Published January 8th, 2008
in Copywriting.
With the NFL playoffs and BCS bowl games dominating January sports websites and radio, it’s definitely time to lead a blog with a bit of footballese.
How many of you watch “Inside The NFL” on HBO? For those of you who (like many of us) can’t keep the names of all those dozens of talking-jock shows straight, that’s the one with Dan Marino, Chris Collinsworth, Cris Carter and Bob Costas trading quips and pretending to be interested in the highlights of games they already know everything about.
Now into its 30-something season, “Inside the NFL” added a new feature called “Say Something” this year. Kind of like a two-minute drill, to drag the football analogy along as far as possible, it allows each of the hosts to deliver roughly 30 seconds of prattle about whatever subject they want at the very end of the program.
Few people outside the HBO bunker know whether the guys make up their own “say somethings” or whether they’re concocted by the show’s writers. Likewise, we don’t know whether the one or two-liners are used in rehearsal or whether the three other filled shirts behind the desk are hearing them for the first time during the taping.
What we, those of us who watch the show, do know is that they’re almost always relevant, interesting and worth hearing. They sound like they were adlibbed and the other hosts unfailingly react as if they never heard them before.
In other words, Marino, Collinsworth and their partners and production staff do “say something” extremely well, very professionally, as if they were born communicators as well as athletes and broadcast gearheads.
What about your “say somethings?” The sentences you put on your site that are supposed to be relevant, interesting and worth hearing? The words that are supposed to sell your products to end users and convince search engines that your site is worth a high ranking?
Does your site communicate professionally and fluidly, or does it stammer and stall? Does it grab the football and take it to the house, or it does it put the ball on the ground and allow your competitors to pick it up and run it into your end zone for a quick sale at your expense.
If you haven’t yet made — and perhaps already broken — all your New Year’s resolutions, you might want to consider adding “improve my site’s say somethings” to the list.
All successful commerce, electronic or otherwise, is based on the art and science of the seller telling the buyer what he wants and needs to hear in words and phrases that the buyer can understand and respond to both intellectually and emotionally.
Sound like a tall order? It’s not really. Consider the example of Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Terrell Owens. One of the best pass catchers and route runners in the NFL, Owens career has been marred by feuds with teammates, arrogance towards coaches, off-field foolishness and general a-hole behavior. This season he’s been a changed man. Showing up for practices on time, praising other players, acting every bit the team leader as well as the superstar player.
You could describe this transformation by saying “T.O. seems to be getting along with everyone better now.”
Or you could describe it as Chris Collinsworth did a few weeks ago: I never, ever believed I’d hear myself say this, T.O. has become a good teammate. It’s almost unbelievable, incredible … T.O., the league’s premier prima donna, is now a great teammate.
The difference between the two descriptions is a clear and crisp as the fall weather at Lambeau Field. The first one dully recites a fact, Collinsworth’s SAYS something.
Saying something on a website, where the ability to adlib is totally irrelevant, is not that difficult. You can almost certainly do it. But if, for whatever reason, you can’t, drop us a line.
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Published December 19th, 2007
in Copywriting and Search Engines.
Confucius say person without guts to affix name to rantings should be not be permitted to publish same in alleged encyclopedia.
Thank you for that, Confucius. You’re quite right as usual. The recent news that Google plans to introduce a community-based virtual encyclopedia in which the truth or falsity of the entries can be weighed against the reputation and bias of the authors should be hailed by every writer in occasional need of some quick and dirty research to finish a job on deadline.
Wikipedia is, as everyone above the age of a second trimester fetus knows, the world’s largest, multicultural, free-for-all collection of true facts, false facts, misleading facts, semi-facts and out-of-context facts in the history of the world.
It contains, at last official count, more than nine million articles in 250 languages written, Wikipedia’s official propagandists claim, by “visitors (who) do not need specialised (sic) qualifications to contribute, since their primary role is to write articles that cover existing knowledge.”
Whoa, let’s stop there for a moment. If Wiki’s primary role is to restate “existing knowledge” so common that it can be encyclopedically described by writers without “specialized knowledge,” what — exactly — is the point of the whole exercise?
If we already know this crap, why do we need an encyclopedia to tell us about it? And if we don’t already know it, shouldn’t we best learn it from someone who has a least a little “specialized knowledge” beyond what one may “learn” about a topic on talk radio or Fox News?
And that, of course, is the pervasive rot at the heart of Wikipedia. Readers have no way to check whether the author and commentators and editors really know something about the subject or whether they are as ignorant about it as the rest of us.
Perhaps worse, you have zero clues as to whether an inaccuracy is an innocent mistake or a deliberate misrepresentation by someone with a hidden agenda.
