The words you write on the web don’t carry much weight. Corporate web copy is littered with platitudes, boasts, claims and statements of ‘facts’ – all with questionable levels of truthiness. Because any company can claim to be:

• experts
• experienced
• creative
• enterprising
• this list could go on forever

the words are weak.

Great web copy gets beyond empty words and offers something tangible.

Don’t claim to be an expert in your field. Demonstrate your experience with copy that reveals your knowledge. Get down to details – talk of things that only the initiated know about. You don’t have to bore people with your technical prowess, just give them a hint of the expert knickers under your corporate skirt.

Your web copy is not the only way to reassure visitors that you really are experienced/creative/enterprising/expert. Make liberal use of testimonials, case studies and portfolio pieces to give proof. The imagery and design of your website is crucial in this respect.

Ask yourself how you can stand out from every other business that claims to be the best – how can you show that you’re the best?

Good copywriters will talk to you. They’ll ask you questions that will draw out useful information. They’ll be bloodhounds on the trail of wounded meat. They know what they’re after: the pieces of information that matter most to your clients. Once they’ve found it, the good copywriter retreats to his lair to write.

Great copywriters want to talk to your people. They know that you don’t know everything, so they want to talk to Jane in the stockroom, Greg in customer services and your most loyal customers. Great copywriters know that the best way to reveal the heart of your business – the heart that must be captured, contained and displayed on the web page – is to delve deep.

I’ve been hearing more and more talk about ‘content strategy’ recently. Unsure what it was, I went looking for answers.
I found:

What is Content Strategy?

Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.

Necessarily, the content strategist must work to define not only which content will be published, but why we’re publishing it in the first place.

Otherwise, content strategy isn’t strategy at all: it’s just a glorified production line for content nobody really needs or wants

From: The Discipline of Content Strategy by Kristina Halvorson

I was hoping to discover an interesting new discipline, but I feel like I’ve just discovered a new way to describe copywriting.

More time passed, and I began to warm to content strategy.

Why? Because ‘copy’ is the most important but least respected part of the web. Web copy is often thrashed out at the last minute, after a hundred interaction designers, user experience designers, information architects, designers, developers and colour consultants have spent months refining their corner of the website – and that’s just plain stupid. Copy is neglected, but maybe it’s neglected because nobody has pushed a serious alternative – nobody has pushed a grown-up approach to producing copy.

Copy needs to be more than copy for it to be taken seriously. A copywriter needs to be more than just a rent-a-pen. There needs to be a method, a strategy, a process for producing amazing copy, and if content strategy can be all of that, then wonderful.

I look forward to learning more about content strategy.

Copywriters! It’s time to fight back against jargon. Who’s with me?

A battle-cry

We all know that good copy is concise, open and easy for everyone to understand. Good copy relies on captivating stories, clear messages and compelling benefits. Jargon and management-speak are not part of the good copywriter’s toolbox. A large part of a copywriter’s work involves detecting BS, stripping it from copy and replacing it with something real.

How do we fight the tide of jargon?

We know the perils of jargon, but how do we handle clients who love it?

I have clients who cannot bear to call their spades “spades”, because “spade” doesn’t sound sophisticated enough, or because (allegedly) the garden managers they sell to do not respond to such lowly language – these captains of industry must read of “soil-shifting leverage devices” – anything but “spade”.

I argue, I persuade, I persist. But however hard I try, some clients remain locked to their ideas, convinced that pseudo-smart fancy-pants copy is the best thing for their business.

Please help!

I want to know your secrets, your tactics and your tips for dealing with clients who love jargon. Do you cite evidence – perhaps a book or a blog post. Do you have stats? Is there a pie-chart I can lob at recalcitrant clients?

Copify is a new company that connects copywriters with content-wanters. So if you need a 500-word article on cat litter you can go to Copify and get a poorly-briefed stranger to churn out some generic words to fill your content hole.

Some copywriters are mildly outraged because Copify pays writers £0.02 – 0.08 per word. So writing that 500-word article on cat litter will earn you £10 – £40. If you spend 2-3 hours working on the article (I’m hoping you’ll research cat litter before you write…) you’ll earn as little as £3.30 per hour. Not a lot!

Having said all that, I don’t object to Copify. But I would never ever seek work from Copify and I would never recommend them to anyone as a source of content.

Copify fills a need. Some people need words. And they don’t really care which words you give them, because they want generic SEO-friendly filler content. Or backlink fodder. Either way they really don’t care about the words, or which order you put them in (so long as you meet their word count!).

Copify already exists in other shapes and sizes. Some agencies get trainee web designers to churn out content, while others pay students £10 per article. Guru and other freelance ‘job’ websites offer thousands of junk jobs that people are free to take if they have the time and the inclination to work for peanuts. And theoretically a super-fast writer could cut and paste some rubbish together in a few minutes and do quite well out of Copify, so who are we to stand in the way?

Services like Copify will not affect the business of professional copywriters because lots of people need professional copywriters, as opposed to a copy vending machine that spits out low-grade copy for stupidly-low prices.

Great blog post discussing the perils of paying copywriters per word

I’ve just been wrestling with copy that’s so thickly coated with toxic jargon that I’ve had to wear a haz-chem suit just to get near it.

I’ve been working through it slowly, battering sludgy phrasing into sleek, efficient copy that everyone can understand. And then I happened to Tweet about it.

Clive Andrews asked me how I go about de-jargoning my clients’ copy. After I explained that I just use a mixture of judicious deletions and sensible replacements, Clive asked how I remove jargon without offending my clients. After all, jargon is often industry-specific lingo that helps to exclude outsiders by mystifying simple concepts unite groups by giving them a shared vocabulary, and people get quite attached to their ‘special words’.

Persuading clients to ditch jargon

When I’m trying to encourage clients to accept my pruned and de-jargoned copy, I simply insist that clear copy sells, while jargon confuses. I never suggest that jargon is bad because I don’t like it.

Jargon is bad because it puts a thick blanket of stupid between your words and your reader. Using jargon is like hanging curtains over road signs.

My other trick for getting clients on the anti-jargon bandwagon is to get other people to do the arguing for me. So if I’m working with a few people in an organisation, I’ll suggest that jargon is probably hampering our goals and then ask the group for their thoughts.

This strategy is a gamble, because I’m just hoping that my colleagues will argue against the jargon. Luckily, they usually do.

An earlier blog post about jargon.

Thanks to Clive Andrews for his questions.