It’s back to school time. Sorry. I know we’re supposed to be more relaxed about spelling and grammar nowadays, but for a website to work to the max, it must avoid alienating its target audience. And some people get intensely annoyed by what they regard as sloppy writing. So here goes. Five common mistakes:

It’s/Its
Only use it’s with an apostrophe, when it represents a contraction of it is. It’s easy to remember. It’s = it is.

Any other use of its, and there’s no apostrophe:

The store opened its doors for the first time.
It’s going to be a hard winter.
The team presented its new players.
No doubt – it’s going to be a great season.

Spell checker hell
It’s something to do with fingers. When we use a keyboard sometimes our fingers consistently enter a word wrongly. Usually the spell checker spots the problem. But where the wrong word is a good word, no alarms ring. My problems are two little words. For, and from. Often I type them fro and form. So do others – it’s a mistake often seen. Learn what your problem words are and make a point of looking out for them when proofreading. Here are a few more:

One – On
Name – Mane
Red – Ref
Fade – Fads
Two – Tow

Same sound, different spelling, different meaning
Lots of examples – too many , but here are a few. This is where an online dictionary (or even a paper one) is your best friend. If you’re uncertain, look it up.

Discreet – Discrete
Principle – Principal
Stationary – Stationery
Their – There
Affect – Effect
Weather – Whether – Wether (that last one is definitely worth looking up, unless you were born on a farm)
Border – Boarder
Born – Borne
Berth – Birth
Etc.

To/Too/Two
There should be no excuse for confusing to and two, but poor old too often loses its last letter. If you’ve used to and you could substitute the word also then add an ‘o’. And her mother came too. But too is also used to mean an excess. He has too much talent. That use is easier to spot, and causes less mistakes, but when your fingers are really flying, look out for it.

Inconsistent numbering
There’s a writing convention. Numbers up to ten are spelt. Numbers over ten are shown in figures.

There were five staff in the store.
We are launching 43 new products.

If you use that rule keep it consistent. It trips the reader up to see ten in one place and 10 in another.

But what should you do if you have both a large and a small number appearing in the same sentence?

The ten syndicate members won £23,000 each.

Rearrange.

There were ten syndicate members. Each won £23,000.

And don’t forget. Proofread.

copy, Copywriting, grammatical errors, webcopy, writing

What’s your web marketing strategy? It’s the kind of question many small business owners don’t give much thought to. After all, now the site is up and running what’s the point of having a strategy?

The thing is, a web marketing strategy should be written before work starts on the site. Why? Because a web marketing strategy dictates the purpose and objectives of the resulting site. In particular…

• What the business aims to achieve on the web
• The revenue the business expects to generate
• The budget (i.e. amount of money) the business is prepared to invest to achieve its revenue target
• The specific components required to achieve the site’s aims

If these high level items aren’t thought of before the site is built, what’s the purpose of the web site? How much can the business afford to spend on it? How can the business owner know whether or not the site is successful?

And how can anybody know what should or shouldn’t be included in the site?

When the web marketing strategy comes first, it’s much easier for all concerned. Everything falls out of the strategy…

• What content to include (i.e. focus)
• What content to exclude
• Whether or not some particular component is too expensive
• Whether or not some particular designer or programmer is too expensive

These four things can tie up a business owner’s time for months. Yet an Internet marketing strategy can be created in less than a day.

It needn’t be a complex document. It’s not a business plan. In most cases, it won’t be used to secure financing (by a small business owner). Its purpose is simply to define what the site should achieve. It becomes a tool for making good choices, and doing away with nice-to-have components the business owner can’t really afford.

The plain fact is, your web marketing strategy only needs to state what you want to achieve, how much you expect to earn, how much you’re prepared to invest, and give a date by when you want to achieve your target.

marketing strategy, Web Marketing

A little rule. 100% of people will read 10 words; 10% of people will read 100 words.

Not true of course, but a good guide to the penalty exacted by long copy.

So, a few tips on cutting copy. Not the full treatise, which will follow, but ways to lose a word or two without losing anything else.

In order to. What’s wrong with ‘to’?

We are doing this in order to achieve that. We are doing this to achieve that.

Same as. Same as is the same as ‘like’, sometimes.

Our products are the same as our competitors’ but cost less. Our products are like our competitors’ but cost less.

As well as. A phrase that can often be swapped for ‘too’ or ‘both’.

We supply red lorries as well as yellow lorries. We supply both red lorries and yellow lorries. We supply both red and yellow lorries. We supply red lorries, and yellow lorries too.

The apostrophe. It can save a vital letter or two.

They will be available in the New Year. They’ll be available in the New Year.

We will get right back to you. We’ll get right back to you.

Don’t state the obvious.

We’ll get right back to you. We’ll get right back.

Adjectives – don’t make lists (it smells like overselling).

This stunning, exciting, innovative new service. This exciting new service.

Articles. Definite and possessive articles are often understood in their absence.

The research shows. Research shows.

Our customers are clamouring for more. Customers are clamouring for more.

