The Golden Thread – The Week in Review
March 23–29, 2008
Welcome to The Golden Thread Online, your free e-letter from American Writers & Artists Inc. Every Saturday, you will receive this recap of all the strategies, insights and opportunities we send to you and your fellow AWAIers each week. Whether it’s a message from a fellow writer about how he landed a new client … a technique from a Master copywriter for writing a control … an insight into how to succeed in a new market … news of a brand new writing job or business opportunity for you … you’ll find it here in this easy-to-access and always available “Week in Review.”
In This Issue:
- Words of Copywriting Wisdom … “You Can’t Say That!” … The “Smart vs. Dumb” Rule of Copywriting
Master copywriter Don Hauptman explains how in today’s high-speed society full of sensory overload, it’s necessary to simplify in order to grab attention, to communicate, to persuade and sell. - Insights From the Masters … Six Techniques for Jumpstarting Your Creative Engine
AWAI Advisory Board members John Forde, Bob Bly, Don Mahoney, Michael Masterson, Jen Stevens, and Paul Hollingshead offer their advice on how to stay motivated and avoid writer’s block. - AWAIer Jerry Krull Confesses … “My offer was so good, the customer offered to pay me more!”
Jerry Krull shares a story about how learning copywriting helped him save a sale and make more money …by accident. - Nick Usborne Talks About a Decade of Writing for the Web
In an interview, web-writing expert Nick Interview tells you what you need to know to succeed as a online copywriter.
Words of Copywriting Wisdom … “You Can’t Say That!” … The “Smart vs. Dumb” Rule of Copywriting
Have you ever had this experience?
Occasionally, a client has criticized a passage in copy I’ve written, expressing his shock with words such as these: “We can’t say that! Our market is too intelligent!”
Asked to elaborate, the client will insist that the disputed copy is too obvious, or too simplistic, or employs a clichéd (albeit proven) direct-response device, such as an unconditional guarantee or a call to action.
True, you shouldn’t treat your prospect condescendingly. David Ogilvy once wrote: “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.”
But copywriters should be equally careful to avoid committing the opposite error. Heed this dictum: “A smart person who is busy may act dumb!”
What does this principle tell us? The problem usually isn’t a lack of intelligence, but rather of time. In a high-speed society plagued by massive information and advertising overload, it’s often necessary to simplify in order to grab attention, to communicate, to persuade and sell. A complex or confusing message, on the other hand, can rapidly discourage or antagonize an otherwise qualified potential buyer.
A longstanding commandment of effective communication is to write simply and straightforwardly, without long words, elaborate sentences, or complicated arguments. It’s been said that a Ph.D. won’t object to writing that is simple and clear enough for an eight-year-old.
Insights From the Masters … Six Techniques for Jumpstarting Your Creative Engine
This article was first published on October 22, 2001.
Read the original article »
AWAIer Jerry Krull Confesses … “My offer was so good, the customer offered to pay me more!”
“I (admittedly by accident) used my copywriting skills, learned from AWAI, to save a failed sale for my product. I not only saved the sale, my offer was so good, that the customer offered to pay me more for my mistake than I wanted.
“I bought your course to help in my business for the copy on my website. I have been flirting with doing copywriting during my slow times in the rug business.
“This event has convinced me that I have the talent to write copy that motivates people to a buying action. Why shouldn’t I get paid for helping another business market their product or service too? It’s fun, gratifying, and lucrative.
“Thanks for opening my eyes.”
Nick Usborne Talks About a Decade of Writing for the Web
Nick Usborne began copywriting exclusively for the Web in 1998. He’s worked with such high-profile companies as Yahoo, MSN, and AOL. He’s also the author of Net Words: Creating High Impact Online Copy and AWAI’s newest program, Nick Usborne’s Million Dollar Secrets for Online Copywriting. Today, Nick joins us to share his years of experience and insights.
CI: So first the obvious questions … how did you get started writing copy for the web?
