Highly Nerdy Former Journalist Explains the Difference Between an About Page and a Services Page

Whereas an About page is all about establishing brand and tone and giving readers a full journalistic sense of the company as a whole, a Services page is essentially a list that shows exactly what the readers can get from said company. Think of the About page as a news story, and the Services page as a grocery store aisle.
About
An About page should always and forevermore be called an About page. Links to the About page should read "About". The About page should be accessible from anywhere on the website, via a link at the top and/or bottom of the website. Don't hide your About page as a needle in a haystack.

The About page must contain a bit of prose that conveys the journalistic Five W's and H of the company - Who, What, When, Where, Why, How. Often these terms overlap, but make sure each of the Five W's and H are touched on in the About page. Sometimes the 5WH must be conveyed in the design, rather than in words - or in both. You need to give a clear, vibrant picture of the company here - quickly and in a highly readable manner.

• Who is the company? Are you tech consultants, green thumbs, an artist? Name names, if you can. Include headshots, if possible. Give a sense of humanity by using a distinctive style and voice.
• What is the company, and what does it do? Is it a law firm that specializes in helping their clients to not get fleeced in a divorce? If you sell widgets that nobody understands, what the hell is a widget? Make readers "get it" quickly.
• When was the company formulated, how long has it been in operation, how fast does the company deliver services? Readers need you to give them a sense of the passing of time. It makes them feel safe. I don't know why. Just include the element of time, somehow.
• Where is the company based? What geographical region does it serve? If the company is decentralized, you still need to mention place names or. We still live on Planet Earth, and so people need a sense of place.
• Why does the company do what it does? What drives the people behind the company? What is the mission, the aim of the company? What is its purpose, its raison d'etre?
• How does the company deliver services, how does the company operate, how can a reader get the company's services right now?

Services
The Services page is a list, period. When someone clicks on a link that says "Services" - and it should always be called "Services", by the way - they are looking for a list. Therefore it must contain bullet points, headings, and other dividing methods.
A list contains nouns. The nouns can be expanded upon if necessary to explain unknown terms. Include all of your services. If some of your services can only be explained after speaking with a client, or if your services are far too numerous to include every last one of them, you must add a paragraph of prose to give readers a general idea.

Include also an action step in the Services page. This can mean linking people to the Products page, or to the Contact page. (Better yet, include contact info on every single page of your website. Don't make people strain to reach you. Just be there for them every step of the way.)

About the Author: Will Conley is a copywriter and former journalist whose high school "College English" teacher made fun of him until he learned the meaning of "parallel sentence."

You Are Not Above the Law: Three Things Real People Look for in a Business Website

Some rules never change, nor should they. The fact that you can read these reads proves my point.

This article is from the standpoint of someone who espouses the "path of least resistance" approach to website architecture and information dispersal. The faster your visitors can find what they are looking for, the happier everyone is.

You can be as creative as you want, but only within certain limits. Just like spoken language, there is a grammar to web navigation, replete with tacit rules, signals, indicators, and sign posts.

A good website follows all the rules of clear navigation - and your creativity can thrive within those bounds.
I always relate the story of the behavioral psychology experiment in which two groups of children were placed in two sets of circumstances and their behavior observed.

The first group of children, Group A, were placed in a fenced-in environment and given toys to play with. The second, Group B, was placed in a wide-open field and given the same toys.

Group A was observed to have had more fun, because there were limits within which their creativity could be expressed. Group B had less fun, because there were no limits. They were wary and disoriented.

Freedom is freedom only when there are rules. Every musician knows this. Miles Davis said you should learn all the musical scales so well that you can forget them.

You must standardize. There is nothing saying you can't have personality without following the commonly accepted signals of web navigation. Here are three non-optional elements of a business website.

1. Homepage
A business website should have a home or landing page with enough information for the reader to learn everything they need to know about the essence of what the business does. This means there should be enough search engine optimized body copy there for Internet users to find the business, but it should also project the brand, attitude or essence of the business.

Directly or indirectly, the homepage body copy should convey:

• something about the mission of the company,
• what the company can do for the user,
• who their typical user (target audience) is, and
  
• an introduction to the website.

