Write Mindset » Copywriting

How to write your own sales copy: a 5-step formula

Simon — Wed, 26 May 2010 11:11:42 +0000

If you’re selling your own products on the web, or promoting affiliate products, then you need to produce compelling sales copy.

Ideally, you would hire a professional copywriter to do this for you. But what if you can’t afford one, and simply have to produce your own sales page?

How hard is it? Not too hard, providing you can write a decent sentence or two.

In this post, I’m going to give you a five step formula for producing sales copy for use on the web. It’s not the final word in copywriting, but if you simply want to produce an effective sales page, this will get you started.

You’ve set out the problem, shown why other attempts to solve it went wrong, painted a picture for what life could be like if only it would go away, and demonstrated that your product is the true solution. Now tell them to buy it.

To start with, why would you write your own sales copy instead of going to a professional? Because copywriters are expensive. I should know, I’ve been working as a freelance copywriter for more around 13 to 14 years. Most of my work is for large companies, businesses with marketing teams and budgets and such like.

If you’re promoting a new business, or simply setting yourself up to sell some stuff online, bringing in a professional copywriter is likely to be one expense you’d rather avoid.

Don’t worry, I understand. I won’t take it personally.

So, you’re going to write your own sales page. Where do you start? With your audience.

1. Hey, what’s your problem?

Your product or service has been designed to solve a particular problem, a pain or a predicament that your audience faces. They may not know they have this problem, in which case you’ll need to let them know that they do. Or they may need reminding what a pain in the **** the problem can be in their lives.

As the writer, you should jot down what these problems are. Your headline and opening paragraphs are going to address this problem.

2. Why hasn’t someone solved this already?

So, your audience has a problem. Hopefully, (for your sales and marketing efforts), there are lots of people who share this pain, this predicament. So why hasn’t someone done anything about it yet? Why have previous efforts to solve this fallen by the wayside?

What’s wrong with those previous efforts? Why does the problem persist? Why won’t it go away?

3. If only

The next step is to ask what life could be like for your audience if this problem could be solved. Could their teeth be whiter and their smile brighter? Could they become smarter, richer, happier? Generalisations are OK, but it’s better if you can be more specific.

As the writer, you should make notes about all the ways your audience could benefit from your product or service. Think broadly. Think visually. Picture how the person’s life or circumstances could change for the better. Are there ways you can paint that picture with your words, so they can see it too?

4. What’s new?

So, the audience has a problem, it won’t go away, but if only it would, then life could be so much better. What’s new? Your product or service, that’s what. Now is the time to explain what is new and different about what you have to offer, how it can help them to finally overcome the problem and reap the benefits you set out in step three.

Make a note of what is truly different about your product, and why it changes the game as far as this particular problem is concerned.

5. Do this

You’ve sold them by now. You’ve set out the problem, shown why other attempts to solve it went wrong, painted a picture for what life could be like if only it would go away, and demonstrated that your product is the true solution.

Now tell them to buy it. Really. Don’t be shy about this. Tell people exactly what you want them to do. Do you want them to sign up, give your their email address, press the buy button, ring you? Whatever it is, make it clear.

How to write sales copy – a few more pointers

So there you have it, a five point plan for creating your own sales copy. But before you go, I’d like to point you in the direction of a few other posts I think you should read before you start to write.

First of all, be sure to read my post on how to write scannable web copy.

Check out some advance techniques for writing to persuade

Brush up your sales psychology with how to motivate anyone

And once you’re done, make sure you review the techniques for checking that your sales copy is on target

Incidentally, if you’re writing sales copy for someone else and need to interview them to get at the information you need, then this five point plan can also be a good way to structure an interview.

You can also use this as a way of testing the marketing viability of a product or service. For example, if your product doesn’t really solve a problem for someone, or doesn’t have anything new or different about it, then that’s a major obstacle. Maybe you have the wrong idea. Or you might need to change your product, adapt it to make sure it meets real needs and solves a problem that no one else is tackling.

Photo by Hilarywho via Flickr.

