The New Editorial Process: When Good Habits Become Bad
Editors are funny people. They really are. Not so much in the form of laughter funny as in the way they view the world and the language used to describe it. Pity the poor novice writer who brings a piece before an editor that has violated the rules of the AP Stylebook. That is a sin tantamount to blasphemy. Typically, the editor’s response starts with the twitching of an eye as the face takes on a deep red color. This is usually followed by a glassy-eyed stare that one would expect to see in the recipient of a ten-thousand cc shot of Novocain. Voice low and trembling, he will then announce the writer’s transgressions in the form of broken Commandments:
“Thou shalt not use a passive voice,”
“Thou shalt not place a preposition at the Alpha or Omega; the beginning or the end,”
“Thou shalt honor the rules of the Inverted News Pyramid in all you write,”
“Thou shalt not place a comma before a conjunction,”
“Thou shalt not start a sentence with a numeral, spell it out and spell out numbers less than ten as well.”
The list goes on and on and the editor seems to know them all by heart. The young writer will usually tuck his tail between his legs and slither off to make corrections in hopes of gaining forgiveness and approval. But just for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that the editor may be wrong in some of his rulings ( if you are an editor and reading this, now would be good time to pour yourself a stiff one and hear me out ).
There is a new school of thought emerging in the world of the editorial process. It is the school of thought that encompasses writing content for the Web; including search engine optimization — SEO. Most of the basic rules of good grammar and writing are still in play. There are, however, great deviations in certain aspects of content written strictly for use online as opposed to copy for print.
Passive Voice: Passive voice should be avoided when possible because it reads slow and creates confusion. Active voice allows the reader to run through the work without stumbling. It assists in the flow. This is very important when writing for the Web because it takes about 20% longer to read from a screen than it does from a printed page. You can learn more about passive/active voice here, if you need to brush up a bit. This rule will stay in effect for the most part when writing for the Web. There are exceptions, however:
Passive voice can and should be used, at times, to facilitate getting important keywords at the front of headings, blurbs and lead sentences. Readers scan web content differently than they do printed copy. When reading printed copy, people scan headlines and the first several paragraphs in hopes of picking up the “information scent.” Web content is scanned in an “F” pattern; the first two or three words of the title, subtitle and subject lines of the leading paragraphs. The search is for keywords that give off the “information scent” for the topic the reader is looking for. If they don’t find these keywords, they lose the information trail and you lose the reader.
Search engine spiders, which crawl across your work online, also look for keywords in titles, subtitles and the subject lines of paragraphs first before moving on to “read” the body of content. This plays a crucial role in how, and for what keywords, your piece is indexed.
Keeping this in mind, there are times when the passive voice would be preferable to the active voice in the structure of your piece.
Structure: While the inverted news pyramid is the preferred method of structure for print copy, it simply does not play well for web content in most cases. It places the bulk of information contained in the work at the top of the piece with less important details and facts filtering in to make up the body.
Internet users have most likely arrived at your page via a search criterion they have established. When they get to your page, they typically are not going to read the first paragraph. Instead they will perform the “F” scan of the first several words of the title and initial paragraphs trying to pick up the “information scent” that brought them there. If they find the trail, then they will stay and begin reading the piece. If they lose the trail, then they will be gone off to other places to try to pick it up again.
Numbers/Numerals: Editors of the traditional ilk are prone to have writers shot at sunrise for starting sentences with a number; worse still, using a numeral there instead. Almost as bad is the failure to spell out numbers less than 10 anywhere in the text. All of this has changed to some degree when writing web content.
It is now acceptable, in some cases preferable, to start titles or sentences with a number/numeral. It lets the reader know at a glance what they are in for: “5 Ways to,” 7 Things You Can,” or “3 Best Sources of.” It also appears that the search engines love them, too.
Readers do not usually count a numeral as a word when scanning and this extends the amount of keywords read in titles and subject lines from 2-3 to 3-4 (two-three to three-four). Numerals stand out conspicuously in a body of text, too and may help serve as an attention grabber.
This post should serve as a starting point for your own “information trail” to get you started on the hunt for other things you need to know. As time passes and writing for the Internet evolves, you will be served well by staying abreast of the current trends and best practices to use in your writing. I hope this piece piqued your interest and curiosity.
Brad McGovern is the Marketing Manager at http://www.Article Marketer.com/, and offers advice and news of note to article marketers. Watch for more from Brad in the coming days at http://articlemarketer.com/blog.php!
