7 diverse routes to keeping great web copy
Don’t want to pay for it?
Easy. Steal it! With cat-like tread. Find a stronger, harder working competitor and right click: copy, paste. Done! Saved yourself time and money – and no one will ever know.
Prevent copying (1)
Insert your text as a jpg image. Mm – wrong! While you’ll certainly block others from highlighting your text, you’ll also block any search engine from reading it. Besides, it’s much less likely that your website content will be stolen over blog content and article content.
Prevent copying (2)
Block right clicks – disabling the copy/paste feature. You could do this – and many sites do – but it’s really, reeeally annoying. Besides, any determined thief will work around your block.
© 2009
A simple copyright message in the footer. Right. Like those houses on Halloween that left their candy on the porch:
“Please take just 1!”
Flickr: isfullofcrap
Remain vigilant
Make a note of your best posts and those which would have widest application – top 10 lists etc. Google a few sentences from each post every so often (I’d say once a month). Honest links and cited references might come up – but, if evident, so will the baddies.
Use a checking website
I’ve tried Copyscape. Couldn’t say it it works or not – it didn’t find anything. They also have badges available: “protected by copyscape” – presumably the internet equivalent of putting a ‘beware of dog’ stick in your window, whether or not you have a dog. If you’re just trying to make a thief go elsewhere – it might work.
Google alerts
Set them up now (How? Here). Sleep a bit easier tonight.
Friends don’t let friends – do any of the below.
Available in Google Labs is a drunk email inhibitor, Mail Goggles, – requiring you to complete math questions before an email will send (during the hours you might have one hand around a bottle and one on your mouse). Clever.
Breathalyzers are fine, but, as a society, we’re in much more trouble than that.
I’d love to see the invention of a basic literacy test before a keyboard will work.
The prototype my brother created:
Thank you Sammy
This needs immediate NASA funding. Otherwise? Our language will be slowly hacked to pieces, sold to the lowest bidder.
A deodorant commercial heard yesterday:
“Leaves less white marks!”
NO! Who put you in charge?
Learn more at Grammar Girl – OR – give up entirely. Million dollar ad campaigns get away with abominable sloppiness – and so can you. Instead, grab a drink and (try to) email someone who doesn’t love you anymore.
Grim statistics: reading and the English-speaking world
It’s a 50-car pile up – life gone horribly wrong. Reams of evidence proves:
- a lot people don’t like reading
- most “don’t have time”
- others would always rather do something else
- TV usually takes precedence
- your web copy and marketing collateral better be pretty damn snappy
Yes, statistics can be skewed and stretched to prove just about anything. Agreed? Yet, exact math and strict numbers aside, I’ve seen nothing in my last half hour of research to suggest the opposite. Oh dear.
…on with the evidence:
The States:
50 percent of American adults are unable to read an eighth grade level book.
Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America
One third of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 million American adults can’t read at all.
National Right to Read Foundation
One in four adults read no books at all in [2006].
The Associated Press, August 21, 2007
Britain
British children aged 11 to 15 now spend 55% of their waking lives in front of televisions and computers.
Canada
Nearly a third of adults (31 per cent) across the country didn’t read a single book for pleasure in all of 2007.
CanWest News Service, January 2, 2008
Well, that explains an awful lot.
So what do we do? Cater to the lowest common denominator or stand up straight and write for real live grown ups? I’m sad to say it depends on your brand – but more than once have I been asked to strike “the big words”.
In other news —
Sarah Palin’s getting a book deal, which means Wasilla is getting a bookstore.
The Colbert Report, November 19, 2008
Fun facts
Who reads the most? Indians.
Who’s got the highest literacy rate? Cuba.
Do you buck the trend?
Receive my monthly newsletter – all the cool kids are doing it and it’s coming out this Thursday. Sign up now.
NIMBY – getting ready for content thieves
3 strikes in 3 days and I need a drink.
Monday
Someone asked where I got my popular 12-step apostrophe programme. That I wrote it myself surprised him.
Tuesday
Researching. Though bored beyond all proportion, I came back to life when…yes, that phrase there…I could have sworn I’d read the same top 10 list just a minute ago.
Calling up my browsing history, I put the 2 pages side by side. The 2nd one was completely stolen – 100% copied and pasted. Nothing on the original article invited interested parties to help themselves and the thief even had the audacity to respond to complimentary comments on the article’s helpfulness.
Wednesday
Someone, a girl I knew in high school, has lifted my entire Facebook profile. My activities, interests – even favourite quotes. If I’d known we had so much in common, we might have been better friends!
