9 ms·

Writing copy for landing pages

416 points by HeinZawHtet 8y ago

abainbridge 8y ago
The advice is begin sentences with "You" or a verb. Seems like weird advice. There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/ https://www.7-zip.org/ Following their rules would make it cringe-worthy. Maybe for certain audiences, in certain types of corporate website, their advice is good, but the article doesn't define the domain to which the advice applies.
- jacobush 8y ago
  If think it can depend on how much the audience is expected to know about the topic and product beforehand. With 7-zip I'd expect much of the target audience knows about it, or at least knows what a zip program in general is. When you are trying to describe something which is new (to the audience at least) it looks reasonable to me, to begin with "what can you get out of this and in what situation".
  - abainbridge 8y ago
    I mostly agree. I just don't think the "you" thing works on engineers. If an engineer doesn't know anything about your product, they want facts about your product.
    - sacado2 8y ago
      It depends. The secret is first to address the customers' problems, then detail technical features. First, hook you with emotions, then shut your critical brain with facts. For instance, look at rust's landing page at https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ : "Rust : Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software." There is a hidden "you" in this sentence (the hidden message is "even if you don't think you can, with rust, you can build reliable and efficient software"). And then, they go on with features : performance (no runtime, no GC), reliability (borrow checker), productivity (great documentation, great compiler eror messages).
      - bshimmin 8y ago
        I actually find it weird and a bit annoying that Rust's landing page doesn't mention that it's a programming language (it's in the page title and in one of the testimonials). I'm struggling to find another programming language's landing page that doesn't explicitly say it's a programming language!
        w-m 8y ago
        It used to say "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety" until the recent redesign. It also showed a code example, so you couldn't really miss the fact (https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-...).
      - anoncake 8y ago
        I thought the hidden message was "you're an idiot, but with Rust even someone like you can build reliable and efficient software"
    - _up 8y ago
      What's a more important fact/thing you want to know first? That the software "XYZ", can ingest 1M data points per hour or that it can actually solve "your specific problem". Given that you never heard about "XYZ" before.
- abainbridge 8y ago
  My GCSE English teacher insisted that when you write anything you should ask yourself who the audience is. If your audience is scientists or engineers, then give them facts. This reminds me of the Perforce landing page from decades ago - in the pre Git era. Unlike all the other commercial version control vendors of the time, their page said basically, "Perforce is fast, reliable version control. It costs $79 per seat". That made me made me think, "ah, this is product designed for engineers", so I bought it. Today, Perforce's landing page says, "Your DevOps Journey Starts Here" in big letters. How times have changed. I don't buy Perforce any more.
  - tim-- 8y ago
    Yes, but you could also say that today's Perforce is completely different from the Perforce of a decade ago. Firstly, you don't need to pay for the Perforce you did 10 years ago. Stripe doesn't have this same issue - they are still selling the same product they did when the founded the company.
- sacado2 8y ago
  You're not trying to sell 7zip. Imagine 7zip is a $1000 software. Would that page make you buy it? Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but the general idea is to focus on the user's problem rather than characteristics of the product. Fetures are boring, bland and frightening. I'm an user, I have problems, do you solve any of my problems? "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code." vs "Are you fed up with buying hard drives after hard drives or choosing which files to delete and which files to keep, only to regret your decision afterward? Well, that time is over. With 7-zip, you can compress files more efficiently than ever and save space on your hard drive". Or, if you're promoting free software: "You don't want to buy one more software to archive your important files. At 7-zip, we heard you. 7-zip is free and open source, meaning not only you don't have to pay for it, but you can modify the source code if you really want to. You can even include it in your own, commercial software". Technical landing pages are good when you address technical people that are already sold to your product.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I guess this is a reminder of how being too nerdy warps my thinking. I mean, of the examples you've given, I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit", and I'd consider the last one needlessly annoying. Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?
    - sacado2 8y ago
      Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature". "With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion. CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more." is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".
- coldtea 8y ago
  >There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/* https://www.7-zip.org/* That's not a landing page in their sense. It's just a project page for a FOSS project.
- PavlovsCat 8y ago