7 surefire ways to write an opening paragraph

Simon — Thu, 06 May 2010 13:50:41 +0000

So, you’ve written a stunning headline, one that pulls your audience into your copy, eager to find out more.

What do you do next? You’ve done the hard part, so it would be a shame to lose them now.

Whatever you are writing, be it an advert, a blog post, an article, press release or letter, your opening paragraph needs to be compelling. It needs to grab your audience and keep them reading.

Are there techniques available for doing this? Tried and tested formulas?

There sure are: these are seven techniques for writing effective opening paragraphs. They come from the world of direct response copywriting, but will also work for blogs, articles, adverts, and probably many other forms of writing.

1. Be startling, or shocking

This techniques depends on delivering a startling or even shocking idea or statement that derails the reader’s train of thought, interrupting their patterns and breaking any boredom. It needs to be something that makes them sit up and take notice.

‘US jails are a valuable source of slave labour.’

‘There are some crimes so stupid, the only effective response is laughter.’

‘A thousand people will die needlessly this week, because they lack access to a medicine that can be produced for pennies.’

Using a shocking or startling statistic is one of the best ways to use this technique.

‘A third of US bees didn’t make it through the winter.’

‘A quarter of all cars on the road have tyres that are dangerous or illegal.’

2. Tell some news

This has always been an effective technique, but is especially useful on the internet these days, where people want to be given information, and are highly resistant to a blatant sales pitch.

‘In the next three years, the future of our whole civilisation could be decided.’

‘A billion dollar a year organisation has sprung into existence, thanks to a bright idea born on a University campus.’

3. Give an overview, or preview

You could use your opening paragraph to preview the rest of your article. Present the core of the information up front, and then go on to summarise. This is very like the journalistic or inverted pyramid style of writing.

4. Use a quotation

You could find a powerful and compelling quotation, ideally from someone famous, known to and popular with your intended audience.

5. Tell a story

This is the fundamental technique of all copywriting. You can use anecdotes and narrative to bring life to articles and posts, even when writing nonfiction.

You could, for example, tell a story about a customer who has used your product or service, or about a reader who has recently commented on your blog.

You could tell a story about the person who invented the product. Or about a person who could benefit from your service.

Ideally, you want to tell your story quickly and powerfully, perhaps by using a relevant analogy, metaphor or simile.

6. Refer back to the headline

Let’s assume your headline worked – it got the reader’s attention and pulled them into your body copy. You could do a whole lot worse than refer back to it, use the same thought, give the same message, in your opening paragraph, to remind them that this is something they really need to read.

7. Ask a Question

By asking your reader a question, you engage their mind, draw them into your copy, and, or course, spark their curiosity.

Bonus option: here’s an eighth option, one you can use instead of any of the above, or ideally in combination with one or more of them:

8. Hit them with the benefits

Load the opening paragraph with benefits, and yet more benefits. These could be the benefits of using your product or service. Or you could simply tell the readers the benefits to be gained from reading the rest of the article. This kind of direct of approach is often the best way forward with busy readers.

Photo by pic of lock by seanmcgrath

The number one thing about SEO that people just don’t get

Simon — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 09:47:00 +0000

There’s one thing about writing search engine optimised copy that people just don’t seem to ‘get’ – and I’m including here some people who make a living out of SEO.

I have clients who ask me to write SEO pages for them, to promote their business. Some use ‘expert’ SEO advisors, who come up with dozens of search terms they want included on a particular page.

I keep telling these people, you can’t do this. You can’t optimise a web page for that many different keywords and phrases. It just doesn’t work like that.

If you’re going to create an SEO webpage, you need to optimise it for just one keyword or phrase. Just one. Not half a dozen others tagged on alongside. Just one.

Let’s discuss bananas for a moment. Say I wanted to optimise a page for the phrase ‘Hawaiian bananas’. But because I also have other varieties of bananas for sale, I decide to mention them as well. I add some details about Costa Rican bananas, and Jamaican bananas.

Pretty soon, that webpage isn’t optimised for Hawaiian bananas at all. No. It’s optimised for bananas. But that’s not going to do me much good, since bananas is a very competitive search term.

