Just a quick post to announce the launch of my latest copywriting work, for Topsail Events.
Topsail Events are a very well established marine events company, who do amazing Thames cruises, corporate events, private parties and elegant weddings on motor cruisers, tall ships, Thames river barges and paddle steamers.
If you’re looking for an unusual venue for a special occasion, give Mark and his team a call!
I ‘ve been a fan of Haruki Murakami, ever since @megnog bought me The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. I’m now reading What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami’s running memoir.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this with you:
“…you can’t please everybody. Even when I ran my bar I followed the same policy. A lot of customers came to the bar. If one out of ten enjoyed the place and said he’d come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive.
“To put it the other way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten didn’t like my bar. This realization lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to make sure he did, I had to make my philosophy and stance clear-cut, and patiently maintain that stance no matter what.”
What a peculiar idea! Murakami’s suggestion – that sometimes it’s better to pursue the business that makes sense to you, rather than desperately trying to please every customer – is vastly contrary to the modern preoccupation with pleasing everyone and countering every criticism.
So, I had this idea… I call it fauxlancing…
It’s a blend of two very different ways of working. It’s regular, full-time employment with a few freelance freedoms. It’s faux-freelancing.
Because regular employment has a problem: it sucks.
Employees get a salary, a job description, a desk, a role, a place in the hierarchy, a routine, limitations, supervision, a patronising dullard to manage them, a thick blanket of bureaucracy and a few other dead weights to hang around their necks as they shuffle from cubicle to cubicle, desperately searching for something meaningful.
The fact that regular employment is often so soul-destroying is not just a problem for employees; employers should dread the sight of dead-eyed worker droids because those are the people that will lazily, inefficiently and accidentally drain the life from their organisation.
Fauxlancing is a word I made up to describe the practice of taking the good stuff from the freelance world and applying it to the world of regular employment.
You might be wondering exactly I mean by the ‘good stuff from the freelance world’ that I just mentioned. Well, I often work with other freelancers, and the people I meet are generally confident, relaxed people who are in control of their own destiny. Freelancers take ownership of their working life. They grab their working life by the balls and get things done in the ways that make sense to them.
Freelancers are relaxed in their work because they know what’s happening. Freelancers are better connected to their work because they don’t merely complete tasks; they pitch for work, liaise with clients, manage projects, raise invoices and deal with all the admin along the way.
Because of this, freelancers can derive greater meaning from their work. They aren’t a hamster in a wheel, turning the gears of a giant thingamajig, dumb to managerial machinations, blind to the bigger picture.
I don’t know. I haven’t really thought this through. If it’s your job to get the most out of permanent employees and you would like to chat about fauxlancing, give me a call.
*Clearly, not all employers fit this description, and many employees have terrifically fulfilling jobs with employers who nurture them.
Websites are versatile, powerful extensions of an organisation. Your website can do many things, but not without your help. You may have expected your website to take care of itself, to run quietly in the background, pulling in customers and generating new business.
You might not have a Website Manager, or Webmaster, or Weblord, or someone steering your website through the crowded digital seas. But to find success on the web, somebody (probably you) will need to start thinking about your website. And that somebody will need to add and remove content, make changes, update information, spread the news and find an audience.
Left to their own devices, websites do absolutely nothing. Without human involvement, websites are lazy, good-for-nothing cash-sponges.
Before you think too much about where you’re going wrong, or what you should change, look at your website’s traffic statistics. You should be able to see things like:
* Daily visitor numbers
* Popular content (what people are looking at)
* Traffic sources (where people came from)
* Length of stay
* Bounce rate (percentage of people who leave your site immediately after arriving, without viewing a second page)
If you don’t have access to this information, ask your web developer to provide it.
If you have this information, spend some time looking at it. Analytics data can highlight many things. Such as:
If your website appears highly in searches for cheese pizzas, but you only sell cheese cloth, then people may come to your site looking for something you don’t offer. As soon as they realise their mistake they will leave. If lots of people do this, your bounce rate will be high.
A high bounce rate could also indicate that nobody likes your website. Is it ugly? Offensive? Poorly constructed? Horribly written? A hideous website could be turning customers away. Ask a few trusted friends and colleagues for a brutally-honest critique of your website.
Look at the most popular exit page. This is the page that your visitors look at before leaving your site. If the most popular exit page is a contact form, or the sales/enquiry page of your site, then people are doing what you want.
If you find that an unusual page is popping up as a frequent exit route, check the page for any suspicious activity. Is there something wrong with the page? Does the navigation work, and are visitors offered a next step on their journey?
The list of traffic sources can be revealing. Sometimes visitors come from unexpected places. And sometimes this can show a new way of finding people.
Scan the list of keywords that people have used to find your site. Any surprising choices? Keep your eyes peeled for anything that suggests people are searching for you with keywords that you hadn’t considered. It may be worth integrating these keywords into your copy a little bit more.
