Enjoy this free chapter from my book on writing for the Web (it's the final chapter).

Net Words - Creating High-Impact Online Copy

Chapter 16

AN ONLINE WRITER'S MANIFESTO.

Honesty is at the core of all great copywriting.

Scamming your audience is easy. A few buzz words, a contest and a photograph of a tropical paradise will do it every time. But that's not how you build a loyal customer base. Trust and loyalty spring only from absolute honesty. Besides, being honest makes it a lot easier to write great copy. Confine yourself to the truth and you won't be distracted by numerous shades of gray. Honesty keeps you on track, in pursuit of a single truth that serves both your customers and your company.

Cynics will never make great online copywriters.

If you take pleasure in the manipulation of an audience and you laugh at people's gullibility and foolishness, you don't have the makings of a great copywriter online. You might have the writing skills. You might know how to crank up response rates. You might make a pile of money. But you'll never know the pleasure of crafting a message that truly adds value both to your customers and your company. You'll never show your spouse and family what you wrote and be able to say, with pride, "I wrote that".

Copywriting is a creative process.

Copywriting is as creative as designing, painting, programming or the writing of fiction. The writing of great copy is a creative process. As with any act of creation, you work within limitations. Paint a picture and you're limited by the size of your canvas. Write a sonnet and you're restricted by the demands of the rhyming iambic pentameter. Write great copy and you have to serve the needs of both your company and your audience. Finding that point of intersection takes time, insight and creativity.

Great copywriters are great marketers.

Copywriters do more than translate the creative brief into the words on a screen or a sheet of paper. Great copywriters are also great marketers, intuitively if not by formal training. They have to be. Without the insight of a marketer, how can a copywriter write copy that truly addresses the marketing needs of the company?

It's the words that make the sale.

Flash animations don't make sales. CRM software doesn't make sales. Pictures of products don't make sales. If you have trouble believing that, remove all the words from your site and see how many sales you make. Without great copy, your online presence is dead in the water. It's the words that open, build and close the sale.

It's the words that build relationships.

Not even the highest-priced personalization software can be personal without great copy. It's the words that connect with customers, not the technology. So why is so much investment made in the software and so little made in the message itself? Without words, there can be no relationships, no personal messages, no personality.

Copywriters cannot succeed without the support and respect of their colleagues.

Traditionally, in the world of offline advertising, a copywriter would be paired with an art director or designer. Successful teams carried all the hallmarks of a sometimes dysfunctional, but oddly successful marriage. The team was better than the sum of its parts. Copywriters would sometimes make great design suggestions. Designers would sometimes write great headlines. They would fight, they would make up. This team would also work closely with typographers, photographers, illustrators and printers. The creation of great work was absolutely dependent on mutual respect among all the parties involved. This was how great advertising was created.

For copywriters to create great copy online, they need to be part of a similar team, based on equal respect for all parties. Without that respect, the team is nothing. Without the team, your online efforts remain a jigsaw of individual contributions, no part quite fitting with any other. Without a strong team, the whole will be less than the sum of the individual parts.

Copywriters are the natural architects of your online presence.

The Web is a text-based environment. That's how the Net started out, just with words. That's how the Web is today, with billions of messages passing between millions of individuals online, every day of the year. For users of the Web, text is the simplest and fastest way to receive and understand your message.

If text is the message-carrier of choice online - the choice of the users, not necessarily the experts - copywriters must be encouraged to play a key role in the development of your online presence. When it's all about words, you need great wordsmiths.

Great copywriting takes time.

It's a given that programmers need time to do their work. It's accepted that designers need time to be 'creative' and find both their inspiration and its best creative execution. So why are copywriters expected to write great copy as quickly as a manager can write a Monday morning memo?

Great copy takes time. It takes time for the writer to find the right thing to say. And it takes time to write and rewrite, again and again, until the right thing is said in the right way.

Online copy cannot be cut and pasted from your offline channels.

To hand a development team the copy from a brochure or offline sales letter and say, "Hey, use this," shows an absolute misunderstanding of how text works online and a total disrespect for the writer. The copy for a site, for a newsletter, for emails and for live chat all needs to be custom-written with the unique environment of the Web in mind. Any copywriter asked to shoehorn offline copy into the Web should hold tight to their pride and politely refuse.

Support young copywriters online.

In twenty years time, when you look back at the great online copywriters, you will see a mixture of writers who came to the Web from a career offline, and those who started their copywriting careers online. This latter group, the younger writers, are the ones who are trying to get a toehold online right now. When a young writer expresses an interest in copywriting online, he or she should be encouraged and provided with the best support and training available. These young writers will have a profound impact on the success of business online. They will have grown up with the Web. The Web's culture will be in their veins and they will understand it in ways that older writers will find hard to match.

Pay copywriters what they are worth.

Salary levels are signposts for young people coming to the Web. At school and at college they will look to see where the money is. If it's in programming, that's where many will go. If it's in design, more great designers will come online. And if you want great copywriters online, you need to give that skill the recognition it deserves. Good online copywriters deserve a good salary. While money is rarely the sole motivation for someone choosing a particular career, it certainly makes an impact. Talented people want recognition. They want a decent title. They want a good office. They want all the signposts that say, "This is an important and highly valued job."

Even the best copywriters need a good briefing.

The last member of the creative team in an offline ad agency is the account executive or manager. This is the person who crafts the creative brief. While not viewed as being part of the creative department, the account person has a huge impact on how good a job the creative group can do.

Can an architect build a great building if he doesn't know what it's for? Can a designer design a site interface if she doesn't know who will be coming to the site and what they hope to achieve there? Can a copywriter write good copy without a full briefing as to the purpose of the text and the audience to which it is directed?

When the brief is poor its hard, if not impossible, to produce great creative, offline or online. Don't expect great work from your copywriters if they don't get a great briefing at the outset of the project.

Study the work of great copywriters.

You may have a natural talent for copywriting, but you'll never become a great copywriter until you have studied the work of those who came before you. You can never stop learning. When you think you know it all, you stagnate.

Study the work of the offline greats, like David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett, Ed McCabe, David Abbot, Bob Levenson, Andrew Ruherford, Tony Brignull, Jim Durfee, Neil French and Barbara Nokes. And then look out for the new online greats, as and where you find them.

Become one of the first great online copywriters.

The great offline copywriters of the past can teach today's writers how to master their craft and take pride in what they do. But none of those people can teach you the unique demands of copywriting online. Much is the same between offline and online copywriting. But even if the differences make up just ten percent of the whole, it's those differences that make online copywriting unique. It's not business as usual on the Net, nor is it copywriting as normal. Take what you can from the offline world and weave it into the new. Stand up and carve out your place as a copywriter in the online world.