  If I had my way, that would just be a giant animation of zeroes and ones being put into compact packages which get unpacked at their destination. The text wouldn't be about "archives", and certainly wouldn't have a list of file extensions. No, it would be about how this product is all about allowing you to create, to be more. Which, after all, is what being about is all about. Maybe it could have a video commercial even, I envision something with piano music? Two young, awesome looking people in a café on a rainy day.. they exchange a little glance, suddenly the image freezes and distorts, skip 20 years to the future, they have raised 4 kids, it quickly skips through birthdays, school rehearsals, all that stuff, then back to the present, where the tender love only just began to blossom.... and you realize, that's all contained in that simple glance, a lifetime of events and stories. As the 7-zip logo fades in, the camera pulls back from the table they're now sitting at together while staring into each others eyes to the point of going cross eyed, camera pulls further back through a window, and a homeless person sitting outside the café stands up and takes their hat off, to reveal fantastic, full, shimmering hair -- in the last instant of the commercial the viewer realizes: that's Jesus! He has come back, because finally, a product gets the whole mustard seed thing, and the time of healing has begun.
- mcbits 8y ago
  I had never even read 7-Zip's landing page until now, even though it is always one of the first programs I install on Windows. The page is just fine for that purpose because the download link is clearly marked at the top of the page. To the author's point about using "you", we could consider two hypothetical headlines for the 7-Zip page: "7-Zip can compress and decompress just about anything." "You can compress and decompress just about anything with 7-Zip." I have to admit that if I had never heard of 7-Zip, the second line would probably be subliminally more effective because it gets me thinking about what I can do with the software, not what some abstract someone can do with it. On the other hand, combine such a headline with a Bootstrap theme and 500-pixel fonts over a giant stock photo, followed by three SVG bullet points, etc, and I'm going instantly into defensive mode--shields up!
nautical 8y ago
Stripe landing page says " The new standard in online payments" ... out of genuine curiosity how is it fitting "Focus copy on them." ?
- djm_ 8y ago
  It's an Atlas Guide written by Joanna Wiebe who is not a Stripe employee. Even if she was, companies are companies - not individuals.
- paxys 8y ago
  "Them" in this case isn't the end consumer (you or me) but a business looking for an online payments solution. Plus, Stripe is big enough that the landing page will focus more on overall company branding than that of a single product.
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  Because they've moved on to target the mass market, which is made up of people who just want to use the industry standard and don't care about specific features. Their target customer is seeking the standard.
weinzierl 8y ago
Part of their second point and the 7th paragraph on the page is: > Patterns may be used to subtly reference a logo or map out a theme. Take a logistics company that transports goods by railway. Perhaps it not only wants to deliver a message, but also simulate a train with a pattern of evenly spaced dots in a horizontal line. To mimic that visual, rewrite landing page copy to link only words of similar length, such as three- or four-letter words. I find this very weird advice, even more so when it is presented so prominently.
skilled 8y ago
Some of the analysis looks a bit over the top. Generalization of an audience on this scale doesn't happen in 'landing page marketing'. You can give a turd a new name, but you cannot change who it is by doing so. From a marketing point of view, I'm more impressed by the fact that the author got Stripe to publish this piece.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
1) "What's in it for me?" Is __the__ questions everyone asks. 2) If you address that then it's "Can I trust they'll deliver on that promise?" 3) And then finally "Does price being asked meet the value of that to me?" Call to action. p.s. "Doubt is the deal breaker." __Anything__ in the UX that makes me wonder "What is that?" __must__ be avoided. This includes any thing from a "weird" layouy, to misspellings, to you name it. If you make me second guess you're going to increase the odds I default to my default. That is "no thanks. I'm out."
- CrLf 8y ago
  Actually, the question everyone asks (first) is: "what is it?" Unfortunately, this question seldom gets answered at all. Which is OK, because it says a lot about whatever is being peedled.
  - sudhirj 8y ago
    Only if you’re building something newfangled that tries to solve a need people don’t realize they have. For everything else, your audience usually knows already.
    - zhte415 8y ago
      I'm currently involved in automation processes, which has always been a thing but now 'RPA' is a fashionable term. Peddlers of the term are also peddlers of ambiguity for what their tools do. Those that I meet that have seemingly been evangalised by these solutions describe 'only low level coding needed'. Assembly? Or not wanting/knowing/needing/trusting to multiskil a team? There are good RPA tools. The authors of which are straightforward about what they do. That's just an example of an audience (me) having trouble understanding something smoke and mirrors is often painted around.
    - chiefalchemist 8y ago
      Being in Space Z and the market having a general understanding of Z is one thing. Me, a customer, understanding why you over A or B is another. If you're assuming anything then it's likely you're creating doubt. That's a deal breaker.
kvanderd 8y ago
6 questions that should be answered above the fold of the page. These questions should be answered again in different ways throughout the page using pictures, text and video. 1. What is it? 2. What does it look like? 3. How big or small is it? 4. Can it be delivered? 5. Can I return it? 6. Can I trust it? People consume content in very different ways. And showing, telling and demonstrating the product/service helps achieve #6.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Hmm, it depends. Elsewhere someone bemoans that landing pages don't answer "what is it?". Some (most!) sellers couldn't care less if it's right for you, just if you buy it. Spelling out what a product is can lose customers. Example: Back in the day I bought a minidisc player-recorder as you could easily put/remove tracks digitally. Turned out you couldn't do that properly, only from computer, not to computer, making it terrible for live recording (my need). If they'd told me properly "what is it" then I would instead have bought an mp3 player. Yup, still bitter - cost me many hours that mistake. A corollary to this though, they made the sale, but I've never bought from the company (Sony) again.
