Having the right testimonials can make the difference between people viewing your services or sales page, and taking that next step to contacting you or buying your product.

At their best, testimonials can be far more persuasive than anything you can say. You can talk about what you provide, your working methods, and list every detail of your services, but when it comes down to it people want to know if you really are as good as you say you are. A good testimonial from a trusted source is evidence that your services or products do everything you claim they do.

Knowing your target demographic – and their comfort zone

Think of a film trailer. If you only like costume dramas and you are watching a trailer for a horror movie, you are never going to be persuaded to pay to see it. That’s fine, you are not their target audience. Glowing 5-star reviews from Scary Movie Monthly Magazine are not going to tempt you to watch it, because it is just too far from your comfort zone.

For your website, you are not going to persuade someone to invest in you or your product if it is just not right for them. Instead, you want to focus on the testimonials that will appeal to your target demographic.

So who are they?

If you are trying to attract certain customers or land a specific type of project, much of this comes back to what we were talking about in Module One: Specialization for Selling. If you are trying to move into a niche area, you will want testimonials from clients within this area, or from clients who have contracted your services for this sort of work. If you have a couple of glowing testimonials you are particularly proud of that are from outside this area you can still use these, but maybe you could edit them to only show more general comments, rather than anything too specific and irrelevant.

Your aim is to appeal to potential clients by showing them that you are used to working with like-minded people in similar industries, or who want similar projects. It is less about the glamour of having worked for A-list companies, and more about showing that you know how to deal with projects that your potential client would like. Actually having too many A-list company testimonials when you are trying to attract smaller clients can put them off if they assume your services will be too expensive. If you can show that you are used to working within the client’s comfort zone, whatever the size of industry, they are more likely to hire you.

If you are selling products, the guidelines for testimonials are very similar: potential customers need to know that people like them have bought your product and found it useful. Reviews of your product can also be helpful here, as long as they are from the sorts of publications that your target audience would read. Going back to our movie trailer example, a glowing 5-star review from Scary Movie Monthly Magazine is not going to persuade you: you are far more likely to see something that CostumeDramaFans.com recommends.

So don’t be concerned if you don’t have ‘big name’ customers to recommend your services; it is perfectly acceptable for you to have testimonials from satisfied clients if they are a similar demographic to your target clients.

How to get your testimonials

However uncomfortable you may be with it, the best method of getting testimonials is to ask for them! Plenty of people find it difficult to ask for feedback, but as a rule satisfied clients and customers will rarely contact you to give praise, it is much more common for clients to get in touch if there is a problem! Sometimes, you just have to ask. If they are happy with your work, there is probably no reason why they wouldn’t give you a testimonial.

If you would like client testimonials and don’t know where to start, try asking the clients you feel most comfortable with until you get used to asking for feedback. By making it clear that you would like something to go on your website you can deal with any sensitivity issues early on, for example if you ghost write or work with companies who don’t want it to be public knowledge that they outsource projects. You can offer a solution from the outset, such as using initials or just stating their general industry.

Be specific

It helps to be specific about what you want for your testimonial when you ask for it. Although you may worry about coming across as rude or pushy, it can actually be helpful to a client or customer to know what sort of feedback to give.
Ideally you would like to know:

• Results: what did your client gain from your work? That will help potential clients to understand how your services can benefit their business. The more accurate they can be, the better. For example, if they can say your website design increased conversions by 20%, that shows the value of your service.
• Professionalism: what you were like to work with, how easy you were to contact, whether you were punctual with deadlines.
• Would they recommend you? An endorsement that a satisfied client or customer would recommend you to others can be very powerful.
• For products, how easy was it to use or understand?

You could even send out a very short survey to help direct feedback if you feel it is appropriate. You can always divide up your questions among different clients, for example asking one client how you were to work with, and another about your results.

What if you don’t have testimonials in your niche area?

