Copywriting crash course: Henneke Duistermaat in How to Write Seductive Web Copy

“Each page needs to have one main call-to-action. In a color that stands out. And that tells people exactly what to do.”

I took the advice at heart to dig into copywriting. I didn’t know anything about copywriting. So this was going to be fun.

With another advisory voice in my head – learn something new every day, read broadly, have wide interests – I purchased Henneke Duistermaat’s How To Write Seductive Web Copy, after doing some research on the web looking for the best books on copywriting. (Why not some webinar or YouTube video? I feel so lazy when I do that. I don’t have that when I am reading. Video learning is challenging to me. Like exercising on a home trainer. Boring. Can’t concentrate.)

So I read the book. This book is outstanding in conciseness. Duistermaat gets to the point and is very practical.

Henneke Duistermaat is an internet marketing expert and founder of Enchanting Marketing and author of a number of very practical books on copywriting, blogging and marketing.

I learned a lot. Very simple messages.

Get a clear picture of who your audience is – write their biography.

Your value proposition is what you write on a billboard: a headline, a few bullet points, and an image.

What is important as well is to have a simple but clear view on the problem you are solving for your clients.

Let’s start with writing your headline. Four different options exist: You state simply what you offer.  You mention the key benefit of working with or buying from you.  You tell readers which problem or hassle you help avoid.  You ask a question to target customers who are right for you.

Your product page shouldn’t be descriptive; it needs to sell your products or services. This is how:  Write for your ideal reader. Focus on the benefits you offer and the problems you avoid.

The question your about page should answer is this: Which problems do you solve for your customers? Don’t talk all the time about your product, your service, or your business because nobody’s interested. Talk about your prospect’s problems. Explain how you solve these problems. Tell your readers how much happier they’ll be if they let you solve their problems.

Gain the trust of your customers. Show them you are not bullshitting or wasting their time. Get personal.

When you engage emotion and the senses, people get transported to a different world. Allow prospects to experience working with you, and their defenses against sales pitches are lowered.

You need to work hard to gain the trust of potential buyers. An easy way is to provide case studies and testimonials, or to include logos of business you’ve worked with, or publications you’ve been published in.

Often people want to get to know you more personally. Rather than focus on an immediate sale, get web visitors to sign up for your e-newsletter.

Also, on your website, Duistermaat provides very clear advice.

Each page needs to have one main call-to-action. In a color that stands out. And that tells people exactly what to do.

Remember that the way you design your web page has a big impact on your persuasiveness.  A few tips: De-clutter each web page and simplify your navigation. Have a lot of white space to create an inviting environment. Use color and font size to show what’s your most important information. Promote readability with large, easy-to-read fonts. Guide your visitors with clear, stand-out calls-to-action.

And links to cheat sheets and other useful materials. Worth every cent.

What to read next.

The Copywriter’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Copy That Sells — By Robert W. Bly

Everybody Writes: The Go-To Guide to Creating Ridiculously Good Content — By Ann Handley

Inside the mind of an Asperger: The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night

Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.

I got The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time as a present for my birthday. My kids were polite and only later told me it was a children’s book. My son said he had read it for his English class. 51js6g5i9pl-_sy344_bo1204203200_
Mark Haddon has created an extraordinary story about a boy with Aspergers syndrome. I had read two books with a comparable first person perspective of a person with Asperger: The Rosie Project (Which I actually selected hurriedly in an airport kiosk for it’s interesting cover design) and the Dutch book Wat Is Er Toch Met Kobus (What’s wrong with Kobus). The first is written from the perspective of a full-grown scientist, with a light Asperger syndrome. Kobus is even more similar  to The Curious Incident: in it’s first person narrative form, and the young main character is a highschool boy.

Little Insight from Insight Selling

I will (and believe can) summarise Insight Selling by Mike Schulz and John Doerr with a few quotes.51fhppsuv2l-_sx333_bo1204203200_

I managed to get halfway through the book. Concurring with Naval Ravikant who does not read business books as ‘they are very simple ideas wrapped up in a lot of pages’. I also agree to not read books that are not keeping your attention.

As in Tas Universum

Jelle Brandt Corstius fietst naar de Middellandse Zee met een koffiekopje van de as van zijn vader in zijn fietstas.

