Make the sale, deliver the service, build the brand
by Gerry McGovern
A & C Black, 2006
User level – Intermediate
£15.99
This action-oriented book is aimed at the business market – at professional marketers and communicators, as well as IT people and middle and senior managers. It is not a book on writing as such but on using content to deliver services and products: ‘The Web is the land of attention deficit syndrome … The vast majority of people come to your website to do something specific, and they want to get in and out as quickly as possible.’
With its punchy style – ‘If you – or some member of your team – has not read every single page on your website in the last 12 months, then your website is not being professionally managed’ – it offers a shot in the arm to company executives.
‘An easy read and I would recommend it as a helpful guide for anyone who wishes to conduct a critical audit of their internet presence … A sleeves-rolled-up, helpful book that tells you that a website is a specialised publication that requires just as much editorial care as a
newspaper or magazine.’ Financial World (December 2006)
A few tips:
- Write your links as if you are writing a heading
- Avoid placing links at the beginning of the sentence
- Make the first couple of words of a headline or summary real attention grabbers
- Good website content is always task focused
- The link is the most important thing you will write on your webpage
- There is no more valuable skill than the ability to know your reader thoroughly
- If you’re not listening to what bloggers are saying about you, you’re not doing your job as a professional communicator
A good chapter on ‘Search: how to get found’ introduces the concept of ‘carewords’ (a play on keywords) – that is, the terms that matter to your audience.
This is not the book to teach you the mechanics of writing for the web but it will get you thinking about whether your site really delivers what users want.
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