As promised, a follow-up to my first post on objections. This is the post where I start to get pointy-headed. I have to warn you that not only will I divide people into three categories, I’ll also divide each of these three categories into three subcategories!

But as long you can deal with that much taxonomy before breakfast, this post should give you a more nuanced way of working out how different groups of customer might relate to a potential objection. And there will be donuts.

I’ll also briefly talk about how to deal with these different kinds of objector. But this will be mostly theory: the applied stuff will come in the final post in the series. (Yes, it’s a trilogy!) read more >

One of the things good web copy does is answer objections – the niggling blockages people have that prevent them from buying what you’re selling. According to marketing guru Sonia Simone, “FAQs” should really be called “FROs” – Frequently Raised Objections.

So when you’re developing web content, you should certainly try to anticipate objections your potential customers might have. But here’s something that might sound a bit odd: you shouldn’t answer every single potential objection! Let me give you a (rather gross) example to show why not.
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This will be the last “ME! ME! ME!” post for a while, but while we’re in a housekeeping mood, I thought it would be a good time to take a look back at the first few months of this blog, and set a loose agenda for the next few. I’ve no plans to go down the problogger path and introduce posting schedules and the like, but I do intend to be a touch more systematic about things.

Prologue: Why do copywriters suck at blogging?

When I decided to become a copywriter, setting up a blog seemed like a no-brainer. I was trying to get people to pay me to write stuff – what better way to promote my skills then, well, writing stuff?

At the time, I wondered why so few copywriters had blogs – and why, of the ones that did, so few of them were regularly updated. (There are famous exceptions of course.)

After a few months of running a copywriting business and a blog, I no longer wonder why most copywriters suck at blogging – on the contrary, I’m filled with admiration for the ones who manage to blog well and regularly. Although blogging might seem like the most natural fit in the world for a copywriter, there are a couple of major things that get in the way. read more >

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Anyone who runs a blog connected to a business should occasionally take time to explain what they do. This is doubly important when your idea of what you do changes on a regular basis! So here’s my attempt. I’ll try (for once) to be brief.

I’ll follow up this post in the next few days with another one talking about my plans for this blog over the next year.

My bread and butter: Flagship web content for small-medium businesses

Most of my projects at the moment involve working with a small or medium business person who’s building a new website, and wants the words on the site to be as professional and compelling as the site design. I mostly work on highly visible “flagship” static content like home pages, “about us” pages, product descriptions, FAQs and targeted landing pages.

As my business name suggests, my focus is on content that enhances usability – that helps people get what they’re looking for (information, products and services, or human contact) as quickly and enjoyably as possible. I like working with clients who believe in creating a great user experience as the best way of attracting new customers, and turning existing customers into fanatically loyal fans.

Anybody who writes copy for the web needs to know the basics of Search Engine Optimisation. I’m no exception, but because of my focus on usability I choose not to describe myself as an “SEO copywriter”. I want to work with clients who put the user experience first. If people need a specialised SEO focus I would rather refer them on.

My growing sideline: Stakeholder communication for large business

Last year I had the wonderful opportunity to work with one of Australia’s biggest companies, updating the Corporate Responsibility area of their website and producing a report on their programs in support of Indigenous Australians.

This is a kind of work I’d love to do more of. I think I understand how to write for multiple audiences simultaneously, and this served me well producing documents to be read by shareholders, employees, customers, community partners and the general public. Whether it’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) work or other kinds of stakeholder reporting (such as annual reports), I like to think this will be a growing area of my business.

Just starting out: Content strategy

“Content strategy” is a popular buzzword in the web industry at the moment. At its most basic, it means thinking systematically about your business goals and what kind of online content you need to achieve them – as well as the logistics of who will write it, how often, using what guidelines, and how it will be published.

I already do this in an informal way – for example, I frequently give clients advice about blogging and other kinds of regularly updated content that they produce themselves. But this is something I can see becoming a lot more systematic over the next couple of years. It might even end up being the main thing I do.

So that’s it.

I hope that satisfies anyone who’s curious. Need to say, if you need any of the services I’ve mentioned, I’d love to hear from you at angus@usablewords.com.

When a young woman called Cassandra Italia got in touch with me last year needing some web copy for her medical tourism business, Global Health Travel, I was a bit sceptical. I didn’t know much about medical tourism – the practice of travelling overseas for (usually low-cost) medical treatment – but my gut instinct was that it sounded dodgy.

Listening to Cassandra, though, I couldn’t help but feel reassured. Cassandra patiently explained that the best hospitals in Asia that service medical tourists have a quality of nursing care and facilities that matches the best the West can offer (and often exceeds it). She said she was dealing exclusively with hospitals that were internationally accredited, and doctors with a proven track record. She’d really done her homework and saw a gap in a very immature Australian market. (Medical tourism is a huge industry in the US and Europe.)

