Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Importance of headings

Jun 23, 2006 No Comments »

Whether you are writing a blog post (a longish blog post, that is) or content for another web page, or even an information-rich article, you should always make ample use of headings. It is no longer a hidden fact that most surfers are impatient readers and most of the time they quickly scan the highlights of your content, and only care to read the finer print if your highlighted text can grab their interest. Since your headings can decide how much time they spend reading your content, make sure your headings are one, precise representation of the fine text that lies beneath them and two, they can grab the attention of the reader.
Personally I don’t believe in "hypnotic words" (a phrase perhaps coined by the daddies of copywriting). State the truth and use the right words, and be imaginative if you can but never, never mislead your readers. Don’t promise them the sun in the heading if you are merely providing the torch light in the smaller text.

The home pages are back

Jun 05, 2006 No Comments »

Cross-posted at Writing Cave. Back in the days of early web development I remember my clients insisting that I set their browser’s home page to their own website so that they could increase the hit count. Home pages are again becoming a rage but now it is the personalized home pages that are gradually catching up. I’ve been using Protopage for quite some months now, and I find it better than Yahoo! and Google home pages. Not that I use it everyday — I use Tadalist everyday though — and it is not even set as my home page, but I use it at least 5-6 times a week to access my links.
Customized home pages are basically remotely hosted pages that you can use to manage your links, your utility programs and your regular news and blog feeds. They are different from the Web 1.0 portal pages in the sense that you can customize them — you can select what you want and discard the rest — and due to AJAX capabilities they give you the much needed and much-missed-on-the-Internet desktop-like applications.

Competititon is good

Jun 01, 2006 1 Comment »

Cross-posted at Writing Cave . Seth Godin shares an interesting thought in his blog post titled fiddleheads . Although I have no clue what “fiddleheads” are (OK, I just need to google the term, I know), I totally agree that competition is good for almost every business, and I don’t mean in the holistic sense.
Apart from the fact that competition motivates us to improve and innovate and hence acts as a big, never ending incentive, there is another aspect of it that very few people explore: the awareness and validity factor. Let’s suppose you come out with a product that only you are selling. No matter how pioneering your fete is, unless there is large scale awareness about your product, you are not going to be able to sell it without a huge marketing budget. In your marketing efforts, you’ll not only have to explain how your product benefits the buyer, you’ll also need to make the prospective buyer aware of the need if he or she is oblivious to it. Take for example air purifiers. Here we can very easily apply the boiled frog analogy and assume that very few people are going to buy your unique air-purifiers because very few people realize — due to the slow effect — what a havoc the air-pollution is wreaking on us and our children.
But what if 5-6 other companies are selling the air-purifiers? People will take notice; they’ll think: OK, lots of people must be buying them, that’s why so many companies are selling them.
I think healthy competition should always be encouraged, and only those companies and individuals are wary of competition who don’t want to work hard on their products and services.