What results you say?  Well, good web copy can effectively raise your website’s conversion rate as much as 100%.  In non-jargon, that means double your online sales or leads without increasing your traffic at all.

A picture may tell a thousand words, but I don’t know anyone who buys something without actual words to explain what it is (features), why it is relevant to you (benefits), and why you should feel comfortable taking action (guarantees).

Four key principles we have discovered that lead to effective writing for the web:

1. Relevant headlines
2. Short, scannable text with good in-text linking (information scent)
3. Simple, jargon-free writing
4. Customer-focused copy

Relevant Headlines

Visitors don’t read online, they scan.  Or, my favorite term, they “pogo stick” around your website until they find something interesting and relevant.  Use headers that are short, focused, and begin with relevant key words that your visitors are scanning for.  If you are trying to drive action, begin your headers with an action verb.

A good resource on the topic is this article Jakob Nielsen wrote about the BBC’s guidelines for creating headlines that persuade visitors to click through to a story.

Short, Scannable Text with Good In-text Linking (Information Scent)

Your visitors are looking for specific information.  You do not have them hostage in the way that TV, radio and other traditional “push” media once did.  Your visitors are self-directed and they know what they want.  Work with your visitors to help them find what they are looking for, and you will benefit.

Key principles include writing in short chunks, emphasizing key points through the usage of:

• bold and italics
• bulleting lists
• short paragraphs for easy scanning
• good in-text linking of relevant phrases your visitors are searching for
  

One of the most useful studies of the web found that online we act as foragers, looking for the “scent” of specific information that is relevant to us.  Giving our visitors as many opportunities as possible to find the information scent they are looking for through these principles will result in happier visitors who engage more deeply with your organization.

Read Jakob Nielsen’s classic article on writing for the web.

Simple, Jargon-free Writing

You find it hard to write about your organization without throwing in lots of nonsensical words that mean nothing to your visitors.  Why?  We all do.  It’s the nature of spending 99% of our time with our organization and working each and every day to make it better, and spending 1% of our time with potential clients of our organization.  As one of the top experts in the field of web persuasion likes to say, you can’t read the label on a bottle from the inside.

One of the easiest ways to combat this is to measure the reading level of the content on your website.  We have built a helpful tool on our website that lets you measure the reading level of your copy here: website writing readability level.

General guidelines:

• For a website aimed at professional buyers (businesses), aim for an 8th grade reading level or below.
• For a website aimed at consumers, aim for a 5th grade reading level or below

Customer-focused Copy

One of the best tools to improve the quality of your web copy and generate more results from your existing visitors is to rewrite your copy in terms relevant to them.

Why does this matter?  It’s the age-old marketing concept of features versus benefits.  Features are things that your product or service can do.  Benefits are things that it does for me.  Until you make it relevant to me, I don’t care.

The simplest way to accomplish that we have ever seen comes from the good folks behind the book Reality Marketing Revolution, Mike Lieberman and Eric Keiles.  We have adopted one of their techniques into what we call the Red/Green Score.  To run this test, simply do the following:

1. Print out a page from your website.
2. Circle every instance of I, We, Us, Our, or your company name with a red circle.
3. Circle every instance of You and Your with a green triangle.  This is “me-focused copy,” or features.
4. Total up each, and subtract the triangles from the circles.  This is “customer-focused” copy, or benefits.

If your Red/Green Score is zero or negative, rewrite your copy until it is not.  The most effective copy is typically at least 60-70% customer-focused.

Good luck writing, and let me know what you think!

What do a pest control company, a luxury car dealership, an industrial manufacturer of acoustic panels and a family law firm have in common?  Depending on how they have chosen to pursue business online, it could be a lot more than you think.

After reading the excellent set of articles on this very topic at Search Engine Land from our friend and national conversion expert Brian Massey (see Brian’s Conversion Optimization Blog) , we realized that this exact concept applied to our clients as well.  We had long wondered how companies can copy a technique from one of their competitors that we know to be effective, only to find that it does not work for them.  The answer is: that the kind of company that you are matters far less than the online strategy that you choose to pursue.  Companies that are utilizing tactics from multiple strategies typically have a poor conversion rate (# of visitors that do something that affects your business positively / total # of visitors) and are constantly frustrated by it.

So, you may be asking, how do I find out what strategy I am pursuing?

The good news is that we have found that our clients’ websites fit into one of only five marketing patterns that, if pursued, will simplify and clarify what to improve on your website.  We will go into more detail on each pattern in future posts, but for now here is an overview of the key patterns:

1. Considered Purchase Website – This type of website is built around a purchase that is not easily compared directly to competitors and usually involves a longer sales cycle with multiple decision makers.  The goal of this pattern is to provide your visitors with something of value so that you receive permission to continue marketing to them.

Examples include enterprise software, most professional services firms and custom manufacturers.

2. Transactional Purchase Website – This type of website is built around a limited number of highly standardized products or services that address an acute and usually urgent “pain” that prospects feel.  The goal of this pattern is to persuade visitors to contact you by emphasizing the pain you solve, offering persuasive incentives, and providing assurance through guarantees.