The challenge for the Global Health Travel website was to create a user experience that was as reassuring as a conversation with Cassandra Italia. We tried to minimise hype and steer well away from the “cheap facelift in tropical paradise!!!” tone of most of the competing sites. Instead, we focused on addressing people’s legitimate questions, fears and concerns.

I think we achieved that, and in collaboration with Acorn Web Studio and Communication Design we ended up with a site that virtually radiates a sense of calm confidence.

The result: Global Health Travel has got off to a great start, with a growing roster of satisfied clients. Cassandra even got herself quoted as an industry expert in Melbourne’s Sunday Age. It’s good when things come together.

My friend Tania took this photo of an official notice on the London Underground. It strikes me as a great example of atrociously bad mass-audience copywriting. In fact, there’s so much wrong with it that it’s hard to know where to start. But let’s try.

Remember, you’re talking to EVERYONE.

If you’re writing something that’s going to be read by a big, diverse audience – every single commuter in the city, for example – keep in mind that everyone who reads it is going to assume, reasonably enough, that you’re talking to them.

From that perspective, the wording of this sign is horrible. It treats the entire body of commuters as one seething mass of repressed grievances, ready at any moment to burst into violence.

The person who chose the wording for the sign was probably assuming that the vast majority of readers – those who would never dream of assaulting a rail employee, no matter how late their train was – would just “self-exclude”. They’d read the sign and think “oh, that’s for violent people, not me” and be on their way.

But that’s not how people’s minds work, at least in modern Western societies. Even when a statement implies guilt – perhaps especially then – our first response is to assume it’s addressing us. A police officer yells “hey you!’ and we turn around, wondering what we’ve been caught at. (The philospher Louis Althusser called this “interpellation”.)

And because we don’t like being arbitrarily made to feel guilty, our second response – once we’ve worked out that we’re not the person being addressed – tends to be annoyance. So framing your rules and prohibitions in the imperative mood (“do this”, “don’t do that”), as a direct address to readers, is a good way to piss people off.

In fact, this kind of public address is a situation where (for once) you want to be as impersonal as possible. “Smoking is not permitted” is much better than “Don’t light up your filthy cancer sticks in here pal” precisely because it doesn’t address the reader directly (another win for the passive voice!).

This sign, on the other hand, reads like something one person would say to another, but in the worst possible way. It’s like one of the lines recited by a badly-trained service employee to a customer they perceive as “difficult”. (“Don’t take it out on me! It’s not my fault! I just work here! You’re not listening to me! I can’t help you!”) read more >

After such a long absence, I feel I owe you a post that will make you feel better about yourself. So this is about something you do all the time. It’s something people have been telling you is wrong, even though they do it all the time too: using the passive voice. The passive voice is a much maligned but perfectly legitimate part of the English language, and I want to help you make friends with it.

I’ve wanted to write in defence of the passive voice for a long time, but I was prompted into action by a post from Glenn at the Divine Write Copywriting Blog. Glenn points out a headline that borders on nonsensical – “Facebook Note Removes Juror from Trial” – and convincingly argues that it’s probably the result of an awkward attempt to rewrite something that started off in the passive voice.

Writers are often taught to avoid the passive voice, especially in things like headlines. Glenn refers to this as a “grammar rule”, which is the one point where I part company from him. The passive voice is a completely normal part of grammar; there’s no grammatical rule that says you shouldn’t use it.

This is a bit of a hot button for me, so I pedantically posted a comment correcting Glenn. Fortunately he took this very graciously, and we’re now Twitter buddies and everything (yes, I’ve succumbed – I’m @angusgmelb if you want to follow me). But as McKean’s Law (named after another friend of mine!) would have it, I made another mistake in my correction: I said the anti-passive thing was a “usage preference”, but it’s not really that either. What it is is a style guideline.

Grammar, usage, style: these are three different things, and the differences are important enough to insist on. That’s something I should probably save for a future post. But just to be going on with:

• A sentence can be either grammatical or ungrammatical. Therefore, grammar has “rules”. (Incidentally, this is something the so-called “prescriptive” and “descriptive” camps agree on. What they disagree on is how to decide what the rules are. If you’re under the false impression that descriptive linguists hate rules and believe that “anything goes” – or even if you’re not – please start reading Language Log immediately.)
• As for usage, word meanings evolve over time, but if we want to get along it’s a good idea not to say “up” when we mean “down”. Therefore, usage also has “rules,” but they change faster than the grammatical ones. (At least that’s my impression.)
• Style is different. Style is an aesthetic category, and aesthetics aren’t the kind of thing people reach consensus about. The most you can say is that style has guidelines. You can call these guidelines “rules” if you like, but they have no more authority than rules about what to wear with what, or what kind of knife and fork to use when. In other words, they’re the kind of rule that was made to be broken.

