I have submitted a proposal for a community site on Area51 of StackExchange, concerning “Copywriting & applications”:

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/14040/copywriting-applications

with this explanation:

Proposed Q&A site for copywriters that have questions concerning copy in general and specific applications and media.

There are already proposals that are vaguely related to this topic, e.g.

On Writing in general: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/1623/writing

And technical writing: http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/8847/technical-writing

but copy is a quite specific skill, and knowledge necessary for its application in different media is considerable. Writing copy is a profession(*) and hence I believe it deserves a dedicated Q&A site.

There is also a proposal concerning copy, Blogging and Copywriting: but this too me too restrictive, in particular considering that the same copy often gets used in different kinds of publications.

So… support and contribute to this proposal!

Note (*): E.g. read

My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic: Everything You Need to Know About Art, Ads, Life, God and Other Mysteries and Weren’t Afraid to Ask

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Name-Charles-Saatchi-Artoholic-Everything/dp/0714857475

I already wrote about my efforts in Learning home made copywriting. The basic problem for copywriting is that you have to have something to say, and have enough imagination to see how interesting it could be for non informed readers. Assuming this, you then need

(1). general writing skills,

and

(2). specific knowledge for marketing copy.

For point (1), it is hard to pick out readings: learning to write well is a vague and hard task. I am studying fiction writing, and this has helped a great deal, but I can’t single out an instructional book for this task. Like, an exercise could be: read (or better: re-read) one of Stieg Larsson books, and try to find out the techniques he uses to keep the attention of the reader. He is a master in that (though I don’t particularly like the books).

Point 2 also involves knowledge of the specific market for which you are writing, and familiarity with marketing technioques. For this, I find Seth Godin books a great help.

For web sites on copy I advise http://www.copyblogger.com/, in particular

http://www.copyblogger.com/copywriting-101/

For readings, though it is not specifically about copy for web marketing, some good ideas from an old copy of some success :

My Name is Charles Saatchi and I am an Artoholic: Everything You Need to Know About Art, Ads, Life, God and Other Mysteries and Weren’t Afraid to Ask

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Name-Charles-Saatchi-Artoholic-Everything/dp/0714857475

Have a good summer.

How *Specifically* Did Balsamiq Bootstrap Its Way To $2 Mil In Sales in 18 Months? – with Peldi Guilizzoni

on Mixergy: http://mixergy.com/balsamiq-peldi-guilizzoni-interview/

The only thing that leaves me a bit perplex in this interview is Peldi’s worry abut his “rocket” success (nice metaphor) suddenly falling. Made me think about how software adoption and abandonment goes.

Mockups has somehow brought “mockupping” to the non design-educated masses – of which I am a member. The fact that “suddenly” all we non-professional mockuppers adopted Balsamiq is not somehow a symptom that we may just as suddenly drop it. Actually, differently from a passionate, professional mockupper, who is always willing to try, test and learn new tools, “we” are not willing to spend a minute on another tool: we adopted Balsamiq exactly because it was so easily to adopt, and are unwilling to change.

Adopted software is amazingly “resilient” with users. That is also why there are still so many DOS applications around. And for people that like me go to work in different organizations, we see how much “old” software is still (happily) used.

For more on this point – adopted software will not be abandoned easily – see also this discussion with a different focus (software rewrite and technical debt) but with several similar observations:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/360297/lifespan-of-software-how-often-do-you-expect-to-do-start-from-scratch

And then there is also to consider what is the reach and authority of the Balsamiq mockup solution in different communities. Balsamiq looks to be popular in diverse environments, and as anyone with experience in web marketing knows, different communities don’t “talk” much with each other. If you are popular with jQuery developers, you may be unknown among Agile project managers, and so on.

This would make it still harder for any competitor to take the place of Balsamiq.

So, I don’t think there is too much to worry. Look forward to hearing about your next tool, Balsamiq people!

Matteo Bicocchi’s (“pupunzi”) mappping of neeeds of site improvements to Patapage:

9 ways to improve your site but you don’t know how to

My mapping of different work management needs with Teamwork:

Stories of work management

Your software is what people’s usage makes of it.

Here I give some quick impressions and links.