Examples include pest control, plumbers, and towing companies.

3. Online Store – This type of website is characterized by selling a significant number of products online,  where any customization that is available can be done on the website.  The goal of this pattern is to convince visitors to buy a product that they are looking for by pre-answering key questions or create interest in a product they didn’t know about through relevant cross selling.  While these are often e-commerce stores, they do not have to have e-commerce functionality (and the other patterns may contain online credit card processing).

Examples include online book vendors and manufacturers with standardized product catalogs.

4. Content Portal – This type of website is built around specific content that is regularly updated to build and retain a regular readership.  The goal of this pattern is to create advertising revenue through creating new and compelling content that keeps your visitors engaged.

5. Brochure Website - This type of website is built around a desire to create a public presence for your business or organization without specific measurable objectives.  It is by far the simplest of the web patterns, because it does not take the visitor or your sales process into account, and it’s success is largely driven by the emotional gratification (or lack thereof) that the client feels upon the completion of the website.

Read Brian’s original posts here for more information: http://searchengineland.com/the-five-core-patterns-of-conversion-marketing-33303

When you are trying to communicate a specific message to your customers and craft something that is beautiful, informative, and functional, it takes time and expertise. Throwing something together does not yield happy results. For example, most of us know the pieces that make up a car. You have the wheels, the body, the engine, a steering wheel, some seats, etc. But if we were asked to put one together, most of us would have a hard time creating something that actually worked. (We might be able to make it look like it works, but try starting it and having it function and it all falls apart.)

The same is true in the world of website construction. So the Synotac team put our collective expertise together to carefully create a new site for CoreIP. The new site includes best practices in usability and visual design as well as a robust content management system that will let CoreIP staff update their content and post news on the fly.

The partners at CoreIP are smart folks with no doubt a lot of technical expertise between them. Maybe they could have pieced together a website, but they recognized that for their new site to be functional, usable, and easy on the eyes, calling on an expert team would pay off.

EarthTechling, a green technology blog, seeks to inform it’s readers about “eco-tech gadgets, electronics, automobiles and in-home technologies, which, in some proven manner, help a person live a more green lifestyle.” They came to Synotac looking for help creating an online presence that would give off the “green vibe”, not look like every other blog, and function exactly how they imagined. We were really excited to accept the challenge.

This was the first “true”, “professional” blog that we have created. Our staple Content Manager that we use is WordPress, an application that is meant for blogs, although most of our projects since we started using WordPress have been business or personal sites where WordPress was being used to update content on static pages rather than power a dynamic, fluid, robust blog.

See, the thing about blogs, is that they are “theoretically” never ending. With non-blog sites, you know, to a certain degree, exactly how much content is going to go on any given page. You create a certain number of pages and you put content areas that may grow a little bit, but are relatively contained. But with a blog, you have to compensate for the fact that content will continue to be created, potentially forever, and that created content needs somewhere to go and systems setup for organizing it.

This is what makes designing and programming a blog so challenging: you have to imagine ahead of time how the site will function when it is brimming with content.

Luckily, with EarthTechling, content was being created even before we got to programming the template. But planning began well before programming in the design phase. Design Guru David came up with a design that not only looked amazing, but which took into consideration the fact that content would literally be oozing from each section.

A Simple, Polished Design

David was able to create something that was sleek, but not too glossy. The buttons and gradients used on the site are very fresh and “web 2.0″, yet it is not overdone and leaves space for the content to breath and really stand out.

The article slideshow on the front page is a great example of this.

These slideshows are a great feature for the front pages of websites, and you can immediately see why on EarthTechling. The image preview is the first thing that catches your eye, and then the title of the article is nice and big and bright. The excerpt is short and to the point, and the links for reading more, comments, and ratings are right there tucked nicely under the excerpt. The title, the image, and “Read More” all link to the article, making it super easy to navigate. The subtle directional arrows on the bottom right allow you to easily navigate through the slideshow.

Taxonomies: Nothing To Do With Money

Another important thing to think about when designing and planning a blog, is the use of taxonomies. Taxonomies are the organization of the articles into things such as types, categories and tags. EarthTechling splits their articles into three main categories or types: Reviews, News and Features. Features is broken into four sub-types: Buying Guides, Previews, Interviews and How-Tos. From there, the articles are divided even further based on tags and topics.

The use of taxonomies makes it super easy to find exactly what interests you. Say you come to the site looking for green gadgets for your ipod. It’s possible that there could be reviews on those gadgets, or news articles, or even features such as a buying guide about such products. But rather than searching through those individual sections, you could simply click on the Gadgets topic in the list of topics which shows on each page. Alternatively, you could use WordPress’ powerful search and see all the articles pertaining to “green ipod gadgets”.

You can see that you don’t have to even view the entire article to see what tags and categories are on specific articles, allowing you to broaden your search by clicking on one of these links which will take you to the tag and category list view of articles.

What we tried to accomplish through the use of taxonomies, was an assortment of ways to find and categorize articles to make them easy to find.

Being Social Isn’t Just About Being Social

“Social Networking” is a hot topic in the business world these days. Everyone seems to be talking about the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Business’s of all sizes are creating accounts with these social networking sites to promote themselves; and it’s working.