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Onderweg kijkt hij terug op het Opperlands universum van zijn vader, Hugo. Hij leert fietsen. Hellingen beklimmen. Leest ondertussen de gedetailleerde wereld van Knausgård. (Wiens vader ook van alles blijkt te verzinnen.) Maakt zich steeds zorgen over de gevoelloze lul die hij na elke dag fietsen in zijn broek vind. Geeft een lesje klimmen voor beginners.

“Het klimmen kun je beter in een rustig verzet beginnen, om daarna de berg te ‘voelen’. Op een gegeven moment heb je een een ritme waarvan je weet dat je dat een half uur kunt volhouden – langer is zelden nodig. Over het algemeen hebben bergen een redelijk constante hellingsgraad, behalve helemaal aan het eind: daar komen de haarspeldbochten. Daar moet je je laatste energie voor bewaren.”

Jelle vertelt over de continue pesterijen van zijn vader. Dat dit niet alleen in diens columns aan de orde was maar dat dit door ging in zijn dagelijks leven. 

Over het plezier dat zijn vader beleefde aan burgerlijke ongehoorzaamheid, hoe hij dit zich als doel op zich leek te maken.

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Het eigen Malle Hugo universum van zijn vader. Waar waarheid en fictie doel elkaar lopen. Waar wereldvreemdheid en publieke figuur met elkaar in gevecht zijn. Waar onverklaarbare zaken werden afgedaan met de uitleg: “Pirelli”. Waar kinderen kunnen weglopen en naar huis terugkeren zonder dat vader iets in de gaten heeft gehad.

Maar die ook een vader is die zijn kinderen leert te overleven door ze naar spartaanse zomerkampen te sturen.

Opperlandse Taal en Letterkunde stond bij ons thuis in de boekenkast. Ik vond het een heerlijk voorbeeld van zinloze wetenschap. Toch fantastisch dat iemand zoveel tijd besteed om met zoveel precies de meest onwaarschijnlijke taalwereld te scheppen.

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Jelle heeft ook zijn universum, en lijkt de denken dat zijn universum de normale wereld is.
Het is een universum van een vriendelijke vervreemde reiziger, verdwaald in de echte wereld. Waar hij zich verwonderd over mondaine zaken, maar waar hem net als zijn vader vreemde zaken overkomen omdat hij vreemde zaken onderneemt.

Hugo Brandt Corstius./Hugo Brandt Corstius.

“Waarom trek ik toch altijd dit soort mensen aan? Zijn het de vragen die ik stel? Of is het andersom? Ben ik zelf op zoek naar dit soort mensen?”

Het is een universum dat ik ook vind in Murakami. Maar in Murakami overkomt het de protagonist echt.

Jelle is een zelfverkozen Murakami-karakter met een eigen wil, omringt door gekken. Geen gevaarlijke gekken, maar vriendelijke gekken.

The lightness of Purity

I wrote about the darkness of suppression of a totalitarian regime and how that influences the lives of people, when I discussed The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes and Jonathan Doerr’s All The Light We Can Not See.
Purity by Jonathan Franzen is the third book I recently read that is dominated by the totalitarian overcast. In this case, the dictatorship is the DDR, East Germany, during the Iron Curtain era.

In long descriptive sections, we learn how Andreas grew up under the suppression of the DDR. He became a critic of the regime, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he started an organization like WikiLeaks. But his personality was damaged for good, and the organization became an instrument for expressing his grandiosity.

“Well, you say you’re about citizen journalism. You’re supposedly in the business of leaks. But isn’t your real business—” “Cow manure?” “I was going to say fame and adulation. The product is you.”

Andreas is unable to shake off this state of mind. He keeps feeling unsafe, haunted, and unable to be happy. We have also seen this state of mind in The Noise of Time and All the Light We Can Not See. When his girlfriend turns him down and leaves him, his madness takes disastrous forms.

He’d never experienced grief like this. It seemed as if he really loved her after all. Grief passed, however. Before he was even home again, he could see his future. He would never again make the mistake of trying to live with a woman. For whatever reason (probably his childhood), he wasn’t suited for it, and the strong thing to do was to accept this. His computer had made a weakling of him. He also had a vague, shameful memory of climbing onto Annagret’s lap and trying to be her baby. Weak! Weak! But now his mother, with her meddling, had given him the pretext he needed to be free of both her and Annagret. A double deus ex machina—the good luck of a man fated to dominate.

