Copywriting

Shattering the myth of the Web Traffic Elf

I hate to do this...but there is no Web Traffic Elf. 

You came to terms with Santa Claus, and now you have to deal with this.

While posting this may seem like a banality to very many of you (a statement of the bleedin' obvious, in Basil Fawlty's terms), I do keep coming across people who believe that building a website for a new venture, and bringing it online, will result in it receiving visitors. By magic.

For anyone who has come lately to the world of web marketing, or anyone whose clients have come lately, here are four fundamental truths.

1. The web is very big. It has a lot of websites. Google, in March of 2008, was indexing 4.28 billion web pages, so probably about 70 million sites.
2. No-one who does not know about you and specifically go looking for you is going to find your site by chance.
3. Google will eventually find you, but may not take much notice of you. It's a bit like joining an old fashioned club. When they first notice you, they make a note of you so they can ignore you. (They call this sandboxing.) If you keep showing up (ie if your site remains in place) they will eventually acknowledge you publicly. But they are unlikely to invite you to dine at the top table against any individual search until you've been there for some time, built up some real content, and generally done the things you need to do to 'join the club'.
4. If you have a new site, driving traffic is as important as building the site itself.

So how do you drive traffic to your new website? If you are a small business / new small business only now launching a site, this is the single most important question for you to find an answer to. Finding the answer will give your site a chance of doing whatever it was you built it to do. Not finding the answer means you might as well have not built the site.

Start by adding the address of your site to the footer of your emails. You might even add 'Need whatever it is you do? Visit our site at www.youraddress.com'

Next, email your site to everyone in your address book. Just send a two-line email that says you've launched a new site and would welcome their feedback.

That's a start.

Then make sure that the site itself is doing everything it can to be found. Check that whoever has built it for you has given each page a search-friendly Title, as well as keyword and description meta tags. (You can Google all of this if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Next, invest a couple of hours in adding the address of your site to as many relevant online directories as you can. (Again, Google this if you don't know what I mean.)

Next, start going regularly to some specialist forums and blogs, whose subjects are the same as yours, and set yourself up an identity so that you can post. Make sure to put your URL in the signature of the identity, so that every time you post a comment, view or piece of advice, your website address is displayed. (This has 2 benefits, in truth: one is simply that it may make someone interested in the subject click to your site; the other is that it creates a backlink, which search engines reward you for.)

What else can you do? Well it's going to depend on your budget.

If you can afford to run a PPC advertising campaign (Google it if you're not sure), then get that set up immediately. Get your keyterms and ad copy right and it will bring you visitors fast, though at a cost.

Then think about every other aspect of your business communications and whether it can be used to promote your site. You send out invoices? Add the website address? Same if you print receipts, hand out flyers, have a store window, awning or van livery.

If you have waitresses or sales assistants, train them to ask people politely if they've had a look at your new website yet, and give them a card or printed slip to hand over to customers who say no.

If you have suppliers who'd benefit from helping you, ask them to send an email about your website to their email lists. Ask customers to do the same if they like what you do.

Do not, on any account, sit back and wait for Google. 

For the average small business, it's not that much more likely than the Web Traffic Elf to do the hard work for you.

The kind of web developers to fire

Web developers. You gotta love 'em. Some of them are so darn clever, with their cutesy clientside coding (stuff that happens in your browser). Some others are just so darn arty, with their pretty designs and fanciful Flash animations. Then there are those who are simply so darn smart, with their complex back-end programming, databasing and integrating. There are so many kinds of web developers. You're spoilt for choice. And there's the problem.

Decorators are not builders. Neither of them are architects. Some people are good to ask to build a wall, but not to repaint your bedroom. Others are excellent for handbuilding a kitchen, but you'd rue letting them loose on anything structural.

If you don't really know what you're doing, or what the function you want for your website actually involves, do not appoint a web development company believing that they will be able to do it: they may well not.

Even more importantly, do not make the uncorrectable mistake of assuming that 4 young web developers in a room above an estate agent, or even 120 less young web developers in a warehouse space in Spittalfields, will know anything at all, or actually care about prioritising, your commercial objectives and business requirements.

