In other . . . → Read More: Small Business Websites – What to Include on an “About” Page]]> It’s important for every small business to give careful thought as to what it puts on its About page. After the Home page it’s often the page that site visitors will go to next, and is one which can strongly influence the decision about whether or not to do business with you.

In other words it’s about credibility and trust. A visitor to your site will typically go to your About page to find out if you’re a business of substance. People only buy from businesses that they trust.

Think of your About page as a window into your business. It’s your opportunity to outline what your business does, how long it’s been trading and where it’s located. Site visitors will also expect to find information there about the size of the business (particularly the number of employees) and gain some insights about the people who run it.

Having said all this you need to remember that in today’s world, where skim-reading has become the norm, you don’t have too much time to get your key messages across. For this reason the content of your About page needs to be succinct. Few people will trawl through endless paragraphs about the history of your business, so keep the content short and snappy.

Another way to consider the value of an About page is to think of it as an extension of the Home page. The two pages should complement each other. It’s OK to have some overlap between the Home page content and the About page content but try to avoid too much repetition.

From an SEO perspective the About page should also include additional keywords which weren’t included in the Home page. Having a good About page means that you don’t have to cram your Home page with keywords – this can make the content seem contrived, as well as uninteresting to read.

Here are 6 key things an About page should communicate to the reader:

1. What the business does and who it does it for
2. How long the business has been operating and (one or two) key company milestones
3. Where the business is located, including any branches (adding photos of the business premises can be useful)
4. How many people work in the business and who the key decision-makers are (photos & short bios of key personnel are good, as are short video introductions)
5. What it is that differentiates the business from its competitors
6. What the core values of the business are.  Inclusion of the company’s mission statement can be helpful.

Steve Shaw

Steve is the owner of Bishopsgate Copywriting in Sevenoaks, Kent.

Bishopsgate Copywriting specialise in financial and business marketing copywriting for websites and print media. For further information about our services please visit:

http://www.bishopsgatecopy.co.uk/

Most of them tell me that . . . → Read More: Twitter as a Marketing Tool for Small Businesses]]> As an active networker I meet a lot of business owners in my local area (Kent and S.E. London). I usually ask business owners I haven’t met before how (or if) they use Twitter as a way of raising the profile of their business and finding new customers.

Most of them tell me that they understand the marketing potential of Twitter. Many of them already have a Twitter account for their business but a lot of them also tell me that they just don’t have enough time to manage this account properly.

It’s certainly true that building up a critical mass of quality followers on Twitter takes time and effort – there are really no easy short-cuts. Business owners will need to set aside some “Twitter Time” each day. In building up their followers they should aim to target people on Twitter who’ll either spread the word to others on Twitter about the business or be likely purchasers of products/services from the business themselves.

It’s quite easy to build up follower numbers through follow-backs if you’re not particularly choosy about who you follow, but the reality is that local businesses need local followers. Having a whole lot of “bots” following you on Twitter is not going to be of much use.

If your business is one which sells products online throughout the UK it’s a different story – having a geographically well-spread Twitter following is preferable, but if you’re say a taxi company based in Sevenoaks you’re going to want to have a Twitter following that’s predominantly local. It may be nice to have lots of Twitter followers in the U.S. but as a taxi company the people who will use and therefore who need to know about your services are mainly going to live within say a 10 mile radius of Sevenoaks.

So, having started to build up a local Twitter following, if our Sevenoaks taxi company wants to get the best out of Twitter it will need to achieve a sufficient level of engagement with its followers. To do this the business owner will need to tweet about the things that people who will use a local taxi service are interested in – special offers, traffic delays and perhaps fun stuff too – famous passengers, or anecdotes about getting passengers to Heathrow Airport with minutes to spare.

I meet many business owners who set up a Twitter account and for a short time really give it a go. Then they start to get frustrated that their follower numbers aren’t growing and that time spent on Twitter doesn’t seem to be translating into new business. The message I would give them is this – be patient and don’t give up on Twitter.