10 Surefire Ways To Grab A Skimmer’s Attention
People don’t have much time to read your sales letters and would rather skim them. They will scan your letter and read only those that catches their eyes.
Is the solution to have a short one? No, it’s not. Generally, long sales letters convert better. You will have more time to present the features and benefits of your product and convince your readers to buy.
If a short sales letter is not the solution, how, then, do you grab the attention of a skimmer so he can read all the important aspects of your sales letter? The following are ways that can help you make them read further:
1. Create a good first impression. Your ad copy should look professional. It should make the reader feel that your letter is worth reading. A misspelled word in your heading can turn off a potential customer. Why would one buy from you if you don’t take care of details? What should your customer expect from your products, or even your support to the product later on?
2. Use a lot of headlines and sub-headlines to easily catch your visitors’ attention. Expand on the benefits and features of your product. Have a sub-headline on each benefit. Your readers may want to read further if they find your headlines and sub-headlines interesting.
3. Use pictures or graphics that show your product and bonuses. They will make your product more concrete to your visitors. Pictures and graphics also easily attract eyeballs.
4. Be sure your graphics load fast and correctly. People don’t want to wait. This is true especially if your graphics is at the top of your sales letter, and your whole web site will only be shown after downloading that picture.
5. Use short sentences or sentence fragments. It is easier to read and understand short sentences than long ones. By just looking at the length of your sentences, the visitor will know the degree of difficulty in reading your sales letter.
6. Use color, bold, italics, underlining to highlight important words and phrases. However, use them sparingly. Too much of them may look like you are in hysterics and will turn away potential buyers.
Use highlighting near the area where you want to have your visitors read more. You may want them to read the features or benefits of your product.
7. Pick the three most powerful and appealing benefits of your product and repeat them in various parts of your sales letter. This will help your visitors to easily remember these benefits. Just be sure to rewrite them, so it won’t appear that you just copied and pasted them in your ad copy.
8. Use bullets to list the features and benefits of your product. Bullets make reading easier, making your visitor to read more.
9. Use a “P.S.”/”P.P.S.”/etc. at the end. This is some of the most read section of a sales letter. You may repeat the strong point of your product, remind the bonuses included, or emphasize the urgency for the prospect to make an action.
10. With a long sales letter, place buy buttons at different places of the letter. Your prospect may have been convinced to buy, so provide them with the opportunity to do so.
People are in a hurry to quickly get over reading a sales letter. Unless something catches their eyes, they would just skim over the letter and go on to the next site. They might miss the important points, and you lose them as customers. However, with the optimal use of eye-catching techniques, you may be able to have them read more, and convince them to click on that buy button.
Discover Kevin Sinclair’s system for making profits regardless of whether anyone joins your network marketing business. http://net-mlm-profits.com/
E-Books – Transition to Modern Day Libraries
Electronic books, or “ebooks”, have become big business on the internet and their creation and distribution has already begun to compete with traditional off-line, hard copy, paper and ink books. If you are unfamiliar with the term “ebook”, or unclear about what exactly it means, it can be rather confusing since on a computer screen or other digital reader, everything that displays text might appear to be an ebook; but that’s not the case.
While all the text displayed on a computer screen or other device might be digitally formed, an ebook is distinct in that it is created with, and relies upon, specific proprietary software and technology; and it is not merely text. An ebook is quite specifically the computer equivalent of an off-line book and, contrary to many things on the internet, has a linear format and will often be designed with recognizable pages, running headers, page numbers and the trappings of a paper book.
Due to the expansion of ebooks across the traditional publishing areas, in terms of topics, they now replicate much of the output of the off-line publishers. You can find many works of fiction and non fiction in an ebook format in addition to poetry, manuals and guides; and more recently, even the traditional offline publishers are beginning to create and “publish” ebook versions of their best sellers. But the recognized gold standard of ebook publishing is the information ebook, or info product; it is an entirely new form of book which the internet has made its own.
It has long been established that one of the main uses to which the Internet, as a whole, is put to is the search for information. People all over the world connect to the internet and search for information. This may be information about pop stars or celebrities, it might be news or sports results, it may be for cooking recipes or diets, travel destinations or the new aging cure.
In every respect it is information which is searched for and the website that makes that information available in the easiest way to the most people is the site that will be visited over and over again. The internet is like a massive reference library. A product of this scenario is the ebook or info product.
Where a website can deliver information with great ease and efficiency, an ebook can deliver specialized information with authority and improved flexibility. When someone searches the internet on Google for something like “dog training” they will be presented with millions of results. They will visit some of these sites and begin to realize that each site has information but they need to go from one to another to put together the “pieces”.