Calm down, if you are a skilled and professional member of the e-commerce consulting profession. I'm not talking about you. Quite the opposite.

For many clients, wandering into the world of web development is a stroll in the darkness. They may well expect that whichever company they go to talk to must have a good understanding of commercial concerns and see itself as being in the business of helping clients achieve these. But they're wrong. The entire staff of very many web development companies of all sizes do not have this experience or, despite what they may say, interest.

How do I know this? Well..  more often than you'd think (I'm talking about a couple of times a month), I find myself in an unenviable triangle: a client, a web agency and me.

The client has usually made the first mistake, by going to the web company and asking them to start building a site before anyone has seriously addressed what it's for, who will use it, what they will do there and how it will thus benefit the business.

The web agency has then usually compounded it by being unaware of their own ignorance. Not knowing how little they understand about business process, consumer behaviour or the nature of the particular sector of internet trading in which this particular client operates, they have gone ahead and 'designed a site'. Not specified a site. They've usually designed it. Visuals first. 

Now I know why they do this. It's obvious. Clients who are none too sophisticated like to look at a photoshop mockup and say, "Yes. I like that one." But it's fatal.

Someone, whether it's the client themself, or a good marketing consultant, or an experienced copywriter (or a business process analyst at the web development company if you are lucky enough to find one which has one), needs to think out the purpose, structure, functionality, tone of voice and messaging of the site before anyone builds anything.

Take care here. If you are a smaller client trying to build yours site cheaply, the kind of developers you are likely to gravitate towards, no matter how nice their sites, will almost certainly not be able to do this for you.

That way, there's a chance that the finished project will achieve its objectives.

And if, as happens unbelievably frequently, you find your own penny dropping only half way through the project, but you are confronted with developers who either will not or cannot change course to help you, and instead bang on about how your new thinking will ruin their art... pick up your hat and head for the door.

Pay their bill though. It's not their fault you hired the wrong people.

How to make 67p and quite a lot of friends.

£ 9.99 is a deal price. Tucked in under a tenner, everyone loves £9.99. And if you're wandering around the West End of London at present, you'll see a lot of 'chain' restaurants trying to tempt frugal tourists with £9.99 dining deals.

Not at Porters though. I know Porters. I'm so old that I remember it opening in Covent Garden's Henrietta Street back in 1979. And for 30 years it's prospered, while trendier restaurants have come and gone, by offering a menu consisting largely of traditional English pies.

It's a very English brand, much loved of tourists. 

And it understands its market. It knows they've been to the Tower. They've trudged round Trafalgar Square. They've been to the Palace. They're doing London: lapping up its history.

Now here's the clever bit.

Why charge boring old £9.99, like everyone else, for your 2 course meal deal, when you could charge £10.66, pocket 67p more to your bottom line, and bring a smile of recognition to the faces of passing trade?

It's cute beyond words. There's a little bit of copy at the bottom of the poster which tells you that good old English Porters is doing this because we're all battling the Credit Crunch now, and 1066 was the last time Britain succumbed to a threat of such proportions. Or something like that. Doesn't really matter.

They turned a pitch for your business with a discount deal into a charming extension of their brand identity. And they earned an extra 67p for their trouble.

Goodbye then, Norwich Union

Andrew Moss, Chief Executive of Norwich Union, has written to me. Not to me alone, you'll understand. Quite probably to you, too, if Norwich Union provides you with insurance, or a pension, or life assurance or any other kind of financial services package.

Andrew wants me to know that the Norwich Union brandname is about to disappear for ever, to be replaced by the globally-inoffensive 'Aviva'.

Andrew is very keen, in a rather well drafted letter, to make sure I understand that he and his colleagues don't think that they like ditching Norwich Union. He's respectful and affectionate about the brand he's discarding after 212 years. But he wants me to understand that Aviva, which is the name created in 2000 to wrap together Norwich Union, Commercial Union and General Accident (all once proud brand names on the UK financial services landscape), now operates in 27 countries, serving 45 million customers.