“Rules were made to be broken”, incidentally, is a pretty good example of a passive construction – a double passive construction, no less – that couldn’t possibly be “rewritten” in the active voice. Go on, try it.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, because one thing that emerges from this whole discussion is that most people only have a vague understanding of what the passive voice actually is. So let me try to clarify. read more >

From Peter Da Vanzo, a very welcome new contributor at Aaron Wall’s essential SEO blog, comes a great introductory post on SEO for regional domains. Definitely worth a look for my fellow Australians (or Unamericans of any description).

SEO copywriting master Heather Lloyd-Martin tells you Why keyword density is crap. (I might quote that title to the next person who asks me if I “do” keyword density.)

The guy who wrote Title tags for dummies does the same thing for meta descriptions. These 2 posts won’t get you a top Google rank by themselves, but at the very least they’ll make your Google listings a lot more clickable for people who happen to find them.

OK, so you’ve managed to attract a bit of traffic to your website, and you’ve been clear enough about what you’re on about so that you’re on the shortlist of your target customers. What next?

Well, what’s next is that they choose you over anyone else on the shortlist. Duh. And there are two basic things you need to do for this to happen:

1. You need to convince them that you understand their problems and you can make them go away. (Even one of their problems would help.)
2. You need to convince them that you can do the above better than anybody else.

In other words, the way to get people to choose you is to make it all about them.

In the next post in this series, I’m going to be talking a bit about point 2, convincing people that you do it better than anybody else. But for now let’s concentrate on point 1, convincing them you can make their problems go away.

What we’re fundamentally talking about here, as many of you will have realised, is selling benefits, not features. In other words, don’t tell people what you do, tell them how you can help them. In the classic formulation, people don’t care about you, they want to know “what’s in it for me”.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. There is a lot of stuff out there about using benefits to sell. I mean, really a lot, and most of it is just some variation on “Tell the prospect what’s in it for them. There, you’re now a copywriting genius. Give me $100.”

So yeah, really important principle no doubt, but do I have anything original to say about it? Maybe one day I will, but in the meantime, let me direct you to two of my favourite posts on the subject, by Sonia Simone at Copyblogger. Sonia suggests you bait the hook with emotional benefits, then reel them in with logical benefits, a formula I’ve found extremely useful.

So go and read Sonia. When you come back, you will be a copywriting genius (and not even $100 poorer), and you’ll be ready for me to tell you how to convince people you’re special. Because you are.

Image: mackz

When a potential customer is in a desperate situation, you need to let them know you can help.

Clearly.

And quickly.

If you can be the first person they hear this from, they become the easiest kind of person to convert into an actual customer. They won’t compare you to your competitors. They won’t baulk at the ridiculous price you charge for an emergency service. They just want the pain to go away.

…OK, all that’s pretty much common sense, right? But if it’s common-sense advice, why don’t people build their websites around it?

Here’s an example. I’ve been working with this one client. Let’s just say they’re a dentist. (They’re not a dentist. But I don’t want their competitors Googling this post and stealing my common-sense advice amazing copywriting secrets, and for my purposes they’re a bit like a dentist, so let’s pretend.)

Now, dentists have two kinds of customers. Well, more than two, but permit me to simplify. They have the kind of customer who can make an appointment in a week’s or a month’s time – the kind who is obediently attending their six-monthly checkup, or having their teeth whitened, or whatever.

Then there’s the kind of customer who needs an appointment right now. This customer has a toothache, and will pay absolutely anything to make it go away.

Well, here’s what I found when I looked at my client’s competitors’ websites: all of these “dentists” have an emergency service. They will actually come out to your place 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and fix your toothache. (If only real dentists did that!)

But none of them – at least none of the ones I looked at – so much as mentions this service on their home page! Instead, the home pages were all (the equivalent of) “porcelain veneers this” and “gold fillings that” – services that are money-spinners for the dentists, sure, but not services you want to have to scroll through when you are in screaming agony and just want to know if someone can help.

So, my advice to the client? “Mention your emergency service in big letters right at the top of your home page. Put it in your meta description too. Give people your phone number, and tell them to call you any time. That way, when someone with a horrible toothache Googles up a dentist, they’ll immediately know you want to hear from them. (SEO permitting, of course.)”

Turns out this client’s web developer had already suggested the same thing (smart fellow!), so I can’t actually take credit for the idea, but that doesn’t matter. A good idea is a good idea. Of course, it might mean these clients get a lot more calls at 3 in the morning from desperate people, but they assure me they’re up for that!

[Update: And here, courtesy of my email inbox, is an actual dentist who definitely gets it.]

Image: trialsanderrors