By connecting your business, or in this case, blog, to a social networking site, you are ensuring yourself masses amounts of free advertising. Here is how it works:

1. You create an account for your business through a social networking site like Facebook.
2. You connect your blog to automatically post updates to Facebook everytime you make a change
3. Everyone who is attached to your account sees the update and potentially passes it along
   OR
4. People visit your site, click the facebook icon, and share the article or page with all of there friends… and the free advertising begins!

Even before EarthTechling’s blog launched, as I was testing the Share feature for Facebook, I published an article to my facebook account and within minutes was receiving comments from friends who were trying to go to ET’s blog, and were having trouble because it was password protected (because we hadn’t launched yet). Social networking really does work.

And so we built social networking right into EarthTechling’s blog.

You can DIGG articles, or share them through a number of social networking sites. ET also created profiles through some of these sites and we displayed their links right in the navigation bar on the site.

ET Phone Home

As I write this, we are on the eve of deploying ET (EarthTechling) into cyber-land, and seeing first hand how all of our planning and implementation of building a better blog goes. We are confident and happy with what we built, and we wish EarthTechling the best as they blog away about a brighter tomorrow using green technology.

Go check it out for yourself: www.earthtechling.com

Below is our first attempt, inspired by the excellent book “The Back of a Napkin,” by Dan Roam. In this short video we tackle the topic of coming up with a solid internet marketing strategy, which is often made far too complex and obscure for a normal person to grasp. While the details may be complex, you only need to master the basics and hold your web design and internet marketing vendors accountable to achieve success. The web design industry has a (deservedly) terrible reputation for trying to obfuscate basic business objectives with a bunch of jargon and tech-speak. Basically, it all comes down to a good slice of pie…

Making Money on your Website – Easy as Pie from Cameron Madill on Vimeo.

One of the interesting parts of working in custom web design is creating specific calls to action that actually produce the desired results. We definitely haven’t nailed down the process yet, but we believe it is our obligation as a professional web design firm to give our clients the best possible return on their investment. We identify key site goals with our clients through our Discover and Define process, create unique calls to action to funnel visitors, while maintaining usability and putting the visitor experience first.

A recent example is our redesign of the Julie Lawrence Yoga Center site. By pairing images of the yoga classes to develop visitor interest, with large orange buttons that guide them through the site, we hope to maintain the design aesthetic our clients are looking for, provide the portals that the site visitors are looking for and turning that visitor desire into action.

There are several different methodologies that are used in usability testing. The one that we prefer is a hybrid of techniques recommended by Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com), the self-appointed guardian of usability on the web, and Mark Hurst, the head of the influential usability company Creative Good (www.creativegood.com). The idea is to get unbiased users who match the different audience segments on your website and observe them while they “think” outloud. Both the user’s face and their mouse movements are recorded on a single video feed, giving us a powerful bit of evidence about how well the website we are testing works.

Usability testing can be useful in several different ways. First, it can uncover obvious problems with your website that can greatly improve its usability and therefore its overall conversion rate (making or saving you more money!). Usually these problems can be fixed for a nominal cost, but they were “hidden” from both your website design company and yourself because you are too close to the product to see it as a new user will. Second, usability testing can help you to find large, strategic issues with your website. Often these take the form of, “oh, users don’t understand that our company does X.” Or, “our users don’t understand that the point of page A is for them to contact us for a quote.” As we repeatedly emphasize, you can never make something too easy on the web. Lastly, usability testing can help to depersonalize the design, copy-writing and development components of your website. While most people are rarely short on opinions about how something should be done, there is nothing quite as useful as real user feedback to get everyone thinking again about what the customer wants.

I’ll leave you with some sample quotes from some of our usability tests. These are often the most effective way to summarize the findings of a series of usability tests:

“I don’t know my flight number, I’m filling this out because I need help finding [a flight]. I’m confused!â€??

“At times I thought it was too messy. I couldn’t find things on the homepage. I like sites that are simple and clear. Everything was so flashy that nothing grabbed my attention. I clicked on a tab to get away from the homepage.”

“Text is very small – with a lot of text to sift through, it may be challenging for older eyes. I know I struggled. Link colors are also a little light.”

“Website is messy at times…too many things happening at one time. Homepage had many things happening. I looked for something to grab my attention, and nothing really did on the homepage.”

I love this observation found in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. When I first read this, it immediately made me think about usability testing – the process of observing users unfamiliar with a site as they try to complete specific tasks on that site.

New observers are almost universally struck by the divergence between expected and actual behavior. For me, it is a humbling experience to watch users ignore seemingly “can’t miss” parts of the page, to fail to complete the easiest tasks given to them, and become irritated with the features that were supposed to impress or help them. Running counter to the tendency and desire of most of us (designers, developers, clients) to add whizzy new features or innovative design elements, the results of usability testing constantly reinforce the importance of simplifying, clarifying, and focusing every page on a site for a specific purpose. Usability testing reminds us that design elegance is achieved by removing as much as possible, and that simple, focused sites are preferred by the only people who really matter: our customers.