If you feel that your current testimonials don’t reflect the niche that you would like to move into, you might consider negotiating with a client to work for a reduced rate plus a testimonial. As long as you are happy that this could bring you more work in your desired area in the future, you don’t need to be too concerned working for lower rates than you normally would.

If in doubt…

• Always ask before using someone’s comments as a testimonial, especially if they were made in a private context
• Never make up or fake a testimonial
• Don’t use names of people or companies if there is a sensitivity issue. Ask what level of identification they are comfortable with (for example, just their initials). You can always put ‘ghostwriting’ or something similar beside the testimonial to show why you aren’t using a full name
• Don’t make them too lengthy, your potential clients don’t need to read an essay. You can always just pick out the best bits or a variety of different comments from different clients or customers.

Image by Flickr user buddawiggi

There are some great tools out there for measuring website statistics. The most common one is Google Analytics, which is free and can give you useful in-depth information about how visitors are interacting with your website.

Why you would want to do this

Measuring your website traffic is the primary way you can test whether your website is supporting your business goals effectively. If it is, you may be able to see ways of increasing its effectiveness, and if it isn’t you can learn more about how it is performing and take steps to guide the behavior of your visitors, attract different visitors, or make structural changes to the site.

What you can measure

There is a huge amount of information available to you through a tool like Google Analytics, but if you are new to looking at website statistics, the ones that are of most interest to you will be: overall traffic volume, numbers of unique visitors and repeat visitors, landing pages, direct traffic and referring sites, patterns of traffic, most viewed pages, conversion rates, and bounce rate.

Supporting your marketing strategies

Getting a breakdown of how people have found your site is crucial to measuring the success of your marketing strategies, and tweaking them as needed. The most obvious figures to look at first are the referral site statistics, that is, the number of people who have found your site through links on other sites.

In the short term, you can see spikes from guest posts, reviews, or affiliate links, but you might also find that you get longer term benefits, such as certain popular posts that send regular traffic your way long after you posted them.

You can very quickly see which methods are most successful for driving traffic to your site and focus your efforts accordingly.

Then there are the social media links. If you put blog post links up on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus, you can start seeing patterns, such as what sorts of posts get the most click-throughs, or what time of day your audience are online and therefore are more likely to share or click your links. Using a combination of your website analytics plus the statistics available through Hootsuite, Twitter or other social media services you use, you can quickly build a picture of the sorts of topics or keywords that are most popular, plus what time of the day to post or share links.

Conversion rates

While it is very helpful to see what sources are sending you the most traffic, it can be far more useful to measure conversion rates. Depending on the purpose of your website, conversion rates are measured by the percentage of visitors who actually convert into sales, inquiries, mailing list sign-ups, or whatever else is the reason you are trying to drive traffic to your site.

So as well as looking at the quantity of traffic, we also want to know about the quality, or the number of conversions. Google Analytics has a specific section for conversions, including goals and e-commerce.

How people are using your site

Setting goals on Google Analytics can help you measure how your site is performing. You can set goals based on criteria such as specific page views or conversion rates. You can also set up e-commerce tracking if you sell products through your site to get a break down of the success of different campaigns or which keywords are driving sales. To can also measure traffic flow: for example you can use the Goal URLs tracking to understand how successful your blog is at generating traffic to your Freelancer Services page.

The Visitors Flow section is invaluable for understanding how different sources (geographic regions, referral sources, keywords, etc) are generating patterns of traffic around your site. You might find that, although a guest post on a large site generates a good volume of traffic, a small, good review on a website aimed at your target audience brings you far more conversions over time. You can make decisions based on this sort of information as to whether it is worth writing guest posts or to invest your time instead networking with potential reviewers, for example.

