Jakob Nielsen, the famous web usability guru, says people don’t read online—they scan.

Unlike some gurus, Nielsen has facts to back up his proclamations. He actually observes how humans interact with a website, so there’s good reason to listen to him.

He’s amassed a lot of good data, and if you could summarize all of it into one idea, it’s that people online are looking for specific, reliable information. And they’re usually in a hurry. Good SEO will get people to your site but if the page where they arrive doesn’t quickly satisfy the need that drove them to the Web, you lose them.

Nielsen also points out that your site visitors don’t think like you. They don’t share your knowledge or assumptions so testing copy effectiveness with people outside the company is an important step.

This link goes to the web page template I use to remind me of these points (and some others).

Trying something different to reach your audience...and get better response rates.

Sometimes we’re too close to what we’re doing to see how it could be better. Thanks to my position as an outsider on my client's project, it only took me about two hours on Monday to help him get a 200%+ lift in responses on an email campaign. He was trying to reach C-level execs on Sales Force.

He was grateful and I was really glad to help, but my point is that my distance from his project has at least as much to do with our success as my writing skill. I’m increasingly convinced that everyone could be a 10X better communicator if they would take just these three steps:

1. Write down what you know about the audience you’re trying to reach in as much detail as possible

2. Write down what you want that audience to know and/or do as a result of reading your message.

3. Put these away for a few days and when you come back to your document, put yourself in your audience’s shoes before you start writing. Consider where they’ll be when they receive your message, what other things will be pulling on their attention, and what you could say—as shortly and sweetly as possible—to get them to take the action you want them to take.

If you don’t have a few days to kill, get help from someone (friend, spouse, customer, colleague), ideally outside your company. Show them your lists from items 1 and 2 above and then ask them what they see as the key benefit/message/etc.

When you're ready to write, focus on that ONE key message and explain it in concrete detail as quickly as possible. (Freewriting is a good way to access some good right-brain insights on how to do this.)

In the case of my client, we asked a favor (“could you forward this info to the appropriate person?”) and built the subject line and message based on that request. For an audience of CXOs who are receiving pitches everyday, requesting a favor stands out from an inbox full of catchy subject lines marketing features and benefits.

If your offering is so “innovative” & “cutting-edge,” why are you describing it with the same tired language everyone else uses to explain theirs?

For starters, words like “solution,” and “proprietary” put your audience to sleep. They rely on the same tired ideas everyone else is using to market their product. Someone shopping for what you’re selling has already read these claims a dozen times by the time they arrive at your site. It’s a good way to blend in with the competition and numb your audience’s brains.

Even more dangerous is what using these words does to the quality of your own thinking about your offering. Our thoughts are manifested by the language we use. If you’re bilingual, you know, some words can’t be translated between languages; in fact, some thoughts can’t truly exist without the words we need to say them to ourselves.

When you think about your offering in the same terms as your competition, you’re numbing your own brain too, and missing an opportunity to make a fresh statement that will attract a prospect’s attention.

“Solution” is a great example of a word that creates white noise. It has its place, but if it shows up more than once on a webpage, it’s a clear sign that your copy needs to be more concretely descriptive. What words could you substitute that rely on the senses? What does a customer see, hear, feel, taste or smell when their problem is solved?

Put yourself in your reader’s shoes for a minute… Why are you spending your valuable time doing research online? What do you hope to accomplish? Now read the home page—or a relevant landing page—on your website, and then look at your competitors’ sites.

Differentiating your offering by describing it in bright, juicy language—the kinds of words that paint a picture for your readers—will help them see they’ve arrived at a website that’s worth their time and that they’ve found a company that understands their problem.

Want to see some lists of words to eliminate (or at least consider carefully before using)?

Look here and here.

I stumbled across this interesting article, "Five Reasons to Keep a Work Diary". To a writer, of course, this sounds like a good idea, but it’s actually worthwhile advice for anyone.

The idea is that a few minutes of recording what worked and what didn't, before you close up shop, gives you a “do-over”—a new way to look at the day, learn from it and see that maybe it wasn’t as bad as you thought.

Have you ever had a “shower moment”? All you have to do in there is bathe, and with so little demand on your brain, a brilliant new idea can present itself without your conscious mind blocking it.

Writing about your work day—even for as little as ten minutes—pushes your brain into new ways of expressing itself. It works differently than a shower moment but the results are the same. By re-structuring your thoughts in the form of text, insights that would otherwise be lost come to the fore.

Maybe you wrestled mightily—to no avail—with a way to communicate your idea to your team or a customer. Spending ten minutes to freewrite about it opens pathways in your brain you couldn’t see when the high weeds of the day were too thick to push through.

Aggravated by a phone call that went badly? Re-living it on paper (or your monitor) will reveal clues for setting the situation on better footing—or reveal that it didn’t go as badly as you thought.

Hate writing? Make your work diary an oral one. Use a Dictaphone (or your smart phone—surely there’s an app for that). On your drive home, babble incoherently into the thing and listen back later. The act of verbally confiding to your recorder can also free your mind. You may find yourself, mid-rant, coming upon a gem of genius.

According to the author of the article, Richard Branson wrote his bestsellers by referring back to and reworking his daily diary ruminations. Who knows? By the end of 365 ten-minute work diary entries, you may find you have the foundation of a book, or an e-book.

The trick is disciplining yourself to do it, especially on a bad day, but I've tried it and this kind of daily reflection really does pay you back for the effort.

The Radio Ad Bureau (RAB), a trade marketing body for radio, has released “Media and the Mood of the Nation,” a document they’re referring to as a study.

According to RAB, respondents to their survey recorded a 100 percent increase in happiness when listening to the radio, compared to not consuming any type of media at all. RAB surveyed 1,000 people in Great Britain to collect this data.

Certainly the Radio Ad Bureau has nothing to gain by developing a biased questionnaire comprising a number of leading questions about how great the radio-listening experience is—and then using it to conduct “research.” Nowhere on their website is there any detail on how their study was conducted.

I’m sure this isn’t the most blatant example of this sort of publicity strategy but it’s really sticking in my craw today. The worst part is that The Telegraph, The Daily Mail and American Public Media’s Marketplace blog among others covered its publication—and they all did so with a straight face, presenting it as useful information. (You can see The Telegraph's story here.)

I don’t fault RAB for it on one level: it seems to have been fairly effective—especially if you believe that there’s no such thing as bad press, but are news outlets that bereft of real news? To run news articles on this “study”—really? Do these publications have that many readers who are that lacking in critical thinking skills?

From a less agitated perspective, this approach is not so different than what content farms are doing to play the search engines, cranking out “content” purely to draw eyeballs to pages full of ads. I just wonder that the RAB isn’t embarrassed to present their schlocky report.

Probably their marketing department would say, "our site traffic and mentions in the press are up," in other words, the ends justify the means. I’d say, credibility is becoming a powerful differentiator.