For donkeys’ years, as an example, Wikipedia reported that Hillary Clinton had earned the honor of being class valedictorian. Which was a nice bit of puffery, but like most puffery simply not true. Was it an innocent mistake or a deliberate lie added to Hill’s Wiki CV by one of her handlers? Since whoever wrote it was able to do so with total anonymity how could anyone know — or even make an educated guess.
In the real (non-wiki-wacky) world you might expect a copy editor to catch the error in the Hillary article and correct it. After all, copy editors, according to the Wikipedia article on the subject, “need broad general knowledge of the world in spotting factual errors, good critical-thinking skill (to recognize inconsistencies), diplomacy for dealing with writers, and a thick skin for when editorial diplomacy fails. Also, they must establish priorities — balancing a striving for perfection and the necessity to follow deadlines.”
Take note of some of the qualities Wikipedia demands of every other publisher’s copy editors: Broad general knowledge, good critical-thinking, a striving for perfection.
Compare that to the standards Wikipedia sets for its own copy editors: With rare exceptions, articles can be edited by ANYONE WITH ACCESS TO THE INTERNET, simply by clicking the edit this page link. Forget knowledge, critical-thinking, striving for perfection, if you haven’t bounced a check to your ISP you’re as qualified to edit Wiki articles as anyone else.
If it all sounds like nonsense, it’s because it is nonsense. If Wikipedia sounds more like the world’s largest (and one of its most crotchety and contentious) social network than a repository of rock solid facts, it’s because there is a lot more of Oprah and talk radio than scholarly research about it.
Which would all be perfectly acceptable (sort of) if you the reader knew whether that article on fetal development was written and edited by experienced OBGYNs or the minister of propaganda for the Christian Coalition.
But you don’t. You can’t. Wiki has a religious fervor about preserving the anonymity of its contributors. A religious fervor which is, very simply, evil.
Like mushrooms, ignorance, prejudice, and superstition fester and grow best in the dark. By being anonymous, Wikipedia — even when it’s entries are correct — is one of the most pervasive contributors to the dumbing down of society and — to get a bit melodramatic — the decline of civilization, or at least internet civilization.
Think about it. What is virtually certain to happen when people aren’t held to any standard of accountability for what they say or write? What is the logical result of having so-called knowledge — encyclopedia articles — produced from behind the same opaque curtains hiding writers of $29 get-rich-quick secrets and mail-order cancer cures?
With Knol, Google promises to add real transparency to the realm of internet encyclopedias. Authors and editors will be identified (allowing you to, pardon the expression, “Google” them to see if you care to trust what they say) and ads will be both accepted and clearly identified — as opposed to Wiki’s policy of allowing millions of product plugs to run as alleged non-commercial “articles,” many of which contain nothing but a few “buy-this” slogans labeled as stubs.
With the arguable exception of the 1918 edition of the Book of Knowledge, the gold standard — before and since — of print encyclopedias, there has never been a totally accurate, completely unbiased encyclopedia. What is new and very disturbing about Wikipedia, particularly from a writer’s point of view, is that there is really no way to tell if the author is intellectually competent and politically unbiased enough to discuss the subject he or she has written about.
If Knol, and it’s a very big if, fixes that it may turn out to be Google’s major contribution to a better world … a far superior and more important alternative to what is currently available than Google search is to Yahoo and MSN.
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Published December 11th, 2007
in Marketing.
“Location, location, location.”
Isn’t that what they always say, those retail gurus. Location. Location. Location. I t’s where you are. A street address, a mall storefront, a search-engine position. Those are all locations and whether they’re good locations or bad ones will have a major impact on the success or failure of your business.
When it comes to putting articles on your website, the equivalent of “location, location, location” is “subject, subject, subject.” The importance of selecting the right subject for your article is critical regardless of whether the article is informative, technical, intended to appeal to your existing customers or simply a piece of linkbait. Even if, for some inexplicable (or explicable, for that matter) reason you decide to put fiction on your site, the fantasies had better be about an appropriate, relevant subject.
What’s a good subject for an article? Let’s back up a step. First, let’s think about what an article is. Think … think … dum, dah, dum, dum… OK, enough thinking, we’re done. A article is a story. That’s it, that’s all. A story.
– A surgeon selling a patient on a bit of unnecessary spinal-fusing to finance a romantic Paris junket with an insignificantly transitory-but-cuddly other not his or her spouse is telling a fiction story.
– A member of the New York City Fire Department writing an article about 9/11 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder for the International Association of Fire Fighters house organ is telling a story that is all too tragically true.
– General Dynamics submitting a 496-page proposal for a new weapons system to DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is telling a story — usually compounded of both truth and fiction — about its superior research, development and manufacturing capability.