The body copy of the homepage should incorporate links to the relevant sections of the website. Think of the homepage body copy as the welcome wagon and tour guide to the rest of the website. It should take readers by the arm and lead them to where they should go next - all the while informing them about the company and, if applicable, leading them to an action (purchase, download, further click-through, what-have-you.)
2. About
Every business website must have an About page that is easy to locate from anywhere on the website. When people click through to the About page, they are looking for fast access to
the essence of the company,

• what it does,
• where it is located,
• who is behind it, and
• what the company offers to the target audience.

Give the readers what they are looking for. Don't hide.
3. Products

If applicable, a prominent link to the Products page should be easy to access from anywhere on the website. Make it easy to find your products at any time, and you will make sales.

About the Author: Will Conley is a copywriter who feels that no matter what your profession, you should learn the rules so well that you can forget them.

My Video Review of the Red Hot Referrals Chapter of Business Network International (BNI)

I attended Visitor Day today at the Red Hot Referrals chapter of Business Network International (BNI). This is my review of the experience.

What is "Red Hot Referrals"? It is the White Bear Lake, MN chapter of an international real-world network of business professionals, called BNI. Similar to a chamber of commerce, members give each other business referrals.

Pretty straightforward.

What sets BNI apart from a chamber of commerce is that each chapter allows a maximum of one member from each type of business. For example, there is only one lawn care specialist in the Red Hot Referrals chapter, based in White Bear Lake. This creates an atmosphere of "preferred referrals" within the chapter and "locks out" the competition. If you join BNI, you will never see a "rival" company in your chapter. This lets you breathe easy and just be yourself. And trade lucrative business referrals with other members.

Pretty smart, right?

It costs about $400 a year to be a member of BNI. You have to attend meetings about once a week. "It's not netsitting, it's not neteating, it's networking," as they say.

The benefits of the organization became obvious to me when I attended Visitor Day today. Many long-time members attested to the effectiveness of the organization. Some members said they get as much as 70% of their business from Red Hot Referrals alone.

Everyone seemed to me very real, very genuine. I detected little to no bullshit whatsoever.

Those at RHR who I spoke with, please feel free to get in touch with me via http://willconley.extendr.com. Also: Comment right here freely.

Those who are not in BNI: Consider joining. It's awesome. And comment here freely.

I hope you enjoy the review.

How to Use Twitter for Business

A few rules of thumb for businesses using Twitter. For beginners and experienced Twitter users alike.

Are you considering using Twitter to promote your business and communicate with customers and prospects? Whether you are a beginner or an experienced Twitter user, the following rules of thumb will help your business get the most out of Twitter.

1. Relax, my friend! It's a cocktail party, not a sales presentation or board meeting.

2. Link your Twitter profile to your website or blog (and your website or blog should include easy links to the rest of your entire Internet presence.)

3. Have a to-the-point but interesting Twitter bio. Include your title and business name, but follow it up with something personal, distinctive or even wacky. You're a human being, act like it.

4. Tweet. Duh.

5. Vary your tweet content and style. Again, you are a human being living on Planet Earth. Don't try to tell me that your business is the only thing you care about. If something random but interesting comes to mind, tweet it.

6. Balance regular tweets with replies. Reply too seldom and you will be correctly identified as self-absorbed. Reply too often and you will be properly pegged as a follower not an initiator. Find an instinctive balance and I might just think you're human.

7. Be genuine. Are you seeing a pattern here?

8. Make your promo tweets AWESOME. Study great newspaper headlines and commercial tag lines. Take note when you see a great tweet and analyze it to find out why you love it. Apply what you learn to your tweets.

9. Time your promo tweets to coincide with UNUSUAL sales, promotions, events, etc. Timing is everything.

10. Help others. Freely re-tweet great tweets.

11. Share great links you think your followers might love.

12. Make friends. This goes along with that whole "try to pretend to act like a human being" thing.

The take-home lesson here is be human, interact, promote others as well as you and your business, be human, be brilliant, be human, and be...

What's the word of the day?

How to Throw a Yard Sale Using Social Media

This article describes how to leverage social media to supercharge your garage or yard sale and make a few hundred dollars in one day by selling things you do not want.

Do you have too much stuff in your house? Do you need a few hundred dollars to help lessen the blow of the economic recession?

Throw a garage or yard sale. Gather all the things you do not want or need, sort them into groups, put some thought into the prices for your things, and present them to your neighborhood for sale.

But how are you going to get people to come to your sale and BUY your things? How will you target the right people who want what you have?

How will you CRUSH IT and MAKE SURE your sale is worth your effort?

