“How can I help you?”
Walk into a retail store and that’s often the first question on the sales assistant’s lips. It’s also the question your website content must answer.
Many businesses make the mistake of presenting their website as a glowing resume, detailing their history, size, mission and achievements. But they forget the most important person: the prospective customer!
I learn something new about website copywriting every day.
Over at Smashing Magazine they’ve put together a list of 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines.
The first tip is to put form labels above the field. It makes sense because we fill out forms from top to bottom.
Looks like I’ll have to email my website designer and get him to tweak my forms!
Other pearls of wisdom include:
Old school copywriting is all “Sell, Sell, Sell!” But online, hype is out and “help” is in, according to website content maven Nick Usborne’s article “Help, Help, Help, Sell”.
When it comes to your website visitors he says, “You need to guide them, inform them, direct them. And, of course, at the same time, pre-sell them.”
Does your website look great, but customers aren’t picking up the phone to make an enquiry? Your website content is probably the culprit.
Here’s how to understand the difference between “filler” content and high quality content, and why you’ll want to purge the latter from your site.
Are you keen to leverage the web to promote your business, but only have a minuscule budget for website development? This four-step process shows you how to build an effective small business website on the cheap. Real cheap.
Recently a client questioned the liberal use of the word “you” in the home page I had written for them.
A central tenet of a successful business website is that it is about and for your customers.
Too many businesses use their websites to talk about themselves: We’ve been in business since… We offer innovative business solutions… We have the biggest range of… We offer superior customer service…
These messages do not work. The hard truth is customers are not interested in you. They’re only interested in themselves and their problems.
If you read just about any book on how to write well it will tell you to avoid cliches. Unfortunately most website owners haven’t read those books.
Two of my all time most hated, worn out web cliches are “innovative” and “solutions”. Trouble is, sometimes clients actually ask me to include these words in their copy. One client even described them as “power words”!
No one builds a website to fail.
And yet many business websites fail to meet basic customer needs. Poor writing is often to blame. The information is vague, badly written, poorly organised or impossible to find.
A good website copywriter can help remedy these problems. Here are five reasons why you need a copywriter on your website team:
Here are some of my favourite nuggets of wisdom from the greatest minds in website copywriting, e-marketing and search engine optimization:
It’s the words that make the sale
“Flash animations don’t make sales. CRM software doesn’t make sales. Pictures of products don’t make sales. If you have trouble believing that, remove all the words from your site and see how many sales you make. Without great copy, your online presence is dead in the water. It’s the words that open, build, and close the sale.”
Nick Usborne, Net Words
There has never been so much bad photography as there is now. Why? Because mobile camera phones and cheap digital cameras have made enthusiastic snappers out of a huge proportion of the population, most of whom don’t have the first idea how to create a compelling image.
Check out Flickr’s most recent photos and you’ll see what I mean. There’s page after page of mostly ill-conceived and boring photos.
It’s always been this way when advances in digital technology put the power of creation in ordinary people’s hands. The advent of user-friendly page layout programs unleashed a tsunami of badly designed documents, as business took their graphic design in-house. The first wave of web design tools helped populate the web with ghastly looking sites built by business owners with zero design knowledge.
And so it is with content management systems. They make it much easier for businesses to update their websites. And so they also make it much easier to publish poor quality content that erodes brand equity.
This week, just by chance, I happened to be emailed a client proposal for a website by a web developer. I was reading through it and came across this sentence: “By [you] supplying us with the text and content, we are able to keep your costs down.”
It strikes me that asking a client to supply their own content to keep costs down is false economy. Clients rarely create high quality content. And why should they? They’re usually not writers. And even if they are, it’s unlikely they have any experience writing for the web.
Without high quality content not only is the site unlikely to achieve its goal (to sell a product), but it could easily tarnish the reputation of the company. By trying to save a few bucks they’re jeopardising their entire web investment.
Failing to educate clients about the necessity for high quality content on their websites is a losing strategy for web developers. Sure they might make some money in the short term. But when their websites fail to create value, their clients won’t be happy and won’t be coming back or singing the developer’s praises around town.
Read Gerry McGovern’s latest spray on the importance of high quality website copywriting.
About the author: Charles Cuninghame is an expert website copywriter and marketing trouble shooter who helps business owners and marketing managers attract more clients.
One of the most overused words on the web is “solution”, as in “web marketing solution” or “SEO solution”. It’s a meaningless cliché that says nothing about the nature of your business.
Take IT&e for example. Their web tagline boldly proclaims “Cutting Edge FINANCIAL SOLUTION Provider” (view website). But what does “financial solution” mean exactly?
Are they a bank, finance company, investment advisor or financial planner? Do they offer credit cards, home or personal loans, financial services staff for business or personal wealth planning? Actually, it’s none of the above.
Last year I was hired to do the copywriting for a large website. The agency’s brief to the client said that a large flash animation would be the “hero element” of the site. The agency poured a huge amount of time and money into the flash animation. It takes up about a quarter of the home page – just sitting there looking pretty.
Meanwhile I wasn’t given a brief. There was no content strategy. My two superiors gave conflicting views on the client’s marketing strategy. I was asked to rehash second-rate press releases and scavenge other content off the web. The result: a pretty site with nothing of value for the target audience. In short, a waste of money.
"I help my clients communicate more effectively, improve their images, and increase their sales with high quality copywriting."