novagrint 8y ago
Am I the only one who is confused by the word "copy" in the headline? Is it meant in the meaning of "text" or am I missing the point here? I also can't find any synonyms used in the text below which would make its meaning in this context more clear to me.
- kowdermeister 8y ago
  That's a rather well known lingo in web/marketing circles.
  - nottorp 8y ago
    The name says it all. Copy. It's a copy of some template all the marketing shops have where they replace a few words and an image to look like it's about a certain product. However, it being a copy, it's indistinguishable from the other 3 billion "copies" about different products.
  - Angostura 8y ago
    It's use in journalism, predates marketing, I believe.
- dean177 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting
- novagrint 8y ago
  I'm not very familiar the terminology here, thanks for making this clear!
- sarabande 8y ago
  See here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/copy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/copy 4a : matter to be set especially for printing b : something considered printable or newsworthy [...] c : text especially of an advertisement
ricardobeat 8y ago
Apple would never ever use the “it’s got Dolby Atmos” line. Can’t explain why, just doesn’t fit their tone of voice (historically). I also find that advisory articles like these lose a lot of their luster when you start trying to outdo other people’s work.
- pbhjpbhj 8y ago
  Selling benefits you'd say "hear your music at it's freshest with our unrivalled audio fidelity" or somesuch, which of course is a lie; but that's marketing.
rebolyte 8y ago
"Everybody Writes" by Ann Handley is a great resource along these lines. Includes general writing advice and useful content-specific tips. For example, make the About Us page on your site not a dry description of the company, but of the company in relation to the visitor, giving more background information on how you help solve their problems.
known 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys FTW
mbesto 8y ago
Landing pages in a nutshell: remove objections. Typical objections (as noted by many people here): - I don't know what this is - Is it relevant to me? - How is this going to help me? - Who else uses this thing? - Why should I use this over the competition? - How much time will it take for me to get set up?
DisruptiveDave 8y ago
Best landing page I ever designed/wrote had this headline: "Fuck it, we like Reddit and we got some shit to sell." By every single metric (views, clicks, time spent on page, conversions), it murdered every other landing page in that campaign. Point is: experiment, have fun, be creative, copy other people's work, add your own flair, do things totally against best practices and logic. Marketing isn't a set-it-and-forget-it kind of activity. It's always moving.
- hartator 8y ago
  Ha! Do you still have a link?
  - DisruptiveDave 8y ago
    Nah, this was a few years ago. I have a screenshot if you want, just hit me up.
- reubenswartz 8y ago
  What were you selling?
  - DisruptiveDave 8y ago
    A subscription music discovery service (pre-Spotify).
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "F* it, we like Reddit and we got some shit to sell." As a headline is essentially click-bait. That you had blowout conversions is great, but it's for the same reason Taboola and Outbrain also have ridiculous headlines and images, and not more informative content.
  - DisruptiveDave 8y ago
    That's a bit reductionist. You're not considering the full context (which, of course, I didn't lay out) of the targeting + the ad + the rest of the landing page. It wasn't click bait. Taboola and Outbrain click bait has shite conversions, that's one way to measure "click bait" (it's not called "conversion bait" for a reason).
waffle_ss 8y ago
Can anyone recommend any services that provide copy critiques like Stripe did to the websites in this post? I don't have the time to read and digest the book suggestions and I don't want to open a business with Stripe Atlas.
SnowingXIV 8y ago
Stripe defines modern looking pages. I've been so pleased using their docs and it's a treat to use their services as they always look incredibly polished. Many companies try to copy their look and it ends up looking like a poor clone purchased from a themeshop and gets lost in the startup ocean but Stripe seems to do design in a very precise way. I can't really explain how they do it but major props to their design team for keeping consistent quality.
- freyir 8y ago
  They're really on another level.
mangoleaf 8y ago
Hacker News landing page is excellent in that it gets me to the info/product immediately. I don't need to scroll though walls of text about Ycomb and endless stupid photos.[1] But for a first time visitor, there is a lot of "WTF?" because of no what/why being answered, which could be done in one sentence. Craigslist's home page is excellent again because it gets you immediately into use, but it again fails miserably in the what/why question. [2] Just a single line saying "find stuff locally" is all it needs. Example of a site that gets you into the product immediately and gives you a one liner that answers the what/why would be vqRN. [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ [2] https://www.craigslist.org https://www.craigslist.org [3] http://vqRN.com http://vqRN.com
- aerovistae 8y ago
  Idk if you needed the link to HN in a comment on HN
  - QasimK 8y ago
    I found it useful to make sure there wasn’t something I missed