Web analytics is a large and complex field. Explore it as much as you feel is necessary. For many small organisations with a website to keep alive, a weekly perusal of the statistics will suffice.
Of course, don’t just gormlessly look at a few numbers: think about what they imply. Draw meaning from the numbers. Consider what those numbers say about the people who visit your site. When looking at website analytics, you’re looking for insight into the minds and behaviours of your potential customers.
Google Analytics is a free program that provides fantastic traffic stats. If you don’t have it, or something similar, ask a friendly web developer to install it for you. If you don’t know a friendly web developer, ask me – I know several very charming geeks.
The biggest problem that any website faces is invisibility. The web is stuffed with great websites, and if you want any chance of being seen, you’ll have to fight for people’s attention.
Websites do not automatically generate traffic. Without a good reason to visit your site, nobody will visit your site.
If you want a healthy flow of human traffic to your website, you’ll need to purposefully cultivate that traffic.
In Part 4, we look at Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
See also:
In my freelance work I regularly encounter two misconceptions about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):
This is like saying that because my toe is broken now, it will never heal. Or like saying that because I can’t ride a horse, I can never have riding lessons.
If you have an un-optimised website you have the most to gain by optimising your website. If you’ve neglected your website and left it to fester, don’t feel bad; feel happy, because you’ve got so much potential for improvement!
Not true. If your business is operating in a crowded market, with lots of big players with well optimised websites, you might need to think carefully about how you approach SEO (maybe targeting long-tail or niche keywords instead of pursuing the obvious ones). And if you have a limited budget, you probably won’t be able to employ a slick agency to do all the work for you.
Either way, you can benefit from optimising your website. And SEO is definitely something that everyone can do.
If you’re new to SEO, have a look at these very useful resources:
Search Engine Optimisation is an ongoing process of refinement.
However you tackle your website’s optimisation, it’s important to understand that you’ll need to maintain and update your website if you want to keep up with your competition.
After making changes to your site’s SEO, you’ll have to sit back and wait to see the effects.
So don’t expect changes to be immediately noticeable, and remember that great websites need to be nurtured and coddled on their way to the big time.
To me, usability means making sure that everything is obvious, self-explanatory and easy to use. I often see things in the physical world which make me wonder what the hell the designer was thinking. Here’s a classic example:
This is one of The Werks‘ watercoolers. So, what’s the difference between the green button and the blue button? I don’t know.
Normally, blue taps signify cold water. So what about the green button? What does green signify? Is it hot? Why green?
Whichever button you press, you get cold water. So why two buttons? Why no explanation of what the buttons do? And why not stick to the convention of:
Blue = cold
Red = hot ?
This is a good example of bad usability, which leaves people with a vague sense of confusion. Obviously, giving people a sense of confusion is a bad thing.
Good web copy (and design) leaves no room for confusion.
Pavement signs are fantastic – your business can leap beyond the boundary of your premises and stand in the path of potential customers. What a jolly good idea!
But, it does help if the sign contains some tempting invocation to pull people towards your enterprise. I recommend you strive for something marginally more persuasive than this:
…not a lot.
I’m reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, which is an account of his time in several Nazi concentration camps and an introduction to his own school of psychotherapy, logotherapy.
I’ll probably be blogging about a few of his ideas, regarding the peculiarities of the human brain, but today I’d just like to share this with you.
In the introduction, Frankl writes of his surprise at this book’s success, and of his bewilderment that subsequent books had not been as successful, despite his best efforts. Because of this, he would tell his students:
“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself…”
(Part 1: How to Do More on the Web: A Few Ideas)
Okay, so you know what you’re selling, but do you know what people are buying?
If you’re selling books, your customers are buying information, knowledge and entertainment. If you’re selling cars, your customers are buying freedom, independence and a romantic idea. If you’re selling beds, your customers are buying a good night’s sleep, relaxation and comfort.
Whatever it is that you’re selling, think about what your customers are thinking about when they’re buying.
Another way of thinking about the difference between the thinking of the buyer and seller is to think about features and benefits.
The features of a product are things like:
• Stainless steel construction
• Dual-core processor
• Available in 200 colours
These features mean something else to your customers. To a buyer, features translate into benefits. Benefits like:
• Won’t rust
• Handles multiple applications without crashing
• You can find one that suits you
Whenever you present a product or service on the web, mention the benefits as well as the features. It may sound like rudimentary advice, but it’s an essential part of any website. Many organisations fail to clearly present the basis of their offer. What seems obvious to you, from within your organisation, is potentially alien to your visitors.
See also:
Do People Understand?
I’m a big fan of freelancing. Being your own boss offers a billion wonderful benefits, which I won’t go into here. But it’s too easy to get wrapped up in the daily blend of work, projects and tasks, without really appreciating the freedoms that freelancing provides.