My niche web page about Hawaiian bananas just lost all its SEO juice, and now it’s having to compete with every website out there that mentions bananas. All 14,200,000 of them. Whereas, there’s only 2,200 pages that mention Hawaiian bananas.

Actually, make that 2,201.

Picture by Jason Gulledge via Flickr

Ebook launch: SEO for writers and bloggers

Simon — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 13:07:11 +0000

Ladies and gentlemen your attention please: I would like to announce the launch of my first ebook. It’s called ‘SEO for Writers and Bloggers‘ and it is on sale now.

It’s a thorough, easy to understand and clear explanation of how to write search engine optimised copy, for blogs, websites, articles, hubs, whatever. It focuses mainly on on-page SEO (the stuff you write, the stuff you control) but also looks at ways to boost your off-page SEO (your popularity or reputation on the internet). It is designed to be the only book you’ll ever need if you want to write effective copy that ranks well in the search engine without sacrificing readability.

If you can’t be bothered to read the whole book, or don’t want to buy it, here’s what it says:

SEO is all about two things: the relevance of your content; and the reputation of your site.
Good content is the best policy.
Keyword research is dull but kinda useful.
Don’t worry too much about keyword density.
Use your keywords at the beginning of your H1 headline; in the first para, in the last para, in bold, in italics, in a list, as an external link anchor, and as an internal link anchor.
Search engines don’t pay much attention to H2 and H3 headlines (subheads) – but they’re a great place to put keywords to increase frequency / density.
You need to put keywords in the right places behind the scenes as well: at the start of the page title; in the meta description (because it usually forms the descriptive text used in the results page, and will encourage click throughs); in your URL (slug); and in alt tags and image names.

The book also deals with off-page SEO – which is all about the reputation of your site. Your reputation comes from what other people say about you:

You need lots of links
But the quality of the links is more important than the quantity
The anchor text used in the link is vital
You’re not really supposed to create your own backlinks – but everyone does
The great thing about making your own links is you control the anchor text
Many of the traditional places to go for backlinks are actually very weak – Google doesn’t pay them much mind. These include: blog comments; article sites; bookmarking sites, social media. They’re all good for direct traffic, but not so much for SEO.
However, the direct traffic people might link to you in their blogs- and that is good for SEO.
You get stronger link juice from sites such as HubPages, Squidoo and Scribd.
Google rates its own Blogger platform highly. You can exploit this.
Guest posting is good for traffic and SEO
Your links out can be as important as your links in. Add links to authority sites such Wikipedia, media organisations and popular blogs to boost your own ranking.

If some of that didn’t make sense to you, that’s because this is an abbreviated run through. It’s all explained in clear English in the ebook, and set out with a logical, easily to follow structure. It’s 50 pages long, costs $14.95 (at present – I’m putting the price up tomorrow. No I’m not, just joking there). And you can buy SEO for Writers and Bloggers here.

There – sales pitch over. So you can relax, just relax, you are feeling sleepy. Feeling sleepy. Go and buy my SEO ebook. Go and buy my SEO for writers and bloggers ebook…..

Scribe – the SEO tool for writers

Simon — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 08:20:55 +0000

If you’ve been around blogs much of late, and you’re even remotely interested in SEO (search engine optimisation), then you’ve probably heard about a new tool that’s out called Scribe.

There are adverts for it springing up on various blogs, including this one, partly because it really is a great tool for writers.

Also, of course, because it has a generous affiliate earning rate. So, yes, you guessed it, this is an affiliate review. Warts and all though – I’m going to give you the nitty gritty of how I’ve been getting on with Scribe both in my professional copywriting and my blogging.

What is Scribe?

If you know nothing about SEO and want to learn the easy way, then Scribe will get you going, and might be all you ever need.

Scribe is a plugin for the WordPress blogging platform. You access it in the dashboard area of your blog. When you write a post, such as this one, it analyses what you’ve written, and tells you what Google will make of your article.

It tells you what keywords will register with Google. It also tells you how you can strengthen those keywords, or how you can bring other words or phrases more to the fore.