Use social media. If you build it, they will come is WRONG. Or at least incomplete. The quote should be, If you build it AND you market it, they will come.

My roommates and I threw a MASSIVE moving sale in Saint Paul, Minnesota USA this weekend. We got rid of all the things we did not want to keep as we all move on to our respective new homes. We made hundreds of dollars. And: WE HAD FUN!

(If you're not having fun, what's the point. Really. Everyone should know that by now. Come on.)

Here is how we made it happen.

1. Agree to the sale date, time, and mission. Our mission? In our case: to get rid of 90% of our material belongings so as to live a more Spartan - and hopefully more free - life.

2. Market the hell out of the sale, one week running up to the sale date:

• We posted an alluring and descriptive Craigslist ad. The ad included a Google map to the sale location, a laundry list of items to represent the diversity of our inventory, a few photos, and a dash of attitude ("MASSIVE moving sale" is better than "moving sale").


• We posted the Craigslist ad to Facebook.


• We tweeted the Craigslist ad. (And again, later, with an intriguingly insane twist!)

3. Make sure your inventory matches the tone of the marketing campaign. (A "massive" moving sale had better have a lot of stuff in it, which it did in our case.)

4. Stay PRESENT during the sale. This means demonstrating a little respect for your customers. Greet them. Answer their questions before they can muster the courage to ask. Listen. Respond. SELL. MAKE FRIENDS!!!

5. Continue your marketing efforts DURING THE SALE. How? Just be awesome. Help carry larger items to your customers' vehicles. Offer coffee to make customers feel more comfortable and at-home. Be fun. Be real. Word-of-mouth will do the rest. In our case, excellent customer service resulted in multiple compound sales referrals.

So, to recap:

How to throw a yard sale using social media? Plan what to sell; market like a hustler; be honest; execute well; and give customers something to rave about.

Free LIFETIME SUBSCRIPTION to Il Mio Vino?!

FINAL UPDATE: The links in the post have all been corrected. Thank you for all your patience and feedback. You in the wine industry should now be able to enjoy your free lifetime subscription to Il Mio Vino, the Italian wine magazine for serious oenophiles!

UPDATE: THE LINK TO THE FREE SUBSCRIPTION IS WORKING, BUT WHEN YOU SIGN UP AND HIT "SUBMIT" YOU ARE TAKEN TO AN ERROR PAGE. Please refrain from signing for the moment. When the sign-up page is fixed I will post the go-ahead for you to sign up and get your lifetime subscription to Il Mio Vino USA Trade Edition. I apologize for sending you down a dead-end. Please subscribe here to be alerted when the fix takes place (and to stay abreast of wine and social media news on Man of Many Words).

FREE SUBSCRIPTION FOR LIFE!
I am NOT kidding you. This is a free lifetime subscription to Il Mio Vino, USA Trade Edition. If you are in the wine industry, you get the magazine for free, for life. No obligation, no tricks, no bull. Just click through to the landing page, fill out a few details, and you're done.

Il Mio Vino, USA Trade Edition is ad-supported so that you in the wine industry can receive unfettered access to the latest and greatest news about Italian wines and stay abreast of the forces that are shaping the Italian wine world. Very cool, right? All I ask in return is that you pass on the good news. Tweet and re-tweet this article, Digg it, thumb it up on StumbleUpon, re-blog it, anything (see below for quick-submit buttons.)

You get a lifetime of FANTASTIC information about Italy's best value wines, like:

• Reviews and comparisons
• Vintner biographies and winery profiles
• General education about the Italian wine system
• The latest news affecting the industry
• Detailed charts, maps, and lush photographs of Italy's best-kept secret wineries
• And WAY more.

Il Mio Vino at Vinitaly April 2-6, 2009

My sponsor Il Mio Vino will be present at Vinitaly, one of the most influential wine events in Europe, April 2 - 6 in Verona.

Editors and experts from Il Mio Vino will be waiting for you at the Il Mio Castello S.P.A. booth, at the Centroservizi Castelvecchio - Stand Area 2.

Give them a call (+39.348.228.1652) or drop an email either to info@ilmiovino.it or gaetano.manti@gmail.com, and they will set up an appointment with you at the booth.

Vinitaly has been going on since 1967. A few dozen wine makers were present at that first event. Since then it has grown steadily to become a complete wine blowout every year. (View history here.)

