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Three things to know about how people read today

By Patrick Gant

iconmonstr-glasses-4-icon-256Audiences today have high expectations about what they choose to read. And that’s especially true online.

As more and more marketing shifts to digital formats, readers’ tastes are changing.

Here are three important trends that can help you be a better writer, to stay connected with your audience and to have them coming back for more.

Be reader friendly: use narrower columns

Susan Weinschenk illustrates in her report on reader behaviour that while research shows people can read faster when you use wide columns (more than 100 characters per line), people respond more favourably to narrower columns (betwen 45 and 100 characters per line).

It’s no accident that The Economist and The Guardian–two publishers who have been highly successful at switching to online content–continue to opt for this narrower column style for their online version (particularly for tablets). People come back more often to what they enjoy best.

Bullets go bad quickly

If you have to use bullets at all, use them sparingly: never more than in a group of five. They’re designed to draw the eye to something very selective. Use them too often and it will look like work to your readers.

People read more when it’s enjoyable. They bolt when it starts to feel like a task.

Rethink the fold
When it comes to posting things for others to see–and even though much of that today increasingly is digital–we’re still prone to think in newspaper terms. Thus the expression: put your most important content above the fold. It’s not wrong, but don’t be too rigid about what it means.
Digital content doesn’t have a fold quite the way that a newspaper does. It cuts in different places depending on screen size, particularly on mobile devices–and that’s where traffic is really growing. That’s why scrolling and gesture-based scanning have come to be integral to the reading experience online. Research heatmap activities on your site. Look where people click more often. The results can be surprising.

Q&A What is SEO copywriting and why does it matter?

By Patrick Gant

[Updated]
SEO writing for the web: question mark imageSearch-engine optimized (SEO) copywriting is the combination of two practices: SEO writing and copywriting. Let’s look at what each of these is all about. Next, we’ll talk about what happens when you combine them.

About SEO writing

First, SEO writing is the practice of choosing a select group of keywords or phrases and placing them in strategic spots on your website for the purpose of gaining a higher ranking in search-engine results.

On its own, good SEO is mainly about keeping robot search-engine crawlers happy.

You do that by making it easy for them to determine what your website is about and whether your content matches the keywords that people might use to get there. Bad SEO doesn’t just doom you to a poor ranking. It’s also an invitation to bad karma.

There’s an entire industry out there devoted exclusively to showing businesses how to make better use of SEO and organic keyword selection. I’m not about to compete with those pros, so I’ll keep this section brief.

As someone who works both as a copywriter and who crafts writing for the web, I’ll say this: SEO is important for every business. You need to learn more about it. But remember: it’s also only one part of the solution to obtaining and maintaining an audience of readers online.

About copywriting

Copywriting is the act of writing text that is used for the purposes of selling a product, service or idea.

Good copywriting converts readers into buyers. Lousy copywriting doesn’t.

Search-engine optimized (SEO) copywriting fuses these two practices into one. But be forewarned if you’re shopping for writing help: not all copywriters are good at SEO writing.

When it’s done well, it draws on good SEO practices that keep the robots happy. And it draws on good copywriting skills and time-honoured principles creating captivating content that keep humans happy.

What does SEO copywriting and happiness have to do with it?

Happy robots help give you a good ranking on Google, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo. Happy humans are going to be more open to what you have to say and are more likely to tell others, too.

These outcomes are a foundation. On this, you can build a loyal audience online and positions you to convert traffic into sales. That’s not to say this is easy to do. But like most things in life, getting the fundamentals right first is a very good determinant of your success.

“It don’t mean a thing if it ‘aint got that SEO swing”

As Brian Clark of Copyblogger points out in his excellent book, How to create compelling content that ranks well in search engines, “” compared with most Internet traffic, searchers are the most motivated people who hit a website. This is important.”

Great content can’t win an audience if the audience can’t find it. And a website found via searching isn’t going to be all that helpful—or visited ever again—if the content isn’t any good.

So it’s worth taking the time to learn more about how SEO copywriting works and to learn the difference between creating engaging content that people can easily find versus hacked-together keyword stuffing.

Here are some resources that I highly recommend for additional reading:

The 5 Essential Elements of Search Engine Keyword Research

SEO Moz Search Ranking Factors

Everything Marketers Need to Know About Google’s Panda Updates

The future of SEO

Infographic / Why Content for SEO?

The case against comments

By Patrick Gant

I’ve revised this post because I’m open to having my mind changed.

Originally, I had titled this “Why you shouldn’t enable comments on your site anymore.”

Maybe that was too broad of a brush.

