When you visit a website, what do you want to see? Would you rather read long pages about how great someone’s products or services are – or whether they have the answer to your situation?

I’m sure that if you can’t quickly and easily find out – you’ll be off, clicking away and leaving that site.

So, when people visit your website, can they quickly and easily find out if you have the answer they’re looking for? One way to check this is to ask a couple of friends to take a look and then give you some feedback.

Because you are very close to your business, the natural tendency is to write about what you do. Unfortunately, this can be a bit boring to everyone except you (and perhaps your nearest & dearest). Connect with visitors to your website by writing to them. So, for example:

“Our services are designed to provide a permanent xxxx solution for all our customers”

becomes

“Your xxxx problem will be solved – for ever.”

Or words to that effect.

Unless your prospective customers are large corporations or government bodies, replace old style ‘corporate speak’ with a more conversational style of writing so the reader feels they’re dealing with a real person and not some faceless organisation. Let them know you understand the problems they have and that you can provide a solution – in the same words you’d use if you were speaking with them in person.

Another way to check if you’ve got the words right is to read them through out loud. You’ll soon find out if the message sounds stilted or natural. I like to do this with every blog post and article as it helps me spot typos too!

We’d love to know how you connect with your website visitors! And if you found this post helpful, please retweet and continue the conversation 

Every day I read lots of blog posts on many different topics.

Just a few short years ago, I used to read every word of the Email newsletters that arrived in my Inbox, as well as online articles and blog posts that I found interesting.  I learned a lot that way.

But now I find my online reading habits have changed.  Because there’s such a mass of material to get through each day, I tend to scan first to determine if the content is interesting enough to read in its entirety.

My heart sinks when I come across blog posts that appear never-ending, or are written in a small sized font.  If I don’t know and respect the author from previous articles, my response is to click away – I can’t be bothered to invest the time and eye-strain it would take to read every word.  I don’t think I’m alone in this attitude.

Your blog may look great to you, but remember that you’re writing it for your readers first and foremost!  They’re the ones who need to be able to read it easily – or they’ll give up and not return.

What I’ve noticed is that there are certain essential elements to writing for the online reader to ensure they don’t click away too soon.

• Short, conversational sentences are better than lengthy academic or over-wordy prose.
• Long paragraphs should be broken up to give the reader a chance to pause at the white spaces.
• Bullet points are invaluable for the scanners and help them get the ‘bones’ of the article straight away as well as to decide if they want to read it full.
• Very long blog posts or articles are better broken up into shorter articles or, if that isn’t possible, they can be made easier to read by inserting sub-headings at intervals.
• Use fonts, type sizes and colours that are easy to read.  Don’t give your readers a headache!

I hope this has been helpful.  Now, I’d better go and check if I’m using these tips on my own blog!

One of the ways for a business to stand out in this world of far too many messages competing for too short attention spans, is to learn how to write well for the internet.  Those who do, enjoy greater success and popularity in the online world, with their readers eagerly awaiting their next post or article.

Know who you’re writing to. This is very much back to basics Marketing!  A mistake many publishers of email newsletters and blogs make is trying to be all things to all people.  If you were speaking to a prospective client, what you said would be different than if you were talking to a friend, colleague, supplier, or even to an existing client.  Your tone and the words you use will change according to your audience.  So when you’re clear who they are you can compose your message with them in mind.

Choose a topic or theme and stick with it. I know it sounds obvious but it can be very tempting to go off topic and confuse, or even lose, some of your readers.  Indeed, the main reason given by people who unsubscribe from newsletters is ‘relevancy’.  If your business is graphic design, your blog and newsletter articles need to be related to graphic design.  Start talking about cookery and your audience will click away.  They subscribed because they wanted to learn about graphic design after all!  If you want to write about your hobby or an unrelated topic, start a separate blog or newsletter.

Get to the point quickly. Save the long ramblings and suspense-filled endings for that book!  Internet readers are so overwhelmed with the sheer number of articles in their inbox or RSS reader, that they simply don’t have time to keep scrolling down.  Not only that; keeping your place when reading on a screen is harder.  Write short sentences and paragraphs and use bolded sub-headings to break up the text and let the reader know what’s coming next.

I hope this has been useful.  For more tips, here are our previous blog posts about writing for the web.

Writing for the web is quite different from writing offline marketing material, as the text needs to be to the point but still interesting and contain calls to action. You only have a few seconds to capture your website’s visitors’ attention before they surf of to your competitors, so it’s not an easy task!

