Read It Out Loud

Many people who write copy for ads aren’t actually copywriters. Perhaps you’re one of them who’s been asked to wear that hat and write the ad, and write it fast cuz it’s on deadline. When reading words, many people read them to themselves with an inner voice. If you’re new to writing ad copy, and you’re not sure how something is coming across, read it out loud to yourself and then to someone else. If you keep tripping over words, think about changing those words. If you find you’re not comfortable saying something in a certain way, think about changing it until you are comfortable. The chances are your copy will come across as being more authentic when you are comfortable writing and speaking the copy as if you were saying it to your neighbor or colleague.

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Benchmarking Your Stats

Daily, weekly and monthly page views are good stats for you to have at your fingertips, no doubt. But they should also be put into context. Compare your stats for this last week to the stats for the same week last year and the year before. Are you trending up or down? Are there seasonal variations? Probably. Are there parts of your site that are visited more often this year than last year? Again, it’s probably the case. The point is a set of stats by themselves is only a snapshot of a horse race. What you probably want is the bigger picture that tells a story so you get a sense of where your visitors were, where they are and therefore hopefully extrapolate where they’ll go next. Digging up old stats and doing side-by-side comparisons is harder than simply looking at this week’s or this month’s numbers. But I think you’ll find the extra effort can pay large dividends.

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Use Short Paragraphs

Whether in print or online, long paragraphs are uninviting to read, and thus less likely to be read. If you conciously look at direct mail collateral and effective email messaging, you’ll likely find no paragraph is longer than four sentences. In many cases, you’ll see paragraphs that are only a single sentence long.

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About this blog

Every Tuesday and Thursday, this blog and RSS feed publishes a short Direct Marketing tip that you can apply in Internet Marketing. Each tip is typically less than 125 words. These tips originally appeared in Larry Chase’s Web Digest For Marketers weekly email newsletter that you can subscribe to free at: http://www.wdfm.com

I invite you to share your comments as well as your own Internet Direct Marketing tips in this blog by registering below.

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