The organizers: a word of praise to the organizers, Develer (http://develer.com). I lived the event as speaker, student and (satirical) “journalist”. In all three roles, I appreciated their efficiency, practical sense and also sense of humor, bearing my postings as “Fake Simone Zinanni”.

Twitter coverage: Maybe in USA conferences this is just normal, but I was amazed by the real time reactions which we got during the speeches through reading tweets: #bsw2010. It was great fun. Also proving a good wireless coverage for 300 PCs – kudos to Develer.

Cirillo’s talk: what has been impressive of his talk is the sense of concreteness. Of interpreting methodology as something minimal, that has to have a deep impact. And the ease with which he can connect habits to problems, never leaving any space for rhetoric.

Actually just before the conference I had studied the “Pomodoro technique”: to learn more about Cirillo see this beautiful site here:

http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/

Alberto Mucignat: I really liked his talk: “Social design: progettare applicazioni che funzionano”

http://www.bettersoftware.it/conference/talks/social-design-progettare-applicazioni-che-funziona

because (given the strict time limits) he has tried to give us “new product / web site creators” some tools to analyze the flow of social interaction of our sites with visitors and communities. I will try to apply his schemes to our (5!) new products and web sites coming out in 2010. Waiting for the slides!

Alberto Falossi: Alberto made a neat and compact talk about crowd funding – see his  kapipalist manifesto. After that I asked him a couple of questions, which for time reasons I couldn’t ask during the class. I reproduce one here:

“Alberto, why did you build a service which serves all kinds of crowd funding, and not one specific for a certain activity (like one for musicians…). Posting your question on a specialized crowd funding site isn’t it more likely that you will get funded?”

His answer (freely re-interpreted – Alberto correct me if I reporting you wrongly): “You should not delude yourself that you will get funded because a casual visitor funds projects of certain category. Searching for funders is an effort that has to be done entirely by you, building a community. The crowd funding service has just to ease the transactions.”

Second question: “You hinted that your idea is not to get a % on the money, as other crowd funding sites do. Where then will you get paid?”

Alberto: “My service is free. I have not decided definitively, but I am thinking of pro versions of the service, instead of taking a %”.

Peldi: I missed Peldi’s talk, only because mine was at the same time. My friends from Open Lab that were there told me that it was great. We had already contacted Balsamiq people for a plugin for Patapage (here). I actually met him afterward at a coffee break through Silvia, who was hunting interviews for Devineu and has “trapped” the fellow.

He is a great fellow, and gave us some interesting advice on our products even in a 2 minutes encounter. Silvia will soon interview him for devineu.eu.

My talk: “Una home page memorabile” –  actually “Get visitors to read and remember your home page” . I am an inexperienced talker. I had 35 minutes for my talk, and that could cover only half of what I wanted to say – so that is what happened: I hope I made the point that copy-writing is neither a secondary nor a trivial skill for any web startup, but I had to skim through the example applications – sorry. You can find the examples presented in detail here:

Part 1: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-the-principles/

Part 2: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-applications/

Thanks to all – see you there next year.

http://devineu.eu

This is a site where European startups can learn from other startups and innovating software houses. Read the mission here:

http://devineu.eu/mission.page

You can even interview yourself here. We used also Patapage for the site development.

P.S. Among the gadgets, there is the Seth Godin – inspired “Tame your lizard brain” app:

http://devineu.eu/lb.jsp

Yesterday evening I had dinner with a very smart friend, developer and consultant. He told me “Tell me about Patapage! The small guy logo is just great. Generates those docked buttons…”. He had had a quick look to the site, and… completely missed the aim of the software. He is not alone: we are finding that this is what happens to most visitors of the beta site: after the first wow effect, visitors believe they got what Patapage is about:

adding pretty docked buttons on your pages pointing to external services, to which some behavior is delegated

This is a quite misleading picture of what Patapage can do as a service for a web site creator. Very few visitors of Patapage site get to see the potential of the service (there are exceptions: yesterday a designer of very nice sites wrote us “This is an amazing service”, and we regularly get some feedback like this).

In the case of my friend, yesterday I started explaining him that yes, delegation to an external service is the one of the basic ideas that makes building richer web sites easy and quick, but Patapage is useful because the “external” content can be integrated page by page in the hosting site – and you are never leaving the site where you started from. This makes say building a site for a conference, like the one we built for Developers in Florence, really fast: once we had built the static page, like this:

Then we just created an account on Patapage for the domain and added contacts, feedback, discussions, filtering or relevant tweets and delicious tagging, and more, as in the picture on the left – see it in action here. Ready to publish!

