My company, Articulate Marketing, helps big tech companies communicate better about their products and services. A large part of my work is writing editorial-style content for websites. My credentials are my work for HP, Microsoft, eBay and others.

In the past couple of weeks, several people have asked me for advice about becoming a web copywriter, so here it is:

1. Learn to write well

The first thing is to become a good writer. You can become better by writing more and being mindful while you do it. This means writing at least 1,000 words a day. It also means constantly thinking about how to be a better writer as you do it. Several techniques have worked well for me:

• Look at good and bad copy on other people’s sites and analyse why it works or doesn’t work. This is also a good trick to get you started on a new assignment.
• Apply the techniques of other media, in particular newspaper journalism.
• Get an independent proofreader. Not only is this a time saver but it can save you from embarrassing typos. I work with Sarah Bee and, mainly, Fullproof. (But not for my blog - I’m too cheap!)
• Get a writer’s bookshelf. I recommend The Pyramid Principle, The Economist Style Guide, Writing to Deadline (also see my 10-minute summary of the book), Stephen King’s On Writing (yes, really!) and Strunk and White. Read and inwardly digest.
• There are some useful online reference sites too.
• Read good writing. Most web copy is non-fiction prose so I recommend reading good non-fiction prose. The New Yorker, The Economist, Slate, The Atlantic Monthly are all good places to start. Of course, read the trade papers of your target market too.
• Learn how to concentrate on writing.
• Do you want to know the short cut to really good writing that rings true for readers? Simple: good interviews with smart people translated into readable prose. That’s it. Learn how to interview someone.
• Read Bad Language. Yes, I know this is self-promotion but I have written hundreds of thousands of words about the kind of writing I do on this site. You can’t beat the price.

2. Know your subject

The secret of making reasonable money at writing is to find a niche and become an expert. Nobody asks for the cheapest brain surgeon. The more expertise you can demonstrate, the less risky the assignment becomes for your client AND the more efficiently you can produce the work. It’s a win-win situation.

That doesn’t mean you have to stay in one area forever. I started out writing business journalism for magazines like Director and Real Business, then I wrote about aviation and did some cool techie stuff for Wired and Popular Science. It’s more a case not trying to take on any job, on any subject.

What to start with? Easy. What are you interested in? What do you know about? What do you like reading about? What are you curious about? Make a list and pick two or three areas to begin with. See what comes up.

Once you have some traction in a given area, look for ways to expand your knowledge. Trade shows are a great way to immerse yourself in a topic. Do lots of interviews with people inside your client - more than you need to - so you find out more about their world. Read the trade press. If you can, try the products or services yourself.

3. Learn to write for the web

The key thing to remember - tattoo it on the inside of your eyelids and never forget it - is that writing for the web is not the same as writing for print. Here are some tips: Avoid PDFs, shorter by about 50 per cent compared to print, free of hype or marketing polyfiller, free of long words and jargon, written for scanning: bullets, highlighting, shorter paragraphs.

• Read books on usability: Homepage Usability: 50 Homepages Deconstructed, Prioritzing Web Usability, Don’t Make Me Think.
• Erect an altar to Jakob Nielsen and visit his website: www.useit.com. Even better, go to one of NNGroup’s conferences.
• Look at good and bad writing online. Read online with a critical eye.
• Learn about how websites are built. Build one yourself, if you can. If not, spend time with a website design company - volunteer your services for free if they’ll teach you.

4. Market yourself

If you build it, they will NOT come. You have to get out there and tell people about what you do and ask them for their business. The good news is that good online copywriting is a rare, beautiful thing. There is a market. Open doors by asking the question: ‘are you happy with the copy on your website?’

• Get a website and a proper email address. No-one is going to take you seriously as a web writer if you don’t know how to do this and rely on a Yahoo! or Google Mail address.
• Get a professional website. You don’t have to spend a lot of money (I built mine for nothing using HTML. It’s not perfect but doing it myself shows that I know something about how a website is built.)
• Get a blog. This is part-showcase, part-playground. Learn to blog like a pro.
• Learn to say no. Not all work is good work. There are crooks out there who will try to get you to work for peanuts. Just say no. Also, try to avoid busy-work. Stuff that makes you think you’re working hard but just doesn’t pay well enough to justify itself. Better to spend more time marketing yourself to the right people to get work at the right price. Sometimes copywriting isn’t the right answer for clients.
• Read my 27 proven freelance marketing tips.

