Friday, May 14, 2010

have some consideration for your readers

Your business's brochure sucks. Your web site content probably does, too.

Jason Fried, a writer at Inc., thinks so too. That's a pretty accurate summary of his article, Why is Business Writing So Awful?

(I'll tell you why, Jason Fried. Right after you marry me. Just kidding, weirdo. You make a very valid point, but your introductory joke did NOT make me laugh out loud, or LOL as they say. Oh, and I'm not even on the market, so please stop flirting with me.)

Honestly, it took me six months from my start date to actually read our entire company brochure. It's filled with jargon and it's a total snooze fest. What makes this even worse is that I recreated this brochure, but I had no control over the copy, so I didn't care what it said.

When it comes to web sites, I think the obsession with keywords is partially to blame. I know, keywords, keywords, keywords. I get it. Google needs to find your site, but it's your readers who need to stay there. I don't read like a spider. You know why? Because spiders can't read. The spiders that crawl your page might see all these key words and think, "This is top notch. Google, we've really got it here. Put it in the top ten!" But really, if it's all jargon and keywords, it's nonsense.



This is a photograph I took of a spider trying to read. He has 8 angry eyebrows because he doesn't understand full sentences.
You know what you need to focus on? You need external links pointing to your web site. And to get good backlinks, you need people to enjoy your content enough to refer it. Give your readers something of value. Or at least respect them enough not to bore them to death.

You don't want to attract ONLY the crawlers. Seriously. Everything that crawls is creepy. Spiders. Worms. Snakes. Babies?! Kidding. Babies are adorable. And yeah we need the creepy crawlers to sustain life or whatever it is they tell you in 2nd grade science. But it's more a necessary evil than it is something to base your entire writing style around.

1 comment:

  1. lead generation
    Why is Business Writing So Awful? hmmmm very important question for Internet businessman and I agree with your answer that "We need external links pointing to our web site. And to get good backlinks, we need people to enjoy our content enough to refer it. Give our readers something of value. Or at least respect them enough not to bore them to death." As well as image and description of crawler is fantastic.

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