What’s your story? What is your website really about? Which of its elements would make a good article?
In conjuring article topics, having an overabundance of ideas can be as almost bad as having none at all.
Consider a breeder of pedigreed dogs. Aside from a full slate of articles about the physical and emotional care of high-strung animals genetically shrunken to teacup size (Miniature Poodle) or generationally brainwashed to trade a full life in the wild and free moors for a twilight existence in a Manhattan condo (Irish Wolfhound), one could post a separate article on every one of the AKC’s 157 recognized breeds.
Yes, one could. But would doing so be a good idea? Until recently, the standard answer would be “no.” Articles about breeds you don’t raise and sell might steer your customers in the direction of different dogs and other vendors.
Today, however, that unequivocal “no” might not be the best answer. An ever increasing number of marketers — spurred by such giants as Amazon.com, which posts both negative and positive reviews of the products it sells — are opting for what the buzz-word wizards have labeled transparency — a policy of letting customers and potential customers see all a company’s glory and at least a couple of its warts. Applying the rule of transparency to our dog breeding site we can — in theory — justify a separate article for every breed of dog.
Theory and practice are far different things, however. Assuming you raise three or four breeds, putting articles about a 150 or so other breeds on your site may not terminally irritate customers seeking info on your breeds, but it will almost certainly dilute your message to search-engine bots.
Here, as in so many facets of life, moderation and compromise are the keys to success. Instead of limiting your articles section to stories about your breeds or opening it up to all breeds, why not go halfway and fill it with information about your breeds and related breeds?
If you breed Scotties, you could include articles on other terriers. If your breed, like the Bernese Mountain Dog, is based on stock from several ancient breeds — some of which have been extinct for a century or more — include articles about those honored ancestors.
If there’s a point to all this canine chit chat, it’s this: In selecting article topics for your site it’s OK, even desirable, to get outside the box (or, in this example, the kennel) as long as you remain close enough to reach out and touch it.
Stray too far from the box and your articles may be judged irrelevant. And too much irrelevance, in any form on any web page, is a surefire way to put your site in the doghouse.
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Published November 27th, 2007
in Copywriting.
One of the most common questions every legitimate, high-quality website designer, content writer or search-engine optimizer gets asked is this: What about the people who advertise they’ll do the same thing you do for the price of a Super Sonic Cheeseburger without the cheese?
The generic answer to that question — an answer that applies to designers and SEO experts as well as writers — is this: They’re lying. They couldn’t do what professionals do whether you paid them in day-old Krispy Kreme dumpster donuts or ingots of solid-gold. They simply don’t have the skill, talent, experience, knowledge or intelligence to do the job well. If they did, they wouldn’t accept assignments guaranteed to not bring in enough money to cover their ISP bill, let along their rent.
That’s the generic answer. There are also, obviously, task-specific reasons why you don’t — and can’t — get high-end web creation work for low-ball prices. In writing, most of the differences between great quality, acceptable quality and totally unusable copy are readily apparent … the bad grammar, misspellings, poor flow, and yawn-inducing prose of the unskilled scribe are out there on the screen … where everyone visiting a site can see them and quickly move on to a better, more literate site.
There is one crucial hidden element, however. One veiled characteristic that separates the real web-content writers from the wannabes; the writers who can generate sales and repeat visits on your site from those whose prose drives potential customers away; the productive wordsmiths from the syntax-challenged stiffs.
That element is research. Good writers take pride in their ability to research almost anything, from historically obscure data about the origins of cufflinks, to the latest, cutting-edge technology for aircraft collision avoidance. Not only do professional writers know how to locate and collate a ton of relevant information, they know how to winnow it down to just the crucial points needed to tell the website’s story, and then translate those points into easy-to-understand, compelling words.
The importance of proper research in writing web copy cannot be overstated. No matter what your e-business or profession, the chances are good that nobody knows as much about it as you do. Certainly not your customers, they’re relying on your site to tell them what they need to know. But you, in part because you have such a deep store of knowledge about the subject, may not be the best judge of how to share that knowledge with people who need only enough facts upon which to base a buying decision.
In sales, too much information can be as deadly a deal breaker as too little.
Which isn’t to say that you should just hire a professional writer and disappear until the job is done. It is almost always desirable, and frequently absolutely necessary, for you to take some time and talk to any writer you hire about specifics relating to the way you do business, your philosophies, your policies. No amount of research, can tell a writer what your policy on shipping costs for warranty repairs is, for just one example. That kind of information has to come from you.
Maybe everything on your site should, in a perfect world, come from you. Very few of us live in a perfect world, however. Most of us have businesses to run, that’s why we’re on the web in the first place. How about you?
