How to Write Killer Web Copy
Hire a professional writer.
Seriously.
Unless you yourself are recognized for your writing talent. If so, have at it: You may well be the best one to write your website.
If not, consider your business goals and what you want your site to achieve. I think you’ll agree there’s too much at stake to trust your Web copy to amateur efforts.
Besides, I and a lot of other professional writers out here could use the work. We tend to be a scruffy lot and need all the help we can get to stay off the dole. Thanks.
What? You really thought I was going to give away the secrets of good Web writing? There are no secrets. You can Google™ all the writing tips you’ll need. They’re a dime a dozen. They generally run something like this:
- Know your audience.
- Write short sentences.
- Keep sentence structure simple: subject, verb – and probably an object.
- Use action verbs, not passive verbs.
- Stay positive. Don’t use words like “don’t.”
- Don’t use big words. (Hey, we professional writers are licensed to break the rules!)
- Avoid clichés (like the plague).
- Limit the use of technical jargon – use only enough to establish credentials.
- Craft a clear “call to action” for every Web page – tell your readers what you want them to do. (Be nice!)
- Proof everything you write once, twice – and again, for good measure.
Actually, those are good rules.
Of course, if you follow them and a gazillion others like them to the letter, you may end up with copy that reads like a “Dick and Jane” primer. Which is okay if you’re writing for Dick and Jane. And you might well be. (See Spot run.) Otherwise, it doesn’t hurt to tweak a rule every now and then, as long as your writing is clear and still in the realm of grammatical plausibility. A bit of carefully considered rule-breaking can give your writing a unique personality, a compelling “voice.” Just be sure you know what rule you’re breaking and why.
Among my pet peeves are the assertions that “You can’t start sentences with conjunctions!” “You can’t use phrases, or incomplete sentences, as sentences!” “You can’t use contractions in formal writing!” Nonsense! These are rules that have never really been rules at all. Desperate grade-school grammarians teach them as such because they know most of their young charges would never learn how to write a good, comprehensible sentence otherwise. The best writers in English have been violating such “rules” routinely for centuries. Literate contemporary writers still do so to “punch up” their writing or to achieve a friendlier, more natural, conversational tone. That tone, by the way, is ideal for most websites. Again: It’s all about giving your site a unique personality and voice.
If you must write your own copy – and, all kidding aside, we recognize that budget constraints or other factors may necessitate that – then do keep the above rules in mind. Consider this, too:
- Your writing will gain in persuasiveness when you follow Aristotle’s advice: Appeal to logic or emotion (whichever best suits your audience or the message at hand), and establish a tone that suggests either authority, trustworthiness, charisma, or some combination of the three.
- You want to keep your writing simple for the widest audience. But you also want to make it vivid. Paint word pictures. Use the standard rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, irony, paradox, puns, and parallelism.
- You’re not just writing for people but also for search engines. That means repeating often enough key words or phrases related to the topic of each Web page. Search engine spiders will hunt down these words and use them to determine how to rank your pages for specific keyword searches. (This is a rich topic in its own right – for another time and another blogger!)
Still need help? Talk with us at Cirrus ABS. We specialize in killer Web copy.
