Welcome to the August edition of my
newsletter.
August has been a long time coming
in our house as we're looking forward to a family holiday later in
the month (Word Constructions will be closed for nearly two weeks
from the 14th.) It will be lovely to relax and be away from a
computer - computers are very useful and my business would be lost
without them, but it is great to move away occasionally (and to not
deal with information overload!) How often do you take time away
form your computer? I now schedule a morning a month for reading
business materials, and even that break from the computer is
energising.
Every two months, I prepare an
article based on survey results for the Business Mums Network.
Recently, the topic was doing business online and there were some
interesting results. About 64% of people answered they knew nothing
or little about setting up an html newsletter (a formatted newsletter sent by
email not as an attachment) which is a pity when newsletters can be
such an effective marketing and communications tool. When I started
this newsletter, I just sent it from my usual email software but
that generally is time consuming and can only go to a limited number
of people before your ISP thinks you are spamming and stops your
email access.
It was much easier once I swapped
to an email package - and even easier when I outsourced sending them
altogether! Email packages vary but most offer the added advantage of
personalising the email (e.g. adding names in the greeting) and
generating statistics. The stats are great for deciding what is or
isn't working so you can amend future newsletters accordingly. The
stats can also be useful if you sell advertising space in your
newsletter.
Use your words wisely!
Tash
Tash Hughes 03 9018 8182 fax 03 9445
9154
blog -
www.wordconstructions.com.au/blog
www.wordconstructions.com.au
For all your business writing needs

In
baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about
the numbers. If you dwell on statistics you get shortsighted, if you
aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”
- Tom Seaver
Consistency
By Tash Hughes of
Word
Constructions
Whether you are consciously
building your brand or simply want your message is to be understood
easily, consistency is important. Consistency in the style and tone
you use (for example, a casual website message needs casual
marketing materials and relaxed images), in the use of specific
words (a legal site can't use lawyer and barrister interchangeably,
they must use each as distinct terms), font choices (colour, bold,
italics and underlining are better ways to emphasise details than
changing font sizes and types), spelling (if using Australian
spelling, for instance, always use Australian versions of words, and
for words that have a few accepted spellings, choose one version and
stick to it) and audience (if 'you' is a customer to start with,
don't use 'you' for a supplier as well.)
Obviously, the little details are
unimportant if your overall business message is not working, but
they can make the difference between a polished, professional look
and a business who doesn't appear to care about details. By being
consistent in your written materials:
-
people will read your message
and not be distracted by unnecessary breaks
-
regular clients/readers will
get comfortable with your materials and come back for more
-
you appear professional and in
control
-
your message is simple to
understand
-
you develop trust in your
message and business
In the worst case of
inconsistency, materials appear as if from different companies which
really doesn't help with branding or building a relationship.
To stay consistent is easy enough
at the start of business and when there is only person preparing
materials. But once you have a lot of written material (for example,
many webpages, some flyers, blog posts,
promotional articles and
some ads) and/or use other people to manage your communications to
some extent, it gets harder to stay consistent unless you have a
style guide.
Many designers prepare style
guides for businesses when they design a logo and brand, but a
design style guide is only part of the story. A
comprehensive style
guide will define colours,
fonts and so forth, but also includes
details on spelling choices, tone, repeated information,
capitalisation and other content details.
Thought: Walt Disney's
company has four values - curiosity, confidence, courage and
consistency. And look at their success...

I just renewed my carbonite subscription for another year as it's so easy to use and gives me peace of mind.
Web page
descriptions
By Tash Hughes of
Word
Constructions
If you manage your own website, or
even if you pay someone else to do it for you, you are probably
aware that you can add a title, description and keywords to each
page of your site. Let's start by explaining the three terms:
title - the name of the
page that will show when the mouse hovers over the tab in an
internet browser and shows as the first line in search engine
results
description - the two lines of information under the title in
search engine results
keywords - important words relevant to the page that search
engines use in determining results
The importance of these factors
for improving your site's ranking varies between search engine and
over time. However, a good page title and description will help
people decide if your page is worth viewing once they see it in a
search engine's results. If there is no description attached to a
page, the search engine will pull words out of the page instead -
sometimes this gives useful information but often it results in
meaningless strings of words (in one case recently, I saw a search
engine description that consisted of a list of business numbers from
their footer. Very boring and very unattractive.)
Given that the description can be
the reason someone decides to visit that page, or not, why wouldn't
you make the description suit the individual page? Instead of a
generic message about your business simply repeated across your
site, make the message relevant to that page.
I am currently correcting this
issue for a client's website where the designer had used a generic
'we sell superannuation to a limited industry' on every page and I
am changing it to descriptions along the lines of 'learn about super
contributions', 'the Government co-contribution', 'accessing your
super savings' and 'member benefits'. These descriptions are
targeted at the page and more attractive to someone coming across
them in search results.
Every order I've placed with The Nile has been simple to mange - they email progress and deliver for free.
Poor examples
Sometimes, the easiest
way to learn the correct way to do something is to see it done
poorly so in this section of my newsletter, I show you some
real-life examples of writing that need a little help.
Today's example is from a website's description of an online
presentation they have available - they are trying to explain who
would be interested in this presentation on income protection
insurance.
Example:
If you are young, single, married and reliant on a regular income.
Issues with this
example:
By definition, how can I be single and married?
Can't I be not young and any of those other factors and want to know
about income protection insurance?
A better version would
be: (without changing the meaning)
If you are young, single, married and/or reliant on a regular
income.
A much better version would
be:
Whether you are young or not, single or married, if you are
reliant on a regular income this presentation...
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