Daniel Cave's blog

Perfect Web Copy is Really Perfectly Flawed Copy

Short and sweet article today

In Terms of social media (including blogging) the aspiration of a lot of companies is to achieve perfectly formed grammatically perfect and mis-spell free copy that conveys your professional company image. That’s Nice.

The issue is as the web becomes a more connected, social, personal (pick an adjective you like) place, people don't want your personality stripped content; they want to read something by and/or interact with a real person... and News Flash! People are not perfect corporate machines. Your starched collar content does not appeal to people, it makes potentially interesting topic dull and uninteresting by removing any personality altogether.

Now, I am not saying every industry is suited to causal and personable content; and there is a fine line between passionate and downright wrong content. But a great many are, and I see people ruining content everyday by sanitising and sterilising beyond recognition into boring corporate speak.

Remember the old adage "People don't buy from places, they Buy from people"?

That old adage is really the base of what I am getting at; in a world where there is no personality online, where there is no banter or joy in writing then there is no chance for readers to buy from a person, because the person has been removed from the equation, you might as well be looking at a store front poster.

My cure for this perfect copy condition?

Let the people who are passionate in your company write for you both onsite and on Social Media platforms. Put their passion down on paper (so to speak) then pass it to your sales person to add there touch of flair to the conversation too. Then as a reviewer you can remove anything Breath-takingly stupid or any offensive material and correct any howlers of mistakes, but leave the personally and passion in place.
I know my content isn't the best put together out there, but I challenge anyone to say its lifeless and doesn’t convey something of me though it.

You never know you might even pick up the odd long tail search visitor on a misspelled keyword, it happens all the time. You may even find you have a natural sales person within your ranks without even knowing it.



Daniel Cave's blog

Javascript:: Welcome to Post Click Marketing

Now you should know im no programmer, I put together bits of Javascript for very specific purposes. My Javascript is neither complicated nor subtle, but anything create though works from real world project and each piece will help you do a specific task.

This week I will be showing you how to do a neat little trick to get the referer from javascipt and act upon specific things from within it.

In case you havent figured out where im going, im giving you the power to make your website behave differently according to where the user came from, including people coming from google with specific keywords or even with a fuzzy match on keywords they used to find your site.

Imagine this. A user comes to your site from google on a search for a keyphrase which happens to turn up your site. When they get yo you site you can highlight every instance of the words they searched for in your page.

Another use is to redirect people depending on what keyowrd they landed on, or to alter advert types or banners or anything you can think of really.

This sample pseudo code will let you get the referrer and then perform an action of your choice.

function checkKeyWords () {

//get referer and split out the Google queery begining with the "q=" bit
var x = document.referrer.split("q=");

// Split the string after the bit we want
q = x[1].split("&");

//set f to be the final string we end with
var f = q[0];

// check if the keyword matches("colourpool+SEO" in this case)
if (f == "colourpool+SEO") {

// Do this...

}
}

Welcome to the world of post click marketing.

The savy developer maybe thinking "hang on I can do this on the server side". And they would be right! and I would advise you do so.

But for those of us who are stuck coding on the client side this script should work nicely once you get your version working.

I will sound a note of caution, if google thinks you are using this technique maliciously it may punish you with ranking penalties, so be subtle.

Feel free to contact me about any of this.