Do you have 15 or 25 hours to sit at your desk and teach your business to some writer who you’re going to use to write one or two or three pages or articles for your site? And even if you do have the time, what’s that time worth? Fifty bucks an hour, seventy-five an hour, one hundred? Saving a few dollars by hiring a writer who isn’t competent to do his or her own research could be the most expensive economy move you ever make.
Sometimes clichés are actually based on truth, more frequently they’re not. When it comes to content for your website, the old hackneyed phrase “you get what you pay for” is not at all true.
Hiring a nothing writer at a next-to-nothing rate won’t get you what you paid for, it will get you even less. Hiring a pro who can write with passion and research with skill, a true craftsperson like those working at GetWebContent.com, virtually guarantees you’ll receive additional value above and beyond what you expected when you and the writer agreed on a price.
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Published November 12th, 2007
in Copywriting.
They, whoever they are, say a picture is worth a thousand words. But they almost never add that a word — frequently even a very small short word — is frequently worth a thousand pictures.
Consider the extremely short, easy-to-spell, single-syllable word “free.” Think of a picture of a product, any product from a 60-inch plasma TV to, say, a bar of soap. A certain number of people will respond favorably to the picture — maybe they think the car looks hot or the soap’s color is cool.
Add 999 other pictures to the display of the TV or the soap. How many people will be favorably impressed now? A few more, certainly, but not many. Most folks won’t even bother to look at 1,000 pictures of either a blank-screened television or a bar of soap.
Add the word “free” to the first picture. How many people will respond to this? Oh, probably about a thousand percent more in the case of the soap and a hundred thousand more in the case of the big screen. Thus we see that the word is indeed worth at least 1,000 pictures.
Let’s look at another, more typical, example. A DVD player. Our picture shows a smallish, rectangular black box that looks pretty much the same as a million other black boxes that play DVDs.
Merchant A displays the box’s picture, price, and a “add to cart” button on his website.
Merchant B has the box’s picture, the price and three lines of type saying things like:
– Progressive scan
– Multifunction remote
– Dual-voltage
Merchant C shows the picture, the price and a complete list of features like digital audio out, supports all DVD video and audio standards, MPEG and JPEG compatible, etc.
Merchant D’s page includes everything that’s on Merchant C’s, but adds a short sales pitch: Pioneer’s latest ultra-stable DVD player is equally at home with commercial video DVDs and home-made DVD - R, +R, DVD-RW, music and still-image discs. With the best error-correction circuitry in the business, it offers jitter and skip-free viewing of all your Hollywood favorites.
Given the same DVD player selling at an identical price in all four stores, who do you think is going to make the most sales?
If you said “Merchant D,” you’re right. Followed, in descending order, by merchants C, B and A. In other words, the seller who relies most heavily on the picture being worth more than words will inevitably be the one closing the fewest deals.
Words are potent. Powerful enough to have convinced you to read 427 worth of them to get to this point in this post. Not too shabby, considering there isn’t any picture at all to go along with them.
Unfortunately, for many of us, we have more skill with images than with words. Modern digital cameras don’t exactly make it impossible to take a bad picture, but they do make it cheap and easy for even the rankest amateur photographer to take as many dozen as necessary to get one good enough to use on a website.
Words are different. There aren’t any programs that will produce text coherently describing your product, let alone convincing enough to make someone visiting your site want to buy it. Words, the ones that bridge the gap between thought (”should I”) and action (clicking “buy now”) are too important to leave to amateurs. For professional words that sell, try GetWebContent.com.
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Published October 24th, 2007
in Copywriting.
“Choose your words carefully, mister.”
Isn’t that what John Wayne, Gary Cooper and all those other cowboy stars used say as they were pointing their Peacemakers at the bad guys? Or is that backward? Maybe it was the villains who said “choose you words carefully” to the heroes they’d drawn down on.
Doesn’t much matter who said it, it’s still good advice — even if you’re not looking into the big, gaping eye of a Colt .45.
The words you choose and the phrases you use on your web pages are key factors in defining your site. They tell prospective customers what your products and services are, whether those products and services are relevant to their needs and, most important, if you are trustworthy and credible enough to deserve their business.
Quite an important function for tiny things no more than seven or eight letters long (generally speaking, nine or 29-letter words are a bit much for e-commerce.) Which raises a good question. What kind of words are best suited for the web?
Active words are almost always better than passive ones in sales situations whether they’re taking place on terra firma or out in cyberspace. There are, of course, numerous definitions of “active word” depending on situation. If you’re writing a dictionary you might define it one way, if you’re selling a car, you’d probably use a different definition.
For website usage, let’s assume we’re selling cars. For this purpose, your active words should embody a “call to immediate action” whenever possible.