It dishes out good advice on how and where to use your keywords, so you quickly and easily add extra SEO juice to your posts.

Scribe in action – for copywriting

I’ve been using Scribe SEO this week to write a website for a client – a school for the performing arts (all together now: “Fame! I’m going to live for-e-e-ever….”. OK, I’ve got that out of my system, on with the review).

Their specific brief was to search engine optimise the core pages of the site, the home page, about page, and five to six pages on their courses.

The school was getting plenty of hits to their home page, but not really moving that traffic through to inner pages.

They wanted to SEO the course pages, to bring in more targeted traffic.

The courses include things like drama, music and musical theatre.

The SEO terms were very straight forward: they wanted the drama page optimised for the terms ‘drama course’ and ‘drama school’. And so on.

So how did Scribe perform?

If you’re a professional blogger, Scribe will pay for itself in increased traffic.

It was slightly awkward to use in this way, because it has been designed to make life easy for bloggers using WordPress. It is, after all, a WordPress plugin. But I was writing copy in Microsoft Word.

To use Scribe for this job, I had to create new pages within one of my WordPress sites and copy and paste the copy across. I also needed to transfer across keywords, meta description and page title.

This isn’t really how this tool is intended to work, but all the same it did a pretty good job. It told me the density of my keywords and I was able to make adjustments as necessary to maximise my scores.

One area where it fell down was the musical theatre page. I used the phrase ‘musical theatre course’ repeatedly throughout the article, but Scribe never picked it up as a keyphrase. It picked up ‘musical theatre’ but not ‘musical theatre course’, no matter how many times I used the phrase.

I doubled checked on a website where you can analyse these things (for free, by the way). There you have to manually enter the keywords you are using. This site recognised the phrase ‘musical theatre course’ and gave it a thumbs up on density: around 3 per cent.

Why didn’t Scribe pick it up? I’m not sure at present. It may be something to do with the SEO engine it uses. It might be that Scribe is right and Google won’t acknowledge ‘musical theatre course’ as a true keyphrase on that page.

But my guess is that it is a limitation with the software and the way it analyses the keywords.

Overall, however, Scribe did make it easier for me to produce the SEO copy for my client.

Scribe in action – for blog posts

When it comes to writing blog posts, things are even easier, and more effective. You can simply write your post in a natural way, not worrying about keywords in the slightest. I did this with my recent article on how to motivate people. Having written the article, Scribe told me that the keywords registering were ‘pleasure’ and ‘motivate’.

That was fine by me. They’re not brilliant keywords, but then again, I wasn’t all that bothered about SEO-ing the heck out of the page.

Having seen what keywords had cropped up naturally, I then used these in the meta description, page title and keywords, to add some extra SEO juice.

So if someone ever searches for something odd like: ‘write + pleasure + motivate,’ they’ll come across my page for sure.

Hang on, why make assumptions? Let’s test it. Let’s do a quick Google search and… yes, number three in the ranking worldwide – behind the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and some course being held at the British Library by the United Kingdom Literacy Association.

That’s pretty good company I reckon. I’m moving in exalted circles.

Will anyone ever search for such a thing? maybe not, but when writing blog posts, I reckon Scribe can save you tons of time, and really improve your ability to SEO pages without going to too much effort.

If you’re really into your SEO, and do lots of keyword research, and you’re writing articles to target specific terms because the traffic will bring you rewards such as money, then it is definitely a tool you should look at.

There are, however, other ways to check your keyword density, many of them free. And once you get the hang of putting your keywords at the start of your page title and meta description, and using plenty of hyperlinks, then you could get by without it.

I would say Scribe has three key advantages:

2) It allows you to write naturally and see what keywords have been created, then make improvements;

3) It’s a good way to learn to basics of SEO with a bit of hands-on work. So, you could try it out for a month or two, learn what it has to offer and then review how you’re getting on.

The question is, will I keep it? Will I renew my subscription every month? I’m not sure. Why? Well that’s simple, and it’s Scribe’s potential Achilles heel: the cost.