Thus, he reaches a megalomaniac mindset, convinced that the world and everyone revolve around him. This contrasts massively with Pip (Purity), the second protagonist in the story.

Both of them grew up under the burden of a very dominant mother. Purity is betrayed by her parents. She finds out about that but refuses to blame them for anything. Andreas, however, escapes, leaves his mother behind, and is unable to forgive and take responsibility for his own life.

In contrast to Andreas’s self-destructive conclusion, Purity can reconcile with her past. She faces her mother, forgives her parents for what they have done to her, and even arranges to settle her mother’s problems.

All The Light disappears in a fountain of earth

All The Light We Can Not See by Anthony Doerr is one of the 3 books I recently read in which the tyranny of a totalitarian regime shapes the life of the main characters.
The other books are The Noise Of Time by Julian Barnes and Purity by Jonathan Franzen.

All The Light is is V-shaped book. The legs of the V are the lives of the two protagonists. A German boy grows up under the Nazi regime. A French, blind girl lives in Paris. The story develops, we follow there lives and finally they meet. As if their lives we only meant for that one special occasion.

Purity vs Dark Brown suppression – The Noise of Time

I somewhat randomly bought The Noise of Time by Julian Barnes. Barnes is one of the writers on my ‘read anything they write’ list (another one is Haruki Murakami, yet another Douglas Coupland).

So, I did buy the book for its main topic—a fictionalized biography of Dmitri Shostakovich. Actually, as I had not read any review of the book or its cover, it took me a couple of pages to realize this was about Shostakovich—or, probably more precisely, about his moral struggle with the Soviet government.

The beginning breathes the dark brown stifling atmosphere of Kafka’s The Trial. Desperate, helpless, surrendering to the untouchable power of bureaucratics.

Barnes writes how Shostakovich became famous as a composer but could not enjoy his success. He gets to visit the United States as a puppet of the USSR politics. He holds speeches drenched with political statements but includes nothing of his own vision. The composer seems to half realize what he is doing and seems to justify it for his family. So the story turns to Shostakovich’s courage, or lack thereof, his cowardness, betrayal, and moral shame.

Barnes describes wonderfully how the oppression permeates every hole in Shostakovich’s life. It makes me wonder how he could still write such wonderful music.

Who does art belong to? The people? The state? The ‘big goal’?

Music in the USSR is played ‘as meant by the artist’ or ‘ strategic’—that is, in accordance with the norms of socialist art.

But in music, there is a purity. Something that can not be washed away by norms, politics, ethics, or violence. A purity that stands The Noise of Time. Eternal. Context-free. An undebatable truth.

And this purity in music probably explains how Shostakovich was able to continue to make his wonderful music, while being oppressed by this totalitarian regime.

163 Reasons To Love Reading Little BIG Things (ok, a few less)

Of course Tom Peters doesn’t need an introduction. He wrote In Search of Excellence with Bob Waterman, a monumental book from 1982 reporting on the key characteristics of successful companies. I would summarize it as: well-run businesses don’t bullshit around.

In 2010, Tom Peters gathered his thoughts in 163 categorized topics in The Little BIG Things. I recently reread all the Things. It has been a fun read again, and here’s a list of the things I like so much about this book.

  • It could be a set of laws. If you abide by these laws, you will become a good and happy citizen (I am avoiding the word successful here).
  • The typography in the book is lovely and innovative.
  • The book is a set of lists. Items are pretty elaborated, but a list. Love it.
  • Humor is all over the place.
  • Great stories to the topics.
  • Self-mockery.
  • Funny exclamations and subordinate sentences. (Yes, damn it, subordinate clauses!)
  • Interesting twists and great ways of putting things

Talk with your matey about the ….. Commercial Effectiveness of Strategic Apology.

  • Reading ahead or jumping through the book is allowed and recommended. Still a great read.

The book is completely quotable. You can take 10 notes on every page. Peters quotes others as well, so I will only close with Peters’ advice on reading.

Read!

Read Wide!

Surprise Yourself With Your Reading Picks!

Read Deep!

Read Often!

Out-READ the “Competition”!!!!!

Take Notes!

Summarize!

Share with Others What You Read!

(Not to impress them, but selfishly, because there’s no other way to embed what you’ve learned.)