Your analytics can show you what landing pages people come in on, followed by what other pages they visit, or whether they leave your site entirely.. These ‘route maps’ can be hugely important for determining whether your site is working as you would want it to, for example whether traffic is funneled through to your services or sales pages as you intended. Your Bounce Rate is the number of people who leave without visiting any other pages on your site, shown as a percentage. Over time you can lower the bounce rate by changing your strategies, including appealing to a more targeted audience, or by changing what information you have on your landing page. One obvious way of reducing the bounce rate is to eliminate ads from your pages and instead encourage traffic to click on internal links.

Search engine optimization

Your website analytics can provide you with a list of key words and phrases visitors are using to find your site. This can be invaluable for helping you get a picture of the kinds of search terms that are being used by your audience. This can in turn help you understand your audience better, as well as your conversion rates. If you feel that the top search terms don’t adequately reflect your vision of the site, you might want to look at your keywords, titles, headings, categories and tags to make sure you are presenting yourself in the right way. If you aren’t attracting your target demographic, chances are your bounce rate will be high (people find your site but leave soon after), the time spent on site statistics will be low, and your conversion rates will also be low. You can also look at the numbers of repeat versus individual visits: you would expect repeat visits on a blog-based site to be high, for example. If they are low you are probably not attracting your intended audience.

The right audience

Attracting the right audience is an important part of lowering bounce rates and increasing conversion rates. However, you first need to have a good idea of the sorts of visitors you want to attract and make sure you are providing content they want and find useful. Your website analytics service provides a huge amount of information but you need a clear idea of your goals if you are going to make good use of it. Remember, statistics are a great resource, but your first step should be to get to know your ideal audience and find out how you can provide what they want and need, as well as putting plenty of effort into attracting them.

Image by Flickr user nerissa’s ring

We’ve previously discussed the issue of allowing adverts on your website in the Creating A Great Blog Module and the Why AdSense Hurts Freelancers post on the Forum, but it’s worth going through some of the reasons why you can make more money and grow your business more successfully by eliminating adverts from your website, even though this can seem counter-intuitive.

Unprofessional appearance

A site containing adverts can start to look a bit like a junk yard sale, with cheap-looking banners detracting from your professional design and image. You probably don’t have control over the design of the adverts, so if you have put effort into a slick website design the result might be less effective.

You also have to think about your own image as a business: are you really in business to promote other people’s work? Would you ever see a dry cleaner posting ads in their businesses for other dry cleaners? Since Google AdSense bases the ads it displays on the information on the page the ad appears on, most of the ads that show up on freelancers’ websites are for other freelancers.

Simple mathematics

The following is Thursday Bram’s explanation of why using AdSense makes no sense for freelancers:

Through Google AdWords (as of October 9th [2011]), an advertiser pays an average of 84 cents per click on an ad for the keyword of ‘freelance writer.’ Provided that we’re talking about AdSense for content, the publisher (or the site owner) get 68 percent of that money. That means the earnings are 50.4 cents.
If someone is looking to hire a freelance writer, they could have a budget of $75 or $7,500 — but either way, sending them to someone else for a payment of about half a dollar is just plain bad business sense.

What about if you also have your own links on your site to your ebook, information product, speaking gigs, and of course how to hire you for your freelance work? If someone uses an advert to navigate away from your site, they might not come back. Instead, try to keep links focused on your site or that directly benefit your business.

Most internet advertising is sold on the CPC (cost per click) or PPC (pay per click) model. Advertisers will pay the website owner when the advert (which is usually targeted by content) is clicked by a website visitor. Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft adCenter are the major advertisers who work on this model, and payments are made either on a flat-rate or a bid-based basis.

What you can earn from advertising varies wildly, depending on your keywords and the type and volume of traffic you receive. If you have 1000 visitors a day to your site, you might expect a 1-2% advert click rate, so maybe 10-20 clicks. If an ad pays $0.25 a click, you could make $2.50-$5 a day. Although this is essentially ‘money for nothing’, I would argue that a niche blog attracting 1000 visitors a day would expect to make a great deal more than that from other sources. How many of those clicks could have been clicking on your products, services or affiliate links instead?

