How to write for your users or The Zen of Acceptable Web Copy

Much across the world, we are entering the fun part of the year.

No, I don’t mean the spectacle of the American electoral process which, let’s admit, is a fun wreck to rubberneck if you are standing at arms length from the consequences.

I am referring to the upcoming holiday season.

Now, imagine yourself visiting your significant other’s family for Thanksgiving.

You are loving the food and you definitely want to make sure the host knows it. So you innocently ask how they made the stuffing, the cranberry sauce, the pie, …doesn’t matter what.

BOOM!

Your host goes off on a tear about the ins and outs of buying the biggest turkey from Costco, the weekend trip to the farmers market, their new, new, updated from last year way of making filling, and that nifty little trick they used to make sure the sauce was evenly mixed.

Well, this is exactly how a LOT of us developers hawk our products to our unsuspecting audience.

Oh, we simply hooked up AWS to to to..oh a Docker and …dynamically update a backend datastore while sharding it with ultra low latency with deduplication across multiple edge nodes..at night using a cron job…because ETL and …to generate reports.

I am exaggerating to make a point but if you take a second look at your own website copy, you may see a milder version of this in action.

How do I know this?

I know this because every month (give or take), I open a thread on one of my favorite communities (www.indiehackers.com if you must know) offering to give feedback on web copy to anyone who asks.

And every time I have opened this thread, I have had dozens of startups asking me to review their copy.

Since this problem seems to be so endemic to the startup world, I thought I’d share my checklist of what you can do to present your product less as a laundry list of features and more as a solution to a problem.

But will this work? Does this work?

I could give you a myriad case studies or I could refer you to some feedback from people you have actually used my suggestions to get results.

OR

The Zen of Acceptable Web Copy

Without further ado, here’s the Zen of web copy writing.

Rule 0

Name things. If you are building a blogging tool, name the blog engines it works best with. If you are building a to-do app, name your integrations. Names create a mental pathway for understanding. It helps people place your product in context with everything else they know about their day to day workflows.

Rule 1

Name your customer’s pain. This could’ve been placed under Rule 0 but it’s important enough to deserve special mention. Spend a day or a couple of creative cycles imagining what exact problem your product can solve.

Take the serverless movement. Cloud providers first rented you hardware. Once they realized hardware management was tedious, they created an entire business line out of productizing server administration and lo, the serverless movement was born!

Rule 2

Start your headlines with an imperative. Even this sentence — Start your headline with an imperative — is an imperative.

Your prospects want to believe you have a roadmap to lead them away from their pain (see Rule 1). If I had written It is better to start with an imperative, you’d have skipped right part Rule 2 as a nice-to-have.

Rule 3

Focus on UX writing. It’s the difference between a hotel website inviting you to Check Availability versus them telling you to Book a room. You want to make sure your UX copy matches your user’s mental map of where they are in their relationship with you.

Rule 4

Don’t be afraid to adopt a tone or an attitude. It’s refreshing and you’ll get to do business with people who like you for you.

Rule 5

While I am not a designer, I will say your font, your color scheme, your text sizing, your stock photo choices, everything matters in creating familiarity and trust.

So there you have it. A handy checklist to orient you in the right direction as you are thinking about your web copy. If you want a second look, you can always swing by to IndieHackers to join my monthly threads.