You need to tweet regularly and really think about who you want to reach. If you don’t devote sufficient time to managing a Twitter account, tweet infrequently or just don’t tweet anything that really engages your target customers, Twitter probably won’t work for your business as a marketing tool.

In my personal opinion Twitter can work for pretty much any small business. It certainly works for mine. Any company that wants to do more business using Twitter has to have a Twitter marketing plan (which doesn’t need to be anything elaborate) and has to stick at it.

Getting the Best Out of Twitter as a Marketing Tool

Here are my tips for the owners of small businesses:

1. Tweet (and re-tweet) regularly (at least once a day).

2. Tweet stuff that is of interest to your followers – engage, entertain and enlighten them.

3. Follow people who might need your services – hopefully they’ll follow you back. (Use Nearbytweets.com to find local people to follow).

4. Use the search feature to find Twitter conversations to engage in.

5. Start Twitter conversations. Ask and answer questions on Twitter. Respond to mentions.

6. Measure the results of your Twitter marketing. Ask people where they found you (don’t be afraid to DM your followers). Allow them to print a coupon/voucher that you only put on Twitter so you can track its effectiveness.

7. Make sure that your Twitter marketing ties in with your other marketing activities, particularly your business website. Twitter is a helpful marketing tool but it’s not a small business marketing solution in its own right.

Steve Shaw

Steve is the owner of Bishopsgate Copywriting and works in Sevenoaks, Kent.

Bishopsgate Copywriting specialise in financial and business marketing copywriting for websites and print media. For further information please visit:

http://www.bishopsgatecopy.co.uk/

Perhaps this is no coincidence because it’s my wife’s home city. I’ve been there many times over the years and got to know it . . . → Read More: A Look Around Kobe – Japan’s Most Attractive City]]> There are so many great places to visit in Japan. My personal favourite is the port city of Kobe, the capital of Hyogo Prefecture in the Kansai Region, Western Japan.

Perhaps this is no coincidence because it’s my wife’s home city. I’ve been there many times over the years and got to know it quite well.

Kobe’s Port Tower and Meriken Park

Although Kobe suffered a devastating earthquake in 1995 which killed over 6,400 people, the damaged areas of the city have been completely rebuilt. Few signs of the quake remain.

Foreign visitors to Japan mostly seem to take a well-trodden path, which doesn’t usually bring them to Kobe – the typical “see as much of Japan as you can in a week” tourist itinerary includes a few days in Tokyo, a stop at Mount Fuji, a bullet-train to Kyoto to see the temples, then back to Narita for the flight home.

If you do find yourself in Japan, and you’re not on one of these guided tours, I recommend that you try to visit Kobe – you’ll find it very rewarding, but you’ll need to set aside 3 or 4 days in order to see all the sights mentioned in this blog.

For a start the city has a wonderfully attractive natural setting, sandwiched between Osaka Bay and the Rokko Mountains. From Mount Rokko, which is easily reachable by cable car, a panoramic view of the whole Hanshin region (Kobe and Osaka) can be had. By day the view is impressive. By night it’s simply stunning.

Kobe’s $10 million night view

Kobe’s location and climate makes it a very pleasant city in which to live. People who work in the neighbouring and much bigger city of Osaka (20 minutes away by train) often prefer to live in Kobe, although it’s pretty expensive. So many celebrities now live in the Ashiya area of the city that it’s known as the Beverly Hills of Japan.

Kobe has a vibrant food culture. This is after all the home of world-famous Kobe Beef. This isn’t just beef that comes from Kobe – it’s beef that comes from a particular breed of cow (Tajima-ushi). The cows are raised in a specific place, in a particular way, and the meat is graded according to some very strict rules. It’s illegal to export Kobe Beef, so the only way to taste the real thing is to come to Japan and try it.

