Chapter 12
Writing for Websites and Blogs
In This Chapter
Finding your voice on websites and blogs
Organizing and building a website
Using online graphics and design to support your words
Creating and growing a blog
The Internet is like a magic door that democratizes communication. It empowers you to reach almost anyone, anywhere, and offers you virtual space to represent your own interests.
The price of entry for online action keeps coming down. You can post comments and images, tweet, connect with people through social media and invest only the time it takes to do the work. But you may also want a more stable presence that you can control, direct and develop: your own website, blog, or both.
This chapter gives you the tools and techniques to plan and write for your online presence whether you want to present your business, hobby, personal passion, or yourself.
Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs
In the early days – meaning the last decade of the 20th century – you had to possess (or hire) sophisticated professional skills to create and maintain a website. A first-rate, multi-dimensional site still demands a team of specialists working together to plan, write, design, produce and optimize it as a pivotal marketing tool.
But thanks to online services such as Wordpress, Wix, Typepad and whatever is best and newest, you can now easily create a blog by doing all or most of the work yourself.
As do-it-yourself tools grow better, you can more easily build a site to your own satisfaction with little technical facility. Still, don’t underestimate the power of good design sense or HTML know-how to help you engage audiences, appeal to them visually, and interact with them better. (If you relate well to technology, check out HTML, XHTML and CSS For Dummies by Ed Tittel and Jeff Noble.
And never ignore the value of good writing. It’s the heart of every website and every blog. Studies show that while visuals entice and entertain, most visitors value the words far more. Even if your site ultimately uses few words, it must make sense in a way you can express to yourself, at least, in written language.
Working on your writing style for websites and blogs
Consciously adapt your writing style
You can write online in a variety of ways, but you need to pick your specific style in order to be successful. Figure out how you relate to your profession and to your audience, and then create the online persona you want to project.
A lawyer or management consultant, for instance, generally wants to be perceived quite differently from a social worker or artist. But you may be a lawyer who works with intellectual property and needs to connect with artists, or a consultant who wants to be seen as creative. Or you may be an artist who wants to be seen as business like. Of course, you want to be ‘yourself,’ but consider how the way you present will affect viewers.
Keep your copy short, pithy, substance-focused, and straightforward
Don’t just get to the point quickly – make your point and move on. Research says that online reading is 25 per cent slower than reading print material. Moreover, it tires the eyes, and your visitors are impatient for hundreds of their own reasons. All powerful reasons to keep text short and lively!
Choose your keywords early on
The Internet has dozens of cost-free ways to help you identify the best words and phrases to include in your site or blog. Google’s searchwords.com and adwords.com tools enable you to pick words and phrases that are most used by searchers looking for what you offer and also identify terms that your competitors use so you can choose those that are less common if you wish.
Use your keywords in headlines, subheads and body copy
Put them to the top and left on a page, and lead with them in headlines and subheads whenever possible. Both readers scanning for what they want and search engines find them more surely that way. Researchers who track eye movement on web pages report that the top left corner is the most read territory, and the average viewer’s attention tapers off as the eyes move down the page. Also, boldface your keywords when appropriate. This practice works well for blogs.
Break copy up into small chunks
Short paragraphs – one to three sentences – go a long way toward online readability. But don’t use all one-sentence paragraphs, which also generates unenticing copy. Chop your prose into chunks by:
Adding lots of subheads. They keep you organized and give readers an easy set of stepping stones to follow.
Building in white space. Bullets and numbered lists are effective. But for online copy don’t list more than six or seven items and be sure they have a context that makes them meaningful. (Just beware of listing more than five or six items.)
Minimize scrolling
People really don’t like to scroll. Many popular website home pages seem to continue vertically ad infinitum. I see this approach as highly counter-productive. An established site, or one featuring content that’s updated constantly, can present a cascade of features, but most home pages are not the place for extended introductions or arguments. Instead, strive to develop strong leads that pull scanners to inside pages.
Make every page self-explanatory and self-contained
People don’t typically choose to land on a home page and then read through the site in your preferred sequence. If they’re looking for one among five things you produce, they’ll probably land on that page. So make sure they know where they are in cyberspace wherever they land on your site. On every page use your company name prominently, include clear headlines, and a call to action. Link to other parts of the site as appropriate.