5. It’s a business, stupid

Never forget that you have to make your income exceed your expenditure and that if you run out of cash and you have bills to pay, you’re bankrupt. Along the way, it would be nice to have a roof over your head, food to eat and some toys. In other words, never forget that you’re running a business.

• Work hard. Get up early. Work late. Concentrate. Drink tea.
• Business plan. You need a proper plan. Mine is typically 2-4 pages and I use it to set goals, benchmark progress and think through potential problems. I update it regularly.
• Read The Beermat Entrepreneur and Sales on a Beermat. They are simple, easy-to-read guides to starting out on your own. Not everything in them applies to a one-person business but they’re best books of their type that I’ve read.
• Be clear about your prices. Tell them how much you’re worth. Don’t wait for them to tell you how much they want to pay. The simple rule for figuring out your daily rate is to work out how much you want to earn and divide by the number of days a year that you are willing to work, after deducting sufficient time for marketing and admin. There are about 240 working days in a year and you’ll want to spend about one day a week on non-billable stuff.
• Big little company. Aim to be a big little company. By this I mean, use technology to give you the same resources as a really big company. For example, LogoWorks can do a Wolff Olins for your brand for as little as $99. TimeBridge can take the place of a diary secretary. See Tools for Writing on this site for more ways to out-big your competitors.
• Don’t be afraid of big companies. Selling to multinationals is easier than you think and often less grief than dealing with smaller companies.
• Better briefs. Make sure that you have agreed the basics in writing. A detailed brief can avoid a lot of misunderstandings. Nearly every problem project of mine started with an unclear or non-existent brief. Do as I say, not as I do!
• Traffic management. When you get a job, book the time to do it. Don’t miss deadlines. Don’t let things fall through the cracks. Time is somewhat elastic when you’re self-employed because you can work late or over the weekend, but you can’t do two weeks’ work in three days. As you become more successful, this kind of traffic management will become increasingly important.
• Don’t hire anyone. Subcontractors are okay but staff need offices, pensions, healthcare and management. Why bother? Believe me, I’ve done the CEO bit and it’s much more fun and much more profitable to stay as a company of one.

6. Other relevant links on this site

• Buzzwords from hell
• Rules of thumb for writing
• How to surprise and delight readers
• How to be a freelance journalist

If you enjoyed this article or found it useful, please Digg it using the buttons below and I’ll be your friend.

I’m starting a new feature on Bad Language - an agony column. This is inspired by guilty pleasure Dear Prudence on Slate. If you have any pressing problems, please send them to me and I’ll do my best to answer them. Feel free to add your own advice and comments to this post.  (And Digg it too please!)

Dear Uncle Matthew,

I have an ongoing debate with one of my suppliers regarding quotes.  Of course, I win since he’s a supplier, but I don’t want that to be the only reason.  He always insists that the quote should begin with the name of the person being quoted.  Smith said, etc. 

Says it helps the reporter or editor see at a glance who is saying it. My position is that it’s more important to start a line with something interesting being said and the reporter or editor can find who is being quoted without any problem (unless we’ve written a shamefully long quote). 

Also, I like quotes to be two short and interesting phrases or lines, with “said Smith” as the breather in between, not a solid block of copy.  Do you have an opinion on this or does it seem silly to you?  Thanks.

- Unquotable

Dear Unquotable,

“I agree with you,” said Matthew Stibbe, Writer in Chief at Articulate Marketing. “Sometimes a run-on quote can be useful too.”

Your supplier says that putting the name before the quote makes life easier for a report or editor. But who are you writing for? Never forget the readers! Your job is to make their life as easy as possible.

