timothy howard november 1, 2012

Timothy HowardNovember 1, 2012

GOOD

Good copy makes a big difference

Website Content1. Text2. Images3. Audio4. Video5. Attachments

Content: Relevant & Searchable

• By Humans– Easy to navigate with

language geared towards your customers

• By Spiders– Search engines use

programs to ‘crawl’ websites to index content

Speak Your Customers’ Language

Nursery

Irrigation System

It’s What You Say & How You Say It!• Make sure your website content is interesting, has

a purpose, and gives your readers a “call to action”

– Call us– Come back – Visit us– Tell someone else– Signup for our e-

newsletter

– Buy our product• Online

– Our site or others• At Retail

– Our place or others

– Signup for our e-newsletter

How do calls to action work?

A Click = ‘Tell me more’

Number of Clicks

Amou

nt o

f Inf

orm

ation

Upside Down Funnel ConceptHome Page

Plant Category

Plant Detail Page

All Plants

Home Page

All Plants

Perennials

Plant Details

What Makes Good Web Content?• Think of a few sites that you like to visit again

and again. What makes you keep coming back? – Quality Articles• Current• Timeless

– Tutorials– Great Deals– Fuels a Passion

• Scanable Text is Critical

How to Write Good Web Content• Keywords. You've worked hard on these keywords; make them

stand out (bold, different font, headlines, etc.)• Clear titles. Make it painfully clear what you are going to talk

about. It's fun to be clever and cute, but it can backfire on you. Search engine spiders won’t understand cutsy puns, sarcasim or out of the ordinary slang terms.

• Be short and sweet. Don’t try to prove you’re a Rhodes Scholar with polysyllabic words. One key idea per paragraph.

• Kill the Fluff. Do you like to slog through a bunch of sales language to get to the meat of a story? Well, neither will your readers. Don't inflate your writing with a lot of hot air; keep it down to earth.

Practice makes….

• Writing quality website content is not easy• You won’t master it overnight• Give yourself some time• Practice a lot• Read a lot– Other sites – you know good copy when you read it– Your site – read it from your customers point of view• Better yet, have other objective people (with a spine) read

it and let you know what they think.

You better than you were before

Putting Technology in perspective….

Leading edge can be bleeding edge. Focus on practical solutions.

Questions?

Comments?

Thank you for your time. Timothy Howard

Clarity Connect, Inc.360 Raleigh St.

Holly Springs, NC 27540timothy@clarity-connect.com

www.Clarity-Connect.com

A copy of all of todays presentations can be found at:www.clarity-connect.com/presentations

Through Monday, November 4th