The costs and the rewards

Let’s face it, Scribe isn’t cheap. Blogging generally is cheap. Hosting costs a few dollars a month. WordPress is open source, and therefore free. Most plugins are also free. I’m running a premium, paid for theme called Thesis, but there are plenty of free alternatives around.

Scribe is not free. Not by a fair margin.

They have three price brackets: $27; $47 and $97 – per month. That works out at quite a lot, over the course of a year.

For $27 dollars, all you get is 30 goes at analysing your copy each month. You’ll probably want to run the analysis at least two or three times on each post or article. So it’s maybe 10 to 15 posts.

That’s probably enough for most casual bloggers. On the other hand, most casual bloggers don’t make much, if any, money from their blogs. So it will probably look like an unnecessary expense to them.

For $47 you get 120 evaluations a month. Or for £97, you get 300 evaluations.

Now, if you’re one of those people that somehow makes thousands of dollars a month from affiliate income and adsense and stuff, then $97 to improve your SEO and save a whole bunch of time is not that bad a deal.

For most bloggers, though, it’s going to sound like a lot of money.

I’m not convinced they’ve got their pricing right on all this. Clearly they have expenses behind the scenes and are using up bandwidth and all sorts in providing the service. They have costs, for sure. (And they have to pay those darned affiliates…)

But I don’t know if the WordPress community is really ready to pay this kind of money in significant numbers.

Buying advice

This is an affiliate review, with affiliate links, so I’m bound to encourage you to give Scribe a go.

However, I can honestly say I’ve found it both interesting and useful. I’m probably going to keep it for a second month, at least (although I got an early-bird deal of $27 for 300 evaluations a month. And I’m still not sure I’ll keep it indefinitely).

If you know nothing about SEO and want to learn the easy way, then Scribe will get you going, and might be all you ever need.

If you’re a professional blogger, I reckon Scribe will pay for itself in increased traffic, and targeted traffic at that. So in that sense, it’s a bargain.

My advice would be to give it a go for a month, maybe two, and then review things. As an ongoing cost, it’s a bit scary. If you’re seriously ‘monetizing’ (hate that word) your site, on the other hand, then Scribe’s probably a sound investment.

To find out more about Scribe, click here.

Pic on this post by Jefka via Flickr

Marketing testimonials – how to provide proof even if you have none

Simon — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:59:09 +0000

I recently wrote about the importance of using case studies as a way of telling stories about a product or service. But what do you do if you have no genuine case studies or testimonials?

All is not lost.

The key thing about case studies and testimonials is that they show other people getting the benefits of using your product or service.

You can still ‘show’ that, even if you have to use some smoke and mirrors to pull it off.

1) List your customers, mention them by name, or show similar proof, such as the number of countries in the world where your product is used; the number of government departments that use your software; the percentage of top 500 companies using your service and so on.

2) Use images and photos of people using your product or service. The photo may be staged, but it creates the right impression.

3) Create a character: this is the written equivalent of using an image. Describe someone using your product or service.

4) Resort to back-story: mention facts such as how long your company has been in business, the number of products sold, the number of customers you have, even the number of products sold.

5) Imply demand: you can suggest that there is huge demand for a product and that it may be in short supply, so customers should act and buy now. At its most simplistic level, this gives the old favourite: ‘buy now while stocks last.’ It is implying that everyone else is rushing to buy, so you should too.

6) Say you’re a market leader – which directly implies that lots of other people use your product or service.

7) Use celebs: an image of one famous person using your product can be more powerful than any number of more genuine testimonials. You will, of course, need their permission, which means you’ll probably need to pay them.

Use reviews: if you’ve had good reviews in magazines or on websites, these can perform the same task as case studies and testimonials.

9) ‘As seen on…’: you can always simply refer to the fact your product has been featured on television or in a magazine, to show that it is well known.

Any I missed? Comments are open…

A case study is a story – and that’s powerful marketing

Simon — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 11:33:31 +0000

One of the secrets to great copywriting is storytelling. People are interested in stories. Stories get their attention. And it’s much easier to convince someone of something through a story, than it is by banging them on the head with a raw sales pitch.