I’ve decided to work harder at working enjoyably. Enjoying work is the best way to make it sustainable and as stressless as possible. Step 1 in my crusade to lap up the freelance lifestyle is:
Working at The Werks means I’m only a ten minute bike ride away from the beach:
And that bike ride isn’t particularly arduous… the entire world tilts slightly downward and my bike literally rolls me through the sweeping grandeur of Palmeira Square:
Why am I sharing this with you? Because I think it’s important for our sanity and internal health to enjoy life. Whether or not you’re freelance or live by the sea, you can probably create spaces in your days that give you a chance to look around and take in the view.
A former colleague had a good approach to beautifying his life: he would always drive to work along the coast road. His colleagues headed inland, where the traffic was less dense. But not him. He tolerated the traffic and just allowed more time for his journey. Less time in bed, but an infinitely richer experience on his drive to work.
Last week I attended Connecting Innovation – an event designed to “look at the opportunities to work together, the ways creativity is cultivated and how productive partnerships can be formed”.
For me the event was worthwhile because of the interesting people I got to meet, and because I got to hear Charles Leadbeater speak.
When Charles was talking about innovation, he referred to the way most people learn to swim. While you may practice strokes on dry land, you only learn to swim when you get in the pool. Innovation can’t really happen until you “get in the pool”.
Charles’ point resonated with my experiences. I’ve learnt most of what I know by combining research (reading online and offline) with doing. I’m a firm believer in learning by doing. I recommend it.
If you’re tackling something new, try getting in the pool.
You don’t always need to wait for approval or a certificate to authorise you to do something new. Sometimes the best way to learn is by experimenting independently.
Have you ever bought a product or service from an Internet Marketing Guru?
I’m trying to learn more about the curious world of the Internet Marketing Guru and would love to hear from anyone who has worked with people like:
This guide isn’t just about selling more on the web: it’s about achieving your goals, whatever they are.
That might mean selling tickets to your gigs, or getting donations for your charity, or building support for your big idea. Whatever you’re trying to do, the principles and ideas covered will apply to you. Just bend the suggestions until they make sense for you.
Good websites are full of people’s ideas. Anything worthwhile needs a bit of brain-space. As soon as you start thinking about your website your chances of success increase dramatically. Most websites suck and fail because they are designed and built in haste and then left to gather dust. Always view your website as an evolving work in progress.
If you get stuck, and can’t find a way to progress, email leif@kendallcopywriting.co.uk – if I can spare a few minutes I’ll think about your conundrum.
This guide should answer questions like:
This guide is designed to help anyone with a website. If you’re a very experienced website creator/owner/manager then this guide might not offer anything new. But if your website doesn’t do a lot, then you might find a few useful ideas.
Selling more things, or recruiting more donors, or persuading people that your scheme is brilliant does not need to involve under-hand tactics. Success does not require evil.
If you’re offering something useful then you should let people know. This guide is all about how you can let people know.
Before you think about your website, you need to think about the people that you created it for: your customers.
If you’re going to sell anything to anybody, you’ll need to establish who wants what you’ve got. Are they:
Identify your target audience. Think about who they are. Imagine you are them. Step into their shoes and consider their motivations. Ask yourself:
Okay, so you know what you’re offering, what it does and why people use it… or do you? Do you really know why people use your things, or engage your services?
You might think you know exactly what people are doing with your stuff, but you might be surprised to learn that people are misusing your products – or that they really just want your services for a reason other than the ones you intended.
Luckily, it’s easy enough to find out what your customers are up to. Just ask them. And you don’t need to set up a survey and harvest reams of data. Just call a few people and have a chat.
A few examples of products that have found unintended uses:
Thanks to the following for their suggestions:
http://twitter.com/mikebrondbjerg
Your products and services might be valued for reasons other than the ones you know about. If people think about your work in different ways to you, address this in your website’s copy.
Related blog post:
Are there other ways you could help your customers? Are there additional products or services that fit with your existing range? What would people like from you? How can you make people’s lives better, easier or more fulfilling?
Don’t just assume that your products and services have to stop where they are now. If there’s something more you can offer – something real, something useful and desirable – then start offering it.
Many businesses decide what they do, then create products and services that they think are required, then offer them for sale. Rarely do businesses ask what is required – what is wanted – and then offer it.
It’s easier to sell the thing that people want, than it is to sell the thing that you need to sell. So if you’re struggling to sell something, consider changing it until it meets people’s needs.
Again, it’s a good idea to spend time talking to your clients. And don’t make it complicated. Just pick up the phone, dial a number, say hi, ask some questions.
Related blog post:
Don’t Treat Your Website Like a Commodity
That’s it for Part 1. Part 2 will look at your products and services (although really we’ve already thought about this, but in relation to how your customers think about your products and services.) Part 2 is the shortest section.
In Part 3, we’ll explore the aspects of your website that might be failing. This will cover SEO, social media and other wonderful things.
Oh, and did you notice that I haven’t mentioned marketing ? There’s a good reason for that. Many people in marketing are disreputable, unlovable rogues who smarm their way through life with slick grins and thin lies. ‘Marketing’ is a word so loaded with negative connotations that I prefer to discuss ‘marketing’ without using the word.
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