Perhaps they will find a site entirely about the sort of dog training they wish to read about but they still have to read each article individually, they will have to discover which articles are relevant and they will have to click from page to page and may even have to come back to the website at a later time to continue reading. Of course, they could print out the web pages they need, but often websites aren’t formatted adequately for printers, and there are many unnecessary adverts and images which have nothing to do with the article. Finally, many articles on websites are not credited and the expertise of the writer isn’t clear.
Why would someone pay for an ebook when there are websites with plenty of information or else a bookshop with excellent, authority books? Because an ebook delivers in the mid area between these two extremes and adds some additional qualities which neither of the other options have.
First and foremost, the ebook is compiled, relevant, information. The job of searching websites or individual articles and web pages is done for you. The price of an ebook can be seen as the price of research on a topic. Second, and almost as important, the ebook contains facts, information, straightforward, no nonsense, abc and 123 and you get it now! An ebook might be five pages or fifty but what it gives you is the information you need in a compact form. Finally, and most importantly in some minds, is that an ebook can target the smallest of niches. The production cost of an ebook is the cost of time writing it; the software for compiling and formatting it can be found free.
One of the many marvels of the internet is in the vanquishing of the concept of rarity when it comes to information. Prior to the internet, specialist interests required work, travel, and industry to pursue. Off-line book publishers can publish books on general subjects or, if there are many people interested in a topic, they can publish a book on that topic because they expect their costs to be recovered due to the topic’s popularity. But what they cannot do is publish books on small niche topics. There may be thousands of people interested but these people will be widely dispersed and distribution costs money, in addition to printing. Minority interests, specialist hobbies and activities cannot be served by conventional publishers. The internet solves this issue. One website can serve all of those widely dispersed people. One ebook can also.
The two first points together are really the midpoint between off-line publishing and websites. You can get compiled and relevant information in a printed book, but you have to go into town and search the bookshelves, an ebook solves that problem. You can get instant information from a web page, but you have to find it and you have to compile which parts are relevant. And ebook solves this problem.
Finally, the added qualities of an ebook come from its ability to target widely dispersed and specialist or minority interests, compile the facts and deliver instantly. Ebooks may be an evolution of the book in form, but in function they are entirely new.
Joshua Watson is the author http://www.successwithauctions.com/E-Books-Your-Profitable-Digital-Publishing-Empire.php http://www.safehavenlc.com and http://www.urhowto.com/Guides_Family/Babies/how-to-buy-baby-clothes.php
Master Yourself With The Art Of Writing Copy
Writing effective copy for your website involves more than just writing a letter to your potential customers. To be successful, you need to compel your visitors to take action. Here are some of the top ways to write website copy that will bring you what matters most- SALES! Here’s what you can do:
- Spend time crafting a great Unique Selling Proposition (USP). Your USP is the thing you offer that makes you different from everyone else in your industry. It may be your guarantee, your bonuses, your method of doing business… whatever it is, make sure your customers know it! Many companies have been very successful at making their USP their company tagline. Take Domino’s pizza for example- “made-to-order hot pizza delivered in 30 minutes or less- guaranteed” is their USP and also the tagline that made them into one of the largest and most successful pizza chains in North America.
- Always include a powerful PS. You can use this valuable space to reiterate an offer or guarantee that you have made, restate the strongest benefits, give your contact information or even to offer an extra bonus for a fast response. Studies have shown that people often read the PS area before the actual letter, especially when it stands out. When testing your sales copy be sure to test different PS’s to find the one that works best with your prospects.
- Use deadlines to create a sense of urgency. For example, “If you purchase X by midnight on December 15, we will also throw in a …” is a good way to let customers know that they need to buy now or they’ll be missing out. Make sure that you enforce your deadlines, or your customers will stop feeling that sense of urgency that you are trying to stir within them. People react to deadlines -and the closer the deadline to the time of their initial visit- the better.
Not all sales copy is created equal. Ask any online retailer and they will most likely tell you that they tried several versions of their sales letter before finding one that really works. Here’s your chance to learn from their mistakes! Use these copywriting tips to craft compelling copy.
No longer will you have to work for hours to find just the right words for your website. The copywriting tips above take the guesswork out of effective copywriting. If you take some time to update your current copy – or to write new copy using what you have learned – you just may be amazed at the results.
Jo Han Mok is the author of the #1 international business bestseller, The E-Code.
He shares his amazing blueprint for creating million dollar internet businesses
at: http://www.InternetMillionaireBlueprints.com