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1) More of everything - words, paragraphs, detail - explains best
Not so for 4 reasons:
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People don’t read websites like they do a printed page; they scan and skim the text, searching for what interests them. |
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Monitors are read 25% slower than paper-based publications and, on average, less than 20% of people read a site word-for-word. |
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The Internet audience is extremely impatient. A U.S. study, conducted in 2005, reported that over the previous 3 years, people had developed higher expectations in every category studied. |
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Readers can spend as few as 10 seconds on a web page. To ensure that their stay is longer, your sentences and paragraphs must be brief, yet meaningful. If the writing is unclear or long-winded, people click to go elsewhere. |
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2) Believing a website designer is also a web content writer
Several questions come to mind:
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What background does the designer (or person to whom the job has been delegated to) have in marketing communications and Internet writing?
-Would you trust your mechanic’s friend to fix your car? |
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Has the person writing your site been exposed to a sales-marketing environment?
-Do they understand that words must sell in a particular way? Can they craft a website strategy to win trust - and clients? |
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What is their knowledge of web writing?
-Unintentional errors and oversights hurt your company’s credibility |
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What questions were posed to you as a means of arriving at your company's unique qualities?
-If business questions aren't being asked, you won't be getting business writing |
Business writing for a website is an art developed over time, based on
research, and proven by the interest in your site and company.
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3)“They’re only words; we’ll do it ourselves (in-house)”
Writing for the web isn’t like any other kind of writing, business or otherwise. Using promotional, explanatory, polite, detail-rich, point-form styles won’t work: Content writing has its own format. If it isn’t followed, site visitors will not stick around to read what you feel to be important.
Commercial sites, ideally, require a writer with sales and marketing experience. This provides the familiarity to ask insightful questions, and to understand if more specific ones are needed. A good interview “drills down” into the core values, marketing strategy, and philosophy of a company. A savvy sales and marketing professional, skilled in website writing, translates those findings into content writing that sells.
Do you know what makes your site’s writing trustworthy? How long paragraphs should be? What they should cover? How to make the writing appeal to search engines? Writing a site yourself saves money up front but can lose your company valuable credibility as soon as it goes live. |
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4) Transferring brochure text to a website saves time and money
Brochures are written in a for-print style whose format and strategy is very different from web writing. The impatient Internet audience isn’t going to wade through long sentences and paragraphs characteristic of brochures; instead, they will leave a site and not return.
Writing a website isn’t just about filling white space with words; it’s about creating a persuasive online sales presentation that identifies your customer’s priorities and explains how you will address them. “Sticking” text onto your site in haphazard fashion reduces credibility, alienates readers, and defeats the site’s purpose.
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5) Fewer words mean lower cost for web writing
The impatient Internet audience wants information and answers. To get their attention, a writing style very different from the ‘introduction-body-conclusion’ type we learned in school must be used. Different information must also be selected, so as not to bore.
This requires a web-specific research and writing process that collects maximum information from which a minimum of words will be chosen. Key points to remember:
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An in-depth, informed interview is necessary to shake loose important details |
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First draft goes through several revisions to arrive at the essence of your business concept. Every word is examined for its impact. Words must literally fight to remain on the page |
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Conversational tone keeps your reader focused on your message |
Since 66% of prospective customers check out your website before contacting you, well-written customer-centric writing is an investment that pays off everytime. Its cost depends on the size of your site, industry or market, content writing options chosen, and the complexity of your product or service.
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