According to some studies, as many as 30% of website ads are never seen by viewers. This can be for reasons such as ad-blocking software or ineffective placement on the site, not to mention ‘ad-blindness’ from over-exposure to advertising.

Alternatives to advertising

What about if you don’t have any products to sell, and you don’t use the site to advertise your services, for example if you already have full-time client work through other means?

You might still want to make money from your site, but there are more effective ways of doing this than using external advertising.

If you have found a particular product or service useful in your own business, you could find out if it has an affiliate scheme. A link from your site to a product selling for anything from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars from which you get a percentage cut is going to earn you a lot more than from advertising. Plus, you can quality control the affiliate product and make sure it is appropriate to your audience. (Just be sure to make it clear that you make money from the link). This allows you to create revenue without compromising on your professionalism.

Another, more indirect, method of using the space to your advantage is by linking to your own work projects, such as an article you are particularly proud of, a high-profile photo shoot you did, or a site where you regularly contribute. If your website is more designed to showcase your expertise within the industry than to sell products, this can work well to boost your reputation. You may be able to raise your rates the better-known you are, or land other well-regarded gigs.

Image by Flickr user Ambernectar 13

It is easy to assume that a ‘professional’ website goes hand-in-hand with a high budget. But all the slick design in the world isn’t going to help your business if your website is badly thought-out, hard to navigate and with poorly-written content.

Smart investment

It is all too easy when faced with building a new website from scratch or overhauling an existing website to go straight to a design professional and throw money at the problem. But do you really need to do this? Would a low cost or premium WordPress theme be good enough to support your goals? How do you know where to invest money and where you can save it?

To decide where to invest resources it is worth looking at how your website will support your business goals, and then decide where you need support. This may be because you don’t have the skills to set up or maintain this yourself, or that you don’t have the time. These are the areas where you need to enlist the help of others, for example if your business depends on a really great sales page you might wish to get this written by a professional if you don’t feel confident in your own writing skills. If your budget is tight you could consider bartering your time; if you are a photographer you could trade a photo shoot for copyrighting.

Where is it not worth investing money? Essentially, if it is not vital to your business plan, you need to think twice about investing money for the sake of it if your budget is tight. How fancy does your website need to be? Or will it function just fine with good navigation, clear, well-written content, a layout that is appropriate to your audience and business, and calls to action that direct your readers to the right places? You can always think about adding cosmetic details later once you have proved that your business plan is working.

First principles: your business goals

In Evaluating Your Current Website we talked a bit about writing down how your website might support your business goals. These might be:

• Finding new clients: your website might drive traffic towards your services page
• Increasing product sales: by creating highly-shareable content or by increasing traffic through a targeted blog you might funnel website traffic towards a product page
• Community building: your website could feature a forum or other engagement tool
• Increasing awareness of your industry expertise: your blog or portfolio could act as your showcase

Once you have your goals set out and understand the role of your website in supporting them, you can think about the structure of your website and how it will work as a whole.

Things to think about:

• How will you grow traffic?
• What is your landing page and how will you direct readers from there to your other pages?
• How will your pages join up? For example, do you have dead ends on your site or do you want to encourage freely-flowing traffic?
• How do other elements of your business interact, such as your marketing and social media, products, testimonials, services, portfolio and contact details?
• What are your ‘calls to action’?

Working through these elements should give you a very clear idea of how you want your site to function. All the other aspects should flow from this and support your vision; it is far easier to decide what you need to invest in your website once you can pinpoint what your goals are.

Mapping it out

If your website is more than two or three pages in size, it might be worth drawing a site map — like a flowchart or diagram — of what pages you will have and how they will link together. This is a good process for spotting gaps or dead ends in your site, and can be useful if you are hiring someone else to put your site together so they can see what structure you are aiming for.

Content

Content should be an integral part of a professional website and not an afterthought. Building in what you want to say where at the planning phase can help you create a more logical and user-friendly site. Even if you are not writing the content yourself, it is worth at least roughing out what information you want on each page and how it will all link together.

