web copywriting | thinkit creative

Three things to know about how people read today

By Patrick Gant

Audiences 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.

Declining online traffic? Stop blaming SEO

By Patrick Gant

Photo for Stop blaming SEO: Everybody looking for something, by Mimmo Pellicola

Photo by Mimmo Pellicola on 500px

There has been plenty of talk lately about important changes that Google has been making to how it ranks websites. Those changes involve Google’s closely guarded algorithm, which is the magic juice behind how its search engine produces accurate results.

As I have been covering in greater detail in my newsletter, the most recent of these updates is code-named Penguin. It’s designed to give more weight to good quality content and down-rank the stuff that isn’t.

Penguin has also made a few people unhappy. [Read more…]

What John Coltrane can teach you about building your audience

By Patrick Gant

John Coltrane

No, don’t do that. Don’t run away.

Don’t let it scare you that I just name-dropped one of the giants of jazz.

Or that Coltrane’s music seemed complicated.

This post isn’t going to preach jazz to you. And the jazz police aren’t going to show up and arrest me for having the gall to use America’s finest art form as a platform to illustrate an important point about the power of audience building.

There’s valuable insight in here even if jazz isn’t your thing.

As a reader of thinkit creative, you could be here looking for advice on search-engine optimized writing for the web to generate online traffic and convert readers into buyers. Maybe you’re a writer looking to build a base of readers. Or perhaps you’re a professional speaker or you own a design studio and you’re looking to take your business to the next level of profitability.

Odds are good that you’re in the idea business. And that means your success hinges on finding and building an audience.

John Coltrane can help you with that.

Discipline

Even this giant of music started without an audience.

As a young musician, John Coltrane loved how saxophonist Charlie Parker wasn’t afraid to be playful with his music.

He emulated what he heard. Not as a cheap cut-and-paster of style.

Rather, his drive to decode Parker and other influential players became part of young Coltrane’s relentless practicing. Biographies on the man often quote fellow musicians who knew him early on, saying they’d never seen anyone put in the hours the way Coltrane did.

Out of the hours came the admirers. From the admirers came the listeners. And then the big breaks, like when he was invited to tour with the first time. Then the audience took hold and the Coltrane legend grew. It’s hard to imagine any of that happening in Trane’s career without the roots of discipline being as strong as they were.

Intuition

“Jazz…is a social music operating in a commercial context,” says Ben Ratliff of The New York Times in his book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. “You give the audience what you think it wants. At the same time, you improvise, and try to bring out the part of you that is the least like anyone else.”

Groundbreaking ideas rarely find their audience quickly. It starts with thinking deeply about your audience and having as much of an understanding of what they want as what they might also be open to. Research will help you, but only up to a certain point.

Intuition goes well beyond calculating a market penetration or measuring the size of an audience. There’s a deeper art. And you only get to exercise that by trying and by experimenting based on a mix of what you know is true and on a hunch you have about what might be true.

Taste

Coltrane learned the hard way early on that masterful technique alone doesn’t win many ears. In fact, more than one audience in his career booed him for doing just that. He learned that ideas—especially the big ideas—have to be presented in a way that are pleasing to others. Often that means taking the time to package your ideas attractively.

One of Coltrane’s great achievements in the American songbook is what he did with his interpretation of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic show tune, My Favorite Things. The music says more than I can say in paragraphs about that. So have a listen.

Platform

To find and build an audience, your idea or your message needs a platform. My Favorite Things was a platform for Coltrane that helped him bring big-headed jazz to a wider audience. So what’s your platform? It can be a blog, an ebook, a series of newsletter articles, or a presentation (to name just a few examples). Invest the time to design that platform properly. Hire a good designer who can help you build something that people will enjoy using. That’s the front door. It’s how you’re going to invite your audience in so that they’ll stick around and see what else you have to say.

Mastery of any creative skill only comes from finding good influences and by putting in the hours to hone your skills. Work to emulate. This is how you learn how great ideas are constructed. Only then can your own voice emerge. Take chances and find ways to build entranceways for people to access even your edgy ideas with relative ease.

Four steps to a more reader-friendly website

By Patrick Gant

Whether you’re a large organization that’s keen on carving out new market share or a small-sized operation that’s looking to build a presence in the marketplace, your web copy plays a key role in reaching readers and turning them into clients (and for some, turning readers into investors). Building an online presence is never easy, but you can make far less work for yourself just by paying extra careful attention to how you present your business case in your online copy.

Here are four ways you can make your web copy more reader friendly, including handy exercises to make it all happen today.

1. Focus less on you and more on them—your reader. It’s often tempting to cram a site full of copy, detailing who you are and what you do. Don’t give in! Granted, your readers do need to understand what your business is all about, but never do so at the expense of demonstrating what’s in it for the reader to do business with you. Here’s a simple exercise that I do with my clients (and I even do this with my own copy). Print a copy of your website and circle each and every reference to “I” or “we” or “us.” See if you can cut back those references by about 25 percent. For each instance, ask yourself if there’s a way you can change your copy so that it refers less to you and more to the readers. The result will be copy that sells readers on the benefits of doing business with you, while still leaving room for you to tell your story.

2. Be useful. There’s broad appeal to being seen as a resource that saves time. Websites are no exception. One exercise that I like to do with clients is the “10 points” test. Looking at your existing site, find 10 things that a reader might come looking for when visiting. Award yourself a point for each item you find and then think of ways to improve your score. Being useful can be as simple as including an always-fresh list of links to favourite books. The key is to put yourself in the shoes of the reader.

3. Be easy to reach. This might seem obvious, but consider the bulk of websites out there and how they treat vital contact information, such as phone numbers, email and postal addresses. They bury them under some tab called “Contact us.” Don’t make your readers work hard to reach you. Even if you simply include a footer at the bottom of each page with just your main phone number, readers will appreciate the thought. And you’ll have just earned a point in the “10 points” test.

4. Be brief. Do you really need to plow every detail of your company’s purchasing process onto the main area of your website? Even for readers who love details (and yes, there are many out there), they’ll appreciate it if you keep your online copy brief and punchy. Use links to archived material or to PDF documents for cases where there’s important background material that needs to be in the public domain. Try limiting every page to no more than 150 words.