Nick: I’d been a direct-response copywriter for about 15 years. And then I did something completely different. I actually stopped copywriting. I opened a public farm in British Columbia. This was in ‘94, so the Web was just getting started. 1994 was the year Netscape first appeared—the first fully functional browser where people could actually see images and browse the Web.
Anyway, while trying to make my public farm successful, I got together with a fellow to create a website for it—which was quite a new thing back then.
By 1996, the farm had not worked out. So I stepped back from that and thought, “Oh well. I’ll have to go back to copywriting and make some money again.” But the website I had created for the farm had given me a taste for the new medium. For about a year, I did my regular direct-response copywriting. Then, as a kind of New Year’s resolution on January 1, 1998, I said, “Okay. From this minute on, I will only write for the Web.” And I did.
I figured if I carried on with my other work, I wouldn’t be able to totally focus on the Web and build my expertise in that area.
CI: How does writing for the web differ from writing for print?
Nick: Some of the underlying principles of communicating through writing remain the same. It’s the audience that is so profoundly different.
Think about it this way. If I receive some direct mail coming through my front door, the relationship between me and that mail is adversarial. It had better be extremely relevant and extremely timely and very compelling for me to actually open it. And I open begrudgingly, because it wasn’t my choice to receive it and I don’t really want to spend time looking at it.
As a writer of direct mail, you’re aware of that attitude in your prospect and you write accordingly. With the Web, it’s totally different. If I go to the Web, I’m going there out of choice.
People who go online are goal-oriented. Everyone who uses a search engine has something specific in mind. And the measure of control the reader has online is something we’re just not used to in offline media.
Let’s say I go online to find out the cost of flights to Mexico City. As soon as that thought enters my mind, I am in control of the situation. It’s utterly different from print because I have an intention. I’m going on the Web to find out about travel costs to Mexico City. And I will write into the Google or Yahoo or MSN search field “flights to Mexico City” or “cheap flights to Mexico City.” So I have a goal.
The user has always been in control of the environment online. It’s just becoming more and more evident now with the advent of so many ways for users to interact—with shopping comparison sites, blogs, the ability to comment on something someone else has posted.
CI: You often see single-page sites—basically just a direct-mail piece on Web page. Do you think those are less effective than sites that have more useful, even interactive, content?
Nick: It depends very much on your audience and on the kind of product or service you’re selling. If I’m buying a coffee machine, and I know there are dozens of different models I could choose from, don’t try to sell me a coffee machine with a long sales letter on a Web page. It’s not going to work. I’m going to go to a comparison-shopping site where I can see 50 different coffee machines and price comparisons side by side.
But if you want to sell me something that I have a more immediate, urgent, and emotional need for—like a cure for severe acne—that’s where a single-page sales letter can still work.
I’ve written both kinds. I’ve written copy for large corporate sites, and I’ve written single-letter sales pages. But, like I say, which one is going to work best for you depends very much on the product or service you are selling.
CI: Is the research process different when you’re writing a piece that will sell exclusively online?
Nick: When I was in the print world, I really depended on the brief that was provided to me by the client company. They’d give me the usual demographics, psychographics, and all that good stuff. Online, I can get so much more granular.
Let’s go back to the coffee machine. Say a client wants me to write a sales page for a particular coffee machine. I can learn so much more about my audience online than I could from one of those briefs. So I’ll say to my client, “Okay, I either need access to your server logs, your analytics, or just answer these questions for me: Where are your visitors coming from? Which page do they enter on? When they come to a particular coffeemaker’s sales page, how do they arrive there?”
I’ll also want to know what keywords they use—what language they use to get to that sales page. Then I’ll go to Amazon.com. I’ll go to Shopping.com. I’ll go to Bizrate.com. I’ll go to any site where I can read what customers are saying about that coffeemaker or similar coffeemakers. What I’ll see on those sites is in real time online, not the result of third-party research. What I’ll read is what people like and dislike about those machines.
Regardless of what the company thinks, I can find out what is actually most important to people about them. I can find out what upsets them, what delights them. I can also understand the language that regular people use when talking about coffee machines. And, in the case of many products and services, that language is often not the same as the language the company itself uses.