I explained this to my friend, and I saw a more and more surprised look on his face, as he realized the simplicity and power of the tool, and that he could use it immediately for some of the web pages he had to publish. Consider that the example I made above is one of the simplest usages: a deeper mapping of your needs is done by integrating Patapage’s functionalities in the body contents of your pages, using your own styled links instead of docked buttons, and even keeping parts of the contents of your pages generated by wiki-like parts, maintained with Patapage. You can delegate to Patapage all the functionality needed to motivate, support and maintain a community on your site: no development is needed.

“So –my friend suggested – I could build a page-by-page help system just by pasting a script on my site’s footer?” – yes, exactly. Just like when you replaced your CMS statistics with Google Analytics – the effort is the same.

“Could one in this way replace completely the functionality offered by a CMS?” – he continued. There are some limits, for example:

- Patapage does not handle your site tree (or better, graph) structure: actually, we believe that in many cases to keep the linked structure in a set of static pages is a great simplification – but this is a separate matter.

- The core of your contents should be on your pages, not displayed through remote calls, also because of indexing reasons. Actually what Patapage eases is to bring back on your site discussions and exchanges that happen elsewhere – and this is more and more a felt need.

Still, as my friend pointed out, most CMS are not very good in handling communities and don’t offer good, ready tools for integrating external services. Patapage can be used to speed up and simplify things also in building quite complex web sites – like my forthcoming European Startups dedicated web site: the site’s contents and structure will  be in the CMS, community support in various forms will be in Patapage.

Creating a good conceptual map for the users between their needs and what your software solution does is what makes complex software useful and usable. Part of this mapping effort can be built in the user interface, part can’t, but it is something you have to deal with when building software. In all cases, the solution is not to oversimplify.

Listening to Stackoverflow podcast, I found this quote from Howard Aiken:

Don’t worry about people stealing an idea. If it’s original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Patapage is a completely original idea. We’ll have to ram it down, then: to do that, we’ll explain the “mapping” in a detailed document, an introduction + examples + user guide – hopefully not too boring. People who are willing to read a short e-book (or print it out and take 15 minutes of quiet reading) we’ll get the point, a bit like my friend did yesterday evening. Others, too impatient for that, we’ll be lost – fine with me

These are among the books  that have most influenced us:

Some of the beloved / informative or both are not currently in Open Lab, because some of us is reading one or is hiding it at home, among which:

Our software house is not formally a startup, though product development has changed so much in the last 12 months that we are proceeding as a startup. There are many nice books from the past in our libraries, whose content is always valid.

-

Also a section for the IT guys:

And there is more:

This is what we believed, and it has been a long journey to realize how wrong we were. In your startup you will need a lot more skills or “hats” to succeed. For example, you need to do SEO on your product presentation site, you need to write license agreements for your software, you need to create and maintain a consistent design, you need to present your plans to potential funders, you need to interview and select workers, you need to have a way to test the application both functionally and on end users, and so on.

A review of the range of activities needed can be found in The Web Startup Success Guide, which I also reviewed here. I have been focusing recently on a skill that underlies many of the needed “hats”: this skill which your startup absolutely needs is

copywriting

usually referred to simply by “copy”. Wikipedia defines copywriting as

Now, there is an apparently simple way for a startup to compensate the lack of internal skills: hire consultants. What is sometimes missed in this “solution” is that most of the needs listed before are not the problems of a day: you have to create copy material almost every day of your startup activity. Also consider that the value of your product may be in details that get added day by day, and there must be a close collaboration between production and copywriting to communicate effectively to the users / visitors / buyers. Considering also that as startuppers you are likely a group of creative people, you may opt for creating contents yourselves! Many – most? – successful startups do that, cultivating a blog, site, tweets and more. And I suspect that spelling out in clear writing the benefits of your product may also help the development of it.

I took notes while studying the literature and introductions to copy, and extracted from there some notes in the form of blog posts. I hope that can be of help to others that are trying to learn copy for their startup.