However, there are some great free resources to help with writing for the web and copywriting in general, so I thought I’d share some of them with you:

Excess Voice – bi-weekly copywriting tips by email from Nick Usborne plus free articles & resources on the website.
Copyblogger – Brian Clark’s very popular blog on copywriting & writing for the web
Useit.com has some useful resources on writing for the web & how users read web pages.
LSE has a best practice guide on writing for the web

Finally, if it’s writers block you’re suffering from, Problogger has written a series of blog posts on  ‘bloggers block’. Although the series is about blogging, it can be applied to any kind of writing.

If you’ve got any tips on writing for the web and overcoming writers block, please feel free to share them with us!

I love the internet!  Every day I visit different website and blogs I didn’t know existed until that moment, and I tend to have a little look around to see if it’s worth bookmarking or subscribing to.

Last week I came across a blog that, at first sight, was a promising candidate to visit again.  Until I noticed that the whole post (about 1000 words) had been written entirely in lower case, and without a single apostrophe (see Louise’s previous post on this much abused punctuation mark!).  I don’t know whether the writer thought it looked cool that way, but to me it looked rather odd and didn’t make me want to read further.  And it seemed as if the writer was just too lazy to use the ‘shift’ key.

In our workshop ‘How to get more visitors to your website’, we spend some time talking about how writing for the web is different in several ways to writing traditional paper reports and formal letters. 
It’s a lot more conversational and grammatical rules are relaxed, but it certainly isn’t lazy or slapdash.  Here are 4 quick reminders to bear in mind when you’re writing:

• Do check your spelling to minimise mistakes.  I find it useful to get someone else to proof read for me or, if that isn’t possible, read it backwards and you’ll see every word.
• Make sure you use the correct word, for example: here or hear; you’re or your; there, their or they’re, are common sights (or sites!)
• Please don’t use ‘text speak’ if you want your blog post or web copy to be taken seriously by an adult audience (a possible exception being Twitter where every character has to count!)
• If you know that your typing or English skills could be sharper, take extra care to check and definitely ask for proof reading help before publishing.  Learn from feedback and improve your skills at the same time!

Take a look at some of the ‘professional’ bloggers, such as Darren Rowse or Yaro Starak.  Both write very well – or they wouldn’t have so many subscribers!  And their content is remarkably free from typos and spelling mistakes, especially when you consider how much they produce!

Let’s say that you’re not a professional blogger but you’re selling a product or service.  What impression do you think your website or blog visitors will get if they are faced with lazy typing?  It could give them the idea that your business offering is a bit slapdash as well!

Have you seen any examples of lazy typing on websites or blogs?  Please do share by commenting, we’d love to know!

A few months ago, Search Engine Guide wrote a series of checklists for website owners and small businesses to use to ensure every aspect of their online marketing was up to scratch and also best practice. The checklists cover everything from web design to search engine optimisation and even what to put on an ‘about us’ page.

We at Savvy Marketers are always looking to share best practice techniques in online marketing and this series really impressed us, so much that we’ll be using these checklists for our own online marketing as well!

Click here for the link to all of the checklists, and these are some of our favourites:

Web Content checklist

About page checklist

Design considerations checklist

Product pages checklist

There are some very different rules that apply when you’re writing for the web.  That’s because people read differently on the screen than from a piece of paper in their hands.  Here are some suggestions to bear in mind:

There are 2 Kinds of Reader.  Some people just like to skim down the page and pick up the important points without getting into the detail.  To keep them reading, use sub-headings and bold font.  Other people like the detail so give them plenty of interesting content to keep them reading. 

The Heading is more important than the Content.  The heading has the crucial job of making you read further.  Unless the heading pulls you in, even the best content in the world won’t get read.  There’s a great tool that will analyse your headlines at http://www.aminstitute.com/

Write as You Speak. When you’ve been used to writing formal letters and reports, this can be a hard concept to get your head around.  Give yourself permission to get the grammar wrong!  This doesn’t mean that it’s OK to write in ‘text speak’ or be sloppy in your spelling.

Write for Your Target Audience.  There’s a lot of pressure, when you write copy for the internet, to remember to include lots of keywords to rank well in the search engines. I agree, but not at the expense of turning off the people you hope will become clients!  Google isn’t going to buy from you. 

Give Great Value in Your Content.  There’s so much excellent stuff out there (other websites, blogs, newsletters, articles, etc) that to keep people interested and coming back for more, until they’re in the right space to buy, you must give value in your content.

Attention spans are getting shorter so you have less time to make an impression and get your reader interested enough to visit again.