Usable Words

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

How do you handle rejection?

If your answer is along the lines of “I curl up into a ball and whimper”, it’s probably just as well you can’t see what happens when people look at your website or see it listed in search engines. Because most of the time they take one look, shrug their shoulders and go “Next!”.

It’s a truism that web users have short attention spans. Perhaps this is exaggerated sometimes. But when it comes to searching for a product or service and “shortlisting” a few possible websites, you really do only have a few seconds to convince someone that they really, really need you.

So what can you do to make sure they make the right decision? read more >

(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 >

When I started in business a few months ago, I decided to operate under my own name. It wasn’t so much that I loved the idea of being my own brand; it was more that I couldn’t think of a name that really captured the kind of business I wanted to be. So many copywriters’ business names were, I thought, just lame – wincingly bad puns, or try-hard attempts to be “writerly”. If anybody should have a kick-arse brand name or nothing, I thought, it was a copywriter. So for want of anything better, I became Angus Gordon, Copywriter.

Then, one night, I suddenly sat up in bed (the way you do). I won’t pretend I yelled “Eureka!” but I certainly thought it. Usable Words just seemed to encapsulate everything I stood for. On top of that, it was four easily remembered syllables. Talk about pithy! With trembling hands I got onto the net and checked for the domain name: bingo! It was available – not just the .com.au, but to my surprise the .com as well. So Usable Words was born. read more >