Facttactic

how to write great web page headlines

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Headlines may be the most important words on your website.

No matter how great the content of a web page or blog post, if your headline doesn’t grab people’s attention, you’ll lose them.

Promise a benefit

“A compelling headline must promise some kind of benefit or reward for the reader, in trade for the valuable time it takes to read more,” says Copyblogger’s Brian Clark.

Read more from Brian at How to write headlines that work.

Researchers from Marketing Experiments have a similar view: “All marketing messages must be centered primarily on the interests of the customer. Therefore, when it comes to crafting headlines, emphasize what the visitor gets rather than what they must do.”

Plus “the goal of a headline is similar to the goal of the opening scene of a movie — to arrest the visitor’s attention and get them into the first paragraph” so “place the value at the front of the headline”.

Details on the Marketing Experiments research is here.

Write for search engines as well as humans

Tips for writing headlines that appeal to search engines are at How to write web headlines that catch search engine spiders.

Writer Shawn Smith says make headlines clear, concise and short, and have them include keywords and phrases relevant to the article and what people are likely to search for.

how to hook your readers with words

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A winning headline is important to attract readers to your web page or blog. But how do you make sure they read on?!

Here’s a summary of views from some experienced bloggers and web writers.

Australian Darren Rowse, founder and editor of ProBlogger, says your opening line really does matter: “Readers will make a snap decision about whether to read your post by how you open that post, both in the headline or title and the opening line.”

Read more from Darren at 10 tips for opening your next blog post.

Danny Iny of Firepole Marketing, in the United States, says “describe in vivid detail the current, frustrating experience of your intended reader. Then, at the very end, you hint that you have a solution, by saying something like ‘It doesn’t have to be this way …’, or ‘Here’s how you can fix it’, or ‘Here’s why some people don’t have this problem.’“

Read more from Danny at A fool-proof formula for easily creating compelling content.

Melanie Lundheim, a freelance writer and founder of Good Copy Fast, says when thinking about what will make your readers “need” to read on, see if you can “invoke a strong emotion among members of your audience, and… strike on their pain points.”

Read more from Melanie at Writing for conversion: the hook, line and sinker method.

Debbie Weil, an online marketing and corporate blogging consultant in the United States, says “you have to reveal enough information to make the reader long for more of the same.”

Debbie has tips on writing an online hook at 5 tips to write a sexy teaser.

new directions in technical communication

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This October, I’m speaking at the Technical Communicators Association of NZ (TCANZ) biennial conference.

The conference theme of new directions in technical communication will, hopefully, be boosted by my 60-minute contribution looking at professional pathways and careers for technical communicators in New Zealand.

If that all sounds a bit dry, don’t worry, my session is hopefully going to be more rock and roll meets user manuals than didactic lecture! Do come along — you’ll have fun and learn stuff.

The two-day, Auckland conference features some world-class speakers from the United States and Australia (Saul Carliner, Anne Gentle, Neil James) and a great bunch of very clued-up Kiwi presenters. Registrations open on 1 July.

I’d encourage all technical communicators to attend. The last TCANZ conference in 2010 was very well run and totally relevant. You can expect more of the same this year.

content and happy about content development

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Managing the content creation for new websites can be a crazy jumble of emails, spreadsheets, Word documents, draft pages, missing-in-action writers and management demands, so I was very pleased this morning to be pointed towards a sweet-looking, online tool for keeping the whole shebang orderly and workable …

Gather Content is a content management tool that looks to have all the features I’d need for my next project. Everyone works in the same system and all revisions are visible and shareable.

Ok, yes, haha, I haven’t actually tried the system yet, but the promise of content development clarity was a bit of a beacon that pulled me in.

Although, with recent news that Chinese will soon overtake English as the main language of the internet, maybe it would be of greater value to learn Mandarin before investing in a new English-language tool!

(In the past decade, English has shrunk from being 39 percent of all internet content down to just 27 per cent at the end of 2011, just 3 per cent ahead of Chinese, which has grown 11 per cent in the past 6 or so years.)

sharing’s caring — useful online document services

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In our work we spend a lot of time sending written documents back and forwards with our clients, and sometimes email just doesn’t cut it, especially if we want to send large documents or collaborate on writing.

Luckily there is a huge range of free, online tools to help make it easier to share information and collaborate online. Here’s a good list of some useful services [Read more…]

be the editor of your own online newspaper

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I like the idea behind the Paper.li service. It lets you easily set up and automatically send feeds from Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and RSS into a pre-built online newspaper.

Every day Paper.li monitors your feeds and from them builds a newspaper-like page of clearly laid out articles with headlines, photos and links, and sends you the latest edition. (You can also manually add any web content you like to a newspaper.)

If you like the content you receive, simply push a button and send it to your social media followers; or if you are confident your feeds will always provide relevant information, you can set the paper to automatically send itself out every day. People can also subscribe to your newspaper.

There are hundreds of thousands of papers around the world.

The paper.li site has a community area with tips and hints on how to use the service. [Read more…]

being an online local

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Back in the day, an online presence was all about being easily seen and found by a wide audience. It’s interesting now to watch moves by many real-world businesses to use the net to communicate with local audiences — people in their own city or even their own neighbourhood.

You may also have noticed that Google searches have local searches showing up more often.

So what does this all mean if you want to communicate via your website with local people?

The first step is to have locality-based information in your page copy, links and titles. [Read more…]

technical writer — new website

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Our technical writing services now live on their own website. The site has the very original name of www.technical-writer.co.nz! 

The aim of www.technical-writer.co.nz is just to give our technical writing services their own identity. They’re a very important part of what we do but very different from our PR activities.

If you’re in Wellington (or anywhere in New Zealand, for that matter), check out our new website, or even visit our original technical writing web page.

case studies — what are they good for?

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Well-structured case studies are a powerful and easy way to show the results you achieve for your clients and establish your credibility.

Case studies are typically a written article about work you have done for your clients — the input you provided and the results your work got in providing your clients with benefits they did not have before.

Case studies are great to help:

  • highlight your skills and your ability to deliver successful solutions to your clients.
  • build your credibility by showing the organisations who have hired you or bought your products.
  • build strong relations with the case study clients by giving them free publicity and promoting their work.

[Read more…]

say what? … how easy to read is your web content?

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Simple, concise language, short sentences and plenty of sub-headings are key to making a website easy to read, according to all the research. But how can you tell if you’ve done a good job in writing your web content?

I’ve just come across this great tool to measure and rank the readability of your web content: The Readability Test tool.

I found it in this very useful article on best practice tips for improving web content.  I recommend this article as a good start to anyone wondering how to tidy up their website.

And how did this site rank?! The tool said it should be easily understood by 15 to 16 year olds. Not quite our target market! … but we think we need to get it down even lower to around the 12-13 years age  group. We want it to be quickly and very easily understood by very busy people.

Here’s a page of links to tons of high-quality papers and essays about how users read on the Web and how authors should write their web pages.

Some high-level information about web writing is here.