Asterisk Content Creation is a full-service content creation company specializing in online writing services for websites, blogs, marketing collateral, SEO-optimized projects, and more.
We create concise, creative, and clean content for web and print.
One of the best ways to boost the SEO for your company website is to blog, but heaven knows no one wants to actually write the thing. Who has time to keep it updated anyway? We do.
We’ll work with you to create custom, SEO optimized blog posts on an ongoing basis so you don’t have to worry about it.
Boost the user experience and SEO of your website with our website copywriting services. Draw in more page views and keep your customers on your site longer with our scintillating prose and inventive, SEO-conscious website copy.
Whether you are a mommy blogger or you’re trying to put together a website for your small business, there are a multitude of blogs and online articles out there that will tell you how you should optimize your website for search engines. But the SEO world is shifting constantly, and a lot of information that may have been great advice a year ago (or 6 months ago) may now be out of date and could actually hurt your SEO.
If you’ve heard these SEO myths before, don’t believe them—even if they come through a so-called SEO company. And when you know what the myths are, you can more easily focus on the kind of SEO is more important.
Yesterday, I had a chance to sit down with Adrian Lazo, SEO Manager and Strategist at Clearlink, about the future of SEO since the release of the Panda update. Our discussion led us down a path that basically ended on the fact that “quality” is now one of the major factors in determining page rank and a optimized SEO strategy. It was serendipitous, then, to see this video by Rand Fishkin, of SEOmoz, posted today, covering—in greater detail—what had been on my mind for much of yesterday afternoon.
Anyway, here’s the great video by Rand about the future of SEO. Enjoy.
A while back, I read a piece at CopyBlogger titled, “Should You Even Be Blogging?!” The first line reads, “Blogging is dead.” But then the rest of the article goes on to argue why that statement is false and why it is more important than ever for your brand or company to be blogging—basically, all the stuff any good content/social media marketer should know. It was a nice little shock tactic to get me to click the link, and it worked. And I agree whole-heartedly that every company and brand should be leveraging blogging platforms for the benefit of their PR, social media, SEO, and more. In my mind, blogging should be standard practice for anyone interested in the health of their website and brand.
Stop Looking—Really
However, there seems to be this general feeling that if you are going to blog for a company or for your brand, you need to have a “unique” voice. In fact, the title of my article comes from another recent CopyBlogger posts titled, “Stop Looking for Your Blog’s Voice.” The article, begins by telling professional bloggers like myself that we should be looking for our unique, original voice—something that sets us apart from the mileu of other blogs out there. So the author goes on to give us pointers on how to come up with a unique voice—which seems counterintuitive to the title, but that’s linkbaiting for you.
Marcel Duchamp is not an artist you might recognize by name, but you’ve probably seen one of his most famous works: Fountain, a urinal signed by a fictional artist, “R. Mutt.” In the early part of the 20th century, Duchamp was becoming frustrated with the spectacle and pretentiousness of the art community. In essence, he felt that critics and collectors would fawn over and buy any piece of crap that was put on a gallery wall, so that’s exactly what he did. Although Duchamp’s initial act of rebellion was meant as a critique of high-art culture, the urinal on the wall has come to symbolize the meaninglessness and absurdity of art itself.
Sometimes it can be easy to get swept up in the startup, web 2.0, SEO, app, branded, social web, muckity-muck that surrounds people in those actual business—but these guys are the worst, and it’s hilarious.
When we sit down to talk about how to write for a social media audience, many small business owners or first-time social media novices go into the conversation believing that social media is, basically, one medium. Even CEOs and entrenched marketing managers look at social media as this “thing” that has to be dealt with and thus treat all social media messaging the same—often resulting in the abomination that is the social media auto-post. Previously, we talked about messaging in the Facebook space and how the mechanics of Facebook dictate the kind of messaging you should use on Facebook. Now we can continue that discussion in terms of the second largest social network in the world: Twitter.
This is a little off topic, but I found it interesting nonetheless and thought I would share. Patricia Ryan, a teacher int he middle east for over 30 years, recently talked at TED: Dubai (I love TED), and discussed the rate at which languages are disappearing from the earth. Although English is becoming more widespread (go English!), it’s spread is having an adverse affect on indigenous languages across the globe.
The idea that I find most interesting about Ryan’s talk is something of which I’ve always believed—that the loss of language means the loss of ideas. To wit, that the loss of languages across the planet makes the human race less diverse and less creative in the process. Essentially, you can’t conceive of an idea which you cannot express. Thus, if your language cannot express an idea, then that idea is dead to your culture. Anyway, enough of my rant. Listen to Ryan, and make your own conclusions.
Marshall McLuhan, in his book “The Medium is the Massage,” states that, “Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication.” What he’s getting at is that the medium by which we communicate shapes the way we communicate and thus shapes our culture and society. Today, the internet is becoming the main medium by which we communicate and social media is becoming the tool by which the communication is facilitated. So, in the world of social media marketing, it behooves us not to examine the social media space as a means to understanding the ways in which we can most effectively create messaging for products, services, and ideas.
In today’s marketplace, the yellow pages are about as useful for driving traffic to your website as hanging out on a corner and passing out fliers. In fact, passing out fliers might be more productive. That isn’t to say I advocate flier passing as an effective marketing strategy, but rather that fliers might be more effective because people actually look at fliers.
The basic truth about marketing your business today is that if you aren’t on Google you might as well not exist. For most people, Google is the first place they go for information on products and services. So, if you aren’t on the first page of Google search results, people will not find you. And you will not get business.
We’ve all been to websites that feel as if they’ve been written by a robot with an eighth-grade vocabulary. Simple prose on your website will get the job done, but it won’t keep your site visitors coming back for more. For that, you need some style, finesses, a certain je ne sais quoi that you might be able to pick up from a few out-of-work MFA grads down at Starbucks. But regardless of where you get it from, that little creative writing oomph can really help us all write better website copy. For starters, here are a few principles we might learn from creative writing that can help us write more scintillating copy for the web. Read the rest of this entry »