Go for clear (rather than clever) title buttons, icons and links
User expectations trump originality, but you don’t necessarily need to stick to the cookie cutter. Naming your company’s background page ‘growing up’ rather than ‘about us’ is a bad idea. But ‘our story’ can work fine.
Frame everything in you, and we or I
Use these words to personalize what you write. Beyond connecting better with your site’s users, writing in terms of ‘you’ helps you stay focused on reader viewpoint rather than your own. When it’s natural to say ‘I’ or ‘we,’ don’t hesitate. There’s no need to write in an abstract third person mode. You can switch back and forth, too. General Electric says, ‘GE is building the world by…’ and two sentences later, ‘We build appliances, power lighting systems…’
Craft conversational, fast-reading copy
Use all the techniques I cover in Chapters 4 and 5 – contractions, simple sentences with few commas, a rhythm that moves the reader along. Cut all unnecessary adjectives and all empty hype – no grandiose statements, jargon, mystery abbreviations, and acronyms!
In sum, find fun and value in drilling down to the heart of your own message and deliver it with conviction, tightly.
Building a Traditional Website
Defining your goals
Just as with every piece of writing – as I talk about in Chapter 2 and demonstrate in all the chapters on print communication and email – first think about your website’s goal. What do you want to accomplish with your website, exactly?
Your initial answer may be to sell something or more broadly, to market something you produce or offer. Don’t stop there! Push your brainstorming to specifics, especially if your venture is new and starts with the site. Additionally answer practical questions such as:
How much of your products or services do you want to sell online?
Are you prepared for large quantity orders?
How far can you reach in the real world to satisfy global customers? Can you ship items long distances – or does it make sense to restrict your geographical thrust?
Once you clarify your marketing goals, brainstorm what website content might help accomplish them. Depending on your product or service the website’s goals may include:
Presenting yourself as the go-to problem solver in your field
Establishing thought leadership
Demonstrating your product’s superiority or value
Showcasing your originality
Generating sales partnerships
Supporting your search for financial investors
Refining your audience ideas
Know as much as possible about your primary audience. Who do you want to market your product or service to?
If you want to reach consumers directly to sell a new tech gadget, for example, your list may include:
Age and gender
Occupation
Hobbies
Degree of technological savvy
Economic status
Buying habits (how they shop for such products, where they go for advice)
Preferences for type and amount of information
Related interests
Problems: what keeps them up at night?
If you want to sell your bottle openers to a business audience, such as wine stores, figure out who in these organizations typically purchases your type of tool and then profile these decision-makers using your knowledge, intuition, and research.
Your sub-goals may suggest secondary audiences. If you’re marketing a product and also looking for financial support, you should consider investors and their needs. Should you want to align with other suppliers, know who they are and what they’re looking for.
Structuring a basic site
What does my audience want?
What interests them?
What do they need?
What worries them?
How do I (or can I) help solve their problems?
What will keep them coming back for more?
As an example, consider someone whose goal is to create a social media consulting business. He decides that his primary audience is entrepreneurs who work on their own and are over age 45, and time-challenged small businesses. Focusing on just the solo entrepreneurs, he characterizes them as being practical people in a wide range of businesses who want to promote through social media channels. They probably feel:
Insecure and perhaps uncomfortable with using social media tools and techniques
Short of time and over-burdened with multiple responsibilities and day-to-day operations
Worried about losing to more tech savvy competition
Conscious that they must keep their enterprises growing
Aware they must offer responsive customer service
This rough profile, plus a second one for the small business audience, enables the consultant to position both his business and website more closely. He can start by defining his core value, what he does and his main competitive advantage. I talk about this in depth in Chapter 9. When the social media consultant applies the core value strategy to his website, he can write a statement for his own guidance in down-to-earth terms:
I’m a social media specialist who provides SM planning services, handles the mechanics for busy or fearful clients, educates them on good SM use, and trains those interested to do some of the work themselves.
Based on this premise, the consultant may then frame his website this way:
I need a website that showcases my skills and proves my credibility and expertise. It explains how I help my clients grow their businesses, save time, use social media, and become comfortable with its use.