“You should consider this model sometime because the $3000 rebate is ending soon” contains a passive call to action, there’s nothing motivating about “consider,” “sometime,” and “soon.”
“You should buy this model today because the $3000 rebate is ending tomorrow” is the same sentence with three active words replacing the passive words.
Power words, which should also be included on every website which is trying to sell something, are somewhat different than active words. For one thing, active words are motion words designed to get the reader to do something — go here, click there, buy now, order today — while power words are more likely to be descriptive — frequently, though not always — adjectives.
For example: Shure EC4 ear-canal headphones feature sound-isolation to block out irritating audio emissions from jet engines, subways, people screaming into cell phones, drunks vomiting, babies yelping and other sources of sound pollution.
An OK sentence, that, but it definitely wins no extra points for power words. Let’s try and fix it, shall we?
Shure’s next-generation EC4 ear-canal headphones feature 40db sound-isolation to kill virtually all irritating audio emissions from jet engines, subways, people screaming into cell phones, drunks vomiting, babies yelping and other sources of sound pollution.
Better. “Next-generation” is a power word which denotes something and new and previously unavailable. “40db” is a simple specification given power status by its placement in the sentence. “Kill virtually all” has power because it makes it clear that we’re talking about really eliminating noise, not just deterring it. Can we improve it even a bit more?
How about this?
Shure’s next-generation EC4 ear-canal headphones feature 40db sound-isolation to kill virtually all infuriating audio emissions from jet engines, subways, people screaming into cell phones, drunks vomiting, babies yelping and other sources of sound pollution.
A minor change, but it illustrates an important point. Power words can be used as negatives as well as positives.
“Shure headphones are good, low-cost imitations are not” has neither positive nor negative power words and, therefore, is a pretty lame sentence.
“Shure headphones are superb, low-cost imitations are trash” has both positive and negative power words and is fairly potent.
Too much of anything being a bad thing, it must be noted that it’s all-to-easy to overdo the use of power words.
Lard your website with multiple references to “awesome,” “super,” “fantastic” and similar words or, just as bad, pile a serious of over-the-top adjectives together (this fantastic, super-awesome CD will rock your world with its awesome power and super great songs) and no intelligent person is going to believe anything you say.
The reality of words on the web is this: They’re very important (super, fantastically, awesomely important to overdo it a bit) and should be deployed with skill. If you’re comfortable doing that, by all means go for it. If you’re not, consider hiring a professional like those at GetWebContent.com. The money you spend will be repaid many times in increased sales.
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Published September 24th, 2007
in Copywriting and Marketing.
The real benefit of capitalism, as opposed to any other “ism”, is competition. Without competition in the marketplace blank DVD discs would be five bucks instead of five cents and you could, if you were lucky, afford to make maybe four calls a month on your cell phone.
Nowhere is the concept of free enterprise and economic competition illustrated more clearly than in e-commerce. The low cost of entry into the market — essentially under $100 to toss up a website — makes it possible for kitchen-table entrepreneurs to compete with Fortune 500 companies for the same customers. The playing field isn’t level of course, the rich teams have access to better web designers and promotional opportunities than the poor. But it is possible for a person of limited means to get into the same game as the bigger teams and make some money at it.
Compare that to the brick-and-mortar world, where the cost of getting and staying in business is high, and the beauty of the web is apparent. Thousands of independent vendors compete with WalMart in cyberspace. How many mom-and-pop variety stores still compete with WalMart on the ground? While there are, of course, exceptions — millions of them — the vast majority of the web’s 40 or 50 million commercial sites are non-exclusive. They sell exactly the same things as tens, dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other sites … usually for roughly the same prices.
Take real estate. Exclusive listings comprise less than ten percent of the average Realtor’s listings. In any given community, at least 90 percent of the homes for sale on every real estate site are the same MLS listings. Since you can’t buy a house using an online shopping cart, the question becomes who’s site generates the most telephone or email inquires about the properties. Almost always it’s the ones who know what to say and say it in the best way.
Consider something that can be, and usually is, purchased online: Music players. How many sites do you think offer iPods for sale? Don’t know? Neither do we. But there are a ton of them. Some probably sell thousands of units a month, others maybe a few hundred a year. What separates the winners from the losers? Their content, pure and simple. The words they use to entice consumers to buy. The same formula that enables one Ford dealer to sell four times more cars off his lot than the dealer across town, the quality of the sales pitch.
But wait, maybe that’s not true. The Ford dealers don’t have to contend with search engine returns, everyone in town knows who they are. OK. That’s a point. But remember this, search engine bots don’t look at pictures and graphics, they don’t know what color your logo is or whether you have the flashiest Flash on the block. All they do is read your words and check your links.