Now I understand that many of these 45 million customers don't know what Norwich Union is, have no idea about why a company would be called that, and will find it as impossible to be confused by the meaningless and unmemorable Aviva as I. Indeed, for them, Aviva is probably preferable.

Not for me, however. When I was first making enough to invest a few pounds each month, I did it with Norwich Union, and a decade later they served me up a surprisingly handsome return.

2 piffling little bits of the protection on my mortgage, now drawing towards their long-time-coming maturity, are with Norwich Union.

And once, many years ago, Norwich Union was my client, with its marketing Director who left work early every Wednesday to play village cricket. We made 2 fine tv commercials together for his brand, all about planning for life's ups and downs, and I'm as proud of them today as I was in 1991.

So goodbye, Norwich Union. In an age of brand names designed to mean nothing, the work of genius branding consultancies who can ensure that the name you are considering does not mean 'Your Mother Is A Tinkers' Whore' in Ecuador, and that its domain may yet be secured in 50 different territories, I for one will miss warm, competent, secure, stable, friendly Norwich Union.

Ours has been a partnership; something all brands crave, yet so few achieve.

Faces that leap out of crowds

So you're writing a sales letter. And because times are tight, you're doing it yourself. Even though you're no copywriter.

You write the whole thing in Word. In 11 point Times New Roman or Arial on single spacing. Because that's how your copy of Word defaults your draft.

Here and there you stick in an underline or a bold.

If you're really smart, maybe you even lift the size of the headline from 11 point to 12 point.

You write and write and write until you're happy that you've made your killer pitch.

But you've not. Not yet. Come with me.

Let's go back to the start.

Take the headline up in size. If the body of your letter is set in 11 point, see how the headline looks at 16 point, 18 point or 21 point.

Now, change the font on the headline.

Nothing says it has to be the same font as the body of the letter: some fonts are actually designed for headlines, and others for body copy.

Try using a font and weight of font (ie how bold the version of the face you use is) that give that headline some impact.

If you have few fonts on your machine try sans serif faces like Helvetica Bold or even Arial Bold. If you have a fuller range of fonts, try something black and grotesque, like Franklin Gothic, Grot 9 or Futura Bold.

Better still, if you've got a condensed version of of of these faces, try that, and take the font size up another couple of points.

How's it looking?

Bit too 'in your face'?

Fair enough. Let's try a serif face. Times New Roman, or Georgia maybe. Or, if you have it, something like Caslon or Century Schoolbook. Again, if you've got a bold cut(version), use that.

Get some 'blackness' (visual density) into your headline.

Oh. And centre it.

Now...let's see. Those subheads.

Get them up in size, as well. If the body size was 11 point, they'll probably look about right at 14 point. Centre these, as well.

Now how's it looking?

Now get rid of all those double returns between paragraphs. They're putting so much air through your letter it's not looking important enough. Use the 'Format>Pragraph' menu options to add an extra few points 'After' each Return, instead. You just want enough space between paras for the eye to see clearly that it is a para break.

Hmm. Now. Font for the body of the letter. Think about your tone. Clean, contemporary, neutral? Well, Ok, try it in Arial or Helvetica or whichever other sans serif text face you have.

Professional? Intimate? Authoritative? Try it in Times or Georgia or another simple, classic serif.

Maybe you should even take a look in Typewriter or a similar monospace font. Sometimes those still say 'this is a spontaneous, unencumbered communication'.

Check the inter-line spacing. Try one and a half instead of one, paricularly if your letter is brief.If you're feeling really confident, you could set an exact number of points. Try about one and a third times whatever point size the type is.

What else? Indents. Have a look at indenting the first word of each para just a little bit. Sometimes it looks old fashioned: others it helps make the letter seem more personal.

The point is that all these parameters, the typography of your letter, will dramatically change its tone, its voice, its impact and its effect. 

You don't need designers. You don't need anything but Word and a few minutes of fiddling.

The results may well increase the response to your letter dramatically.

You'll be amazed to find that the content of the letter accounts only for a part of its effectiveness. The styling accounts for the rest.