The next challenge – how to translate this thinking into a website plan and structure – becomes easy to meet. The consultant can plan for the following content chunks:
Describe what I do from the customer perspective (Services page)
Explain who I am and establish my credentials and understanding of their challenges (About Us)
Cite evidence, such as stories about how my services have helped similar clients grow, save time, interact with customers, and so on. (Case Studies)
Offer pieces of useful practical information site visitors can act on quickly and that will draw them back for more (Blog)
Give readers helpful additional materials (Resources)
Provide easy ways to reach and interact with me (Contact)
Give visitors an enticement to get in touch or at least provide contact information (Special Offer)
Better to focus your originality on what you say within the framework, how you present it visually, how you engage people, and how you use additional media such as video to deliver your message with impact. See the later section ‘Incorporating Graphics and Other Elements ’ for more detail.
Assembling a home page
Your website home page must instantly tell people they are in the right place for the product, service, information, or whatever else they’re looking for. Even though many viewers land on other pages first or never visit your home page, it must introduce your message effectively.
The following sections touch on the major elements common to smart home pages.
Company names and taglines
Ideally, your company name should tell it all – capsulize what it does. Think of going to a lively trade or craft show: Would you rather exhibitors identify themselves with banners like ‘Main Street Services’ and ‘Cutie Pie Products,’ or ‘Overnight Laptop Repair’ and ‘Toddler Puzzles in Wood’?
If your enterprise is new, coming up with a tight way to say it is worth a lot of thought. As an old advertising adage puts it, ‘Don’t be clever, be clear.’ Take account of keywords (see the earlier section ‘Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs’) and keep what’s most important as far to the left as possible (where both people and search engines more often notice it). Thus, you may be better off putting your name later in your tagline. For example, ‘Social Media Support by Jane’ may work better than ‘Jane’s Social Media Support.’
Taglines bolster the following less-than-crystal-clear names for two real companies and a non-profit, melding well to tell each story. (These are real organizations and if you look them up online, don’t be surprised if their home pages are substantially different from what I present. Things change fast in the web world!)
PERSUASIVE GAMES (www.persuasivegames.com
) We design, build, and distribute videogames for persuasion, instruction, and activism
COURSERA (www.coursera.org
) Take the World's Best Courses, Online, For Free
ACUMEN (http://acumen.org
) Changing the way the world tackles poverty
The positioning statement
This element of your homepage often follows the organization name and tagline. The positioning statement is where you want to distil the reason your organization exists, who it serves, and ideally, your competitive advantage. You may be lucky enough to have worked out a core value statement for your organization that you can adapt to your website (Chapter 9 shows you how to create one). Or you may be part of an organization that hands you one. Whatever the case, make sure what you use really works.
Here’s how Persuasive Games introduces itself after title and tagline:
Welcome to Persuasive Games.
Games communicate differently than other media; they not only deliver messages, but also simulate experiences. Our games influence players to take action through gameplay. While often thought to be just a leisure activity, games can also become rhetorical tools.
Here’s how Acumen positions itself.
A bold new way of tackling poverty that’s about dignity, not dependence and choice, not charity.
Acumen is a non-profit that raises charitable donations to invest in companies, leaders, and ideas that are changing the way the world tackles poverty.
When I looked at Coursera’s site a month before writing this section, its approach was chatty and offered more context:
Once upon a time, the only way to take a course taught by a professor employed by a great university was to attend a great university. With Coursera, you don’t have to leave your seat. Instructors from Princeton, Duke, Caltech and 13 other schools conduct online classes on everything from math to music, complete with video lectures, quizzes and homework. You might end up in a course with tens of thousands of classmates all over the world. And the site is free – no scholarship required.
But when I checked more recently, I found that this gabby discourse was gone, replaced by a search box in which the site visitor can enter a subject of interest. These lines appeared under it:
Join 3,879,639 Courserians.
Learn form 388 courses, from our 83 partners.
As I watched, the first figure changed to reflect more ‘Courserians.’ The rest of the home page consists of upcoming course titles with interesting images to represent each. Coursera’s copy shift is a good example of applying the ‘show, don’t tell idea’ to a website – try to say less, show more. Website thinking shares a lot with video in this regard, which I talk about in Chapter 9: When you can use visuals to tell your story, you need fewer words.