And what about the top five sites in searches for “Charleston, SC homes for sale” or “iPhone?” Does the site returned number one outsell number three and five? Not necessarily. Few people buy after visiting only one site. They’ll look at a number of sites on the first and second return pages and make a decision based on the quality of the sales message.
As with real estate and iPods, there are many websites offering to write your sales message for you. Unlike a house on Main Street or an iPod, words are not all the same, they’re only as good as the person writing them.
The winning Ford dealer doesn’t use the amateur copywriting services offered as a freebie by the radio and TV stations he advertises on, he hires a professional to craft his words. He doesn’t depend on his sales people to mumble whatever happens to come into their heads at customers. He drills them into learning the message he wants them to convey, he teaches them to recite specific, relevant points about each model on the lot.
Telemarketers who get rich work from professionally written scripts. Those who don’t use scripts hear only the lonely sound of hangups and are usually out of the business within a week.
So how are your site’s words? Are they equal to the task of competiting with those of your Fortune 500 competitors? If not, GetWebContent can help. At GWC. we specialize in Fortune 500 quality at small business prices.
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Published September 4th, 2007
in Copywriting and Marketing.
Here’s a cyber-variation on a “cheerful” bit of conversation frequently employed by coaches on the first day of practice, drill sergeants at the beginning of boot camp, and college orientation lecturers who, despite their numerous degrees and pedigrees, haven’t been able to think of anything better to tell incoming freshmen since about 1492.
Open your chief competitor’s website in a new browser tab or window.
Next, open your own site in another new tab or window.
Finally, open another major competitor’s site in a third tab or window.
Depending on what browser you’re using and how it’s configured, you should have three tabs or windows next to each other at the top of your screen, on your taskbar, or, perhaps, snuggled together one on top of the other under a taskbar icon.
For the purpose of this demonstration, let’s assume that the view you have is of three tabs across the top of the browser with the tab signifying your site in the center flanked by your competitors’ tabs.
Look to the left of your tab. Now look to the right of your tab. A year from now the site represented by one of those tabs won’t be there anymore. The site represented by the other tab will still exist, but it will, most probably, have changed substantially in the ensuing 12 months.
It may be bigger and more profitable or it may be struggling, barely clinging to life. It may have a higher page rank or a lower one. It may have branched out and be offering a whole new range of products and services or it may have shed some excess baggage and be concentrating on one primary line.
One thing is almost certain, it won’t be the same site it is today. Virtually nothing in cyberspace stays stationary for 90 days, let alone a year. Fact is, the web is ever changing. Which is, beyond any doubt, its greatest glory — and presents webmasters with their greatest challenge.
Take a look at the middle tab, the one representing your site. Where will it be in a year? Where will you, in your career as a netrepreneur be in a year? Will you be enjoying the success and earning the money you dreamed of when you opened your hosting account and — perhaps excitedly, perhaps not — uploaded your first index page? Or will you be counting your orders in single or double digits and wondering why you ever bothered creating a website in the first place?
The answer to those questions lies largely in how and how often you augment and refresh the editorial content — the words — on your site. And, just as importantly, how good, how relevant, and how unique those words are.
Everyone, or almost everyone, knows that search engine bots are steadily becoming more active, visiting sites more often, analyzing what they find on those sites in greater depth. Not surprisingly, the average online shopper is also becoming more sophisticated and analytical.
With over 70 percent of active internet users in the U.S. accessing the web via broadband (according to the General Accounting Office), shoppers are looking at many more websites than ever before making a buying decision. In the past, for many people, convenience and a wide variety of product choices was the major thing that mattered when shopping online. Today, consumers are looking at websites the way they look at newspaper, magazine and TV ads. If the words in the ads or on the sites aren’t compelling, they’ll shop somewhere else.
At GetWebContent we specialize in powerful web copy customized specifically for your website. Our words sing, dance, sell and exceed the quality and ethical specifications of every major search engine including you (or is that goo) know who. No, as in ZERO, article-posting service or packaged content vendor can make that claim. Except by lying — which many of them, sadly, do.
Content malnutrition is a top ten website killer. To immunize the site in the middle tab — your site — contact GetWebContent today.
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Published August 9th, 2007
in Copywriting.
Price is what you pay, value is what you get.
– Warren Buffett
This is what our FAQ page has to say about price: Our rates are the most cost-effective in the business.
That said, there are a lot of amateurs, wannabes, and non-English-speakers wandering around cyberspace peddling dollar-store-priced web content hastily concocted of inappropriate words, snarled syntax, flaky factoids, and irrelevant ramblings.
So to everyone who says, “I thought you said you’re the lowest-cost content provider in the business,” we say this: You thought wrong. We said our rates are the most cost-effective. Not the lowest cost, not the cheapest … the most cost-effective.
