Usable Words

This one works (spelling mistake and all):

(From Grill’d.)

This one, I’m not so sure:

(This is the first in a series of posts about how people use the words on your website.)

Here’s something about writing for the web that’s totally unique. On the web, whether people can find you or not depends (in part) on the words you write. To be exact, it depends on how the words you write relate to the words they type into a search box.

As a word geek, I find this fascinating. The ancient art of rhetoric – to which every copywriter owes his or her livelihood – is about using words based on how you think people will behave. You predict that pressing certain verbal buttons will trigger the behaviour you want. So you could say that all of us in the word business use language in predictive ways.

But I can’t think of any other word-based activity that’s so specifically, mechanically predictive about human behaviour as writing search engine optimised (SEO) content. (SEO is about a lot more than content, actually, but content is a good place to start.) read more >

Imagine you’re launching a new clock radio. Clock radios are a rather boring item (apologies to fans and collectors), so you’re racking your brains to think of something your product can do that will excite people. Then you hit on it: there’s this button you can press that will turn off the alarm and it will turn itself back on nine minutes later! It’s like magic!  Is that cool or what?

You’ve read Copyblogger enough to know that you need to sell benefits, not features, so you carefully craft a benefit statement for your snooze button that cleverly leverages a pain point or an emotional hot-button. “Give Mondayitis the flick!”, maybe. Or “Catch an extra few minutes of precious sleep…and still make your 9 o’clock meeting!”

You’re pretty pleased with yourself. You plaster your new tagline all over your website and your promotional materials, sit back and wait for the sales. And they don’t come.

The reason is hopefully obvious. Every single clock radio on the market has a snooze button. Snooze buttons were probably really groovy when they were first invented (their inventor is no doubt either very rich, or cursing him/herself about not taking out a patent). But nowadays, you’d no more be surprised to see a big button on a clock radio that you can press to make the alarm go away for nine minutes (why is it always nine minutes, incidentally?) than you would to see a handle on a saucepan.

This might all seem very self-evident, but it’s amazing how many businesses – large and small – are out there selling the snooze button. From airlines selling the generic benefits of plane travel, to work-from-home financial planners offering to “grow your wealth with a comprehensive range of investment services”, these businesses are doing some great pro bono PR for their industries, but totally failing to explain why customers should choose them over their competitors.

What you need to do instead is sell that nifty iPod dock that you’ve just added to your line of clock radios. Well, actually you needed to do that five years ago; iPod docks on clock radios are the new snooze button! But you get the idea. Work out what you’re doing that nobody else is, and sell that.

Image: seanmcgrath