Similarly, if you have a blog-based site or if you publish a regular newsletter, you will need to plan the content for posts and publications.

What not to have on a professional site

Having an over-designed website with too many bells and whistles can be almost as bad as not having a website at all. There is a restaurant that I had been to previously and liked right up until the day I tried to look something up on their website. I was so bombarded with flash animations and a painfully horrible soundtrack that I gave up waiting for it to load and searched for somewhere else to go. What I wanted was to be able to view a menu, check out opening times, view the location, and find out if there was somewhere to park. After a quick search, I based my choice on three places whose websites told me all of these things easily with minimal navigation. The website of the place I finally chose was not fancy or slick, but was very user-friendly with all the right information.

Although design can be a hugely subjective experience, certain things will irritate the majority of people:

• Flashing images or text
• Automatic sound effects that come on when you open a site
• Information overload (users can always follow links if they want to learn more)
• Broken links or links that don’t go where they should
• Spelling or grammatical errors
• Overly pushy or salesy pop-ups

A professional website will always put its users first, so try to stick with design and color schemes that suit your audience, and be aware of accessibility issues. For example, red text on a green background may not be visible to color-blind viewers, large audio or visual files will take a long time to load for people with slow connections, and not everyone has Flash or Javascript enabled, so avoid these as a basis for your website design, especially in unnecessary introductions.

If in doubt, go for a less-is-more approach. Style elements should support content and usability and not detract from them.

Image by Flickr user Sebastian Anthony

As a freelancer, your website is of vital importance to your business. Even if most of your new business comes through referrals, you may use it to direct potential clients to your portfolio, your contact details, or pricing information. You may have a blog that is importance to your reputation as an industry expert, or links to products, whether free or paid-for.

With such an important tool in your toolbox, it is worth revisiting your website periodically to examine how successful it is in supporting your business goals, how relevant it is, and perhaps getting an outside perspective to make sure others find it accessible and easy to navigate.

Having a clear plan for your website

It is easy to get caught up in your blog or sales pages without taking the time to step back and look at your overall plan for how your website supports your business objectives. For example, your website might do a great job at driving traffic towards a free information product, but if your business relies on attracting new clients, you may want to signpost your audience towards your ‘About You’ page instead.

It might be worth taking some time out and writing down your business goals, then thinking how your website might help to achieve them.

Think about:

• How you want your business to grow
• What are the most profitable parts of your business (for example, your services, your products or your speaking gigs)
• Who are you trying to attract to your website, ideally?
• Which pages do you want to be seeing the highest numbers of hits?

Getting an outside perspective

Sometimes, it’s hard to see your own website objectively. If you’ve put a lot of time and effort into it over the years it can be difficult to think about the impact it has on someone viewing it for the first time.

This is where some outside help can be helpful, preferably from the sorts of people who would form your customer base. You could survey past clients or customers to get a clearer picture of how they used your website, how easy they found it to navigate, and what their first impressions were. Alternatively, you could find volunteers among your friends, colleagues or other freelancers who understand your client or customer base and ask them to take part in a few role-play situations or user study. It doesn’t have to be anything formal, just ask them to find certain information on your site and watch how they navigate the pages and take notes of where there are difficulties. If you are uncomfortable asking colleagues to do this, try offering a reciprocal arrangement for their own websites.

Think about your audience

Before you start to think about any potential changes, it is worth thinking about who are the audience for this site. You may be a software developer, but if you are aiming to attract families with pets you might find that what appeals to you might not appeal to your intended audience.

When thinking about your potential clients or customers, it is worth noting:

• What devices they would typically be using to view your website
• Are there accessibility issues? Do you need to think about size of text or high-contrast color schemes?
• What sort of language they will respond to. For example, if your skills are technical, you might want to think twice about using jargon that would put off a client with a non-technical background.