416 points by HeinZawHtet 8y ago

The advice is begin sentences with "You" or a verb. Seems like weird advice. There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/ https://www.7-zip.org/ Following their rules would make it cringe-worthy. Maybe for certain audiences, in certain types of corporate website, their advice is good, but the article doesn't define the domain to which the advice applies.

jacobush 8y ago
If think it can depend on how much the audience is expected to know about the topic and product beforehand. With 7-zip I'd expect much of the target audience knows about it, or at least knows what a zip program in general is. When you are trying to describe something which is new (to the audience at least) it looks reasonable to me, to begin with "what can you get out of this and in what situation".
- abainbridge 8y ago
  I mostly agree. I just don't think the "you" thing works on engineers. If an engineer doesn't know anything about your product, they want facts about your product.
  - sacado2 8y ago
    It depends. The secret is first to address the customers' problems, then detail technical features. First, hook you with emotions, then shut your critical brain with facts. For instance, look at rust's landing page at https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ : "Rust : Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software." There is a hidden "you" in this sentence (the hidden message is "even if you don't think you can, with rust, you can build reliable and efficient software"). And then, they go on with features : performance (no runtime, no GC), reliability (borrow checker), productivity (great documentation, great compiler eror messages).
    - bshimmin 8y ago
      I actually find it weird and a bit annoying that Rust's landing page doesn't mention that it's a programming language (it's in the page title and in one of the testimonials). I'm struggling to find another programming language's landing page that doesn't explicitly say it's a programming language!
      - w-m 8y ago
        It used to say "Rust is a systems programming language that runs blazingly fast, prevents segfaults, and guarantees thread safety" until the recent redesign. It also showed a code example, so you couldn't really miss the fact (https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/ https://web.archive.org/web/20181114045725/https://www.rust-...).
    - anoncake 8y ago
      I thought the hidden message was "you're an idiot, but with Rust even someone like you can build reliable and efficient software"
  - _up 8y ago
    What's a more important fact/thing you want to know first? That the software "XYZ", can ingest 1M data points per hour or that it can actually solve "your specific problem". Given that you never heard about "XYZ" before.
abainbridge 8y ago
My GCSE English teacher insisted that when you write anything you should ask yourself who the audience is. If your audience is scientists or engineers, then give them facts. This reminds me of the Perforce landing page from decades ago - in the pre Git era. Unlike all the other commercial version control vendors of the time, their page said basically, "Perforce is fast, reliable version control. It costs $79 per seat". That made me made me think, "ah, this is product designed for engineers", so I bought it. Today, Perforce's landing page says, "Your DevOps Journey Starts Here" in big letters. How times have changed. I don't buy Perforce any more.
- tim-- 8y ago
  Yes, but you could also say that today's Perforce is completely different from the Perforce of a decade ago. Firstly, you don't need to pay for the Perforce you did 10 years ago. Stripe doesn't have this same issue - they are still selling the same product they did when the founded the company.
sacado2 8y ago
You're not trying to sell 7zip. Imagine 7zip is a $1000 software. Would that page make you buy it? Now, starting every sentence with "you" is a bit odd, but the general idea is to focus on the user's problem rather than characteristics of the product. Fetures are boring, bland and frightening. I'm an user, I have problems, do you solve any of my problems? "7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio. 7-Zip is free software with open source. The most of the code is under the GNU LGPL license. Some parts of the code are under the BSD 3-clause License. Also there is unRAR license restriction for some parts of the code." vs "Are you fed up with buying hard drives after hard drives or choosing which files to delete and which files to keep, only to regret your decision afterward? Well, that time is over. With 7-zip, you can compress files more efficiently than ever and save space on your hard drive". Or, if you're promoting free software: "You don't want to buy one more software to archive your important files. At 7-zip, we heard you. 7-zip is free and open source, meaning not only you don't have to pay for it, but you can modify the source code if you really want to. You can even include it in your own, commercial software". Technical landing pages are good when you address technical people that are already sold to your product.