Kobe Beef

It’s a city with rather a sweet tooth as well. The cakes at Morozoff are sublime as are the handmade chocolates at Goncharoff and the Kobe Fugetsudo gaufres. Tins of Kobe gaufres make great souvenirs.

The city also has some great shopping. The quality and variety of both the shopping and restaurants in Kobe, particularly in the downtown Sannomiya area, is every bit as good as you’ll find in Tokyo or Osaka.

Kobe has been an important port city for centuries and was one of the first places in Japan to be opened up for foreign trade in the 19^th century. As such it has always had a relatively large community of non-Japanese residents, particularly Chinese, Indians and Europeans. Today the city has a vibrant Chinatown (Nankinmachi area), a sizeable Indian community and a surprising number of long-term western residents.

Nankinmachi (Chinatown) Area of Kobe

At the foot of the Rokko mountains is Kitano-cho (北野町, Kitanochō) an area where diplomats and wealthy foreign merchants settled in the second half of the 19^th century. This area features a number of grand mansions, known as Ijinkan, more than a dozen of which are open to the public as museums. This is a lovely area to walk around as its steep, narrow streets have a nice variety of cafes, restaurants and boutiques.

Ijinkan area in Kitano-cho

Kobe has long been famous for its sake – the Nada district of the city is the world’s top sake-producing region. The Hakutsuru Sake Brewery has a brewery museum in its grounds where you can see the whole process of sake brewing and there is usually an opportunity to do some sake-tasting.

Kobe certainly makes the most of its location by the sea – Kobe Harborland is a lively waterfront shopping and entertainment district and Meriken Park is a waterfront park full of modern art and home to some of the best examples of the city’s iconic contemporary architecture, including the bright red Kobe Port Tower and the Kobe Maritime Museum.

The city also has some attractive gardens and shrines. The Sorakuen (which has a Japanese garden and a Western-style garden) and Ikuta Jinja (a shrine) in Sannomiya are well worth a visit.

Sorakuen

Other places not to be missed around Kobe include Arima Onsen, a famous hot spring resort town on the other side of the Rokko Mountains, and the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, which, at almost 4 kilometres, is the world’s longest suspension bridge. It spans the Akashi Strait and connects Japan’s main island of Honshu with Shikoku.

The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge

The city also has its own airport. Kobe Airport opened in 2006 and is built on an artificial island only 8 kilometres from the city centre. The Port Liner (monorail) will take you from Sannomiya to the airport in just 18 minutes.

Once you’ve seen all the sights of Kobe and sampled some of the great food you can either jet off from Kobe Airport or take a bullet-train from Shin-Kobe Station and continue your travels around Japan.

Steve Shaw,

Bishopsgate Copywriting

When localising any product or service for the UK, . . . → Read More: UK Localisation: What Is It and Who Needs It?]]> UK localisation is not some Government policy intended to ensure that only local people get jobs. It’s actually the process whereby products, services, software, websites and text documents are adapted to the language, culture and “look-and-feel” of a particular country, in this case the UK.

When localising any product or service for the UK, translation alone tends not to be enough – the ultimate objective of localisation is to make sure that the product or service appears to have been developed locally, by local people for local people.

As well as ensuring that the spelling, grammar and punctuation are suitably tailored it’s essential that local idioms and linguistic conventions are used. It’s often necessary to make subtle changes to take account of things like local social, cultural, racial and religious sensitivities, gender roles, geography, topography, date/time formats and national holidays.

After the translation work has been done, successful UK localisation requires the additional services of people with these two key skills:

• mother-tongue language skills
• expertise in local cultural sensitivities

For any business which wants to succeed in the UK market with its product or service it’s important to get it localised properly. When, for example, UK consumers see Spanglish, Franglish, Chinglish or Japlish in UK marketing content they quickly get the impression that the company isn’t really thinking very much about its target customers here.

