So you’re in digital marketing. You write / create / produce good content? If you think you do, then this article may not be for you. However, it might well be, because you may be blissfully aware of your own issues with style. I see it time and time again – the same mistakes by bloggers and professionals alike, and often a failure to address style problems that offend many a web reader.
The major problem with online style errors is that they are more noticeable than spelling mistakes. You’ll see from the issues below, writing alone, no matter how great it is, is unlikely to get you very far online. If you then deploy your copy in sloppy presentation, with no help to the reader of navigation, you are close to doomed, and the ‘reader’ will probably bounce.
The Problems of Writing Alone
While I was a copywriter for the early part of my career, I quickly became aware of its limitations in the online world. Copy just doesn’t get read enough by impatient users. While there are statistics to back up what’s read (or indeed what isn’t) online, I rather like this quote from the advertising world, from Luke Sullivan’s Hey Whipple, Squeeze This:
I don’t think people read body copy, long or short. I think we’ve entered a frenzied era of coffee guzzling, email sending channel surfers who honk the nanosecond the light turns green and have the attention span of a flashbulb. If the first nine words of body copy are ‘May we send you beer and money for free?’ word ten isn’t read.
Online attention spans create headaches for writers, because people generally only scan web pages. You might be an SEO copywriter who satisfies search engines; contextually, that’s a good skill, but it isn’t necessarily related to creating great content that humans genuinely want to share and link to.
A Note on Fonts
Currently we are closing in on 200 million blogs on the Internet. Almost every blog I read relies on the same old font systems: Arial or Verdana, while a few might break into Georgia. It amazes me, particularly when there are 404 fonts currently available for free from Google.
Rarely can you reflect the character of your brand by writing in a font that everyone else uses. I’ve made sure I have a different font for my personal blog, and in a recent relaunch of Grazia, we made sure we examined a number of different fonts which would fit the brand. The font gives a huge amount of personality – make sure you pick an interesting and reflective one.
5 Rules for Styling Body Copy
Before we concern ourselves with the production heavy benefits of adding media, writers need to be clear on what good clear online content really constitutes. The best guide available is simple The Yahoo Style Guide.
1. Omit Needless Words:
- I make this the number 1 rule in writing because it has been laid clear for nearly a hundred years. In
Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style this is the first rule you will come across. This doesn’t mean cutting your copy so ruthlessly that you are left with barely anything, but it does mean you need to make your point as swiftly as possible. Beware wordy sentences such as:
I often think to myself that the fact of the matter about New York City is that it is so frightfully smelly.
Which could be translated into:
New York City stinks.
Cut the crap.
2. Make it Interesting:
- Writing like a post-structuralist academic with no sense of joy may induce your reader to a similar mood of gloom. Make it fun. Writing online is effectively a conversation – make it read like one.
3. Use Subheadings:
- If you finish a piece and there are just words on the page that are of all the same style, then you have done something wrong. It is a necessity to add subheadings to work to guide the reader to paragraphs they may be interested in. I almost never read full articles. I read the intro, then scan. If there are no subtitles, my scanning will be impossible and I will leave.
A subrule of this point is to use the correct elements. Using bold text for subtitles is an error. Use <h2> or <h3>.
4. Do not abbreviate unless the abbreviation is more common:
- You should not use British Broadcasting Corporation, since BBC is commonly known. However, you should not use clique media names like:
- ‘K-Pez’ (Katy Perry)
- ‘Ri-Ri’ (Rihanna) or
- ‘Giggsy’ (Ryan Giggs)
There is a chance your reader will not know who you are talking about, thus go to somewhere else to find out, or that Google won’t know who you’re talking about, and thus you’ll rank lower.
5. Break things into lists wherever possible:
- This goes in tandem with the first point. Usually, things can be broken into a list format and then stripped of words. Any copywriter who uses an ‘or’ list within a paragraph should be boiled in oil, stretched on a rack or thrown from the top of the Empire State Building.
Of course, I broke the rule to make the point:
Any copywriter who uses a list format within an online paragraph should be:
- Boiled in oil
- Stretched on a rack
- Thrown off the Empire State Building
Imagery
Now you’ve followed the simple rules for body copy, we can consider imagery. Imagery is vitally important – without it, I would say articles are again doomed. Just check out this article on Kate Middleton from the Daily Mail. Did anyone read the copy? I didn’t. The images make the point.
The simple rules are as follows:
- Any images under 50% width should typically be aligned right.Copy starts on the left and flows to the right. It would be a mistake to align and image left and force the reader to start reading from the middle.
- If images are full colour and not going to be under 50% width, make them full width, or line them up with another image.
- Full colour images should line up with the copy, else they should be lined up with another image to create full width. Out of line images are distracting.
- Center all images that are over 50% width, but less than 100%.
People who align images to the left due to laziness should be:
- Boiled in oil
- Stretched on a rack
- Thrown off the Empire State Building
Image Production
Let’s take this a bit further. So few content producers ever consider creating their own imagery for their posts. Normally, they’ve got Google images as a library of whatever they want, so they just rip it from there. Naughty.
Instead of infringing the copyright of content producers who invest in original imagery, you should attempt to do the same. Go out for a day and create as much stock imagery as possible. The following would be great:
- Landmarks – cool buildings and monuments
- Scenes – countryside, urban or coast
- Scenarios – having an interview, going on a date etc
It all depends on the context of course, but in the digital age, the cost of producing imagery is your wage, a camera and a photoshop elements license.
Additionally, it also goes a long way to consider amusing scenarios and customise your images. Microsoft Word has some superb action point tools, such as speech bubbles, to help you. You can make cartoons and humorous things as easily as the below:
Think that you are not just a copywriter or a journalist, you are a content producer.
Video
I’m a massive advocate of using video online. Although apparently costly, it can vastly increase engagement metrics and influence buying decisions. Start taking it seriously in your content strategy.
Regarding the presentation of video always align center in much the same way as you’d use for images. Left aligns are punishable by firing from a cannon.
You can always use a video from YouTube to back up a point, but I’m a much bigger fan (again) of creating your own.
The apparent barrier for entry is that it is prohibitively expensive: not so. While it is rather expensive to edit videos and make them look entirely professional – very rarely do you need to do this. Consider the video:
3.5 millions views – say what? Gary Vaynerchuck explains in his book Crush It! ‘Your content has nothing to do with the lighting, the mic, the camera or the set.’ This video makes a point about motorcycle safety and was filmed on a phone camera, with no commentary. It is good: 3.5 million good.
Like the other forms of online content mentioned above, you need to be aware of what makes video interesting. You have 15 seconds to persuade your viewer to keep viewing. Give us a slow start and you won’t get many completed plays.
Conclusion
So this has been a crash course in content styling, but if you apply the rules above, you will almost certainly make your content go a lot further. If we apply an 80/20 rule, that extra 20% of time required to make your articles look the business will often give you 80% more traction. Be unstylish at your peril. Make your content look like a supermodel:
Gratuitous use of Kate Upton in one of my posts
