Is Long and Hard Better?

December 18, 2008 · Filed Under Writing Copy

The ideal situation is to build your business for the long-term. You want to keep visitors coming to your site and for them to return. There are a number of points you should consider when copywriting for the web to keep your visitors on your site and increase the chances of conversion.

1) Keep your copy short.

Unless a visitor has been directed to a particular page on a site and is expecting detailed information, more often than not, they will only read 1 or 2 lines of the text before clicking off to go somewhere else. You have about 15 seconds to capture the visitor’s attention and keep them. The longer your text is, the less likely they will want to read it. You want to capture and hold their attention with an enticing headline. Which of the following headlines would get you attention:

“Put ads on your blog to make money.” or “7 Tips To Make Ads Perform Better On Your Blog.”

Why are you reading this article? Was it the headline?

2) Keep your copy simple.

Visitors should be able to understand what has been written on their first reading. They do not want to have to spend time thinking about what you have written. Rule #1 of website building and copywriting is “Don’t make me think.”

3) One idea at a time.

In most cases, you should be able to convey one key idea effectively in just one or two lines of writing. By writing any more than that, you are likely to ruin the chance of the first idea you are providing to get through to them. Paragraph length should be kept to two or three sentences.

By anticipating what your visitors want and covering it, they will look for the page that has the information. Give them the link to another page of your site where they can find it.

4) What if you do need to write long copy?

If you do need to write longer copy, organize it. Even if your visitors are expecting to find a page heavy with text, they may not actually be willing to read it. In order to help them, divide any distinct ideas you have into separate paragraphs. Provide them with useful headings, sub-headings and numbered or bulleted lists. This is a great way of introducing key ideas to them deliberately.

It is best to assume that not all the visitors to your site will read longer articles in their entirety. Write copy that they will be able to skim through and allows them to read the parts they are interested in.

Although longer copy should still be easy to read. You will find that those visitors to your site, who have difficulty understanding what you have written, will stop reading it. They will click back to the search engine to find another site.

If you are writing on a technical topic, tell your visitor at the beginning that it is a technical article, white paper, or thesis. This will allow them a few seconds for their brain to get up to speed.

(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

Loading ...

No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this post)

Related Posts

Don't Index My Pages Wednesday's technical post day. After my post about "Are Your Web Pages Indexed?" there was a comment left by Dante from www.datingattractionreviews.com asking "how do I keep some pages from being indexed and listed in the search results?". Before I attempt to answer his question I need to warn you......
Back Links and Web 2.0 Using Web 2.0 Resources to Get Back Links What is Web 2.0? This is a term coined a few years ago to describe the "new" interactive internet. Evolving web technologies allow people to get more involved with websites — gone are the days when all you could do on the......
Power Words III Go to Power Words I and/or Power Words II, if you missed those posts. You might as well start at the beginning. Well, by now you are thoroughly convinced of the importance of using power words to trigger the positive emotional responses of your customers. Please remember not to overdue......
How To Boost Your Conversion Rates How to Boost Your Conversion Rates In the previous posts this week we covered several ways to increase your website's search engine ranking and generating traffic. However, there is more to creating a profitable website than just getting traffic... you also have to convert this traffic into customers! Now, I've......
Profitable Keywords 2 Profitable Keywords - Another Method A subscriber left a comment on the original article "Finding Profitable Keywords" asking if there was a way to use the Google keyword tools to find the profitable keywords. The commentor didn't want to learn how to use new software like Traffic Travis and PPC......

Related Websites

Be Sociable with Wordpress Social Media Marketing! Theres a lot of ways you can leverage off social media marketing to build your business and increase traffic to your website. Social media marketing is a form of viral marketing. How that might look is simply this - the visitor to your site has read your stuff and......
Will Free Website Traffic In Reality Increase Your Current Internet Enterprise? If you could have ever tried to create totally free targeted traffic to your site? You most likely spend hours upon hours surfing in order to create credits so that you could screen more details. Most with the time, it is real drudgery that may earn you really couple of......
Corporate Blogging May Be Right For You If you are trying to get more consumers interested in your products and your company in general, you may want to consider adding a corporate blog to your website. These are quickly becoming very popular and thousands of companies have found that they are an incredibly effective means of adding......
Prefab Wednesday - Blogging The Construction Of A Res4 Architecture Prefab. Over at the blog A Prefab Project you can follow along with the construction diary of prefab cabin in Lost River, West Virginia. It is supposed to be finished the beginning of this month, so hopefully they will put up some finished photographs very soon. The blog was started back......
8 Sites That Turns Your Web Traffic Into Cash Turns Your Web Traffic Into Cash [ad#adstext1] After chosen a host, getting a domain and put decent amount of content in a blog, You want to earn some money from your sites visitors. One way is to put up some advertising on your web pages. Another way is advertise the......