Writing for leads: How professionals can market themselves online

Editor's Notes

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• #3: I know what you’re thinking as I stand here.\n\n
• #4: You think I’m going to stuff ridiculous rules about writing for the web down your throats. \n\nNope.\n\n
• #5: My history, in a graph.\n\nIn this time, I’ve invested a lot of work in testing and measuring different kinds of writing, marketing and otherwise, to see what works best.\n
• #6: And before you say “Oh, but you get to write about all sorts of exciting stuff - this is law. No one wants to hear about it.” \n\nYeah. No.\n\nI’ve had to write articles about reroofing the Tacoma Dome, the importance of colon cleansing, the magical moment when you select just the right rubber grommit for your HVAC unit, and I’ve had to impersonate a pleasant bride-to-be writing about her bridesmaids.\n\nI’m picking on me, too, by the way.\n
• #7: What I will be talking about: Everyone who comes to your blog post should somehow convert. That’s the perfect world. And you can write to make them do that. I’m not talking about deception, or selling, or anything else. I’m talking about writing that makes the reader want to read the next thing you write, at a minimum.\n\n
• #8: This is the cycle.\n
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• #11: No one cares about you. They care about them.\n
• #12: Readers on the web are more distracted, less attentive and less willing to stop and actually read the words on the page than a preschooler who just ate 10 bags of M&Ms. You can beg, plead and bribe. You'll get nothing.\n
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• #21: Search engines use the title tag. On any given page, the title tag is the strongest signal of a page’s relevance. The words that come first in the title tag are the words for which you have the best chance of being found.\n\nAnd, search engines display the title tag at the top of the search ‘snippet’. So once you show up in the rankings, the title tag is the strongest signal to the reader that this is a page they do or do not want to read.\n\nIf you look at this example, the title is ‘Captain Crazy Pants and the Flight to Nowhere’ with some other stuff after it. If you search for ‘captain crazy pants’...\n\n\n
• #22: ...this article is #3 out of 2 million competing pages, beating sites like YouTube. That is, in large part, because of the title tag. I only use the phrase ‘captain crazy pants’ one more time on the whole page.\n\nI know what you’re saying - that’s just some nonsense phrase, Ian. We’re real journalists. We don’t write about drunk Google engineers who harass innocent SEOs. This will never work for me. But nice job presenting the best possible case. Loser.\n
• #23: Feed readers use the title tag. A feed reader is a tool many people use to subscribe to a site’s latest stories. When I subscribe to a web site’s RSS feed, I get a list of titles from the latest stories. It’s convenient, because I can review the latest stories from many different sites, all in one place. Then I can decide which stories I want to read and click through to those sites. \n\nIf your headline becomes your title tag, and your title tag is the first thing someone sees in a feed reader, then your headline determines whether they’ll click through to your site.\n\nThat’s pretty important.\n\n
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• #28: I couldn’t get permission to share specific client data, but we’ve tested great, clever but not fully descriptive headlines against fully descriptive headlines that aren’t as clever. The fully descriptive headline wins every time, without fail, usually by 2:1 or more.\n\nAnd that’s not just in search!!!! Clickthru from feed readers, Twitter ‘tweets’ and other ways of forwarding a story to others perform better, as well.\n\nNow, a couple of examples...\n
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• #42: It’ll be too hard to read.\nI won’t understand it.\nIt’ll be the same stuff I’m reading everywhere else.\nIt will be a waste of time.\n
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• #44: Be the one attorney everyone can understand, right off the bat.\n
• #45: Be the one attorney everyone can understand, right off the bat.\n
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• #48: Don’t ignore them. But understand that search engines are awfully good at what they do. If you follow the blank sheet of paper rule you should be fine. So don’t “write for search engines.” Leave that to the professionals.\n
• #49: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #50: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #51: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
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• #53: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #54: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #55: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #56: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #57: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #58: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
• #59: If you’re fully descriptive, the rest will take care of itself.\n
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• #61: First, if you are responsible for formatting your images, compress them! Look at this image.\n
• #62: Then look at this one. It’s 18 kb. Almost 1/4 the size. It’ll load faster, which means more people will use it (because they don’t have to wait). It also means search engines are more likely to index the image.\n\nThis isn’t really part of fully descriptive or properly classified, but it aids in both. Slow loading images don’t perform as well in the rankings, and they sure don’t get as much love from your readers.\n
• #63: You also need to resize images in a photo editor, not using the height and width attribute.\n\nI see many cases where an image that’s 300 x 300 pixels (dots) on a page is actually a 600 x 600 pixel image that’s been scaled in the HTML itself.\n\nYour content management system probably lets you scale images by a % or specific dimensions when you insert them into your articles. But most of those systems don’t actually resize the image - they don’t take the original file, smush it down, and then save that as a new, smaller file. Instead, they wedge the original file into a smaller space by using some code: The height and width attributes of the IMG element. I won’t nerd out about it - you can look that up if you need to.\n\nWhen that happens, the page still delivers the humungous image file. Visiting browsers and search engines have to take the time to download an image that’s larger than necessary in both dimensions and file size. \n\nAnd, visiting search engines can’t properly classify the image. Google and other engines classify images by dimension. If you scale your images in the HTML code, you’re forcing the search engines to take an extra step. Why do that? Don’t!\n
• #64: And, make sure you fully describe the image in its ALT attribute.\n\nThe ALT attribute is literally the alternate description of an image. It’ll show up if, for whatever reason, a visiting browser doesn’t download the image. It’s also used by search engines to categorize images. \n\nRemember the blank sheet of paper test? If you write your ALT attribute on a blank sheet of paper and show it to a stranger, they should know what the image is about.\n
• #65: No one cares about you. They care about them.\n
• #66: Chain content. Make a blog post the entry point for the reader to get a whitepaper, or to sign up for a webinar, or to just subscribe to the blog. Then they get more content. You get the idea.\n
• #67: Be the one attorney everyone can understand, right off the bat.\n
• #68: Be the one attorney everyone can understand, right off the bat.\n
• #69: Those shares are more than just a happy feeling. They help your firm and your blog rank higher. This is an opportunity for you, cause your competitors aren’t doing it.\n
• #70: Be the one attorney everyone can understand, right off the bat.\n
• #71: Those shares are more than just a happy feeling. They help your firm and your blog rank higher. This is an opportunity for you, cause your competitors aren’t doing it.\n
• #72: Chain content. Make a blog post the entry point for the reader to get a whitepaper, or to sign up for a webinar, or to just subscribe to the blog. Then they get more content. You get the idea.\n
• #73: Chain content. Make a blog post the entry point for the reader to get a whitepaper, or to sign up for a webinar, or to just subscribe to the blog. Then they get more content. You get the idea.\n
• #74: Chain content. Make a blog post the entry point for the reader to get a whitepaper, or to sign up for a webinar, or to just subscribe to the blog. Then they get more content. You get the idea.\n
• #75: This is the cycle.\n
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