Create/Join a Reading Salon!

Read!

Read!

Read!

(FYI. I am not a fast reader-a suprise to many.)

More than nothing learned from Tim Kreider’s We Learned nothing

I’m not sure where I dug up the reference to Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing, but I am sure it was from a self-help book.

So, when I began with this book, I was quite confused. It was like taking a sip of coffee, expecting the bitterness of a black coffee but testing the sweet, creamy flavor from the choice of your friend opposite you with your cup and a disgusted frown on his forehead after tasting yours.

So, this is not a self-help book. They are essays about the strangeness in Tim Kreider’s life. Just to mention a few:

He is stabbed in the throat and escapes death.

A year-long friend passes away and is found to have lived in a slum and has suffered from severe mental problems. Tim and his friends continue to love him, not even forgivingly, but rather naturally.

A friend has a sex operation and changes into a woman, but very much remains Tim’s old-school friend.

We learn Tim is adopted and how he later in life finds his biological mother and two sisters.

The book’s theme is friendship and love, and the confusing interrelationship and differences between them.

It came as a belated epiphany to me when I learned that the Greeks had several different words for the disparate phenomena that in English we indiscriminately lump together under the label love. Our inability to distinguish between, say, eros (sexual love) and storgé (the love that grows out of friendship) leads to more than semantic confusion. Careening through this world with such a crude taxonomical guide to human passion is as foolhardy as piloting a plane ignorant of the difference between stratus and cumulonimbus, knowing only the word cloud.

 

Also, about the laziness and passive character of de-friending, real-life defriending, not Facebook defriending. I found it very recognizable, and I am sure most of my defriending was due to this laziness. I am equally sure most of these friendships would have continued if the other person had reached out.

Defriending isn’t just unrecognized by some social oversight; it’s protected by its own protocol, a code of silence. Demanding an explanation wouldn’t just be undignified; it would violate the whole tacit contract on which friendship is founded. The same thing that makes friendship so valuable is what makes it so tenuous: it is purely voluntary. You enter into it freely, without the imperatives of biology or the agenda of desire.

An achievement to write about such topics and dramatic events in an undramatic but sensitive style. Humorous and nicely illustrated (though very difficult to read on Kindle).

 

 

Sloppy Lifebox print, excellent read from Rudy Rucker

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Annoying: pages 237 through 240 are shuffled in my print of The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. Though not entirely surprising, the crumbly paper was an indicator of a sloppy edition. Maybe it is a collector’s item now. Mail me and you can have it.

I bought it about ten years ago, and recently reread Rudy Rucker‘s The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul It is a very interesting book, although it smells odd here and there.  

Rucker writes about Alan Turing that Turing ‘apparently was given to bringing home sexual partners he met in the streets.’ What does he mean with that phrasing? For historical facts on Turing, I prefer to rely more on Turing’s biographer Andrew Hodges who wrote the respectable biography Alan Turing: The Enigma. Hodges pictures Turing as naive in confessing his homosexuality (for that time), but also describes him to be rather restraint in getting involved in sexual relationships. What I am sure I haven’t read anywhere is that Turing would go skimming the streets looking for ‘sexual partners’ (sexual partners – is that really correct English?).

Also the idolizing references to Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science are unnecessary. Wolfram generously takes care of that himself.

Also, Rucker’s habit of regularly quoting his own Science Fiction stories to illustrate his theories begins to annoy me at some point. I understand his frame of reference, but he is not very scientific in this way of providing ‘proof’.

But, as said, the book offers a number of very interesting ideas and visions. I realize I sound so negative, but I really enjoyed the book.

Rucker confirms that Artificial Intelligence – the discipline in Computer Science – has not achieved a lot. After my personal introduction to scientific AI, I became very suspicious. I found it odd that AI was dealing with decision rules, (fuzzy) logic, and the like. And used this awful programming language Prolog. Wasn’t there anything better to focus on in Artificial Intelligence? Cognitive is hot these days, but is it really Artificial Intelligence? A step forward, probably.

Rucker describes the life box—a device that captures every aspect of your life. I’m not sure if he invented the concept, but it is the first time I saw it described in such a realistic, predictive way.

This book has become history. The lifebox is there. People like Cathal Gurrin are walking around with cameras and devices recording everything they do all day.