- Uncle Matthew

David Bradley pointed out that my assertion that tea should be made with freshly boiled water was, scientifically, untenable.  I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to. For me, perhaps, tea is a faith-based beverage.

I went looking for support. Invoking literature over science, I turned to George Orwell only to be badly let down.

“Some people add that one should only use water that has been freshly brought to the boil, but I have never noticed that it makes any difference.”

I should have known. He disapproves of sugar in tea but I like it. Heretic. (And the Royal Society of Chemistry disagrees with him on a few points too.  They recommend milk in first.)

I interviewed Edward Bramah a few years ago (he of the very visitable Bramah Museum of Tea and Coffee) and I’m pretty he sure he said to use freshly boiled water. I can’t find my notes so I can’t be certain.

This week I am mostly drinking Lapsang Souchong from Mariage Frères.

I work from home and I’ve added a lot of kit over the past year - media centre, new printer, file server, wireless routers and so on. But my energy bill has risen from £25 a month to £140.  Ouch! 

I buy my electricity from Good Energy so it is all 100% renewable. They charge 2-3 pence extra per kWh compared to regular suppliers but, as I understand it, they are the only supplier in the UK that gets all of its energy from wind farms.

Even so, £140 a month hurts.  A lot.  It was time to get medieval on my electricity bill. Here’s how I cut my energy consumption by approximately 40%.

• Measure, measure, measure. You can’t reduce what you can’t measure.  So I bought an efergy Energy Saving Meter (Amazon link). It costs £45 but it’s the heart of my cost reduction strategy. You clip it onto the live cable that comes out of your electricity meter. Don’t worry, you don’t need an electrician and it is perfectly safe. It takes about 30 seconds to do it. It wirelessly transmits the energy going through the meter every six seconds to a handheld, portable display. You can get readouts measured in cumulative kWh, current consumption in kW, CO2 emissions and cost per hour. The great thing is that you can take the display anywhere in the house and see the effect of switching things off in real time.
• Eliminate the unnecessary. When I first switched on the unit, I was consuming about 1.3 kW.  It turns out that there were a lot of things in the house that were plugged in permanently that didn’t need to be. Toothbrush chargers, spare bedroom alarm clocks, an unused DAT drive on the server, a TV and Xbox that we rarely used etc. etc.  Going round the house and switching all this stuff off cut out about 0.2 kW.
• Better networking kit. I replaced two wireless routers with a Netgear WNR854T. This has better range than the old ones so that it could cover the whole house on its own. Plus, because it is Wireless-N compatible, it will work with the next generation of wireless kit at speeds up to 300 Mb/s. It has a 4-way gigabit switch in it so I was also able to ditch one of my old Netgear switches.  This replaced three devices that each had a power supply with just one.
• Bye Bye Standby. Next I wanted to tackled the dozen or so phone chargers, home cinema boxes, TVs and computer equipment that I needed most of the time but which had to be switched off when it wasn’t in use. This is where the Bye Bye Standby comes in. It costs £20-25 per kit. It’s a small remote control that lets you switch plugs on and off remotely. The starter kit comes with three plugs and one remote but I found that I needed two kits. If you plug a power supply strip into a plug, you can switch three or four devices off at once. I have one on my home cinema, on my power chargers, on the Sonos boxes in a couple of rooms, on my strip of phone and camera chargers etc. etc. At night, all I do is switch everything off.  This accounts for another 0.2-0.3 kW of consumption.
   
• PC Power Management. I set my PC and my wife’s to go into sleep mode after 30m and to switch off the display after 10 minutes. Hard to judge the total savings because we use our computers at different times. However, the computers consume 0.2-ish kW more when running than when sleeping, so I’m anticipating a good saving if only because they will go to sleep overnight automatically.
• Better behaviour. I’m trying not to overfill the kettle. I love tea (see Tools for writing: a nice cup of tea) and I hate limescale. So I boil the kettle with fresh water every time. Using a water filter means that I can fill the kettle with less water, avoid limescale build up and still get a clean cuppa.  The worst energy consumers though, are the oven, dishwasher and washing machine. They use 4 or 5 kW each when running. My eyes have opened to the value of the microwave and eco-friendly settings on the other devices.
• Longer term. I’ve got the “resting” power consumption of the house down to around 0.5 kW (from 1.3 kW on average before the campaign). Once I factor in the major appliances which only run a few times a week, I reckon this is about a 40% saving.  But I’m not done.  I’m planning to upgrade my wife’s PC and I’ll get her one of the ultra-low power consumption HP models. I’m looking for an Energy Star 4.0 compliant machine with an 80% efficient power supply.  When I upgrade my server later this year, I’ll want something much more energy efficient.  We have a few energy-efficient bulbs but as the other ones fail, I’m going to replace all the bulbs in the house with low-power ones.