Navigation

Getting an outside opinion on the navigation of your site can be particularly valuable: what may be obvious to you may not be to someone else and it can be detrimental to your business if clients can’t find the information they need.

Even without outside help, some things to think about might be:

• Are links clear and ‘clickable’, and is their style consistent through the site?
• Without clicking through several pages, is it immediately obvious what is your site’s purpose and what clients or customers can expect to find on there?
• Is your site balanced, in that each section is roughly the same number of pages deep?

Content

Content inconsistency often happens when a site has evolved over time, especially if there have been several different authors. It can be worth putting together a simple style guide if you have multiple authors, for example if you have a blog. The tone of your site can similarly evolve over time, perhaps becoming more relaxed as you get more comfortable with your business. It is worth checking for consistency of tone as well as consistency in the type of language you use, especially where technical terms are involved. Your content and tone should also reflect your audience, with care taken to explain terms in a non-patronizing way if you are writing for a non-technical audience.

Layout

It is worth remembering that the layout of your site can look entirely different when viewed on different devices or browsers, or if the text size is changed.

Services such as Browser Shots can give you an idea of how your site looks to others, but it’s still worth physically viewing it on as many devices and browsers as you can. If you expect a large section of your audience to be viewing it on mobile devices, it might be worth building a mobile layout into the design.

Other design and layout questions to ask yourself might be:

• Is text broken up into small blocks for easy reading?
• Is your font easily readable in different sizes?
• Do you have text-based versions of videos or images if they can’t be displayed?
• Does it appear cluttered on smaller screens, and do any of the elements move around on the page if resized?
• Are the layout, color schemes and styles appropriate to your audience and content?

Looking at other sites

If you are having a hard time pinpointing exactly what you think you should change about your own site, try having a look at sites that provide a similar function to yours, or that cater to a similar demographic of clients or industry. Find a few that you like and ask yourself what it is that you find appealing, whether it is their navigation, content, or layout. Then find ones that you don’t like and repeat the exercise. After spending some time on other people’s sites it is worth going back to your own: you may find you view it with a new outlook.

Staying current

One thing you may notice about other sites you browse is that they look outdated, although if you are not a web designer it can be hard to put your finger on exactly what looks wrong. Introductions to websites (the little trailer you had to wait to load) were very popular a few years ago and now seem dated. Similarly, using frames, certain fonts, color schemes (or lack or them), or layouts can make a site look old. As web design is a fast-moving industry, look to update and refresh your website every so often to keep it looking current.

Image by Flickr user Easterbilby

WordPress is one of the best known blogging platforms, but it also functions as a full content management system (meaning that you can run a website from it, not just a blog). It’s our first choice for running both blogs and other websites — in fact, EnhancedFreelance.com is built on WordPress.

One of the biggest benefits of working with WordPress is that it’s very easy to customize. You can add plugins and themes as easily as attaching a file to an email. Themes change the design of a site and make it look dramatically different. Plugins can make equally dramatic changes to the way a site functions.

If you self-host your site, WordPress is free to use. Many web hosting companies make it very easy to get WordPress set up, even if you aren’t particularly technically savvy. Many now offer ‘one-click install,’ which allows you to set up a new WordPress blog with just one click. You can also set up a free site on WordPress.com, although we recommend that you at least buy you’re own domain name to use with such a site: it just looks more professional than yourname.wordpress.com. There are also limitations on how you can use a free WordPress.com account for a business (including freelancing).

The main competition to WordPress is Blogger. Moveable Type can also be an alternative. However, both Blogger and Movable Type are harder to customize and have smaller communities. WordPress’s large and active community is a major benefit because that means that you can get a lot more help with your site without needing to hire a web developer if there’s an issue.

Managing meetings when you’re not actually in the same building as the folks you’re meeting with can be difficult. Not only do you have to determine a time that works for everyone, no matter what time zone they’re in, but you have to determine an agenda and figure out how you’re going to keep the meeting on track. MeetingMix speeds up the process of setting your agenda, as well as helping you keep the meeting flowing and managing minutes.