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I guess this is a reminder of how being too nerdy warps my thinking. I mean, of the examples you've given, I'd pattern-match the middle one to "company selling bullshit", and I'd consider the last one needlessly annoying. Do regular people really don't care about accurate information, and buy based on who can make nicest sounding blurb?
  - sacado2 8y ago
    Well, first, I'm not necessarily the best copywriter in the world ;) Now, you can be much more "under the radar", and focus a little more on technical features, but still from the user's perspective. Look at rust's landing page : https://www.rust-lang.org/ https://www.rust-lang.org/ , or clion's : https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ https://www.jetbrains.com/clion/ They use "you" a lot, and rather than telling "our product has such and such and such feature", say "you can solve this problem thanks to this feature, and this other problem with this other feature". "With CLion, you can create code that's beautiful and correct at the same time. Potential code issues are identified instantly and fixed as you type! Be sure all the proper changes are handled automatically by CLion. CLion also performs Data Flow analysis to find out all the cases of the unreachable code, infinite recursion and more." is more appealing to me than "CLion features a dataflow analyzer that is 47% more efficient than eclipse and can detect 153% more potential bugs (unreachable code, infinite recursion, etc.)".
coldtea 8y ago
>There's nothing wrong with, say, this landing page: https://www.7-zip.org/* https://www.7-zip.org/* That's not a landing page in their sense. It's just a project page for a FOSS project.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
If I had my way, that would just be a giant animation of zeroes and ones being put into compact packages which get unpacked at their destination. The text wouldn't be about "archives", and certainly wouldn't have a list of file extensions. No, it would be about how this product is all about allowing you to create, to be more. Which, after all, is what being about is all about. Maybe it could have a video commercial even, I envision something with piano music? Two young, awesome looking people in a café on a rainy day.. they exchange a little glance, suddenly the image freezes and distorts, skip 20 years to the future, they have raised 4 kids, it quickly skips through birthdays, school rehearsals, all that stuff, then back to the present, where the tender love only just began to blossom.... and you realize, that's all contained in that simple glance, a lifetime of events and stories. As the 7-zip logo fades in, the camera pulls back from the table they're now sitting at together while staring into each others eyes to the point of going cross eyed, camera pulls further back through a window, and a homeless person sitting outside the café stands up and takes their hat off, to reveal fantastic, full, shimmering hair -- in the last instant of the commercial the viewer realizes: that's Jesus! He has come back, because finally, a product gets the whole mustard seed thing, and the time of healing has begun.
mcbits 8y ago
I had never even read 7-Zip's landing page until now, even though it is always one of the first programs I install on Windows. The page is just fine for that purpose because the download link is clearly marked at the top of the page. To the author's point about using "you", we could consider two hypothetical headlines for the 7-Zip page: "7-Zip can compress and decompress just about anything." "You can compress and decompress just about anything with 7-Zip." I have to admit that if I had never heard of 7-Zip, the second line would probably be subliminally more effective because it gets me thinking about what I can do with the software, not what some abstract someone can do with it. On the other hand, combine such a headline with a Bootstrap theme and 500-pixel fonts over a giant stock photo, followed by three SVG bullet points, etc, and I'm going instantly into defensive mode--shields up!

