Online Copywriting - WRITING FOR THE WEB

Is 35 Pages Too Long for Product Copy?

- Not for Apple

Long copy vs short copy is one the never ending arguments in marketing, both online and offline.

Hardened direct response marketers will insist that long copy produces more sales every time, while many online gurus’s will insist that short attention spans mean we must keep our online copy short.

What to do? Well, looking at what other successful online marketers do is a good place to start.

Find out more...

How to Write for the Web

You must start with the end in mind

Too much about what is written about writing for the web comes down to rigid rules that can often do more harm than good. A better approach is to take a more strategic look at your web writing and go from there. IE: “Start with the end in mind.”

My recent post about How People Read on the Web certainly stirred up a lot of debate, which either means I’m a clever copywriter or good at stirring the pot. (More likely a little of both.)

The interactions I’ve had certainly show that people have strong opinions and beliefs about the topic.

So rather than try and espouse some hard and fast rules about what and what not to do, I’m going to list seven strategic options to consider when writing your web copy.

That means you have to think.

How People Read Online

There’s been a dangerous rule floating around the web for the past decade that people read differently on the web than they do offline. Well, they don’t. They read exactly the same way.

So called web copywriting guru’s like to say that people scan and skim on the web, so writing for the web should be different.

Scanning and Skimming Since the Dawn of Time

Scanning and skimming are nothing new; people have always read that way, it’s actually part of our survival instinct to scan and skim the horizon for any possibility of mating , potential dinner and  threats from things that might see us as dinner, but that’s another story.

To understand how ingrained scanning and skimming are...  read more

Clever Copywriting

This clip with Ronnie Corbet and Harry Enfield is a short masterclass in clever copywriting.

Obviously it's funny, but it's funny because the writers have done their research.

Every line is packed with meaning, both subtle and obvious.

The skit appeals to all personality types.

Conversion Rate Optimisation Tip #5 - Don’t Use Reverse Type

Back in the eighties Formula One Grand Prix teams discovered that the easiest thing to read on a car travelling at 300kmh is black type on a white background.

They promptly redesigned the car’s livery so that where ever they needed to paste a sponsor’s message it was black on white.

This of course gave the sponsor a better return than if their message had been say black text on a red background, or even worse white text on a black background (otherwise known as reverse type).

The Myth of the Short Attention Span

There is a dangerous and persistent myth around online copywriting that you should keep your copy short.

Doing so will cost you sales and leads.

The argument goes that any potential customer has a short attention span and is constantly skimming and scanning copy rather than reading it.

Well, what are they scanning and skimming for?