Two words. Cost and effective. Yes, you can buy bushels of ill-chosen words for next to nothing, but they won’t be nearly as effective as a somewhat higher-priced handful of well-chosen ones. Illiterate copy won’t sell your products. Irrelevant copy won’t help your search-engine ranking. Inane copy won’t convert web surfers into online customers.
And that’s the good news. The bad news about poorly crafted copy is that it can actually re-route customers already on the way to your order page to someone else’s website. It can cause GoogleBot to shake its silicon head sadly and put a black mark on your report card. It can make even a brilliantly designed site offering world-class products be perceived as a joke.
As an example, here’s the way one lower-cost web writer explains how crucial his craft is: “The use of written language is a vitally important aspect of web copywriting.”
Pardon the small profanity, but it would be damn hard to do any kind of writing without a written language. The sentence is pure nonsense. It means nothing. Is “nothing” and “nonsense” what you want on your website?
Basically, the old adage “You get what you pay for” applies to what lawyers like to call “intellectual property” as much as it does to tangible goods like computers and cars. You can get computers and cars — and web content (from us, among others) — at bargain prices. But there is a point at which a bargain stops being a bargain. If a product is gutter-ball priced, its quality, workmanship, and performance are going to be in the gutter as well.
So how do you know what you’re getting? Let’s answer that question with a question. How do you tell a good chair from a bad one? First, you look at it as it sets. Does it look well-made? Are the upholstery seams even and sturdily stitched? Does the material have a quality feel? Next, you might take a peek underneath it. How are the pieces fastened together? I f there’s a lining on the bottom, is it nicely tacked up or loosely stapled? Finally, the acid test, you sit your butt down on it.
Applying that lesson to judging copy is easy. How does it look? Do the sentences run on forever? Do the paragraphs extend for inches? What’s it made of? Clean, crisp, power words or prepositions, adjectival phrases and other linguistic fillers? Finally, is it comfortable, does it feel right?
Here’s how to answer that last, most crucial, question. Read the copy aloud. See how it sounds in your ears. Does it flow smoothly from your throat and over your tongue? Does it sound convincing? Does it raise questions in your mind, or answer them? Are you comfortable with the author? Is he or she someone you’d enjoy having a face-to-face conversation with? Everything else being equal, would you buy a used car from the author or walk off the lot determined to kick tires elsewhere?
As noted elsewhere on GetWebContent.com, all of our writers are full-time professionals who speak and write plain, clear and declarative American English as a first language. None of them are students or interns, and all of them have extensive experience writing for major magazines, Fortune 500 companies and/or top advertising agencies. They know their business and they have the ability — and take the time — to learn yours before typing a single word into their computers.
Important as that is, however, it isn’t the major factor in hiring a writer for the mission-critical task of putting a literary face on your website. The major factor is quality. Read most, if not all, of a prospective writers’ sites. Is the copy below average? Is it merely OK? Is it good? Or is it better than good, maybe even great?
How about the copy they’ve written for paying customers? Read their samples carefully, maybe even aloud. (If they don’t have a robust selection of samples on their site, seek a writer elsewhere.) Are the samples good or better than good? Are they on-topic? Are they written with clarity, energy, warmth, passion? Do they catch and hold your interest? If you were in the market for the product or service offered, would what you’re reading make you want to buy it right now?
Sixty-six years ago, Winston Churchill coined a phrase that has become so universal many people believe it dates back to biblical times. “Give us the tools,” the British prime minister told the American public in a radio speech, “and we will finish the job.”
In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, your ability to finish the job — to close the sale — is only as good as your tools. For those of us conducting business on the Internet, our words — what we say about ourselves and our products — is the dominant tool in the shed. The one indispensible tool we need to finish our job successfully.
Buying a cheap imported clone of the real tool to save a few dollars is more than a classic example of losing a dollar to save a dime. It is, plainly and simply, an exercise in stupidity and website suicide..
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Published July 23rd, 2007
in Copywriting.
Website articles work. They provide valuable, often interesting, and frequently compelling information that help turn surfers, browsers, and “looky-loo” shoppers into buyers. Articles — high-quality, relevant articles — also make websites a more attractive search-engine “buy” because adding them satisfies the engines’ preferences for “fresh, rich” content.
So the question is not is an articles section on a website a good idea. In most cases, it rather obviously is. What the question really is, is this: Where do articles come from?
Hhhhmmmm. Does the stork bring them? Noooo … Do you clip them out of books and magazines and glue them onto a page in your website? Not unless you want to risk getting sued for copyright infringement and penalized by search engines for stealing content that isn’t exactly legit.
