Knowledge: Increasing Your Footprint Online
Writing Copy for Your Alpaca Web Site
Copywriters provide writing services to businesses, and some copywriters even specialize in writing websites. While many alpaca owners may enjoy the writing process themselves or simply not have the budget to hire a copywriter, it's important to bear in mind the best practices that an online copywriter would follow when writing for your website.
Two guiding principles you should keep in mind are:
1. Target your copy for your audience; and
2. Make your copy easy to read on-screen.
Here are a few ways you can achieve this:
Use "you"-oriented language
Too many small businesses start all their sentences with "we" or "our". Your audience wants to know what's in it for them, so it's your job to draw that connection.
Take the following line of copy, for example:
"We are committed to raising high-quality alpacas and we offer some of the nation's best Peruvian Suri at our farm."
You could make it a little more reader-friendly by changing that to read as follows...
Featured Marketing Resources
Alpaca Marketing Tip of the Month
Gaining exposure for your farm in your town and state is an important part of marketing your business. Take a few minutes now to brainstorm who might be interested in learning about alpacas: local kids clubs, high schools, college classes, 4-H clubs, business clubs, and so on. Plan to reach out to at least one organization every month for the next year. You can offer to provide an educational tour of your farm or to be a guest speaker at an event.
You never know what may come of those important contacts who hear your message. Be sure to write about these events in your blog or on an events page on your website!
Q&A from Readers
Question: You mentioned Twitter last month. What is that? How can it help me market my alpaca farm?
Answer: By now you've probably heard of Twitter. Its phenomenal growth as a real-time short messaging service has been documented by most major news networks.
Twitter asks one question, "What are you doing?" Answers (AKA your status) must be under 140 characters in length and can be sent via mobile texting, instant message, or the web.
What started as a way for friends to stay in touch has now become a must in the marketing toolbelt of businesses - including alpaca farms.
A search on Twitter.com shows activity where people are using the word "alpaca". There are people buying alpaca wool for knitting, talking about what's happening at their farms and commenting on alpacas in general. For example, you can see that Alpaca Farm Girl has booked her flights for AOBA and the International World Alpaca Conference, halbeatty has 5 alpacas left to shear, riverstonestar is watching 2 one-month-old crias chase each other, inlangley is selling a brown alpaca female, midlifeexpress enjoyed the alpaca event at Serena Lodge Alpaca Farm... and so on.
When you sign up, you can update your status and find people to follow. Then when you log in you will see the statuses of those people. It won't be long before your farm has some followers, too, who will all see your status updates.
And thus your message gets around to others who will potentially be your customers. Consider it a quick way to network online. Twitter lets you reply to status messages, send direct messages and a few other features that make it easy to get to know other like-minded Twitterers, too. There are over 100 different tools that have sprung up to help you get more from Twitter, though all you need is to simply go to www.twitter.com and update your status every now and then.
You only have 140 characters to set as a status, but you can link to web pages, so it's a great way to get the word out about that new article you wrote or your latest newsletter issue, for example.
We've only been on Twitter for two months and we already have nearly 120 followers! See our Twitter page here: www.twitter.com/seo_alpaca Hope to see you there, too!
What's New at SEOAlpaca
New Website Design for
North American Alpaca Company
We've been working on a new site design and copy for www.northamericanalpacaco.com. Now you can click through to check it out. This alpaca farm in Washington State uses our alpaca catalog system, which lets you update your alpacas in one place - but have them show up in two (Your web site plus the National Alpaca Directory)! Tell us what you think...
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