Here’s one straightforward way our friend who’s setting up a social media consulting business (see ‘Structuring a basic site’) can combine name, tagline and positioning statement to present his business.
SOCIALMEDIA-IN-MOTION CONSULTING
Social Media Planning and Support for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs
Social media is the way to grow your business – but it takes time, tools and techniques. We handle it all! We’ll show you how to use the right media and take care of the mechanics. Imagine, online power in your hands.
The name, tagline and positioning statement can generally be used in this sequence in descending order of importance – and font size. The name should be largest and preferably rendered as a designed logo, or at least look like a logo, with an interesting typeface. The tagline can nestle below it. Take some creative license with the positioning statement, but using it on the bottom half of the home page often works well, depending on the design.
Calling for action
Most web specialists believe that every page should contain at least one call to action, certainly at the page bottom. Actionable activities may include links to other parts of the site or offsite resources.
Use simple declarative statements and hyperlinked words and phrases to tell viewers what to do next. Give thought to which words to make ‘clickable,’ indicated in general by underlining: Call Jane today for your free 15-minute consultation
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Writing your inside pages
Following are some content ideas for various pages which are part of nearly all well-developed websites.
About Us
This page is your opportunity to tell your story – the personal one, the business one, or a combination of both. You can use third person – he, she, they, it (for an organization) – or first person – I or we.
You can use first person for About Us and third person for the rest of the site if you wish.
When to use we and us is trickier. If you’re a solo operation and want to give the impression that you have a whole organization behind you, why not? Millions of people say ‘we’ for this reason and in any case, you probably have a set of resources and specialists to call on if needed. So go ahead and talk as ‘we’ and at the same time feature yourself as the prime mover.
Your About Us page allows some creative thinking and expression. Some options:
Tell the story of how you came to build this business and/or your expertise
Cover a notable success that communicates the heart of what you do
Include your key credentials, the ones most meaningful to your audience
Incorporate third-part testimonials from happy clients
Talk about why you love your work, why you feel passionate about the help you offer, or simply why you think it’s important
Include a good photograph of yourself or your team and give some thought to the emotional qualities you want to project. A female management consultant I know deliberately had a ‘tough’ portrait photo taken to show prospects she was capable of dealing with CEOs while a psychologist friend chose a warm, low-key welcoming look; she even wore unnecessary glasses to look more approachable.
The Services page
This is a good place to exercise your chunking skills (see Chapter 11). Break out your distinct services and use strong subheads to introduce each. If you have a long list, consider a dropdown menu or links at the top to take readers directly to the service of interest.
The social media consultant I used as an example earlier in this chapter might begin with a concise overview of offered services and also include a section titled ‘How we work with you.’ Additional options for his social media consulting services page may include:
Social media custom planning programs
Social media posting services: daily, weekly
Facebook campaigns
LinkedIn campaigns
Social media introductory workshops
Social media coaching and support
The Contact page
The contact page is a good place to collect information about your site visitors. Keep online forms short and simple to use. Assuming you do not intend to share the information with third parties – which in any case is illegal in some countries without permission – build in a brief, matter-of-fact statement saying you will only use the information to communicate with the person, and will not pass it on to anyone else.
Testimonials
All the research says that testimonials are among the most-read parts of websites. We’re predisposed to trust third-party endorsements by people who are like us. Testimonials enable you to say things about yourself that would be hard to write about yourself. What’s more, testimonials add life to a site because they are written in different voices.
Group testimonials as a separate page of their own (called Testimonials, What Clients Say, or some other name) or scatter them around the site in a sidebar area. Or do both if you can collect a good number.
What do you most value about the service (or product) I provide?
How has it helped you?
How has it changed how you handle X?
What would you say in recommending me to a colleague?
What do you like most about working with me?
Needless to say, keep your ears open for constructive criticism and ideas for improving your performance as you collect testimonials.
Incorporating Graphics and Other Elements
Graphic design is beyond the scope of this book but is so important to the way in which your words are read – and whether they’re read at all – that I offer my viewpoint and some tips.