I’m still not a fan of comments on blogs. I post on a few myself, but more often than not, I skip them altogether.

I have a few reasons for that and I’ll get to those in a moment.

But first, a point about you.

As my reader, you value great content and creating a fantastic reading experience as much as I do.

I want your readership here to be a great experience every time. I’m always happy when my readers tell me what they have to say in response to my posts. Those comments are good. And the idea behind doing that is a good one.

That’s not why comments have fallen out of favour with me.

I just don’t think they are for everyone who has a blog. The default position should be don’t do it.

Before you enable comments, you should ask yourself why you’re doing this in the first place.

Does it add to your reader’s experience?

In its infancy, the web was small and operated like a community of communities. Comment-enabled blogs were very handy for people to share thoughtful ideas to help build on what you were saying. It also was a place where diverging opinions could hash things out. It also tended to be a key place for link exchanges.

There was, in many ways, self-enforced civility in what people had to say in their posts. Just like that old maxim: reputations are made and undone faster in a small town.

That’s often not the case anymore.

Have a look at the calibre of comments that populate the bulk of newspaper websites, for example.

Much of it borders on being unreadable.

If you’re in the business of finding ways to create the best possible reading experience for your reader, comments are the last place you are going to find inspiration.

It’s a telling point that Seth Godin and John Gruber–well-read people with no shortage of opinions–don’t have a comment-enabled section to accompany their posts.

Does it contribute value to your reader?

Sure, there are still websites and blogs out there today where built-in comments still add value to original content. But for every good example, it is no effort at all to find tens of thousands of bad ones.

You are in control of your content. But there are considerably more constraints on what you can do about who posts and what they have to say in the comments section of your site.

Look past the pointless arguments, the self-promotional replies and the “great-post-I-agree-completely” responses. Does any of what’s left in comments really help your reader? I’m less and less convinced.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some great examples of comment-enabled content out there. I even comment on a few. But in each case, it is clear that a blog moderator has asked themselves the hard question about who is benefitting from having this feature in the first place.

Do you have the time for this?

Remember that in many countries, you can be held legally responsible for what gets posted in your comments section. Couple that with your wish to create great content, and you can quickly find yourself spending a large chunk of your time moderating discussions and writing reply posts. Is that really the best use of your time, both in terms of product and serving your audience?

Can you address authenticity issues?

Anonymous posts are troublesome. I struggle with this myself. Inauthentic content equals zero value.

And poor-calibre comments aren’t independent of your content. They become part of your product.

Is this something you’re doing because you can or because you should?

I’m always tempted to call this the JBYCDMYS principle. But that would look really awkward. Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should is a principle that ought to be exercized far more than it is these days.

Our world online is crammed with this kind of thinking: features and ornamentations that look nice at first glance or do things that initially seem like good ideas, but deliver questionable long-term value.

So what if your new content management system makes it easy to enable comments? So what if this is something that everybody else is doing? The only measure that really counts is whether it helps your reader solve a problem.

You can only determine so much of that with metrics. You can’t measure good taste.

Are there better alternatives?

There are many alternatives now to commenting (and the hassles of registering to do that). Tweet about it. Or write your own post. Or post something on Google+. You can even kick it old school and email somebody. There are plenty of great ways to engage people that do a better job of ensuring authenticity while delivering a better experience for readers.

Having asked all these questions…

There is one more question to ask and it’s a biggie.

What do your readers have to say?

Mine are telling me that comments matter to them. And a few were peeved that I shut off comments on this blog.

Well I’m all about doing right by my readers, so I’m ready to be proven wrong about this.

I’ve re-enabled comments on this site (and hopefully have addressed the spam-comment issue, too).

So how about it, reader? Are you still using comments on your site? If so, are you asking yourself the tough questions first about why you’re making this available?

The dangerous invention and why that matters to you

By Patrick Gant

13,800 by Adam Wilson

Photo: 13,800 by Adam Wilson on 500px

Just weeks after he set out to write a new book, noted web developer Jonathan Snook had a brand-new product ready to hit the market.

His work on this project was the outcome of a series of notes he’d been collecting for a few months. The result was an ebook that shows developers how they can use cascading style sheets to better manage large, complex websites.

The technical term for this is SMACSS. But this post isn’t to talk about what that does (besides, his book explains it so well that even a guy like me can begin to understand it).

Rather, I want to share with you three valuable lessons that anyone in the ideas business—and as a reader of this blog, that means you—can learn from and apply, based on Jonathan’s example.

There is no time-to-market anymore.

We live in an idea-powered economy. The market for smart new ways of doing things—in this case, developers who build big websites—isn’t the kind that’s going to wait around for months to get a paper-based book in their hands.