I watched The Apprentice last night. The task involved presenting ideas for a greetings card to three different card shops. Both teams botched the presentations monumentally.  Why?

• Too formal.
• Hectoring.
• Talking but not listening.
• Too much machismo masking too little self-confidence.
• Standing up.
• Humourless.
• Dependent on the script.
• Too little preparation.
• (Probably) too long and verbose.
• Using jargon and clichés.
• Inappropriate use of rhetoric. In one case, the presented lapsed into the worst kind of green hectoring with rhetorical questions (”Did you know that…”). It just alienates people.

In short, they turned into monsters. Unrecognisable as human beings. Totally unfriendly, untrustworthy and boring. It’s a common problem.

Last week, I saw a presentation that worked really well. The future of the internet and how to stop it by Jonathan Zittrain at the RSA. (Download the MP3 version.) It was witty, relaxed, informal, engaging and while he did use PowerPoint, there was no text on the slides only pictures. As my old history tutor might have said, you can use PowerPoint like a drunk uses a lamp post - for illumination or support but not both at the same time. What worked for him:

• Good jokes
• A compelling story that builds an argument
• Responsiveness to the audience
• Friendliness
• Obvious mastery of the subject and willing to go into more detail on different points
• A quarter of the allotted time given over to questions
• Jargon- and cliché-free

My wife’s theatre company, C Company, is running a course today for a London PR firm. The actors in her company all train in the Meisner technique. Its central tenet is responsiveness which means putting your attention on the other person and adjusting your own acting in response to them. The catchphrase is “living truthfully under a given set of circumstances raised to the optics of the theatre.”  It’s an interesting sidelight on the whole question. 

Perhaps it’s applicability to presentations is summer up by the quote from Wikipedia: “Solid preparation supports the spontaneity, an idea articulated by Martha Graham when she wrote, ‘I work eight hours a day, every day, so that in the evenings I can improvise.’”

(As an aside, it was depressing to watch one team argue for three hours about whether ‘National Singles’ Day’ should have an apostrophe and if so, where?  They even rang the editor of the Daily Telegraph for advice. What do they teach in schools?)

Whether or not to capitalise the word ‘internet’ provokes occasional debate. I used to capitalise and then Wired announced that they were not going to do so, I changed too. I figured they knew. However, I still see it capitalised in mainstream magazines and some clients insist on capitalising it.

For capitalising Internet

• It’s a kind of place and places are proper nouns that get capitalised.
• Lots of other people do it.
• There are lots of internets (networks of networks) but only one Internet.
• According to Wikipedia (not a wholly reliable source) The New  York Times, Associated Press, Communications of the ACM and Time capitalise.

Against capitalising internet

• Capital letters are speed bumps for the eyes when reading. Like unnecessary punctuation, they should be eliminated where possible. (Some clients like to capitalise all Nouns and especially Multi-Word Nouns. Maybe they are German.)
• As Wired says “That it transformed human communication is beyond dispute. But no more so than moveable type did in its day. Or the radio. Or television.”
• According to Wikipedia, The Economist, The Financial Times and The Times do not capitalise.

My instinct is that the trend is towards the lower case. Certainly, that’s my preference. Welcome to the internet.

Kudos to BBC Four. Their medieval season got off to a great start with Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press. But I particularly love the medieval/psychadelic trail for the series with Jimi Hendrix’s classic played on historical instruments. You can watch all the programmes online.