The problem?
If you’ve got good web content, it’s almost inevitable it will be stolen. A lot of people are a lot less scrupulous than yourself – and the internet provides such a handy cloak of anonymity.
Like pretty much every website out there, you’ve got a copyright at the footer of every web page. Right? Perhaps you’ve even kindly prepared articles and PDFs for duplication – with the reasonable request that your byline is duplicated when the article’s used elsewhere. Right.
It’s sad to avoid putting out your best work, only to defend your intellectual property. Consider the carmakers crying into their beers after visiting April’s Shanghai Auto Show.
If (when?) it happens, there are resources a-plenty to go Jack Bauer on their thieving skins:
- SEOChat recommends taking a screenshot and a few further steps
- Website Law helps with what to do next
- SEOMoz soothes with 4 ways to enforce your copyright
- IdeaLady offers a few new weapons
Today?
Take the blinders off and stand guard. Set up your Google Alerts before lunch. Make a folder in your Google Reader or a folder in your inbox- ‘my best bits’. Create alerts for a few random phrases throughout. I’ve done so for my most popular posts and a few articles. Then go out and buy a cookie as a reward for a boring task.
Greedy? Why not bake cookies! Learn about the competitive world of copywriting + cookie recipes.
SEO Carbo-Loading
SEO is a whining, needy and bloody annoying child. To get – and keep – good Google rankings requires your near constant attention. I thought it was time for some chocolate-laden reward.
With a nod to the success of any good 12-step programme, read on for my official SEO Carbo-Loading programme. I welcome new recruits.
1. Choose a cake
Find a recipe that will really work. Need fudge? What about height? Is frosting real estate important to you? Where butter and sugar collide, why look elsewhere than nigella.com?
2. Make a cake
From scratch. It’s not hard. Betty Crocker’s gross and we’re all about learning new things here. Make a cake. Cool the cake. Circle it, examining its chocolatey perfection.
3. Get with the programme
Here’s the weird part you didn’t see coming: freeze it. We’re training now and you’ve got to earn that sucker. Why a cake you’ve made from scratch locked in the freezer?
- It’s immune to any cheating snack binges (girls?) because it’s frozen.
- You didn’t make it and then lose the chance to ever have it.
4. Sucky boring-ness
Compile a list of all your website’s current keywords. (Ya, ya it’s boring. Do it. Cake!)
Where do they currently rank? You can take a lazy estimate or an anal, scientific approach. We’re just lighting fires here.
5. Game on
Check in with Google Analytics for your keyword search results. Could they be better? Probably? Want some cake?
Scrutinise your results. Have a dig through Google and look at what’s in the way of your site now and where you want it to be. Narrow your eyes to slits. The enemy is at hand. In road race terms, what training have you neglected? What’s the hard, boring stuff, the lap repeats in the freezing rain, that you’ve been avoiding? Do you need new equipment? To cross train a bit?
Whatever it is, stare it down and ruin it.
6. Target practice
On a Post-it note, write down your targets.
- General traffic level?
- Bigger and better online presence?
- Fattened content section that does the work for you?
- Healthier rate of internet inquiry?
The note goes on top of the cake. Put it in the freezer and say goodbye.
7. Call in this guy
Pull out every SEO stop you can. Make sacrifices: give up some YouTube or Facebook time. Get up ten minutes earlier. All that crazy hardcore stuff that Olympian athletes brag about doing. It sucks, but do you have any idea how much cake Michael Phelps would eat?
8. Breakfast of champions
These 3 sites are a good start to a healthy regime:
SEO for people who love cake
9. No excuses
Do it. All of it! Like a maniac! Every day, uphill, through 5 miles of snow in the pouring rain (or whatever your parents used to say).
10. Are you winning?
Check on your results. Your eyes will either narrow in hatred to the damned man who has not yet relinquished your spot (OR) glaze over in greed: things are about to get chocolatey.
11. Victory?
12. You betcha
SEO techniques are tedious and gnaw-your-arm-off boring. It has to be a ridiculous game or you’ll go crazy.
Welcome to the club. Send photos.
90s week: What the 90s taught us about copywriting | Day 5
Day 5! We’re almost finished!
“Happy happy joy joy!”
Feeling better about things? Ready to get jiggy with your web copy? Did you inhale?
Yeaaa, I’m gonna need you to go ahead and give me need a call to action.