Just to give you an idea as to how big it is, here are some vital stats on this year's Vinitaly:

• 89,630 sq.m. of net area
• 4,215 exhibitors (148 international)
• 157,177 visitors (43,524 international, up by 16% over the 2007 edition)
• 2,054 journalists (347 international)

So if you're into wine and you're in Europe, chances are you're already at Vinitaly. Please do stop over to the Il Mio Vino booth. Tell them Will Conley sent you. If they don't know what you're talking about, act real surprised and say, "You don't know who Will Conley is?"

An Open Cry for Help to Woot.com

To explain:

Woot! is a product review website and distributor. They write funny reviews. Hilarious, even. As I am always on the lookout for new clients, I thought I would hit up Woot! for some freelance writing work. The contact page on Woot.com was frightening, so I said screw it and wrote an email posing as a depressingly poverty-stricken person begging for a job. So Woot!, open your damn email or just read this post and respond. People are starving.

*****
Subject: So funny you won't believe I'm unemployed.

Seriously, how can one so funny be so jobless?

Hi. I'm Will Conley, and welcome to My Cry for Help. Brought to you by:

My landlady.

These and other fine clients (and my mom) are supporting me in my time of need, but not quite enough. That's why I'm foregoing six meals in a row to craft this email to Woot.com, so that I might make a plea for paid employment, if only on a trial basis. I have no food.

Send me one product and I will review the living f*ck out of it for Woot.com. Just to show you how flexible I am, you can pay me whatever you want, as long as it's $500, give or take my last remaining shred of pride.

I love you.

Sincerely,
Desperately Hilarious

My Awesome Sponsor: Seriously, Who Doesn't Love Italian Wine? Be Honest Now.

Introducing: Me! Brought to you by:



Il Mio Vino, the Italian wine magazine, now available in English. Want a free issue? Click here. Fill in your name and email address. You will not be asked for a credit card. Later, if you want, you can get a year's worth of Il Mio Vino (12 issues) for $4.99.

Here's the deal. My client, Il Mio Vino, has been publishing their magazine and distributing hard copies on newsstands throughout Italy for years. This January they finally came out with an English version, but here's the twist: it's only available online, in a PDF-based flash program called FlipIt. Basically the thing looks and behaves almost exactly like a regular magazine.

You flip the pages, you browse stories, you get your read on, you get the inside dope on some of the lesser-known Italian wineries and you end up looking cool in front of your friends and enemies.

So how is Il Mio Vino different than a regular Italian wine magazine? Obviously, the first way is that it does not exist in the physical world. Il Mio Vino decided to publish online-only for cost and environmental considerations. No paper, no plastic sleeves, no shipping costs, infinitesimal carbon footprint. It just makes sense to publish online these days. Especially when you look at how some of the old heavyweight publishing companies and news conglomerates are crumbling into bankruptcy.

Some other features of Il Mio Vino's FlipIt format:

1. You can bookmark pages "flag"-style. Neat and tidy that way.
2. You can zoom in and out, scroll to any page, and view the magazine in fullscreen mode.
3. It is fully searchable (only single-word searches, for now).
4. Download and print any full story in PDF format.
5. When you scroll over ads they light up and you can click them if you feel so inclined.

Il Mio Vino prides itself on its totally blind taste tests and stringent editorial standards. The two latest controversies in the wine industry:

• Wine Spectator recently gave out a wine award to a restaurant that failed to exist. Oops.
• Decanter has been widely rumor to sell positive reviews to highest bidder. D'oh!

I'm a journalist by training, so I'll give it to you straight: I'm new to the world of wine tastings, celebrity taste buds, Gary Vaynerchuck and that whole crowd. I don't know how often these wine reviewers let ethics fall through the cracks, and I don't know that anyone is particularly immune to lapses in judgment. But I have never heard of Il Mio Vino being caught with its pants down like that. So far it's got a nice clean reputation. Therefore if you're looking for credibility, I suppose you should make Il Mio Vino one of your wine information sources.

Am I right or am I foul? How can you tell what's a credible source for good information about wine? Let me know in the comments.

Il Mio Vino focuses on reviewing wines from the smaller producers. These vineyards generally have no advertising budget, so this is a nice way for them to get seen. The benefit for readers is that they get to learn about some of the one million-plus "ma-and-pa" wineries that produce top-notch stuff but just don't have the money to get reviewed in Decanter. (Oops, did I just take a potshot at the competition? My bad.)