Well, then. How about fast-food content mills where you select a topic from a menu, shout your choice into a plastic clown’s mouth, and pick up your article at the next window? Is that where you get them?
Yes, you can get articles at the local Spam-In-The-Box or Copy Chef, but GoogleBot and its cousins at the other engines know the selections even better than you do. Specifically, they know how many thousands of websites are running those identical poorly written, dollar-menu articles and how totally generic and non-specific to your website they are.
Putting junk food on your site will not get you a higher search-engine page rank, it may even erode the one you already have. Grease burgers and kangaroo meat won’t impress your customers either, they’d almost always rather have prime beef.
Frankly, the only way to get really quality articles on your site is to either write them yourself — assuming you’re a good writer acquainted with the latest SEO copywriting techniques — or hire a qualified professional to custom write them for you.
Let’s assume that you majored in creative writing in college and spent three years as a junior copywriter at an ad agency before deciding that what you really wanted to do in life was operate an online jewelry store. In other words, you’ve got more than enough chops to write your own articles. Now the question becomes, is it cost-effective for you to do so?
To find out, let’s walk through a create-an-article scenario, kind of a war game that uses words instead of guns.
Here’s our objective:
• Create a new and unique 350-word article on the history of cufflinks.
• Reveal when cufflinks were originated and how they were used.
• Highlight the significance cufflinks represented in identifying certain events.
• Establish when the personalization of cufflinks with monograms began.
• Construct the article with content that is optimized for customers and search engines alike.
That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it? Only 350 words. And we’ve got a broadband internet connection. No need to travel all the way to the New York Public Library and spend three or four days behind the lions doing research. It’s a snap.
Maybe, but there are two strings attached. One: You have to find and use multiple sources for your historical information because if you take it all from one or two sites Google and the other search engines are likely to tag it as duplicated content. Two: As is the case with most article topics, there is no “one” or even two or three websites or books that contain facts covering all the aspects of this article. In-depth, or at least, medium-depth research is required.
Shall we go to work by trying a search for cufflink history? Wow, look at all those jewelry companies that have pages of corporate history online. My, there seem to be hundreds of museums and custom jewelry makers selling replicas of old cufflink designs. And all those eBay vendors who seem to think the Lucky Strike cufflinks granddad got free with a carton of cigarettes during the Depression have real “historic” significance.
How are we ever going to discover if the first cufflinks were made in Babylon or ancient Egypt by sorting through this mess? Guess what? We’re not. We’re going to have to refine and research and refine and research indefinitely until we get an answer. We may even have to search every period of history we can think of — from the Victorian era back to a thousand years B.C. — using “cufflinks” as an added search term.
And that’s just the beginning of the job. Consider talking about the significance cufflinks represented in identifying certain events. Did Hannibal reward his hard-working elephant wranglers with celebratory cufflinks after they successfully crossed the Alps? (He didn’t.) Did Ronald Reagan present his top one-half-of-one-percent campaign workers with solid-gold commemorative cufflinks after his re-election campaign? (He did.)
And how long would it take you to find those things, or a few other examples like them, out?
Have we gotten to monograms yet? And the invention of French cuffs, without which the use of cufflinks would probably have disappeared before the beginning of the 20th Century? And when were double cufflinks — two identical buttons connected by a chain — first used?
Unlike a true war game, the article-writing game is basically single-player. If you want to work through the cufflink scenario, you don’t need our help. We can, however, give you some scoring guidance. If you can do the research to write a really killer cufflinks article — one that meets the requirements listed above — in under 12 hours you’re an expert. Unless you’re getting rich selling jewelry, you probably should go back to your ad agency career.
Of course, that ten or 11 or 12 hours is just the research time. You still have to write, edit and proofread the article. Say, 16 hours — two full work days — for the entire job.
Now, at last, the real questions. What would you have to give up, in terms of income lost and work undone, to take two days out of your business week every time you wanted to add an article to your site? And what is your time as CEO of your online business worth? Is it worth more or less than the salary you would get cleaning shower stalls at Motel Six or flipping pancakes at iHop?
Or, to phrase the question another way, what is your annual gross income? If you earn more than $40,000 a year, your average daily workday income is about $156. If you devote two days to writing an article, it’s costing you over $300 and, almost certainly, creating a backlog of other work that will make the next day or two more difficult than they have to be.
And, unless you are the skilled professional — or at least semi-professional — wordsmith and SEO expert described earlier, the completed article is unlikely to work as well, sell as hard, improve your rankings as much, as one written by a full-time copywriter.
Hire a professional or write it yourself?
Good question with an easy answer.
Hire a professional and devote the two days you save to taking care of your real business — running your website. Or, take the two days off and go fishing. Either way, you’ll be making much better use of your time.
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