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Writing for hummingbirds - the essentials of drill down copy
Scott Clark
Have you ever watched a hummingbird get breakfast? It darts
about staying but a few seconds on each perch before
disappearing in a blur. Imagine trying to sell your services to
this creature. Absurd, you say? Well, statistics show that
website visitors and humming birds have a lot in common: They're
flighty.
Website writing plays a bit part in how long a web visitor will
stick around, but is usually neglected. In the time and
budget-limited world of web design projects, existing text is
used verbatim from the last trade show handout or company
brochure. It's tempting to "re-purpose" hard-earned sales copy.
Copy and paste it to the website and visitors will love it.
Well, not usually. It's often shocking to hear when 90% of your
web visitors spend less than 15 seconds on a website. Even
targeted marketing campaigns can have only 25% of visitors stay
more than 30 seconds. When someone sees a mass of copy on one
page, they make an economic choice: "Do I have time to read all
of this?" This is reality and your website must deal with
it.
Get the main points out quickly - then, after they're perched,
show them the sweet stuff. I remember a t-shirt that said "Life
is short, eat your Derby Pie first" which makes sense in so many
ways here. So for web pages selling services, I like the
journalistic style known as the "inverted pyramid method." High
level selling points at top, followed by supporting copy (around
200-250 words) and then linkages to other pages to continue. You
can stop reading at any point along the way and get 80% of the
benefit of the information. The resulting structure looks like a
tree, and the path a visitor takes on that tree describes their
interest and intent.
Some advantages:
Major Points Made First, Details Available. Visitors with
greater interest are rewarded incrementally as desired, carrying
with them the big picture concept. If they are interrupted or
distracted, your site still gave them something to take away. If
you should want to provide a "printer friendly" version, you
should do that with Adobe Acrobat, and insert all information in
one PDF file for simple printing. Don't assume that your website
will print well right off the screen, as it usually doesn't.
Information is neatly sliced. Search engines have their own
economic decision to make when they visit your site. It is well
known that they have an easier time indexing each page properly
in this simplified layout. When optimizing a page, having only
one major theme to target usually results in better success, all
the way up and down the tree of your site.
Scrolling is reduced. While hot-rod mice make scrolling less
a burden than it used to be, many prefer to see everything
"above the fold." Make sure the continuation links also show
above the fold so they can find their way to the rest, and never
force them to scroll "sideways."
Individual concepts are linkable. Your sales emails can
casually link to areas of your website to support a comment.
Others linking to your site in their blogs can get closer to the
topic they're wanting to link to.
Web sitemaps can be constructed. A site map is a table of
contents for your website and search engines eat them like
Halloween candy. Google even has a way to feed your sitemap in a
sort of "fast-pass" around its normal process of rating sites.
When sections are sliced well, sitemaps just work better. In
addition, the off-screen Adobe Acrobat version can be structured
using Acrobat's Outline function, mirroring the site perfectly,
but still very printable.
Click-trails can be examined in statistics. You cannot track
the user's eyeballs (yet) over a huge block of text, so it's
hard to say what was interesting to a visitor. But when visitors
click towards the area of interest, you can track their intent
as subsequent pages are requested from the site.
The site can adjust itself on the fly. Ok, advanced topic:
By reviewing actions, dynamic websites can change the visitor's
experience on the fly. An example might be a website selling
equine insurance. The visitor who enters looking for Quarter
Horse products has no use for sections on Thoroughbreds. After a
few software-monitored clicks, the website morphs into a
full-blown Quarter Horse Insurance site with other breeds fading
quietly to the side. Suddenly you've multiplied your chances for
a sale several times over.
Lastly, while it's getting better, but it's still hard to find
good copywriters who understand the inverted pyramid. Often
those skilled in writing press releases are excellent at it.
Style guides for press releases are excellent training material
for this method as the goals are much the same. Perhaps a good
way to find someone is to interview writers over lunch. Then ask
the waiter to bring Derby pie before the main course. "Who
knows," you can say, "the place might catch fire!"
About the author:
Scott Clark is a website turn-around artist, author, and speaker
about web marketing and usability. His consulting firm is highly
sought after for Internet Marketing Strategy, website clinics
and critiques, and search engine strategy. He can be reached at
scott@websiteadvice.com or online at
http://www.sitecreations.com
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