It’s been a good week for techno-medievalists with Melvyn Bragg covering the Norman conquest in In Our Time.

I studied all this stuff when I was at college and it’s really satisfying to see well-made TV shows that deal with complex historical stories rather than the endless archeology programs they run on the mainstream channels.  BBC Four may have an audience of one person - me - but I love it.

It’s inspired me. If the weather’s good, I’m flying off to York tomorrow to look at the Minster and the Shambles and do a bit of time travelling.

“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs,” said Kenneth Clark at the end of his classic TV series Civilisation.

I was struck by this when I watched the series years ago and it rattles around in my brain quite often.

In countries, companies and, yes, individual lives the importance of confidence, of morale is critical to success but often overlooked.

Just today, I came across William Slim’s book Defeat into Victory on my bookshelf. He stands alongside Montgomery as one of the outstanding British generals of World War II. But since he was self-effacing by nature and fought the ‘forgotten war’ in the Far East, he had less fame than Monty. He deserved more.

It fell open at a well-marked page which I think captures the point better than I ever could. He is writing about a time in the war when the British were on the back foot in Burma and things, generally, were very bleak.

Morale is a state of mind. It is that intangible force which will move a whole group of men to give their last ounce to achieve something, without counting the cost to themselves; that makes them feel they are part of something greater than themselves. … I remember sitting in my office and tabulating these foundations of morale something like this:

1. Spritual

(a) There must be a great and noble object.

(b) Its achievement must be vital.

(c) The method of achievement must be active, aggressive.

(d) The man must feel that what he is and what he does matters directly towards the attainment of the object.

2. Intellectual

(a) He must be convinced that the object can be attained; that it is not out of reach

(b) He must see, too, that the organization to which he belongs and which is striving to attain the object is an efficient one.

(c) He must have confidence in his leaders and know that whatever dangers and hardships he is called upon to suffer, his life will not be lightly flung away.

3. Material

(a) The man must feel that he will get a fair deal from his commanders and from the army generally.

(b) He must, as far as humanly posssible, be given the best weapons and equipment for his task.

(c) His living and working conditions must be made as good as they can be.

Substitute ‘company’ for ‘army’ and ‘career’ for ‘life’ and change ‘he’ to ‘he or she’ and I think you have a pretty good recipe for creating an extraordinary company.

Introducing Google’s latest feature: Gmail Custom Time.

Just click "Set custom time" from the Compose view. Any email you send to the past appears in the proper chronological order in your recipient’s inbox. You can opt for it to show up read or unread by selecting the appropriate option.

Wait, I’m just checking my inbox and there’s an email from Future-Matthew in it.  It says, "Look at your calendar.  What day is it?"

I was asked to join the advisory board of the UK’s Business Superbrands project. The book just came out and it included this article, which I wrote for them about the use of writing as a branding tool. Regular blog readers will recognise several themes but I enjoyed writing this article for them because it weaves everything together nicely.

Companies lavish great sums on ads, branding and websites. But they give less thought to the everyday writing they create. I’m not talking about copywriting in adverts. That’s poetry. I’m talking about prose. The humdrum stuff of daily business life: press releases, contracts, marketing collateral, website content and the rest.

I believe that writing is a fundamental part of a brand. Finding a corporate voice and using it consistently adds weight and distinctiveness to a brand. Companies that neglect their writing risk short-changing their brand.

Google is a role model. It is no coincidence that it has a very consistent style and that its writing echoes the brand. Google’s home page is nothing but words, after all. Most people concentrate on the button “Google Search.” Those two words define what Google does but the other button, “I’m Feeling Lucky,” is more subtle. It reassures me that I’ll find what I’m looking for. It tells me “I” am in charge. It radiates optimism. These few words tell me a lot about the Google brand.

Google’s word-branding goes deeper than its home page – it permeates everything they do. Its terms and conditions also talk straight to the reader (“Thank you for trying out Google Desktop! Google Desktop is made available to you by Google Inc….”). It tells you what’s important (When you enable advanced features it said “Please read this carefully, it’s not the usual yada yada”).