If localisation is overlooked, or just poorly done, the business runs the risk of reputational damage and possible damage to its brand, as well as the financial implications of poor sales. Equally, when localisation is done skilfully and thoroughly the benefits can be significant.

Bishopsgate Copywriting have the UK localisation skills that non-UK businesses require.

If you need to get your website, product manual or any other type of text document localised for the UK market please contact us today for a quote.

Steve Shaw, Bishopsgate Copywriting

Bishopsgate Copywriting are based in Sevenoaks, England and specialise in financial and business copywriting and editing for websites and print media.

I thought that this would be a fairly straightforward task involving making all the obvious spelling changes…making sure that words like “color” and “flavor”  . . . → Read More: American English v British English]]> I was recently asked by a client to review about 50 pages of content on their U.S. website and edit this so that it was suitable for a British audience.

I thought that this would be a fairly straightforward task involving making all the obvious spelling changes…making sure that words like “color” and “flavor”  had a “u” in them, changing “center” to centre, “toward” to towards, “program” to programme and amending words like “organization” and “specialize” to the UK spelling.

The work actually turned out to be rather more time-consuming than I had anticipated. It was easy enough to go through the text and amend the American spellings of particular words, but what surprised me was the amount of additional work required to amend some of the grammar, vocabulary and punctuation.

You don’t very often come across words which have completely different meanings on either side of the Pond but you do have to take into account things like different noun usage, different verb patterns and use of tenses, and different use of prepositions and adverbs. Until I did this work I had never really appreciated the amount of divergence which exists today between American and British English.

In terms of the spoken word we’re so familiar with American English usage over here, through TV, music and films, that we rarely misunderstand what Americans are saying. We take American English for granted and new examples of American English usage are creeping into the way we speak over here all the time.

Look at the written word on pretty much any American website though and the divergence between the two forms of English is quite apparent. It would have been easy for me just to let many of the differences go, because at the end of the day a British audience will have little difficulty in understanding the content on an American website.

As a professional copywriter I wanted to do the job properly of course – my brief was to edit the content so that it looked like it had been written by a Brit. On each page of content I had to make perhaps 10 to 20 edits. In this type of work edits have to be done manually – as far as I’m aware there is no software available which can flawlessly amend American English to British English.

The key learning point for me from doing this, and one that I would like to pass on, was….don’t underestimate how much work is required to amend American English web content to British English.

Steve Shaw, Bishopsgate Copywriting

Bishopsgate Copywriting are based in Sevenoaks, England and specialise in financial and business copywriting and copyediting for websites and print media.

Tickets are priced at £15 and are available from the Sevenoaks School . . . → Read More: Music for Japan]]> Fundraising Concert

A fundraising concert for victims of the disaster in Japan is being held on Saturday 4^th June 2011 at The Space Performing Arts Centre at The Pamoja Hall, Sevenoaks School, Sevenoaks, Kent TN13 1HU. The concert will start at 7pm.

Tickets are priced at £15 and are available from the Sevenoaks School Box Office tel. 01732 467765 or email boxoffice@sevenoaksschool.org

The concert programme features work from Mendelssohn, Mozart and Bach, plus a selection of Japanese songs arranged for a string ensemble.

Performers include the The Aiso Quartet, The Fujita Piano Trio, Yusuke Kinoshita, Annette Isserlis and Chihiro Ono.

This promises to be a great evening of music at a superb concert venue. Refreshments will be available.

The proceeds of all ticket sales will be going to the charity KnK Japan – Children Without Borders.

Most people are happy to give interviews and will communicate freely and openly, but I do sometimes encounter interviewees who are more . . . → Read More: Interviewing Tips from a Copywriter]]> As a financial copywriter I must often interview people face-to-face in order to be able to complete my work, whether it’s for a business article, an annual report or a press release.

Most people are happy to give interviews and will communicate freely and openly, but I do sometimes encounter interviewees who are more reticent, perhaps through shyness or concern about being misquoted.

