Copywriting

Why good websites are written like junk mail.

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websites written like junk mailYou might be surprised to find me saying you should write a website the same way you write junk mail.

After all, I have spent the last 15 years insisting that writing for the web is different.

Well, I’ll happily defend both positions. Writing for the web really is different, in several ways. But also, it’s important to remember that the web is a direct response medium. Click or no click. Action or no action. Response or no response.

Therein lies the similarity. Just like with junk mail, a website can only claim success when its readers take some kind of action. If a visitor simply glances at your home page and neither scrolls nor clicks before hitting the back button, you have failed. You haven’t driven action of any kind.

Let’s look at the life of a piece of direct mail, from the moment it lands on your doormat, and see how that compares with a successful website.

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When cold-calling a prospect…give, don’t ask.

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cold calling with giftCold calling is hard.

Yes, a small proportion of freelancers find cold-calling easy. But for most of us, reading through our list of prospects, reaching for the phone, dialing the number, and then doing our best to pitch our services is one of the hardest tasks imaginable.

It’s hard because we know that more often than not our prospect will say no.

And when they do say no, we feel bad. We feel we have failed. And on a personal level, however professional we try to feel about the experience, we feel rejected. We are not good enough. Our prospects have found us to be inadequate and wanting in some way.

In a quite different way, it’s tough for your prospect as well.

First off, she has been interrupted. When her phone rang she was busy doing something else. Her mind was in a whole different place.

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The geeks have done their part for social media. Now it’s time for the writers.

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social media writing toolboxWhat do I mean by this?

Let me explain with a story from 1998.That was the year I began to work full-time as an online writer and copywriter.

By that time hundreds of thousands of companies had already launched websites. Generally, they looked reasonably good and worked reasonably well. But the writing was not so good. What many of them did was simply cut and paste text from their old print materials.

They didn’t understand that writing for the web was different. And that was the message I shared with my audience and my clients.

The developers and designers had done their part. But to make websites achieve their potential, these companies needed good writers who understood the medium.

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When to use your copywriting skills, and when not to.

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copywriter as magicianI receive a lot of email from all kinds of people, including freelance copywriters.

Some are saying hi, some are asking questions, and some want me to do something.

I have no problem receiving the emails. I like to keep in touch with other writers. But I do have a tip for anyone writing to me by email.

When you send me an email, don’t “copywrite” at me.

In other words, don’t use your copywriting skills to try to persuade me to read something or do something.

Strange as it might seem, I can recognize when I’m being “copywritten” at from 50 paces. And I can hit that delete button in about 50 microseconds.

Why is it wrong to use your copywriting skills when writing to an individual by email? Because the context is wrong.

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Web writers: For every great performance, you need to rehearse.

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web writing practiceWhen you watch a live performance of your favorite play in a theater, you are looking at a performance that has been preceded by weeks or months of rehearsals.

And those rehearsals take place without costumes, without scenery and without the pressure of an audience watching.

The rehearsals allow the actors to get things right, outside of the public eye. There are fewer constraints. There are no downsides to making mistakes, missing lines, and so on. No pressure.

OK. Now let’s consider how we go about writing interior pages on websites.

As an example, let’s assume we are working on the rewrite of an insurance company website. The company offers home insurance, auto insurance, commercial insurance and farm insurance. Each of these areas has an interior page of its own.

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To write a great homepage, try the “no-body-copy” test.

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write homepage

First things first. This test and approach applies to static home pages for sites that sell stuff — products, services and subscriptions etc. It does not apply to publishers, blogs or websites which have a blog on the home page.

With that out of the way, let’s begin.

When working with clients on their home pages I will often suggest the following:

“Let’s take a screenshot of the first screen of your homepage, erase all the body text, and then see how much of your core message survives.”

To put it another way, I want to see how much of the site’s message survives if people read only the headlines, subheads and text links.

What’s the point?

Because that’s how first-time visitors actually behave when they arrive on your homepage for the first time.

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