It's not aesthetics or whimsy. It's psychology.

Split test it and see.

Justifying indulgence

When times are hard, people spend their money in strange ways. Predictable ways, though. While true luxury products (high end hotel rooms, top notch health club subscriptions, leathery sedan cars) might take a bit of a bashing, 'pretend' luxuries (butterscotch caramel frothy cappucinos, extra deluxe nail chamfer packages) generally get a bit of an uplift.

Why? Well, because people are trying to cheer themselves up, put on a brave face, and have a little excess. The kind of wanton extravagance you can buy for a few pounds.

When we decide what to splash our mini-cash on, though, the question of a 'justifier' often comes into play.

How can I justify this little indulgence? Well... there are various possible answers, but if any of them apply to the products or services you or your clients offer, then you ought to think about the marketing opportunities this might create.

'It's healthy' is a justification. 'It's for my kids'. 'It's educational'. 'It's a bargain'. In the end, even 'It will do me good just knowing there's no justification for it' is a justification.

Accepting cookies

Oh how much impact you can create when you demonstrate intuitive understanding of your target group and think imaginatively.

As he exited a mid morning lecture in Cambridge, a friendly face greeted my student son with this Starbucks-scale chocolate chip cookie on a card bearing the message 'You'll Find There's More To Life at KPMG'.

Now you might think the message could have been sharper. But the empathy shown with the budget-watching and peckish teenagers KPMG would like to have feeling good about them as a prospective employer could not.

And if you fancy a competition...what might have made a better copy line to accompany the cookie? Submit your suggestions below as comments and pop your email address on. Best one by the end of Feb wins  the most impressive chocolate chip cookie I can find.

Search term tails wagging content dogs

SEO copywriting has always thrown up conflicts between the requirements of search mathematics, and those of sound, intelligible marketing communication.

But the now prevalent search strategy of optimising pages for 'long tail' keywords creates a situation which is especially hard to resolve.

(Long tail keywords are the 'long tail' of key words or phrases which may only individually be searched a handful of times a week, but which, when added together, may account for a relatively high proportion of a site's traffic. Chasing rankings on these terms is wise, because competition is likely to be less intense for them.)

Now one set of keyterms which I've been asked to optimise for twice in the last couple of weeks is those achieved by adding the name of a town or city to more generic terms.

Let me give you an example. You sell TVs. Your keywords are  'TVs', 'LCD TVs' 'Plasma TVs' etc. The problem with these is that everyone who sells TVs is chasing them.

So say your high street TV shop is in Birmingham.

If you add 'Birmingham' to those key terms, you get new terms like 'LCD TVs Birmingham'.

Now less people will search for that term, but those that do will be very likely to be near to your shop. You get the idea?

Here's the problem though.

A searcher types 'LCD TVs Birmingham' when searching, because he wants to locate somewhere in Birmingham that sells LCD TVs.

But when you or I have to integrate this naturalistically into a piece of copy, it all goes a bit haywire.

How can you, for example, naturalistically mention 'Birmingham' within the flow of copy about TV's? You can maybe do it once, here and there, but as a Birmingham based TV retailer selling online, the last thing you want to do in your copy is suggest disproportionately that you are based in any particular place. Place is irrelevant. You'll be happy to sell me a TV if I live in Glasgow, so long as I pay carriage.

So far as I can see, the only way to do this sensibly is to create a raft of pages which feature the name of every major conurbation, and which are engineered to include the words 'LCD TVs Birmingham (or wherever)' in close proximity to each other. It's hard, but everyone will know why it's there, and the page will not be a part of the site's main navigation.

But if you're an SEO writer asked by SEO technicians to do this to general page content, you should probably explain to them that they're letting an SEO tail wag a content dog.

And, at the risk of overstretching a metaphor, barking up the wrong tree.

Copywriting fees

Working out how much you should quote for a job never loses its intrigue, no matter how long you do it.

Quote too much, and you're likely to lose the project to a lower pitching competitor. Quote too little, and you may well secure the project but find the rate at which you earn significantly lower than your target.