nautical 8y ago

Stripe landing page says " The new standard in online payments" ... out of genuine curiosity how is it fitting "Focus copy on them." ?

djm_ 8y ago
It's an Atlas Guide written by Joanna Wiebe who is not a Stripe employee. Even if she was, companies are companies - not individuals.
paxys 8y ago
"Them" in this case isn't the end consumer (you or me) but a business looking for an online payments solution. Plus, Stripe is big enough that the landing page will focus more on overall company branding than that of a single product.
douglaswlance 8y ago
Because they've moved on to target the mass market, which is made up of people who just want to use the industry standard and don't care about specific features. Their target customer is seeking the standard.

weinzierl 8y ago

Part of their second point and the 7th paragraph on the page is: > Patterns may be used to subtly reference a logo or map out a theme. Take a logistics company that transports goods by railway. Perhaps it not only wants to deliver a message, but also simulate a train with a pattern of evenly spaced dots in a horizontal line. To mimic that visual, rewrite landing page copy to link only words of similar length, such as three- or four-letter words. I find this very weird advice, even more so when it is presented so prominently.

skilled 8y ago

Some of the analysis looks a bit over the top. Generalization of an audience on this scale doesn't happen in 'landing page marketing'. You can give a turd a new name, but you cannot change who it is by doing so. From a marketing point of view, I'm more impressed by the fact that the author got Stripe to publish this piece.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

1) "What's in it for me?" Is __the__ questions everyone asks. 2) If you address that then it's "Can I trust they'll deliver on that promise?" 3) And then finally "Does price being asked meet the value of that to me?" Call to action. p.s. "Doubt is the deal breaker." __Anything__ in the UX that makes me wonder "What is that?" __must__ be avoided. This includes any thing from a "weird" layouy, to misspellings, to you name it. If you make me second guess you're going to increase the odds I default to my default. That is "no thanks. I'm out."

CrLf 8y ago
Actually, the question everyone asks (first) is: "what is it?" Unfortunately, this question seldom gets answered at all. Which is OK, because it says a lot about whatever is being peedled.
- sudhirj 8y ago
  Only if you’re building something newfangled that tries to solve a need people don’t realize they have. For everything else, your audience usually knows already.
  - zhte415 8y ago
    I'm currently involved in automation processes, which has always been a thing but now 'RPA' is a fashionable term. Peddlers of the term are also peddlers of ambiguity for what their tools do. Those that I meet that have seemingly been evangalised by these solutions describe 'only low level coding needed'. Assembly? Or not wanting/knowing/needing/trusting to multiskil a team? There are good RPA tools. The authors of which are straightforward about what they do. That's just an example of an audience (me) having trouble understanding something smoke and mirrors is often painted around.
  - chiefalchemist 8y ago
    Being in Space Z and the market having a general understanding of Z is one thing. Me, a customer, understanding why you over A or B is another. If you're assuming anything then it's likely you're creating doubt. That's a deal breaker.

kvanderd 8y ago

6 questions that should be answered above the fold of the page. These questions should be answered again in different ways throughout the page using pictures, text and video. 1. What is it? 2. What does it look like? 3. How big or small is it? 4. Can it be delivered? 5. Can I return it? 6. Can I trust it? People consume content in very different ways. And showing, telling and demonstrating the product/service helps achieve #6.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Hmm, it depends. Elsewhere someone bemoans that landing pages don't answer "what is it?". Some (most!) sellers couldn't care less if it's right for you, just if you buy it. Spelling out what a product is can lose customers. Example: Back in the day I bought a minidisc player-recorder as you could easily put/remove tracks digitally. Turned out you couldn't do that properly, only from computer, not to computer, making it terrible for live recording (my need). If they'd told me properly "what is it" then I would instead have bought an mp3 player. Yup, still bitter - cost me many hours that mistake. A corollary to this though, they made the sale, but I've never bought from the company (Sony) again.

novagrint 8y ago

Am I the only one who is confused by the word "copy" in the headline? Is it meant in the meaning of "text" or am I missing the point here? I also can't find any synonyms used in the text below which would make its meaning in this context more clear to me.

