What’s the Sound of One Hand Writing?
Robert Bruce at Copyblogger has written a brief but interesting essay on how one can create world-class content without ever “writing” again. The idea behind this Zen riddle is that strong content is best achieved by gathering, collecting, and assembling all the information you can about your industry and your product. Your natural personality and voice will then infuse itself into the copy. If, on the other hand, you work from the mindset of having your linguistic creativity guide you, you can find yourself stymied and your work will suffer. This all makes sense, as the best copy for content merchandising is an assemblage of the most important, relevant facts and info, as opposed to some lovely sounding sales poem.
Read the full article at copyblogger.com.
Spelling Counts
Following up on a BBC story we covered last week, Stephen Cobb of Search Engine Watch expands and offers his own insight on the topic of detrimental spelling errors in your copy. Cobb posits that perfect spelling and grammar in your content indicate legitimacy, integrity, and trustworthiness, especially because online retail lacks real-world indicators like “facial expression, tone of voice, and body language.” The most important things you can do to ensure clean copy are to not rely on spell-checker, and to use multiple human editors (no fewer than four eyes, not including bifocals).
Read the full article at searchenginewatch.com.
A Mom Knows Best
According to Cecilia Kang at the Washington Post, one of the most active online-consumer demographics is moms, in large part as a result of iPhone use. Those who Nielsen Research calls “power moms”–making up 1/5 of all online presence–are picking up smartphones faster than men their age and seem to be using them in force to do research and make purchases. Said Marshal Cohen, chief retail analyst at research firm NPD Group, “We’ve known about the opportunity of online moms for a while now, but then mobile technology came along and blew everything up.”
Read the full story at washingtonpost.com.