Every kind of company tends to have its own jargon—the kind of words, phrases, and language they use when talking about their products. Very often, that isn’t the language their customers use. But when you research your audience online, you can uncover their language by reading their writing, their blogs, and their comments on comparison-shopping sites. You can learn a huge amount about your readers. You can discern what is most important to them, what they’re really looking for, what they really dislike.
So I now pay much less attention to a client’s briefing document, and a lot more attention to what people are actually saying about their product.
In terms of research, my life is totally different online.
CI: Can you tell us a little bit about how writing email promotions fits into being a Web copywriter?
Nick: I don’t want to generalize too much, but I think email is used badly by many companies—especially large companies—because they use it with a traditional mindset. They will often just broadcast a standard promotional message via email. When they do that, they misunderstand the nature and potential of email.
Here’s what I mean. If I go to your company’s website, I’m going to your space. That’s your place. That’s your website. You can speak the way you want. You can present me with what you want.
But when you arrive in my email inbox, that’s my place. My very personal place. Other than people like us who are in this business, most people use their email inbox as a place where they hear from family and friends. Or where they’re alerted to new postings in a forum that they follow—something to do with their personal interests.
So an email inbox is a very personal space. It’s a place where correspondence takes place with family and friends, and where you continue to hear about things that interest you. So when a company just broadcasts a promotional email message, it’s out of place. Like junk mail, it’s annoying … even if you’ve signed up for it, even if you’re interested enough to have opted in to receive it.
When I’m writing an email, I try to fit in organically with the nature of the medium. I try to make it a lot more conversational than the language I use on a website. Email is where people hear from friends and family who speak in regular language, not in promotional marketing language. So I strip away as much of that promotional marketing language as I can and try to speak with a much more personal tone. When I advise companies about email promotions, I tell them to do the same thing. And I encourage then to send their emails not from the company or the team, but from an individual … so it really is personal.
A lot of companies will send out a promotion for something this week, and another promotion for something the next week, and there’s no connection between the two. Well, that doesn’t fit in with the nature of the medium either. So another thing I try to encourage companies to do is to write emails that connect. Like: “Hey, we wrote to you last week about that coffeemaker. Well, this week we want to tell you about all the different …” That makes it almost like a conversation. And the next time they send out an email, people will think, “Oh, okay, this is from the guys who were telling me about such-and-such.”
CI: Nick, we are guilty of that ourselves at AWAI. You’re giving us a lot of very useful advice that I don’t think our readers have heard before.
Nick: The way I’ve been talking about writing websites and writing emails … I hope it doesn’t sound like I’ve given up on selling. I haven’t at all. I still use all of the the skills I had as a print copywriter.
I was a direct-response copywriter for 15 years, and the Web is a 100% direct-response medium. Whether it’s an email or a webpage, you need to get someone to do something. That “something” may be buying, it may be subscribing, it may be registering, it may be participating, it may be just clicking on a link to the next page. And if you fail to get that response, you’ve failed.
So, I’m still a direct-response copywriter. I’m just careful to understand the profound differences of this medium.
CI: Can you take us briefly through the process you use for writing Web copy?
Nick: The first thing I do is what I described before … the research. The next thing I do hasn’t changed from when I was a print copywriter: I focus all my energy and attention on figuring out what to say.
One thing I see a lot with younger copywriters is that they pay too much attention to how to say something. They seem to feel they’re being paid to write beautiful or clever copy. If I had a copywriter working for me, I’d much rather have a so-so writer who always understood what to say instead of an outstanding writer who didn’t bother to figure it out.
Let’s say I’m selling a coffeemaker that makes a single cup at a time. I would say to myself, “What is it about these machines that really excites people? What is the most important aspect? Is it what the company thinks?” I try to say that in no more than 10 words. Then I write that down as my headline.
Now that may not be my final headline, but I write it down—and I now know that I’m focused on saying the right thing. I’m going to be talking about something that I’ve discovered is deeply important to my audience. And then I just start writing.