kowdermeister 8y ago
That's a rather well known lingo in web/marketing circles.
- nottorp 8y ago
  The name says it all. Copy. It's a copy of some template all the marketing shops have where they replace a few words and an image to look like it's about a certain product. However, it being a copy, it's indistinguishable from the other 3 billion "copies" about different products.
- Angostura 8y ago
  It's use in journalism, predates marketing, I believe.
dean177 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copywriting
novagrint 8y ago
I'm not very familiar the terminology here, thanks for making this clear!
sarabande 8y ago
See here: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/copy https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/copy 4a : matter to be set especially for printing b : something considered printable or newsworthy [...] c : text especially of an advertisement

ricardobeat 8y ago

Apple would never ever use the “it’s got Dolby Atmos” line. Can’t explain why, just doesn’t fit their tone of voice (historically). I also find that advisory articles like these lose a lot of their luster when you start trying to outdo other people’s work.

pbhjpbhj 8y ago
Selling benefits you'd say "hear your music at it's freshest with our unrivalled audio fidelity" or somesuch, which of course is a lie; but that's marketing.

rebolyte 8y ago

"Everybody Writes" by Ann Handley is a great resource along these lines. Includes general writing advice and useful content-specific tips. For example, make the About Us page on your site not a dry description of the company, but of the company in relation to the visitor, giving more background information on how you help solve their problems.

known 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys FTW

mbesto 8y ago

Landing pages in a nutshell: remove objections. Typical objections (as noted by many people here): - I don't know what this is - Is it relevant to me? - How is this going to help me? - Who else uses this thing? - Why should I use this over the competition? - How much time will it take for me to get set up?

DisruptiveDave 8y ago

Best landing page I ever designed/wrote had this headline: "Fuck it, we like Reddit and we got some shit to sell." By every single metric (views, clicks, time spent on page, conversions), it murdered every other landing page in that campaign. Point is: experiment, have fun, be creative, copy other people's work, add your own flair, do things totally against best practices and logic. Marketing isn't a set-it-and-forget-it kind of activity. It's always moving.

hartator 8y ago
Ha! Do you still have a link?
- DisruptiveDave 8y ago
  Nah, this was a few years ago. I have a screenshot if you want, just hit me up.
reubenswartz 8y ago
What were you selling?
- DisruptiveDave 8y ago
  A subscription music discovery service (pre-Spotify).
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"F* it, we like Reddit and we got some shit to sell." As a headline is essentially click-bait. That you had blowout conversions is great, but it's for the same reason Taboola and Outbrain also have ridiculous headlines and images, and not more informative content.
- DisruptiveDave 8y ago
  That's a bit reductionist. You're not considering the full context (which, of course, I didn't lay out) of the targeting + the ad + the rest of the landing page. It wasn't click bait. Taboola and Outbrain click bait has shite conversions, that's one way to measure "click bait" (it's not called "conversion bait" for a reason).

waffle_ss 8y ago

Can anyone recommend any services that provide copy critiques like Stripe did to the websites in this post? I don't have the time to read and digest the book suggestions and I don't want to open a business with Stripe Atlas.

SnowingXIV 8y ago

Stripe defines modern looking pages. I've been so pleased using their docs and it's a treat to use their services as they always look incredibly polished. Many companies try to copy their look and it ends up looking like a poor clone purchased from a themeshop and gets lost in the startup ocean but Stripe seems to do design in a very precise way. I can't really explain how they do it but major props to their design team for keeping consistent quality.

freyir 8y ago
They're really on another level.

mangoleaf 8y ago

Hacker News landing page is excellent in that it gets me to the info/product immediately. I don't need to scroll though walls of text about Ycomb and endless stupid photos.[1] But for a first time visitor, there is a lot of "WTF?" because of no what/why being answered, which could be done in one sentence. Craigslist's home page is excellent again because it gets you immediately into use, but it again fails miserably in the what/why question. [2] Just a single line saying "find stuff locally" is all it needs. Example of a site that gets you into the product immediately and gives you a one liner that answers the what/why would be vqRN. [3] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/ https://news.ycombinator.com/ [2] https://www.craigslist.org https://www.craigslist.org [3] http://vqRN.com http://vqRN.com

aerovistae 8y ago
Idk if you needed the link to HN in a comment on HN
- QasimK 8y ago
  I found it useful to make sure there wasn’t something I missed