This premise carries a number of implications that you need to consider when writing your copy:
Leave out the expensive glitzy animated intros. Most only annoy people. Especially leave out the music or other sound that accompanies viewers through the whole site; they quickly tune out and click off. If you must include either the intro or music, provide a clear opt-out button.
Make the text easy to read. This means a large enough type in a classic face: Arial and similar typefaces are favored. Printed material reads best in serif faces (‘feet’ on the letters), but onscreen, the clean look of sans-serif reads well and looks contemporary.
Avoid everything that can possibly interfere with easy reading. Go with dark fonts against light backgrounds, and a simple color palette with no more than two or three main colors. Avoid or minimize dropout type (white against a dark background), copy in all capitals, and an over-variety of typefaces.
Avoid busy, overly complicated design. A complex layout confuses the eye and provides no logical path to follow. Especially on the home page, keep the look simple and highlight the elements that are important to visitors. If you work with a designer, be sure he knows which components merit the most attention.
Never present long dense text blocks. Break up anything longer than a few sentences with visuals, subheads, bullets, and lists. Build in plenty of white space.
Use good, relevant visuals. Research, again, says that people don’t like visual material that’s not related to the site or message. Don’t cheapen your message with crummy clip art or generic photos of happy smiling diverse groups of people. Use photos of real people with whom readers may have contact. Or invest some creative thinking in how to interpret aspects of your message into interesting visuals and find free or cheap image sources online.
Use video if and when possible. People love the extra dimension that video offers and it can show off your personality, demonstrate your expertise or offer a sample lesson in how to do something. See Chapter 9 for more on video. (For more on incorporating video into your website, check out Video Marketing For Dummies by Kevin Daum, Bettina Hein, Matt Scott and Andreas Goeldi.)
Unless you have strong confidence in a specific video, don’t make it play automatically right off the home page. Viewers hate that.
Find ways to avoid forcing readers to scroll. First defense to endless scrolling is brevity. Another is to break pages into separate subsections – for example, give each different service its own page. Or, at least give people a way to choose what they want to look at with clear drop-down menus or links.
Creating Your Own Blog
Whether your goal is to support a business, build a platform to support a book or consultancy, stake a place in the virtual universe, make friends or influence people, the blog may be your medium of choice. Like all the media you use, a blog works best if you plan it and co-ordinate it with all your other communication channels.
Blogs can take many forms. Collect your own favorites and analyze what you like about them. Be aware of content choices, style, tone, length and all the other factors. Getting to know others people’s blogs enables you to create your own guidelines for how you want yours to look and sound.
Comprehensive help is available from Blogging For Dummies by Susannah Gardner and Shane Birley. Here I present my own take on how to plan and write blogs.
The following sections give you a framework to think within as you develop your blog, as well as some ideas to try out.
Planning your blog
If you want to use your blog for any purpose beyond the joy of self-publishing your own writing, invest some thought first. Some elements to consider and questions to ask:
What are my goals? How can it support what I want to accomplish in my personal and/or business life?
How much time is this worth – or, how much time do I want to spend on the blog? How often can I post?
What should I write about?
Who do I want to reach?
How do I handle the mechanics of getting posts up?
How do I promote my blog and let people know when I have new postings?
What does success look like? How do I know my blog is helping me achieve the goals I set?
Blogging is an unparalleled tool for marketing, especially when integrated with all your other marketing activities. Today content is king. And blogging is the main way to offer content that draws people to you (a process known as inbound marketing).
Choosing a subject
As part of a recent writing workshop for communication professionals, I asked participants to create a plan for a personal blog and compile a list of 10 subjects they intended to cover. Some chose subjects with a deliberately limited audience – for example, an immigrant planned a blog about life in New York to update her large extended family on her activities and bring them into her world. Some chose a cause, such as eating nutritiously with prepared foods or high fashion dressing for overweight women. Each subject suggests its own niche and promotional strategies.
Another participant wanted to write a blog about his personal impressions of new films, books, restaurants and ‘whatever.’ That presents more challenge: Who will want to read it? Can the writer be so entertaining that readers will care about his opinions? How can you build an audience beyond the writer’s immediate circles for something so amorphous?