———–

There are many more ways of cutting copy, including radical rewrites. But  little wins, like these, can make a big difference. Read on, if you wish.

From a Transport for London web page:

Cycle revolution
Cycle journeys in London have more than doubled in the past decade, with a nine per cent increase in cycle journeys on the city’s major roads in the past year alone.
The new facilities will provide for growing cyclist demand and also help to promote cycling as an easy and convenient way to get around the Capital.
Kulveer Ranger, the Mayor’s transport adviser, said: “If we are to deliver a cycle revolution in the Capital we must ensure Londoners can park their bikes where and when they want to.
‘The availability of cycle parking plays a major role in helping people decide whether it is convenient to take to two wheels or not.
113 words, 628 characters

or:

Cycle revolution
London cycle journeys have more than doubled in a decade, with a 9% rise on major roads in the last year.
New facilities will meet growing demand and help promote cycling as an easy and convenient way to get around.
Kulveer Ranger, the Mayor’s transport adviser, said: ‘If we are to deliver a cycle revolution Londoners must be able to park bikes where and when they want.
Cycle parking plays a major role when people decide whether to take to two wheels.
82 words, 452 characters

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Copywriting, web, webcopy, writing

Social networkers will recognise the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year 2009, unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site.

It’s fun to spot new words – although often they are uglier than three-week dead haddock (‘scrappage’ for example) – but be careful about their use in web copy.

The prime job of commercial web copy is to tempt your readers into a profitable relationship with you. The second priority is to get your site near the top of search engine listings.

While Google won’t care a whit about you unfriending scrappage, human readers quite possibly will. So don’t risk upsetting them. Keep your language simple, open, everyday, approachable*. And non-upsetting. It’ll stop people unfriending you.

*Errrrrr – one exception. If you’re just addressing a technical audience that’s on your wavelength, go ahead and use as much jargon and as many TLA’s as you need. They’ll be flattered to be thought of as part of an exclusive community.

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Copywriting, web, webcopy, writing

To use a cliché (something I normally wouldn’t touch with a bargepole, and would avoid like the plague), you only get one chance to make a first impression. It’s important, therefore, that that impression – in all likelihood your home page – should communicate clearly, concisely and compellingly what it is you do and, more importantly, what benefits that will bring to your customers.

So, what do you need to say on your home page? For many people that’s not an easy question to answer because they don’t think in the same way as their customers. When you work with a product or service, you see what you offer with supplier’s eyes, not those of a consumer. If that’s a problem for you, then read on; I’ll suggest a simple way of jumping to the other side of the fence.

When I ask clients of mine what it is they do, sometimes I get answers that leave me scratching my head: “Basically, we observe and track historic movements of stock indices across significant bourses worldwide, and using that data we construct behavioural models which, when married with real time data feeds, allow us hypothesise about future market movements, short, medium and long term. This allows our customers to identify upcoming transaction opportunities, whether of an instant acquire or dispose nature, or as potential go-long or go-short situations. Essentially, it’s non-trivial number-crunching and we have some seriously heavy metal in our computer room, mirrored to a distributed site so that in the event that in any one location we go into a crash and burn situation, then continuity is assured by automatic switchover. Is that clear?”

That’s not a real life example, but I’ve had real ones that are that bad, and worse. There’s a useful technique I apply, under my breath, when this happens which – politely – I’ll call WTF*.“So,” I ask politely, “WTF does that mean?”

Applied (and usually reiterated) with due regard to the sensitive nature of the client/supplier relationship, the WTF question lets my client – with some gentle prompting – distil a simpler statement about what they do. “We provide mathematically-based predictions of stock market movements to our customers, and we do it in a robust, fail-safe way.”

That still leaves much to be desired, and more work is required, because the next question to ask, politely, is “SFW*?” And this is where it gets interesting, because now we’re looking for a benefit statement. We probably won’t get there immediately, but we’ll get to an answer like: “Well, our service lets our customers buy and sell at the optimum point, within the uncertainty constraints of market behaviour.”

“SFW?”

“So they can make more money”

Great, between us we’ve got there, a solid reason for a customer to do business with my client. There are very few motivating benefits that make a customer think about spending money with a previously unknown potential supplier. This list is not exhaustive, but look for messages as powerful as these:

Business

* You’ll save money
* You’ll save time
* You’ll sell more
* Your profits will increase

Personal

* You’ll be healthier
* You’ll be richer
* You’ll be more successful
* Your family will thank you

Those, of course, are bold, bald statements but your home page should incorporate a lightly embroidered version of one (or more) of them within the first sentence. One of my websites opens with the sentence “You’ve invested time and money building a website – Write for Web helps you make your site work hard and produce a return from that investment.”

Do you need professional help to arrive at a powerful message for your own organisation? Perhaps not. What you do need is the ability to ask yourself questions and determine exactly what benefits you offer. And then, of course, you have to communicate them.

*WTF, SFW. Acronyms inserted to avoid triggering parental advisory warnings

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