Content is Still King
January 8, 2010 at 4:49 pm
That’s the first thing I learned when I started working on websites back in 1999. It was important then, and it’s equally as important now. It doesn’t matter how beautifully designed your website is, if it’s got nothing to say people won’t come back to it. Often businesses put up the blurb from their marketing brochures as the text on their website.
WRONG!
On the web, the big difference is that people can click away from your website and land on a competitor’s site in a couple of seconds.
When they’re reading your brochure, that’s not as likely to happen.
So – what can you do?
- Write 50% less than you would normally. This is because we know that people – even when they’re concentrating really hard – take in 25% less when reading it off a screen.
- Write your headlines like literature; body text like a tabloid journalist. ie. Be really clear what your text is about… but when you’re writing it, keep to short sentences, no multi-syllabic words, keep it simple.
- Stick to classic copywriting rules about sentence structure and length. Bulleted lists. Punctuation and more.
It’s not rocket science, but you do need someone to show you how to write for web just the once. After that, you’ll fly. If you write content that is published on websites, on a blog, on emails, or you just generally want to spruce up your business language style generally – you might be interested in attending a 1 day online copywriting course run by Brightspark.
Thursday 28 January, 10am-5pm, Dublin City Centre, €295: www.brightspark-consulting.com/write-for-web.htm
We’ve been teaching Irish people how to write for web since 2001 and get great results. Online copywriting is a core skill for business this century. Why not get 2010 off to a good start and skill up in this important area? All that – and we guarantee you’ll enjoy yourself. More info on online copywriting training.
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