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What I Do

I am a copywriter.  I’ve written technical articles in the Bell System, sales copy for HVAC and concrete construction, informative commentary for acupuncture, massage, and alternative healing, and white papers for business ventures.

Underlying my writing experience is years of web and social media development.  I say underlying because web sites are often the platform where my writing lives.  I build the house then furnish it.

I brand myself as an Online Presence Guy for small business and solopreneurs.  I don’t do one-time projects like building a website and then walk away.  I work with my clients to continuously evolve their online assets.

Online Presence

Your Online Presence is more than your website.  While that website is the anchor of your online presence and almost always necessary, it still requires a lot of active details that are not obvious to the casual observer.  Here’s a few of these things…

Why a Website is Necessary

People assume that your business has a website.  A website creates a seriousness and solidity that customers expect, and without it they are less inclined to trust your company.  Search bots and respected online business sites also assume that you have a website and build their own offerings around that.  Businesses that only have a Facebook page just don’t command the same respect, although some types of businesses achieve respectable success this way.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The most common online presence thing that you’ve probably heard about, SEO is essential for your website being easily discovered.  Well-done SEO practices will have the various search engines (primarily Google) indexing your site in a way that gives good visibility and high ranking when people search using certain terms.  Conversely, sneaky or nefarious SEO tactics (called Black-Hat) will get your site demoted so low that even Cuskeel fish can’t find it.  The key is knowing the difference.

Website Updates

Keeping an active, current, and updated website piques the curiosity of the search engines like Google.  When the Google-Bots crawl your site and see that there are changes, your information is updated and refreshed in the search results.  Never updating your site causes search engines to believe that your content is getting stale, and your rankings begin to drop.  We refer to these stale websites as “cobwebs”.

Social Media

As the name implies, these platforms (think Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) are just that – social.  Some small business owners believe that all they need is a Facebook site and they are good to go.  This is like trying to pick-up customers in a bar.  It can work sometimes, and it is surely worth doing, but it should not be your primary outward face to the public.  There are prospects that will never find you because they don’t frequent social media.

Google Business Profile

Formerly called Google My Business this is a Google service that provides detailed information about businesses with a physical address.  It is the place where Google Reviews are registered, and it can also increase Google rankings for your website.  The business can post updates and other relevant information on this site, further increasing Google rankings.  If your Google reference page is managed and updated, it makes your business look active.

What You Do

Because you are an entrepreneur, you can easily get sucked down the rabbit hole and yanked away from your real profession by the shiny object of website building.  There are now so many good ways to build your own website that it’s hard to resist.

At first it’s great, and it looks good.  After a while, you realize that this online stuff is not static and there’s a lot of stuff you didn’t know about.  Your actual business starts suffering unless you let the web stuff or your personal life suffer.

It seems like you’re saving money by doing it yourself, but the truth is that missed-opportunity costs in your actual business are much bigger.  You’re also not developing your own craft as quickly as you would with full attention to your life’s work.

Check out a few of my documents and live websites to get a feel for the kind of work that I do.

Let’s Talk

Get in touch so we can explore.