Reinforcing the brand

Good writing, like Google’s, enhances a brand in different ways. It can reinforce the reader’s idea of what the brand stands for. For example, Virgin Atlantic shares the Virgin brand’s cheeky irreverence. Tired by a long flight? “Pretend you’re already there,” says Virgin Atlantic. Bored by safety announcements? Watch a cartoon instead.

On a more practical level, good writing can increase sales. Amazon’s login screen has a big friendly button which says “Sign in using our secure server”. This reassures me that Amazon will keep my details safe. Similarly, on the penultimate page of the checkout process it says “you can review this order before it’s final” right under the “Continue” button. Amazon has analysed where and why people stop buying and they’ve added these cues to get more people through the process.

Breaking faith

In contrast to Amazon, Virgin and Google’s success, most corporate-speak is bland, undifferentiated and hard to read. Meaning is obscured by jargon, waffle, hype, verbiage, legalese and conventionality.

The cost of bad writing far outweighs the value created by good writing. A typical example is the heavily-promoted ‘free’ online trial that opens with a daunting click-through contract. Another common problem is website copy that just doesn’t answer your questions. Yet another is the pious press release that takes 200 words to clear its throat and get started. My pet peeve is application forms that might as well be written in Medieval Latin. In fact, once you start looking for bad business writing, it’s easy to spot.

It is possible to track the impact of clear product descriptions on sales, well-written manuals on support calls and snappy website copy on traffic. On the other hand, it is very difficult to add up the costs that come from poor marketing collateral, obscure press releases or badly-worded letters.

The cost of bad writing is two-fold. First, you lose the money you spent delivering the words to the reader. Expensive website? Waste of money. 50,000 brochures? Recycling fodder. Second, you lose the hoped-for result. Have you ever read a brochure that bored or confused you? Did you buy the product afterwards?

Once you get past the glossy ads and shiny exterior, most companies sound like a headmaster, bank manager or lawyer. Is this how you want your company to sound to its customers and employees? In a wider sense, a company breaks faith with a reader any time a company’s words don’t match its brand. It’s like a witness squirming under cross-examination. The truth will out.

What is good writing?

Good grammar, punctuation and spelling are necessary but not sufficient. Business writing is about hooking and persuading the reader. The best way to engage a reader is to use stories because human beings are wired for them. We look for believable details, natural speech and a flow from beginning to end. Journalism has evolved ways of creating credible, persuasive and readable stories and books like Donald Murray’s Writing to Deadline have a lot to teach the business world. But journalism stops short of persuasion and that is the objective of a business writer. The ‘call to action’ often comes at the end of a piece but good business copy has a logical thread running through it that persuades the reader as it goes.

Writing for the web

We’re all internet entrepreneurs now. The internet has done what technology always does. It has gone from being gee-whizz to ho-hum, from avant-garde to comme il faut. Business writing – so important in this new medium – has not caught up with the change. The BBC has got it right, though. They know that people don’t read web pages the same way they look at newspapers or books and they write accordingly. Their website uses short paragraphs, short sentences, scannable text (clearly labelled links and headlines), hype-free language (in the journalistic tradition) and crisp micro-content (“Falklands return. How going back 25 years later helps heal veterans’ scars”).

One of the problems with less switched-on websites is the low priority given to web copy during development. A 2006 survey of digital agencies found that over half of them blamed delays on content problems but only 10 per cent said that content was a priority. They thought that design, development and search engine optimisation were much, much more important. To me, this is like building a missile but forgetting the payload. The gap is filled by ‘lorem ipsum’ placeholder copy. If you see this on a development website, consider it a warning sign.

We’re all writers now

Thanks to email, blogs and social networks like Facebook, we’re all business writers now. Microsoft positively encourages its employees to blog. Its thousands of employee-bloggers put a human face on their business. But most companies prefer to muzzle employees rather than develop their writing skills and embed a corporate tone of voice across the business. As these new media burst into life, we have a chance to embrace every written word as a tool that can make a brand strong, fresh and different. Otherwise it’s just the usual yada yada.