Smash Mouth – Walking On the Sun
So don’t delay act now supplies are running out
Allow if you’re still alive six to eight years to arrive
And if you follow there may be a tomorrow
But if the offer is shun you might as well be walkin’ on the sun
Act now!
Tell me what to do next.
Pick your top objectives – for your website, for each web page….for your entire marketing campaign.
When beginning a new project for a client, they’ll often tell me their goal is “to get more traffic.”
Well, why? What do you want to do with that traffic?
- Get more blog subscribers?
- Sell more ebooks?
- Receive more inquiries?
- Take more bookings?
- Build a mighty empire?
To get from here to there, you need to tell your readers what action to take next.
Use words that leave the control in their hands – and emphasise those precious benefits over & above the distasteful task of spending money. Create a believable sense of urgency, based on the reader’s need to solve his/her problem starting now.
Basic rule?
If you’ve seen it or heard it in an infomercial: leave it the hell alone.
As for you, my homeys, I’d like to help you put into action anything discussed this week.
Only one thing left to say:
(oh, you knew it was coming)
SHOW ME THE MONEY!!
90s week: What the 90s taught us about copywriting | Day 4
Day 4 – Writing for the web
Wannabe – Spice Girls
If you wanna get with me, better make it fast
Now, don’t go wasting my precious time
Get your act together, we could be just fine
To review our lessons so far:
Day 1 – Give it away
Give content and useful knowledge away for free, interested paying parties will follow quality
Day 2 – Don’t be a dinosaur
Boring product? Make it interesting and project your personality
Day 3 – Use description well
Help me to imagine it, throw in some benefits
Today:
Got something to say? Make it snappy.
Get on with it. You’ve got 7 seconds to pull off all of the above.
An average visitor will hit up your site and decide whether or not to peace out in 7 seconds or less.
Busy readers. Don’t read books.
Check your website’s bounce rate.
“Must go faster! Must go faster!”
- Write for scanning
- Cut adjectives
- Bullets are good
- Bold words – in moderation – are best
Your readers are busy
Long, flowery copy in dense paragraphs? As if.
How YOU doin’? See you back here tomorrow – same time, same place. Go feed your Tamagotchi.
90s week: What the 90s taught us about copywriting | Day 3
Day 3 – Use description well
Barenaked Ladies – One Week
Chickity China the Chinese chicken
You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin
Watchin X-Files with no lights on,
We’re dans la maison
I hope the Smoking Mans in this one
Like Harrison Ford Im getting Frantic
Like Sting Im Tantric
Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy
Whether or not I need your product or service – or you just hope that I do – I probably have no imagination and care to try very little. You (website) are here to help me (reader). Want me to see what you see? Put the words in my mouth and the picture in my head.
Use a story!
“…and this one time, at band camp…”
Use a metaphor (your own)
“Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.”
Use catchy, memorable description
“Buns of steel” vs. “a firm behind”….
Use benefits!
“The very best thing of all! There’s a counter on the ball! So try to beat your very best score! See if you can jump a whole lot more!”
Describe the feature, then list the benefits in ways a reader can visualise.
Feature:
“Our spa has 10 pedicure stations.”
Feature + benefit:
“Our spa has 10 pedicure stations, so you can enjoy a bottle of wine and a girly movie with your closest friends while your toes get hot to trot.”
A straight features list is, like, so what-ev-er!
- Make it memorable
- Love your audience and describe what they love best.
Hey…hey, guess what?
Your mom! Tomorrow’s post is smarter than Steve Urkel – except not annoying.
Don’t go postal, man – here’s some more:
Textbook stuff! “Features vs. benefits”
90s week: What the 90s taught us about copywriting | Day 2
Day 2 - Put the ‘grrrrrrrr’ in ’swinger,’ baby, yeah!
The Offspring – Pretty Fly For a White Guy
You know it’s kind of hard
Just to get along today
Our subject isn’t cool
But he fakes it anyway
He may not have a clue
And he may not have style
But everything he lacks
Well he makes up in denial
If you’re lucky, your product or service has a little sparkle about it. If you’re most people, you lose your audience in seconds. What you do, sell or offer – quite frankly – bores other people. Blah freakin’ blah!
Take Ross, above. A PhD in paleontology. His friends just know “dinosaurs”. To them, dinosaurs are boring – he never put a twist on it. No sex, no drama, no hook – nothing.
Age-old adage, take 1: “It’s not what you say. It’s how you say it.”
Start with the headline – and make it snappy. Raise da roof!