In the same spirit, Il Mio Vino often pits less-expensive wines against pricier varietals/blends in blind taste tests. The February issue, for example, features a story entitled "David versus Goliath: Six Sagrantinos at less than $70 vs. one at $126."

I'll let you read the story to see who wins.

So that's my sponsor these days. Do me a solid: take a look at the magazine and tell me what you think.

IWearYourShirt.com Begins its Print Newspaper Bonanza

iwearyourshirt.com on front page of Florida Times Union (Metro section)
Originally uploaded by iwearyourshirt

As predicted, Jason Sadler of IWearYourShirt.com fame is starting to get some attention in the print newspapers. Expect more ink spilled on bigger broadsheets over the next few weeks as Sadler's one-man marketing juggernaut continues to broach the digital divide.

Jason Sadler a.k.a. iwearyourshirt.com Goes Live

I just think this is fascinating. Jason Sadler wears your branded shirt for the price of whatever day in 2009 he wears it (e.g., January 1st is $1, December 31st is $365). The shirt can depict anything you want, as long as it's not too profane or inappropriate. He doesn't pimp your company out loud, necessarily, unless he feels like it. Buyers can request he salsa dance or do ten push-ups while wearing the shirt, but again the extras are up to his whim.

To get your brand seen, Jason:

• Walks around and lives his normal life in Florida
• Runs a live stream on ustream.tv every day for an hour or so (while wearing your shirt)
• Twitters his doings
• Connects with people on Facebook
• Puts up photos of the shirts on Flickr

And whatever else comes to mind.

The live stream he did today, which ran four hours in length, was an interactive bonanza. His viewership averaged a steady 150 throughout the live stream, many of whom chatted with each other and with him in real time. He showed us his closet with the 365 hangers. He shorted out his ceiling fan in his apartment. He got his girlfriend's family on the phone to do some promo shoutouts for iwearyourshirt.com...

...and everybody just more-or-less had a goofy time of it.

People are excited about Jason's ploy. Yes, it's a transparent scheme to get money in a troubled economy, but that's what's so endearing about it. He's just a guy. He uses words like "sweet" and "awesome" to promote your brand. Not that this is all that new. For years people have been tattooing brand names on their skulls, selling their bodies as billboards to guerilla marketing firms, and so on. What's different about Jason's idea is the era in which it is taking place.

Twitter, Facebook, the proliferation of live personal video streaming--all this is relatively new, and even less understood as a marketing medium. The business colleges and universities of the world continue to hold onto traditional marketing for dear life, if only to safeguard their graying jobs. As print newspaper models (see the Tribune Company) plummet in profitability, social media is a wide open field. In these early stages of social media, little guys can profit. Give it a few years, and we'll all likely be shoved out of the way by the mega-conglomerates. The whole dream of an open Internet will become but a collective longing for a bygone era.

That bygone era is NOW. Jason Sadler is using it while he can, and so should you and I. As for Jason's project itself, I suspect it is going to command a lot of ink in the (dying) print media. As I said, this is not a new idea, but his execution is mesmerizing for its interactive capabilities. I myself plopped a few comments into the chat stream while he was running his live promo today, and he responded on camera immediately, laughing along with his viewers.

No day is safe from Jason's campaign. Christmas Day has already been sold. He'll even wear your shirt if he has a wedding or funeral to attend.

Jason doesn't mind making a fool of himself. He's already sold the shirtspace on his back to half a year's worth of companies. The Royal Botanical Gardens already bought a week's worth of shirt-wearing, and they're even flying him to London for a good time. All told he is poised to make about $66,000 in 2009. With the backing of his day job and a few hundred early followers/fans, he should be able to raise the price in 2010.

Now that's creative marketing. At this point he could spin this into anything he wants. So what if you call him a corporate whore. You and I both know it's brilliant.

Check Out iwearyourshirt.com NOW

Hey all, breaking news: go to http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iwearyourshirt-daily-shirt-show right now and watch this guy's live stream. He's live, chatting with his viewers right now, 2pm Eastern, talking about his idea. He wears your branded shirt for a day at face value: January 1 is $1, December 31 is $365, and the first 160 days are sold out. The guy is hilarious and he is ubiquitous. Your brand will benefit, for sure. Bound to get maximum ink.

Social Media Follies

The thing about social networking is it takes the pants off your company. I'll just say that for now.