A note about the “startup” term: I use “startup” more to mean an attitude, or even state of mind, that even software houses which strictly speaking are not startups may assume. In particular in the European Union, creating a new software product and creating new companies may be activities that do not coincide, given the complexity of setting up a company.

These two posts are directly about writing:

Improving the writing style of technical blog posts (part one)

A checklist for improving the writing style of technical blog posts (part two)

and I will talk about this theme at the forthcoming Developers in Florence 01 meeting.

This is about home page composition:

Get visitors to read and remember your home page – the principles

Get visitors to read and remember your home page – applications

and as I will talk about the latest two at the forthcoming Better Software conference, I am expanding the information there with new experiences – will publish an update blog post.

Good luck with your copywriting!

As you survived reading up to here, now you get a reward: a simple checklist which you can use to verify your posts before publishing them. The checklist does not contain anything about the core quality of your contents: being a technical writer / worker, it is simply assumed that you have something of value to say, but don’t know exactly how.

Checklist

(Get attention)

• There is an effort to capture reader’s attention in the title and very first sentence

  Copy is never too long, just too boring.

• Benefits for the reader are immediately clear – instead of features
  

  I woke up this morning thinking: I really need …

• At least in the first paragraph, every sentence somehow leads to the next one.

• The post contains a (short) story

  “For sale: Baby shoes. Never used.” Ernest Hemingway

(Authority)

• Substitute opinions with descriptions

  “That’s just like, eh, your opinion man” Big Lebowski

• Your assertions are backed up with specific proof

• You establish authority somewhere, somehow

• You kept the initial promise through which you got attention

(Style & format)

• Can you make it shorter? Where in doubt, cut it out

  “To be or not to be?”
  

• You kept the language simple and clear.

  No one will ever complain that your writing is too easy to understand.

• You sum the contents up at the end of the post.

(Review)

• You’ve printed the draft on paper and re-read it

  A way to get a new perspective, a bit like giving it to someone else to read it.

• You read it loudly

  A way to become sensitive to the rhythm of your writing.

• Immediately before publishing it you did spell check it not just on some online spell checker but on Microsoft Word.

This is it. Shouldn’t be too hard. Download here the checklist in PDF format.

One could add to this list, with a slight change of focus, “Did you insert meaningful SEO words?” in your writings – but this opens up further considerations, maybe I will discuss them in a following blog post.

Using these techniques

Am I using this checklist? Well, I am. Consider for example this recent blog post I published in one of the most boring blogs on the web, the one where we announce Teamwork’s releases:

Teamwork’s blog usually has posts like “Teamwork 4.3.12323 released”, followed by say a series of bug fixes which make sense only for Teamwork administrators, and can be made more interesting (and popular) using the techniques just described. In fact many people liked this last one.

Another example, this very blog post: this is a bit particular as it is half way between a guide and a blog post, some call it a “blogzine” entry. I did review it (several times) according to its own criteria, and made many changes (improvements, I hope).

A well-written blog post can have several “usages”:

• It can be used as a base for a talk for a conference – or for proposing one
• It can become a chapter of an e-book
• It can be the base for building the contents of a dedicated micro-site
• It can be transformed in a project – for example as done at the Startuptodo service

Again, all contents of good quality have a positive SEO effect: it is a side effect, but it can be great.

Exercise: review your latest blog post with this checklist. Is there anything that could be improved?

Conclusion

So we started from examining the writing and narrational style of some popular technical blogs, and then isolated a few techniques in a checklist which you can use to refine your own blog posts. This is just a start, you can find references and more material to study in the next section.

Further reading

I would like to thank Mr. Brian Clark for his brilliant site, copyblogger, that I discovered half way through and gave me a host of new ideas. Some advice on how to write blogs is at the end of this podcast:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/01/podcast-81/

From the notes:

Some tips from Joel and Jeff about why and how (or if) programmers should blog. Set a schedule and stick to it. And don’t be a commodity blogger! It helps to focus on the storytelling aspect of the writing, per Ira Glass. And remember, writing a better article on any topic is usually pretty easy, because so much of the content on the internet is so darn bad.

The Delicious links provide some sources.

This blog’s theme is discussed on Twitter and classified in Delicious under the tag “wellWrittenBlog”. The first part of this blog post, “A checklist for improving the writing style of technical blog posts” can be found here.