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

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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.

Dungeons and Dragons is connected to Google. From the New York Times (hat tip: Boing Boing).

I am connected to to everything else. This diagram and the accompanying article was written by Adam Rogers who used to work at Wired. I used to write for Wired. I produced a diagram for them that linked video games to everything. It’s six degrees of separation by diagram.

How Pong invented the Internet. From Wired 11/2004. Hat tip: me. I wrote it.

I’ve must have spent a month researching this piece and I wrote tens of thousands of words of notes. The whole thing was boiled down into a network diagram by Wired’s patient design team. One day I’m going to set up a computer games history site. (In the meantime, you can read a brief history of computer games on my personal site.)

Just when I was puzzling over what to write today, The Onion came to my rescue with Idiom shortage leaves nation all sewed up in horse pies. Here’s a taster:

WASHINGTON—A crippling idiom shortage that has left millions of Americans struggling to express themselves spread like tugboat hens throughout the U.S. mainland Tuesday in an unparalleled lingual crisis that now has the entire country six winks short of an icicle.

Alexander Kjerulf is in the category of people who wrote their own job description and then people took them seriously. The self-described Chief Happiness Officer is working on the same "Happy People" project at HP as me and I really like his blog.

Like me, he comes from an IT background. I think is why I enjoyed his post: How NOT to lead geeks so much. In summary:

1. Downplay training
2. Give no recognition (I used to write handwritten thank you letters to team members when products shipped, but I wished I had given more recognition generally.)
3. Plan too much overtime (I was very guilty of this back in the day)
4. Use management-speak (see my old posts The Devil’s Marketing Dictionary Part One, Part Two and Part Three)
5. Try to be smarter than the geeks
6. Act inconsistently
7. Ignore the geeks
8. Make decisions without consulting them
9. Don’t give them tools
10. Forget that geeks are creative workers

Another common problem in my experience is "two peoples divided by a common language".  I wrote about Geeks: how to write for a non-technical audience and (in the opposite sense) How to write like a hacker.

Just as management-speak is inspires cynicism in geeks, techno-speak inspires fear in managers. I’m thinking of writing a post on this. Does anyone have good examples? Any good suggestions for bridging the gap?

Following news that long words make us look stupid (see Short words are best) comes a report that multitasking makes us stupid.

It comes from The Atlantic (who have now opened up their entire archive free of charge) in an article called The Autumn of the Multitaskers. (Hat tip: Slashdot.)

Here’s the gist:

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires — the constant switching and pivoting — energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on… studies find that multitasking boosts the level of stress-related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline and wears down our systems through biochemical friction, prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion, fatigue, and chaos merely hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term, they may cause it to atrophy."

The author suggests that difficulties with multitasking explain why the USA is simultaneously losing two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afganistan. "It also explains, perhaps, why sexual threesomes are often disappointing."

On a more mundane note, multitasking is why I get less done in a day than I’d like. I flit between answering emails, answering the phone, tinkering with my computers, writing blog posts, watching old episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, looking at The Onion, making tea, reading a book and generally pottering around. 

I still wrote about 1,000 words but I can’t help feeling that if I concentrated harder on my work and got it done first, I’d enjoy guilt-free pottering more.

Anyhow, here are a couple of previous posts that may help with concentration: How to concentrate on writing and Distraction-free text editors.

I watched Helvetica last night on DVD. It’s a fascinating documentary that celebrates the 50th anniversary of the almost ubiquitous typeface and explores its cultural significance. It may sound like a bore, but the film shows how amazingly widespread the font is. As one of the interviewees says it’s like the air - it’s just everywhere. (Film website.)

Here’s a clip featuring Dutch designer Wim Crouwel, an early enthusiast for the font.

The film starts off by describing how the font was created and how it came as a breath of fresh air in the fifties, simplifying design and creating a sort of democratic soft/hard font that was both reassuringly clear and comfortingly neutral.

But then the narrative pulls a switcheroo. The filmmakers interview designers who were part of a backlash against Helvetica and all that it stands for. The proponents of grunge fonts and the designer who used Zapf Dingbats for the body text of an article he thought was too boring to be readable join forces with a designer who thinks that Helvetica is the font that supported the Vietnam war.

And here’s Neville Brody and Rick Poyner on how to choose typefaces.

I remember the excitement of discovering fonts on my Mac Plus back in the early 90s. For a long time, the ability to print out professional-looking designs and proposals was a competitive advantage for my business. I had a Mac, PageMaker and a LaserPrinter at college - when I designed and sold my first games. At the time, I don’t think many of my publishers had kit that was so good. Later, I bought a Canon colour inkjet printer (it cost thousands!) and I could produce very high quality colour proposals for my games. That printer (and the software, fonts and computer behind it) built my first business. I often wonder whether I’ll find any other technology that will have the same impact on me personally. I think we’re all much too technologically-minded now for anything like this to remain a niche product for long.

But it had never occurred to me that a font could be so rich in history or deep in controversy. Or have such an impact on the world. This documentary is delightful and eye-opening. It’s made me think very hard about the fonts I use at work and what they say about me and my business.

Here are a couple of previous articles on this site about typefaces: What font do you write in?, and the Interesting links (See What’s the right font?)

PS Apologies for the double posting. I’m still working out the kinks involved in getting video into posts.

I wrote an article last year about distraction-free text editors, but I wanted to add one to the list: AloneWriter from Craig Ritchie. If you run it full-screen the menu only appears when you put the mouse over it. But it also works nicely in a window. I particularly like the very subtle word count at the bottom of the screen.

Having said that, I really find that I am happy to use Word 2007 with its word count always visible. When I’m writing long documents, I need the Document Map feature to navigate. For work where I’m trying to structure information, I use tables a lot. It’s funny how the tools we use affect the way we think.

However, there is one feature I would like for Word: a ‘concentrate on writing’ mode. With one click, it would hide everything else on the screen, give me a cut down ribbon menu and a live word count but nothing else. More importantly, it would mask incoming emails and IM. It would much more useful than the pointless “Full Screen Reading mode.”

Windows Vista has this feature for presentations and on HP laptops there is even a button on the keyboard to put you into presentation mode. What about ‘writer mode’? Or ‘concentrate mode’?

Technorati Tags: distraction-free text editors, WriteRoom, Dark Room, AloneWriter, Office, Word, 2007, concentration

Interesting article where an editor asks ten writers whether the internet has been good for writing or not.  (Hat tip: Slashdot.)

Greetings from Florida where I am studying for my commercial pilots licence.  (See my other site: ModernPilot.com for more about my Compulsive Flying Disorder.)

Here are ten reference sites that everybody needs to bookmark:

1. The Taxonomy of Logical Fallacies
2. A Handbook of rhetorical devices
3. Data Visualization: Modern Approaches
4. MBA in a Page (hat tip to Guy Kawasaki)
5. Top 1,000 Web 2.0 sites (probably most useful for geeks like me)
6. Refdesk.com
7. Word spy - a dictionary of neologisms
8. Purdue’s Online Writing Lab - grammar and writing guidelines
9. Economist Style Guide online
10. Wikipedia. I’m against using it as a primary source but it’s a great place to start your research

Any other suggestions? Essential reference sites?

Technorati Tags: Reference, wikipedia, Purdue, Economist, MBA