Many initial enquiries are accompanied by the request to quote a 'day rate'. The problem with this lies in the assumption that you're happy to sell every day, day after day, at the same price, regardless of what you're being asked to do or for whom you're being asked to do it. While there are, of course, people who do this, it's always seemed to me to severely limit the amount of money you're likely to earn.

Other enquiries ask for quotes on a 'price per word' or 'per thousand words' basis. This is a journalism practice, the failing of which is that it doesn't allow you to reflect the work involved in any individual project properly. There are jobs which end up 3 or 4 words long, but on which very handsome fees can be earned, while other tasks running to a few thousand words command fees significantly lower than their word count.

Effective quoting is, of course, a matter of experience. As there are generally no bought-in costs for the writer to factor into his consideration, it's simply a matter of judging what the job 'feels' as though the client will be prepared to pay for it. I'm guessing that most writers start off by applying their own, notional 'day rate' to the amount of time they think the project will take, and then tailor this using gut feel, to the kind of client they're quoting for. Can a 3 day task sold to Microsoft be priced slightly higher than a 3 day task sold to a local hairdresser? You'd think so (though the answer is not always 'yes'). 

The longer we're in business, however, the better most of us get at sensing the right level at which to quote.

Over the years, I've developed a sort of algorithm for quoting with. 

I calculate by allocating values to each of 4 factors and then multiplying them together: AxBxCxD = Fee

A) Number of days I consider it'll take me to do the work

Estimate  the time required to do the task. Allow proper time to do the work, so you don't later resent working on a task you've underestimated to begin with and end up rushing things or being grumpy about revisions.

B) Who the client is

I charge a little more when working for large corporations, and a little less with entrepreneurs, small businesses and NFPs. I do this because it's my experience that the key concern of large corporations is having the job well written and professionally managed, and in return for that a fair professional fee will generally be agreeable; whereas to smaller concerns fee will generally be more critical in the decision as to where to place the project.

C) The complexity of the work

Some tasks require simply what I consider to be straightforward copywriting skills. There will be lots of writers out there who could do a creditable job on it. I charge less when quoting this kind of task than when the project calls for greater experience and more sophisticated skills which are harder to find in the marketplace. 

D) The likely value of the work to the client

If the project involves providing copy for a transient need within the client's business, I apply a lower factor than if it involves writing or developing something which by its nature will be central to their marketing or brand position for a number of years to come. Similarly, if the work is to be used for broadcast media distribution (TV commercials, for example, or national press advertising campaigns), I'll incorporate a higher factor.

If you like the model and would like to try it out, you just need to devise your own ratio in which to combine the values, and your own scale for rating them. 

(I'm keeping mine private, but you could easily work out your own.)

Once you've got the ratio right for you, you have a method of building a quote which reflects your intellectual endeavour and the true commercial situation, rather than simply treating you as if you had a meter on the side of your head.

Donate your Facebook status

You might have noticed that 'no-cost marketing' is a bit of a theme of mine right now. And I've written about Facebook 'status' lines before, too. So it won't surprise you how much I love this: Donate Your Facebook Status.

For those who don't use the Facebook social networking site, the 'status' line appears beneath a user's name, and allows his contacts to read a readily updatable sentence on his or her state of mind, concerns or similar.

I change mine every few days. Some people don't set one at all: others change it more than once a day.

But this evening I clicked to a friend's page to see that his status displayed a message about a current affairs issue close to his heart. Underneath was a link inviting me to 'Donate my status' to the same cause.

I clicked to go and check it out.

Someone has written a little plugin application which enables users to put their Status line at the disposal of the organisers of the cause in question, allowing them to display their choice of message on the 'Status' line of every Facebook user who gives them permission. Apparently it was used first during the 2008 US Election campaign.

Now Facebook Status lines are good media. they get read, and they are by their nature linked inextricably to the person (usually one of your friends or associates), who is displaying them.

It's clever marketing.

The Facebook user gets to show his or her allegiance to whatever the cause might be, and the cause get thousands, or even millions of pairs of eyeballs.

Net cost? Zero.