Setting up a meeting in MeetingMix is a matter of giving it a name and assigning it to a time and date. At that point, you can begin to set an agenda by adding topics, as well as subtopics as necessary. You can also assign presenters to speak about each point on the agenda. Once you’ve added everything you want on the agenda, you can send it out to those individuals you need to attend the meeting. You have the choice of using MeetingMix’s email tool or emailing each attendee a link to the agenda yourself. Once you’ve invited other attendees to see the meeting agenda, they can review it, suggest additional agenda topics and review any minutes that have already been added if your meeting has started. You can also upload relevant files, which meeting attendees can download and review.

When you’re ready to start the meeting, you can activate MeetingMix’s live meeting tool. It integrates your agenda with a timer and a minutes tool. Anyone attending the meeting can log into the minutes tool and add their own notes on what’s happening in the meeting, as well as details like next steps. Because you can easily tell who wrote which note, you can keep the meeting on track and revisit individual questions and concerns at a later time. (If necessary, you can disable your fellow attendees’ ability to add, edit or delete information.) The minutes tool is particularly easy to use — just enter text and hit “save.” You can add some rich text formatting as needed, as well.

During meetings, you can also create action items and assign them to attendees. You can also add “parking lot” items. At any time you can change topics, check the full agenda or stop the meeting timer. You can see at a glance how much time has been spent on a particular topic, as well, telling you whether you need to speed the meeting along. When the meeting is over, you can review minutes and send a copy to any attendees, as well as save it to PDF or print it. You can also check which of the individuals you invited actually made it to the meeting.

If you hold multiple meetings through MeetingMix, it’s easy to import information from past meetings, allowing continuity between meetings. Your minutes for past meetings are also available for review if you need to go back and check what was said during a past meeting.

MeetingMix offers a free 30-day trial, after which the web application costs $4.95 per month. For that price, you can have unlimited meeting pages, file uploads, attendees and customer support. Your meetings are also protected with SSL data encryption.

Whether you’re developing software, working in marketing or even a full-time writer, the odds that you’ll be asked to contribute to a blog at some point just keep going up, because blogs have become a key method of communication for many organizations. However, contributing to a blog is not easy, especially if writing isn’t one of your strengths.

Fortunately, it is a skill that can be learned. “The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing,” a new e-book from Ali Hale, offers a guide to sharpening your writing skills and improving your ability to get important information across in a blog post.

While Hale doesn’t dispute the importance of the need to practice blogging to build up skills, she works hard to demystify the art of blogging. She offers the background necessary to help writers of every level speed up the writing process, write effective posts and even improve the quality of the blog as a whole.

What sets “The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing” apart from other writing instruction manuals is that while it includes general writing tips, it also explores the specialized needs of blogging. For instance, where you might write a memo or an article and expect it to stand alone, a blog post is expected to relate to the rest of the content on the site. Blogs also tend to be written with an end result in mind. If you’re running your own blog, that goal can be something like keeping readers coming back, so that you can land advertisers. On a company blog, that might be convincing readers to purchase a new product. Individual posts have to support that overall goal.

Of course, Hale doesn’t skimp on explaining the mechanics of writing for a blog. She digs into details like tips for improving on the standard how-to post with images and resources, as well as an upfront explanation of why it can take significantly longer to write a how-to post. She also gets into how to effectively create each section of a post, devoting a chapter each to writing a post’s introduction, middle and conclusion.

The e-book is also full of links to further resources, from examples of how to implement Hale’s instructions to research that backs up her suggestions. She draws on successful bloggers of every stripe to create an educational book that should help.

“The Blogger’s Guide to Effective Writing” is available for $29. It’s 82 pages long, and comes with a set of templates for different types of posts, including a look at how a few particularly successful blogs construct their posts.