Some people write a quick first draft and then do a second draft. I tend to take three steps forward, two steps back. So I write my headline. Then I write the first paragraph, second paragraph, and I may go on a bit further. But then, when I hit the third paragraph, I might suddenly realize that I’ve finally written a sentence that does a good job of communicating what I’m trying to say. So I’ll scrub the first two paragraphs, and make that my opening sentence. And that’s how I continue through.
I’m constantly writing and then going back and fiddling and changing, adjusting. Sometimes I’ll get halfway through and think, “Well, now that I got this far, maybe it would be smarter if my headline was a little different and said such-and-such.”
So I go back and I go forward, and back and forward. That’s how I do it. That’s how I write.
CI: What do you like best about writing for the Web?
Nick: As I said before, there are some things I used to do when I wrote in the print world that I’d never get away with if I tried to do it online … because so many people are watching. And they’re all communicating with each other in forums and blogs and so on.
So one of the things I like about the Web is the transparency—the insistence on honesty. You can’t be bad.
There is a demand for honesty in writing and marketing online that I really like. It just matches my nature and character. I like the fact that every copywriter out there is being forced to be more candid. There’ve been awful lies told in advertising … and you can’t do that anymore.
CI: If you had to emphasize one point about writing for the Web that you want our readers to come away with, what would it be?
Nick: Understand that writing for the Web is a lot more complicated than writing a sales letter. There are hundreds of copywriters out there who simply write a traditional sales letters on a single Web page. If you can make a living doing that, that’s fine. But there’s a much broader opportunity out there. And that is to learn the specific skills of writing for the Web.
One thing that’s different on the Web is how people read the copy. If I pick up People magazine, I look at the photos first. On the Web, people don’t look at photos first (unless it’s a glamour-related site). They read the headline first. Why? Because Web users are driven by a purpose, and they want to know if they’ve come to the right place. The headline will either say to them, “This isn’t what you thought it was going to be,” and they’ll leave … or it will say to them, “Yes, you’re in the right place,” and they’ll keep reading.
Some time ago, I was asked to do some work for the Getty Trust out of Los Angeles. They have a vast website. And when you’re writing for it, yes, you’re writing Web pages—but you also have to understand, really understand, issues of navigation within a website, issues of usability, issues of using funnels of pages to direct people forward (to where they want to go as well as to where you want them to be). When you get into complex websites like that, the challenges are really interesting and very different from the traditional skills of just copywriting.
You also have to bear in mind that a website can be an enormously difficult thing for people to actually use.
If I get a Sears catalog through the mail, I know how to use that catalog. I put it in my right hand, and with my left hand I peel back the cover. I know that the front cover is always the front cover and that I can flick through the pages. I know that one page always follows another. I know how just about every print catalog in the world works.
But when I go to a website, I never know how it’s going to work, because every website is different. How do I find what I want? Is the navigation at the top, at the side, or both? Does it have a search box? Does it have drop-down menus?
The challenge for website designers and writers is to turn something incredibly complex into something as simple as possible. So you’re not only writing sales copy, you’re writing links. You’re writing navigation tabs. You’re writing copy that moves people on to the next page or across to a different page.
That’s what makes online copywriting such an exciting opportunities—there is such a wide range of new skills to master.
CI: Did we miss anything important that you’d like to touch on?
Nick: There is a huge opportunity for copywriters who embrace the complexities of the Web and are enthusiastic about learning new skills—copywriters who decide, “Yes. I will learn at least the fundamentals of search engine optimization. I will understand how search engines work. I will learn how that affects the pages I write. I’ll learn at least the basics of website usability. And I will study the navigation systems that various sites use.”
I work for a lot of companies. I don’t just do copywriting. I do consulting. I train in-house copywriting teams. I do day seminars for editors. And I find that what these companies are missing is writers who have that much broader range of skills for the Web. It’s very hard for a mid-sized or large company to find a copywriter who can not only write a sales page, but also truly understands the nature of the medium, the ins and outs of that company’s website.
So though there’s a lot of learning to be done, there is, like I said, a huge opportunity out there for writers who embrace the complexities of the Web.