Conversation about this blogger’s interests soon revealed that he’d had a passionate hobby since his early teens; he was a part-time disc jockey and had educated himself in the tools and techniques used by professionals. Asked whether he could think of suitable DJ-related topics to write about, his eyes lit up and he enthusiastically came up with a long list of ideas on the spot.
When you’re blogging to support the organization you work for or your own enterprise, use the same criteria to identify topics. Explore subject possibilities such as:
The part of the work or service you care about most
Things you have special insights about or access to
Inside tips and behind the scenes glimpses into organizations (particularly effective if the business or non-profit boasts a fan base)
Highly specialized information
Announcement/analysis of new product
Stories and examples of how customers have used or been helped by the product or service
Writing for blogs
I offer general guidelines for online writing earlier in ‘Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs,’ but the following writing tips apply specifically to blogs.
Structure and organization
While a website can present pieces of information as separate chunks that don’t necessarily relate to each other, and can use grammatically incomplete sentences for effect, a blog needs to be more cohesive and sequential. You’re typically presenting directions, opinions or arguments. So your narrative in each posting needs to flow and be held together by good transitions.
Tone
Aim for writing that’s simple, straightforward and conversational.
Choose the tone most appropriate to audience and subject (see Chapter 2 for much more on crafting your tone). If you’re writing about headstones, obviously a flippant tone may be taken badly. Lawyers and accountants have not yet lightened up noticeably as a group, so they probably require a more formal tone than soccer fans.
If you choose to limit your audience to those who are already knowledgeable or enthusiastic, like sports fans, is it okay to use jargon and terminology understood only by insiders? Yes, if you’re sure you don’t want to expand your readership to newbies.
Length
The ideal length of a blog or blog post varies widely and depends on the subject, audience, and what you’re willing to put in. Many e-media gurus recommend quick-read posts of a few paragraphs. But this keeps the material superficial and many readers find these limits frustrating.
As a rule of thumb, to contribute something solid, I say plan for 500 to 700 words. But if it’s a quick tip or idea that doesn’t call for elaboration, do a couple of paragraphs. If you write for a technical audience that thrives on detail, go longer.
Varying the length of your posts each time is absolutely fine – even preferred by many audiences.
Headlines
Headlines are critical to getting your post noticed by readers and search engines alike (see ‘Shaping Your Words for Websites and Blogs’ for more). They’re also critical for attracting readers to older postings, which you may choose to list alongside the new blog.
Start out with how the information benefits the reader: Will they find out how to do something faster, better, cheaper? Improve their lives in some way?
Free is always a great promise:
All-purpose business writing template to make you a star – FREE!
Sharing secrets is great:
What nobody knows about X and why it can kill you!
Saving money is appealing:
Buy monthly supplies of your favorite soft drink at 40% off
A promise to teach readers how to do something is tempting:
Teach yourself to play the piano like a soloist in 6 weeks
A question can be compelling:
Do you know what your girlfriend watches when you’re not there?
And headlines with numbers are always grabbers, which is why you see them so often:
9 ways to save a fortune on your health insurance
Watch for the 7 signs of extreme dandruff before you’re humiliated
Three easy arguments to get a raise
Subheads
Subheads help you easily organize your own ideas, improve visual impact by adding white space, pull in readers, and keep them going. What’s not to like? Even a short blog benefits from subheads. Make them active and informational rather than just labels:
Rather than,
The new numbers
Write
New numbers show upward leap
Writing good subheads is also covered in Chapter 8.
Categories and tagging
To help people find your blog posts, it helps to identify them with at least one category and at least one tag. A category is the larger descriptor – if you write about food, ‘cooking,’ ‘appetizers’ and ‘desserts’ are category options. A tag is a more specific label. If you’re presenting a cheesecake recipe, categories could include ‘dessert’ and ‘baking,’ while tags might be ‘cake,’ ‘cheesecake,’ ‘cheese,’ ‘low-calorie cheesecake,’ and so on as appropriate.
The process is the same as for thinking of keywords and search terms: you figure out how members of your intended audience will look for what you’re writing. You can tag internally, within the content itself; and/or externally, which relies on services like Technorati and Flickr.