Which is where case studies come in. Case studies are superb marketing tools for two key reasons:

• They provide proof

• They tell stories.

A good case study starts out with our hero – our satisfied customer. Like every good hero, he wants something, he has a story goal. He may want to find the perfect ice cream; he may want to buy the car of his dreams; he may want to learn to play the piano; or he might be looking for a world-class data centre where he can host the corporate databases and applications for which he holds prime responsibility. You get the idea.

There is conflict however: he doesn’t know how to reach his story goal.

This conflict is resolved when he discovers product X or service Y. We see how he is able to reach his goal, and come to a satisfying happy-ending when product X delivers a huge range of benefits.

So, to write an effective case study, you need to remember you are telling a story about a person or a company that wanted to achieve something, what they did about that, and how it all worked out in the end. It gives a proven, rock-solid structure for a case study that works every time:

1) The problem – the status quo, the situation at the start of the story, where we see our hero/customer struggling to achieve his story goal.

2) The solution – we show how our hero found product X, and how he used it to achieve his goal.

3) The benefits – we show how using product X has enriched our hero’s life and made him happy-ever-after.

This formula should work for any case study you need to write, be it for a big company, or just a testimonial for online marketing. The story can be a few sentences long, or many thousands of words. The structure can remain the same, only the level of detail needs to change.

Remember, however, to give your story a touch of life. Every good story needs a believable character, so include details of the person/company and a quote which lets us hear the proof in their own words.

Finally, make sure the quotes don’t read like corporate committee speak. Many a case-study has been ruined by the inclusion of so-called ‘quotes’ that don’t sound like something any human being would ever actually say. If the customer can only supply that kind of material, then change it so it sounds like a real quote, or write something for them. In either case, go back and get their approval.

If you’re not sure how to make up a quote for someone, just ask any journalist to help. They’re always making up quotes….

How to write a film or TV documentary treatment or proposal

Simon — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 14:15:52 +0000

If you want to make a documentary film, you need funding. This may entail persuading other people, such as TV companies, to stump up the money in advance.

They’re only going to do this if you can convince them that you know what you’re doing; you have a great idea; you can make it work; you’ve planned it properly; and most importantly of all, that it will pull in an audience.

The documentary proposal or treatment is, therefore, a sales document. For copywriters, this is a potential source of work. For film-makers, it is a necessary evil and something they will have to complete, one way or another. Either they do it themselves, or they pay someone else to do it for them.

But what should a documentary proposal contain?

A synopsis

This is the most important section – this is where you summarise the overall project. It needs to sell, and hard.

The audience

State clearly your anticipated audience. ‘Everyone’ is not sufficiently specific. You need to convince the TV company that you can pull in an audience for this programme, and that they will sit through the film with you all the way to the end. If you’re making a series, you need to convince people will keep coming back for more.

The big idea

What is the programme all about? WHat is different about this programme? What new ideas or information will it contain? What is the programme’s main goal?

The conflict

You need conflicting views to be brought out during the programme, otherwise it will be dull and lack drama. Even a factual documentary tells a story. Outline the conflict, in ways that the buyers and planners working for the TV company can easily understand.

Structure

A paragraph or two on how you intend to structure your film.

Resolution

How will the programme end? Where is it heading?

The presenter

Who is the presenter? Why has he or she been chosen? What special qualities do they bring?

A treatment

Documentaries rarely if ever have a script. Film makers can’t control what will happen when the cameras are rolling. They are not working with actors and cannot dictate what their subjects should say.

Instead, you should include a treatment. This might describe in detail the people who are the interviewed, the places the programme will visit, the topics to be discussed, the areas of conflict which will help to bring it all to life.

The treatment will usually be written in the present tense. So: ‘The programme opens with the presenter standing in front of the Taj Mahal. He tells us about….’ and so on. Treatments are usually a narrative, and do not use technical language or jargon. There is no need for camera angles or similar detail. It is an outline of the content, and the emphasis should be on making it as interesting and compelling as possible. The people with the money want to know that this programme will be interesting and engaging to a wide audience – usually s that they can sell advertising and so turn a profit on the whole deal.

