Usable Words

If you’ve never heard the motto “Work on your business, not in it”, then you probably haven’t spent much time hanging around business coaches, or fans of the various iterations of Michael Gerber’s E Myth.

I haven’t read Gerber myself, but from what I can gather, “Work on your business, not in it” means roughly this:

If you own a business, you shouldn’t be spending your time doing the day-to-day things that keep the business ticking over (“working in your business”). Instead, you should hire, outsource or automate these tasks, and concentrate instead on the “big picture” strategic tasks that will make your business bigger, more scalable, more efficient, more saleable down the track, and so on (“working on your business”).

Now, obviously there’s something to this idea, otherwise half the business people I know wouldn’t devote their lives to realising it. The problem is, these same people are often so enamoured of the phrase itself that they want to use it in their marketing copy. I think this is a mistake, for two reasons:

1. Some people prefer working in their business to working on it.
2. If you haven’t read the book, it’s not that easy to see the difference.

The first of these is a problem with the underlying idea of the phrase, the second a problem with the wording. But both of them lead to what I’d describe as “huh?” reactions. Something that seems totally self-evident to the person saying it seems either wrong or confusing to the person hearing it. And that’s never good marketing. read more >

Am I the only person who’s sick of being talked to like a 14-year-old boy gamer?

“10 tips for killer copy!” “Dominate your niche with these killer content ideas!” “Killer strategies for destroying the competition!”

It’s all a bit…macho, don’t you think?

What if we stopped channeling Jean-Claude Van Damme and tried channeling Jane Austen instead, just for a change?

Anyone agree? What other copywriting clichés annoy the bejesus out of you?

Image: simon.wright

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 >

Here’s something I’ve been seeing a lot: businesses, especially small businesses, especially small businesses who write their own copy, using “why not?” questions in their marketing. As in: “If you’re looking for a nutritious snack, why not try our delicious nut mix?” “Bored in the evenings? Why not learn French?” And so on.

I’m not a great fan of this. But before I explain why, it’s important to ask what people who use this form think they are doing. What’s the attraction of “why not?” I think it boils down to three things:

1. It’s a question. Asking customers questions is supposed to be good because it makes it sound like you’re interested.

2. It’s not boasting. It’s politely inviting people to try your product, which will of course then proceed to sell itself. (This diffidence about actually telling people you’re any good might be an Australian thing.)
3. It saves you the trouble of actually identifying and describing your product’s real benefits.

I think we can deal fairly speedily with 2 and 3. Regarding 2, this reluctance to brag about – sorry, to enumerate the wonderful features of – your product is just something you need to get over. (As true for me as it is for anyone, by the way, if not more so.) As for 3, if you can’t be bothered to articulate the benefits of your product for yourself, hire a copywriter to do it. (What a masterfully delicate hint.)

What about asking your customers questions, though? Isn’t that a good thing? Well, yes, asking questions in your marketing copy is often a very good thing: it helps people to engage with your product by identifying needs they might not have even known they had, which is a great kickstart towards giving you a chance to meet those needs. It also has the side benefit of filtering your customers down to your target markets, so that you don’t spend all your time dealing with queries from people you can’t help.

“Bored in the evenings?” is this kind of good question. But “Why not…?” isn’t. The trouble with “Why not?” is that it’s a rhetorical question, a question you don’t actually want an answer to. And the trouble with using rhetorical questions in marketing is that people tend to answer them. “Why not try your nut mix? Because it sounds the same as every other nut mix, that’s why not!” “Why not learn French? Because I tried to learn it in high school and I hated it!”

So concentrate on giving people reasons why. Don’t invite them to think of reasons why not.

Businesses that deal with other businesses don’t sell products or services any more. They sell “solutions”. Technical Solutions, Mobility Solutions, Product Development Solutions, Volunteer Solutions…with this many solutions out there, we must have a lot of problems!

That, of course, is the point. Buzzwords become popular for a reason, and in the case of “solutions” the reason is basically a sound one. By offering a solution, we send the message that our starting point is the customer’s problem and what we can do about it, rather than our own products and our desire to sell them. The idea of a “solution” also enables us to bundle a whole lot of products and services together: for example, rather than a web development business saying “we do site design, coding, content creation, SEO, etc. etc.” they can just say “we deliver complete web solutions”. (“Solutions” are always “delivered”). I get it.

read more >

Business owners, I have a question for you.

Does your website feature the word “Welcome” prominently on the front page or in the title bar? (Feel free to run off and check if you need to.)

If you answered “yes”, I want you to imagine you’re a first-time visitor to the site, then answer two more questions:

Would you feel unwelcome if it wasn’t there?

If your answer to both of these is “no”, as I think it might be, perhaps you should start thinking about what you can replace that “Welcome” with. Maybe something that really engages your potential customers and tells them something interesting about what you have to offer. Or something they might type into a search engine (nobody searches for “welcome” unless they want this place).

Don’t feel bad, though; you’re in good company! All of us have a tendency to repeat things we’ve seen on another sites without quite knowing why. But the conventions of web writing are still developing, and “Welcome to my website” has really had its day; it makes your site read like somebody’s GeoCities homepage from 1997, and it takes up room on the page or the title bar that’s too valuable to waste on formalities.