Plain English for the web

So just how different is copywriting for the web to its old-school print cousin? I'd say not very - IF you compare it to the very best print copywriting (which a lot of web gurus don't, perhaps because they've never seen any).

Here's what you need to do to make your web copy sing. And for once I'm going to avoid the whole SEO thing.

Not because you don't have to do it but because there's a new way of talking about it. Of which more in a moment.

Five rules for effective web copy

#1 Keep your sentences to an average of 10-12 words. It's never been a good idea to write long, windy sentences.

But online, where people feel busier than they actually are, the longer your average sentence the bigger the sense of panic/boredom you create in your reader.

#2 Use the most personal tone of voice you can muster. On the web you must create a relationship with your reader.

Bounce rates, abandonent rates, non-conversions, whatever your favourite metric for assessing the stickiness or otherwise of a web page, one of the prime culprits is an impersonal tone of voice.

Try addressing visitors as "you". Write what you'd say to them in your local coffee shop. Or bar, if you prefer. That's an old journalist's trick, but it's tailormade for the web.

#3 Keep it relevant to your reader. Remember why they came to your site in the first place. Some come direct, some via search, others via links.

It doesn't matter which, once they're on your site keep talking about the things that interest them. And thanks to Latent Semantic Indexing, it's no longer a case of mindlessly repeating keywords.

Instead go for a richly detailed conversation on the subject that interests them, whether it's non-surgical facelifts or aluminium baseball bats.

#4 Break it up into ultra short paragraphs. Most people are used to writing copy in Word or an equivalent.

Which is the right way to do it because it doesn't distract you with design elements. But remember the column width your copy will eventually inhabit. Anything over three lines in a Word doc is going to start looking slabby on the web.

Use the old direct mail copywriter's trick of deliberately breaking a paragraph in the wrong place. Why?

Because you train your reader to read on.

#5 Highlight key words and phrases with bold, highlights or even underlining. yes I know they can look like hypertext but it doesn't seem to matter. It's good for SEO and helps scanners decode your copy faster.

My closing comment is that those five rules work fantastically well in print too. In fact that's where they come from.

There's a lot of sound and fury at the moment about Copify - one of the new content mills acting as an intermediary between copywriters and clients. Incidentally, whatever happened to disintermediation? I thought the web was going to do away with all that.

Copify pay copywriters according to a pay scale ranging from 2p a word for newbies, through 4p for I guess you'd call them middleweights to 8p for experienced writers. They also have a minimum order of 100 words, yielding a newbie writer the princely sum of £2.

As far as I am aware, Copify aren't coercing anybody to take any of the assignments on their site. So it's functioning as any market does - if a buyer and a seller agree on a price, it's the right price. I agree it does seem low. To write 100 words and get paid £2 - well by the time you've bought a coffee and factored in the cost of toner and electricity for your PC you might be making a loss.

I imagine the job, being apparently aimed at creating SEO content, is less about what we might call the craft of copywriting than the simple process of typing as fast as possible with a client-specified keyword every tenth word or so. If you can type at 60 words per minute and you count as a professional, you could make £48/hour, which is OK. And if you can keep that up for ten hours straight you would make £480, which seems pretty good.

So why all the fuss? Some copywriters believe that Copify is dumbing down the craft. Others are losing clients to content mills and feel justifiably aggrieved. Still others can't get their heads around the notion of working for peanuts and rail against the injustice.

Ultimately you can't game the market. Clients who want quality will search it out and pay for it. Clients who want cheap will do likewise. Copywriters always have a choice about who they work for - the freelance ones I mean - so if Copify doesn't appeal, just ignore it.

And for writers who are working through Copify and retort "Well I'm quality and I'm cheap" I think the answer is, "Good for you!"