These are posts currently waiting in my Google Reader:
- How to Become a Copywriter
- What You Need to Know About Online Copywriting
- Words to Avoid in Web Copywriting
- Five Good Tips for Successful Copywriting
You did not have me at hello – they all sound really, really boring.
They might have useful info, but it’s just not worth finding out.
So is your subject cool? Make it cool.
Are you pretty fly? Show us. Da bomb? Prove it.
A bit of humour, personality, humanity – we’re dying for it!
Everyone else is writing it straight and playing it safe.
A blog’s a great way to let your hair down and have fun – nowhere better demonstrated than on Twisted Oak Winery’s blog. Make sure to ogle their rubber chickens.
They’re a small winery in California. Whether or not you’ve heard of them, after a quick read of their blog you won’t just add it to your RSS feed, you’ll send it to your mom for a laugh and, next time you pick up a bottle, you’ll look for their label.
“Wine, wine, other wine, expensive wine….funny rubber chicken wine!”
Never underestimate the power of personality. It’s not that Twisted Oak invented anything new – people being stupid with rubber chickens has been a sport since Ross’ dinosaurs roamed – it’s that they’re doing it and you’re missing out on the fun.
There’s a time and a place, yep, and if you’re in a serious field – come through for your readers in a blog. I’ll even hold your hand and write it for you.
You love what you do – make us love it, too. Could I BE any more clear?
Allllrighty then! Tomorrow? More wholesome than a Danny Tanner bedside chat. Hurry back.
Related – and equally FLY – posts:
90s week: What the 90s taught us about copywriting | Day 1
Some days, it all gets a bit overwhelming. The world won’t stop tweeting.
I can’t sum it up better than Drew Barrymore in a recent movie monologue:
“She calls at home but he doesn’t pick up. She calls on his cell, and he e-mails her. She texts him. He Twitters back and leaves coded hints on MySpace. She tries snail mail. He apparently never learned how to open one. She yearns for the days when people had one telephone and one answering machine, and a guy had either definitely called you, or he had not.”
Likewise the copywriter’s headache.
- Did you write for people?
- Did you write for a novice reader, unfamiliar with the subject?
- Does it equally interest an expert?
- Did you write for Google robots?
- Can it easily be scanned and digested?
- Is it properly broken into sections with applicable sub-headings?
- Did you make it interesting?
- Did you make it believable?
- Did you build trust and confidence in the brand?
- Is it search engine optimised?
- Do the internal and external links use the best keywords in their anchor text?
- Did you use long and short form keywords for best effect?
- Did you use a good mix of competitive keywords for ideal results?
- Did you include a call to action?
- Is the grammar perfect?
- Are there any typos?
- Does it seep character, wit, delirious charm?
- Have you dropped as many classic 90s movie quotes as possible?
Houston, we have a problem. With those voices in my head, I don’t need real friends. The many demands on a web copywriter and the flawless copy she must produce can leave her yearning for a simpler time. The 90s.
Stunned to realise that we’re hurtling towards the teens, there’s never been a better time to reflect – Matchbox 20 playing in the background – on what the 90s taught us about great copywriting and online marketing.
1 crucial lesson coming every day this week – add this to your feed or check back daily.
It’s totally gonna suck. NOT!
Day 1 – Give it away
Give it Away – Red Hot Chili Peppers
Give it away, give it away, give it away, now.
Give it away, give it away, give it away, now.
Give it away, give it away, give it away, now.
Give it away, give it away, give it away, now.
Content marketing 101.
WAAZZZAAAAAAAAAAP. If you write it, they will come. Who will come? First Google, then visitors, then their friends, then the random people who find you through links….
Got pages of dope content? They show you believe in what you’re offering. SEOMoz is a great example. The site’s got an amazing blog, heaps of leading SEO industry info and lots of brilliant tools.
They make the bulk of their money through paid, professional subscriptions to SEO tools – and they’re not cheap. You wouldn’t just show up and fork over $80, so how to convince the buyer? Give [lots of other things] away. Once you’ve tried all their free tools and realise you can’t live without them….then you’re a willing buyer.
Likewise your content. Write it – or hire me to do so. Someone in your industry is going come through with the goods – why not mop up the ‘best in class’?
Deliver more than you need to, every day. Just leave it out, on a plate. “Help yourself.” If you deliver it, they will trust you, like you, buy from you.
***
Tomorrow’s 90s week post will be more fun than Kelly Kapowski at a pep rally – see you then!
Goooooo Bayside! Word to your mother.
Day 2 - Put the ‘grrrrrrrr’ in ’swinger,’ baby, yeah!