Length

Be clear and precise about how long the programme will be. If there are options to make a long or short version, say so.

Budgets

If you know how much money is needed, this is the place to include the details. If you have no idea, then it will be much harder to get funding.

Production timetable

If you know this, or at least have an idea, it’s a good idea to include it. It shows you’ve done some proper planning.

Biographies

This section should include detailed information to demonstrate the competence and talent of all those involved. The director and producer should be included. Other people you may want to present in detail here include the presenter, any technical or scientific advisors, and possibly some of the interviewees and subjects featured in the programme.

Make it sell

Making a film or programme is a time-consuming and expensive business. It’s worth spending some extra time and / or money on the proposal to make it as compelling and convincing as possible. As a copywriter, I would argue that this is a job for a professional. But it certainly can be done by the film makers themselves, providing they have the time to commit to getting it right, making it sell their idea effectively, and giving the buyers and planners enough information to make a decision in you favour.

SEO: “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists”

Simon — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 13:59:53 +0000

Here’s a passionately written blog post which has gone viral, and which should interest anyone involved in writing search engine optimised copy. I found it through Boing Boing (my main source of news these days, I have to admit) – and it’s a post in which the writer has a real good go at anyone involved in SEO:

“Search Engine Optimization is not a legitimate form of marketing. It should not be undertaken by people with brains or souls. If someone charges you for SEO, you have been conned.”

That’s just how it starts. There’s more. Lots more:

And so, like the goat sacrificers and snake oil salesmen before them, a new breed of con man was born, the Search Engine Optimizer. These scammers claim that they can dance the magic dance that will please the Google Gods and make eyeballs rain down upon you.

Do. Not. Trust. Them.

I have a lot of sympathy with the opinions in this post, even though I sometimes write about SEO, and offer it as part of my copywriting service. I don’t do everything connected with SEO, simply writing web copy in a way that Google’s spiders will find the search terms.

It’s actually pretty simple stuff – and a way it is obvious, as Derek says in his piece.

On the other hand, I was involved in creating SEO copy for a web designer the other day – a company which itself offers an SEO service, and yet I had to explain to them some of the basics, such as optimising one page for no more than one or two search terms.

The same company was also planning to optimise its site for the term “online solutions.”

I had to explain that I didn’t think anyone goes into Google and searches for “solutions”. Do they?

So, while much of SEO may be “obvious” to those in the know, most people don’t have to engage with all this stuff.

Isn’t that the basis of most professions, from lawyers and doctors to designers and chefs? You specialise in one area that may not be rocket science – but because you specialise, you know what needs doing.

Nontheless, Derek has a lot of good points to make about how the quest for Google love is distorting and harming web content. It’s actually a subject close to my heart.

And one I’ve ranted about myself, on occasion.

My dog can write better copy than you

Simon — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:37:43 +0000

My one-year-old Airedale Terrier knows how to get to the point. She’s much better at it than most people I know running businesses, teaching classes, or even some people who write for a living.

If she wants you to do something, she has a way of telling you. If she wants the door opened, she lets you know by hammering on it. If she wants some of your lunch, she gives you the big brown eye treatment. You’re not left in any doubt.

She doesn’t get bogged down in corporate jargon. She doesn’t think you have to use “sophisticated business language” to impress people. She doesn’t try to hide a simple idea behind pompous academic nonsense.

A quick bark, she picks up the tennis ball, gives you a glance and invites you to play.

She knows a lot more about effective communication than most people in business. And just about everyone in academia.

She knows how to tempt you into playing ball.

She can persuade you to rub her belly just by rolling on her back and offering it to you.

And she even knows that it’s not all about her. She has to give something back. She has learnt that the humans have to enjoy the game too, or they won’t play next time. She has learnt not to bite your hand, or there won’t be any food offered in future.

It’s a pity a few more companies couldn’t learn that lesson: don’t bite your customers for the sake of an easy biscuit because they won’t come back – and you could be hungry by meal time.

And if you want someone to play ball – show them the ball.

A simple idea. A simple message. Perhaps that’s one reason dogs are so much more popular than business people.