Boost Comprehension with Embellished and Difficult Fonts

I can’t stop trying to imagine a reason why so many ads are created using text that is ALL IN UPPERCASE. AND THEN THEY MAKE A PARAGRAPH OR TWO AND ACTUALLY EXPECT THAT THEIR BMWs OR MERCEDES ARE GOING TO ROCKET OFF THE CAR LOTS. Is it just me or does it take you a [...]

Spinning Knowledge and Passion Into Content

I love proving how successful smaller businesses can be when they leverage content to distinguish themselves as unique and fascinating. I’m on the heels of an article I just read in NYTimes, The Difference Between a Good Web Site and a Great Web Site, by Gabriel Shaoolian. He profiles a somewhat recently redesigned website of [...]

Clever Content

Example of our herd mentality over at Wired…article on OnWander.com. We will follow others…maybe that’s what it is all about. Offline guerrilla marketing. Remember the coroplast yard signs that appeared a couple years ago for singles? They urged passersby to visit [SmallTown]Singles.com. That marketer must have owned hundreds of hyperlocal domains. (The national–viral–  yard sign [...]

Speak Unique: Distinctive Web Content

I wrote the following post over a year ago. And I have additional thoughts: “What Are Your Competitors Doing? Not an uncommon question in the web world. I was reading a new book the other day in which the author urged her audience to use this metric–competitors’ websites– as a key way to measure my/your [...]

The Stirring New Case for Web Content in 2012

Anne Handley’s article Why Content Is Still King When It Comes To Lead Generation is a great way to sound off in the New Year–if you’re me. She’s retrofitted the dusty adage, “Content is King,” with an ingenious new hook–”Lead Generation.” She’s right—content IS king and that hasn’t changed. The challenge for content providers like [...]

Best Intranets

Jakob Nielsen announced the new report on the 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2012. Not to be confused with intERnet. An intRAnet is a secure web experience within a company or organization designed to be used by employees, etc. It’s literally their private web. And designing and writing for them is a skill in and [...]

Building an Irresistible Call-to-Action

Sales copy is persuasive, is it not? Yes. A call-to-action is an important piece of the online sales process, would you agree? Yeah… The invisible “yes” is key to overcoming buyer resistance and building irresistible web copy that can turn sales. But once you’ve negotiated a series of invisible “yes-es” in your prospective customer’s mind, [...]

Does Your Web Content Match Your Brains and Business Ethic?

Building an online business takes “Effort” and “Commitment.” The good news is that many of your competitors can’t stand to hear those words! Why? They want “it” for free or automatically, and they are lazy. (yeah, keep drinking that guru koolaid, kids). They have no grit. This sloth-dom is good news for you. Kiss ‘em [...]

Website Without Words: Are You Missing This Piece?

Online customers interact with content and the written word in a few different ways. I occasionally come across a client who believes that his or her particular customers are not interested in reading. Usually it is barked out something like this: “My customers don’t want to read a lot of words on a page.” Period. [...]

Stop, Smell, and Poke the Web Copy

We stop and smell the roses We taste test our recipes We listen to the engines purr, clunk, and bang We drink in the bouquet of fine and not so fine wines Why do we often spend so little sensory time with our web content? In some cases we literally slap words onto a web [...]

Rage Against the Content Machine

Some gooroo, as Ben Settle calls them, is currently pitching an outsourcing training program that promises to show online entrepreneurs how they can outsource many of their needs to “English-speaking” persons for as little as $2.50/hour. Yes, that is two dollars and fifty cents per hour. I’ve unsubscribed from this guy’s list. I’m not his [...]

Reading: “Word Hero”

During my Saturday haunting of the book shelves at Barnes & Noble, I stumbled by accident on this gem: Word Hero, by Jay Heinrichs: “A fiendishly clever guide to crafting the lines that get laughs, go viral, and live forever.” Had I looked for it in the business or marketing section I’d never have found [...]

Good Writing Friday (in homage to words well woven together)

From The Food at Our Feet, by Jane Kramer, in the New Yorker:   I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes. It didn’t matter that the first thing I learned about that daunting pastime of hunter-gatherers and visionary chefs was that nature’s bounty is a thorny gift….I had foraged as a [...]

Lo-Fi Content Strategy and Whiteboard

Content strategy documents and artifacts are not automatically accessible for all that may need to actually use them. Take a “simple” copydeck for instance– one of the lowest of the low strategy documents. This is where the rubber meets the road. End users of this document could be developers, programmers, and content management specialists. But [...]

Good Writing Friday: Barry Hannah

Barry Hannah is a short story genius. From the story, “Two Gone Over”: I was in North Dakota around the SAC base in March. The wind blew hard across the beet fields and the tarmac, wherever it was. I had done my duty in Grand Forks and we talked in a bar. She and her [...]

Memorable Call to Action

Sometimes the best way to grab users is to put a quick, catchy, memorable call to action, slogan, or other message in front of them: “Before you break a bone, put this in your phone.”