For the chop-down-a-tree publishing industry, the time-to-market (fancy talk for the length of time between creating a product and it being available for sale) is typically measured in months. Sometimes even longer.

That’s an agonizing amount of time to wait and it’s a major sore point with writers and thought leaders today. As Scott Stratten, best-selling author of Unmarketing once tweeted on this very subject: “publishing needs to decide if they’re in the information biz or the paper biz.”

Opting for self-publishing your ebook erases that delay. It eliminates everything that used to stand between you and the people you want to influence. It puts ideas in people’s heads. And it does so nearly as fast as you can come up with ideas.

That’s why the ebook is one of the most dangerous, disruptive inventions to have ever emerged in human history.

Let me repeat that…

“The ebook is one of the most dangerous, disruptive inventions to have ever emerged in human history.”
Click to tweet this.

No wonder publishers (among others) are freaking out.

Build on permission.

Jonathan understood that it’s not enough to just write an ebook, upload it to Amazon, Kobo or the iBookstore and sit back and wait for readers to come to you. Ideas travel fastest in groups.

As I am fond of saying, people are busy. No matter who you are, the public’s attention for what you have to say is scarce. “Permission,” says Seth Godin, “is still the most important and valuable asset of the web (and of publishing).” You need credibility to build an audience. And that’s an ongoing task.

In case of my friend Jonathan, he already has a legion of fans and followers. The way we sells his book and his ideas shows you how he’s done that.

In addition to offering his newest product for download either directly from his site or via Amazon, he’s also included a membership option, featuring some pretty great added benefits for a small fee.

“We’re all marketers now.”

That’s a quote from a 2011 McKinsey Quarterly report. And it’s spot-on. You are no longer separate from your message. Today, who you are, what you do, what you offer, what you solve and how you solve things are all part of your product and your offer.

Among the last of the perceived benefits of the publishing industry was that they would look after all these things for you. They would package your product, edit it, and use a bunch of methods to try and draw attention to your product.

Even in those areas, you are now better served by doing things your way. No one knows your idea and your audience better than you.

It’s not hard to find experts who can help you look after all the things you need to build the best possible experience for your readers. For instance, Jonathan hired a fantastic illustrator who developed a great looking character mascot for his cover. Need an editor? It’s not hard to find a great one who is easy to work with. Same goes for graphic design, translation…and so on.

This is a great time to be a writer. If you’re in the idea business, you already are one. There are pros who can help you refine that skill, too. Don’t know one? Subscribe to my newsletter. I’m happy to share what I know.

Learn from the examples of others like Jonathan and you’ll see: in this digital age, with this dangerous invention, it’s never been easier to share your ideas and build a market with more people in less time.

You are what you post

By Patrick Gant

Silhouette
Photo:Adrian_S

We used to call it the Web. Or the Internet. Or even (if you’re old enough to remember this gem of an anachronism) the information superhighway. And like good students of Victorian order, we even had subcategories for things that populated this space: blogosphere, social media, chat room, instant messaging” the list goes on.

Many fretted over the need to define these as places.

Some demanded that these words be treated as proper nouns, requiring capitalization and all the formality that we could muster in our language. We did this for a time because it was new, and out of worry that there might otherwise be what editors sombrely call “ambiguity for readers” ” in other words, people just might not understand. Slowly, people most people came to realize that just wasn’t necessary anymore.

That’s all in the past now.

Online is no longer a shelf space or a channel for content. It’s no longer a subset of what was once loosely called mass media.

Online is now the outcome of things.

It’s the record of what we do, of the things that matter to us. Every blog entry. Every tweet. Every comment posted. Every review or testimonial by a customer. Every friend made, or connection reacquainted. Every work sample. Every article written. Every collaboration. Every mashup.

Think about how what you say says everything now.

Today, what you have to say, what you write about and how you say things is all a direct reflection of how people see you.

That includes your clients and prospects.

And you better believe they’re reading what you post.

The number-one thing that people do now when considering doing business with someone is to consult online. Google calls it the zero moment of truth. Others simply call it finding out more right now.

According a US study by Google, 88% of consumers now engage in the “zero moment of truth” prior to making their final decision. As of 2011, they consult more than 10 new media or traditional sources before making the decision to buy—that’s double the sources consulted just the year before.

That good first impression you hope to make on someone? It’s probably already happened whether or not you were ready.

Whether it was successful or not is going to be determined in large part by what you post and how you treat others online.

You are the sum of the choices you make and how you choose to express yourself online. You are what you post.

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