My job is to ensure that interviews run smoothly and to establish a rapport with the interviewee so that I get all the information I need. The best interviews happen when the interviewee is happy with the process too.

Here are a few interviewing tips that I would like to pass along:

Prepare Well

This probably goes without saying but it’s vitally important to do your background research on the person, the company and the subject you’ll be writing about before you sit down for the interview.

Put all your questions down on a sheet of paper and keep this handy in front of you. You might not get to ask all of them during the interview but it’s great to have the questions sheet as an aide-memoire.

Ensure, if at all possible, that your questions are such that only the interviewee can answer them. Don’t ask questions which you can easily get answered somewhere else.

Your questions should show that you have knowledge of the subject. Never ask questions which are vague, or open-ended, or which can simply be answered “yes” or “no”. Your questions should help you to achieve the goals of the interview – you want the interviewee to think and to talk.

Note – more often than not you will be asked to submit your questions ahead of the interview so that the company’s corporate communications team can “vet” them and to give the interviewee an opportunity to prepare his responses.

Arrive in Good Time

I always aim to arrive at the interview venue at least 10-15 minutes before the scheduled start time. This allows me to run through my list of questions and to gather my thoughts.

Starting the Interview

I like to put the interviewee at his ease – believe it or not even company chairmen sometimes get nervous at interviews, so I start with a quick introduction and an observation on something topical, to get the ball rolling. It’s important to smile and maintain positive body language in order to create a positive environment in the room.

I always exchange business cards with the people I’m interviewing – not only does this ensure that I get their names right but it also means that I get their job title right as well.

For lengthy interviews digital voice recorders are very useful. I always use one if I can, but not everyone is comfortable with these – always confirm with the interviewee before you ask your first question if it’s OK to use one. Be prepared for the interviewee to say no, and if this happens quickly put the device away with no fuss.

Listen Carefully and Clarify

Having prepared your list of questions make sure that you listen attentively to the answers. Never ask an interviewee a question that he has already answered, unless you’re doing so to clarify a point – doing so out of inattention can ruin an interview.

If an interviewee gives a response that you don’t understand don’t be afraid to seek clarification, but always do this politely. Never try to pretend that you know more than you do as you will be “found out” later on.

Often an interviewee’s answers will lead naturally to the next question. While you have your list of prepared questions bear in mind that interviews rarely proceed according to these as interviewees’ answers may jump around from topic to topic. Be prepared for this. You must try to master the art of framing good follow-up questions “on the hoof”. Do this and you will get good interviews, but it requires that you listen carefully to what the interviewee is saying.

Never Be Confrontational

There will be times when you will interview people who are difficult or unco-operative, people who are shy, or evasive, or monosyllabic or who look like they don’t want to be in the room with you. There can be many reasons for this (not worth going into here) but if you encounter such situations there is absolutely nothing to be gained by being confrontational yourself. Whatever the situation you must plough on and try and get the interview done, however uncomfortable this may be for both of you.

Closing an Interview

As a general rule there will be a fixed amount of time allocated for an interview. It’s important that the interviewer keeps track of time during the interview and covers all the ground without an unseemly rush of questions at the end. Equally, if a 60 minute interview seems to be coming to a natural conclusion after 45 minutes, don’t be afraid to say something like this to the interviewee…”well that concludes my questions for the interview, thank you very much”.

It is useful at this point to give the interviewee the opportunity to add any other thoughts he has which were not covered in the interview questions. I often find that this sort of “free format” session after the prepared questions have been answered yields very useful material for the interview.

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Interviewing people can be quite a challenging task, but it is an essential one in many types of writing assignment. If you prepare well and follow these tips you’ll find that the task gets easier.

Steve Shaw, Bishopsgate Copywriting

Bishopsgate Copywriting are based in Sevenoaks, Kent. We specialise in financial and business copywriting and copyediting for websites and print media.