What does ‘the can’ mean? Well, its literal meaning relates to canned goods on supermarket shelves. If your can is up there among thousands of others, the label had better state pretty clearly exactly what’s in the can.

Sliced peaches? Peas? Coffee?

Really, it would be unthinkable for a can label designer to feel that any job was more important than simply describing the can’s contents.

So here’s the question…if your Web site were up on a shelf among tens of thousands of others (it is!), do you tell people what’s in the can?

How quickly can a first-time visitor find out exactly what’s in your ‘can’?

In general, I think most Web sites do a horrible job in this regard. If a Web group were given the job of designing the label for a can of chili, it would probably read something like this:

“Family Meal Solution”

And if they were sent away to improve on this, they’d come back two weeks later with something like:

“Robust Family Meal Solution”

It seems as if we go to extraordinary efforts to disguise what can be found in our sites. It’s almost like we turn all our cans around, so they are facing away from the aisle. We fill that first screen with the contents, the ingredients and other non-critical information… But we fail to achieve the most important task of all – telling our visitors what it is we do and offer. We don’t tell them what’s in the can.

Here’s a quick example.

I recently went to a site called plaidonline.com. The name and tagline that jumps out off the screen at you is this:

PLAID.

So Beautiful. So Easy. So Plaid.TM

Do you have any idea what they offer through their site, based on those words? Neither did I.

So here, drawing on my many years of copywriting experience and a sock-drawer filled with awards, is my suggested alternative:

PLAID

We Sell Craft Supplies.

And no, it doesn’t take any great copywriting talent to write a simple line like that. In fact, the temptation to ‘copywrite’ can often get in the way of clarity at a time like this.

Remember, visitors come to your site with the hope of being able to achieve a specific goal. They want to do something. They want to get a task completed. Whatever the dominant tagline or copy block on your home page may be, it needs to be written with a view to helping your reader get started towards achieving her task.

Don’t think of your home page as ‘ad space’. Think of it as one can, on a long shelf, in an aisle in a huge supermarket that stocks millions of cans.

Don’t assume that everyone knows what it is you do. They don’t.

Don’t assume that every visitor will take the time to dig deeper and work out for themselves what you offer. They won’t.

The responsibility to describe the contents of your site is yours alone – and you need to achieve that within the first two seconds.

Job one is to tell people what’s in the can.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

This isn’t the first time I have written about the benefits of inserting a human voice or presence into your online communications. And I make no excuse for writing about this again.

Site visitors crave the sense that someone is there, within and behind your Web pages, your emails and newsletters.

Dealing with the bare technology of online interactions is a cold experience for many, or even most of us. It makes us feel anxious. Technology isn’t warm. It has no heart. It neither understands us, nor cares for us.

For many Web sites, whether for businesses or organizations, we simply plug in and play the bare technology – the super-duper means of information delivery. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.

And then we sit in our expensive offices and wonder why it is that we get such terrible conversion rates on our sites, why so few people continue to open our emails or read our newsletters.

Well, perhaps it’s because we’re bringing an ‘ATM’ style to the most interactive, vibrant, networked, warm and essentially human communications space imaginable.

But what if you enabled your visitors to catch just a faint scent of humanity in your site? What if you did a few small things to show that your business is more than just a cold room, filled with servers? What if you showed that the heart of your business is about people, and not technology?

Would that be such a bad thing?

In fact, it would be a very good thing. Your readers, prospects and customers will feel relief, they will smile, feel reassured. And they are more likely to sign up, to register, to buy and come back.

Can I prove this? No, not with certified, verified figures, charts and signed affidavits. But I have corresponded with and listened to so many business people who know very well how ‘being there’ and ‘being human’ has helped them online. They have seen how conversion rates, sales and levels of customer loyalty can rise and fall in response to the level of ‘humanity’ expressed through their sites.

Here are a few, very simple examples of how different businesses have sneaked a little humanity into their sites and emails.

- A second level page at 1800Flowers.com features a photo of the CEO Jim McCann, and a personal message to his customers. (You might consider this to be an unoriginal and mundane idea. Well, do you have an equivalent page on your site? Would it harm you to give it a try?)

- At iQVC.com you can see how they have included images of and short messages from a variety of hosts and experts. (Are you too cynical to believe that visitors can really relate to paid ‘hosts’?)

- At Foolmart.com they use simple words and phrases that tell you right away that a ‘real’ person wrote that content. Have a look at the text for their Customer Service Pledge. See how the word ‘leap’ and the phrase ‘burning questions’ transforms this from corporate-speak to something very human and a lot more credible.

It’s not hard to take a few steps that will add a sense of humanity to your sites, emails and newsletters. You can do this with images, a few carefully chosen words or a combination of the two.

And if that works for you, take an audit of all your online communications. Take a look at all the places where you could add a more human voice.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

The sad truth is, general Web users would love it if all our sites looked like Amazon.com.

They’d immediately be familiar with the interface, they would know how to find what they wanted, and they’d find it a breeze to check out and complete the purchase.

Or, if your site is crammed full of thousands of pages of content, make it look like Yahoo!. That’s what FindLaw.com has done.

The trouble is, the creative spirit hates to copy the work of others. We want to make out own mark, do something different, be original. And the more creative we are as individuals, the greater that compulsion becomes. As a result, we build flash homepages, with unfamiliar scroll bars and use strange icons in place of familiar words like ‘Home’ and ‘About’.

Or designers make a compromise and build a traditional homepage, but with a different look. They’ll move the navigation links from the left side to the right side – anything to look different!

And writers are no better. We’ll look for other ways to say familiar things in a different way.

Some writers say ‘Entry Page’ instead of ‘Home’, or ‘Go to Checkout’ instead of ‘Buy Now’. Is this a problem? I don’t have figures to prove my point, but my guess is that conversion rates drop off whenever you give a reader reason to pause. And when you say “Entry Page’ you are giving your readers pause for at least as long as it takes for them to wonder to themselves, “I wonder if that means the homepage?”

But the issue of familiarity goes beyond the words we have come to expect on the Web. We should also keep in mind the many words and phrases that our prospects have grown to recognize from the offline world.

If you sell directly from your site – and that includes selling newsletter sign-ups and registrations – spend some time looking at the junk mail you receive each day.

Also, take a look at those small cards that drop out of the magazines you receive. Check out the language.

Limited Time Offer. Save. FREE. Reply now. Special Offer. Call 1-800-000-0000. Offer expires May 22. Free Gift. Trial Offer. Guaranteed. 30-Day money back guarantee. Subscribe.

And so on.

While you may not see all of these words and phrases in abundance online right now, you might want to try a few.

A sense of familiarity can cross boundaries between media. All of the terms above are also use successfully on TV and radio. So why not on the Web?

Learn from the hard-won experience of others and use terms and words that your consumers are familiar with, whatever the source.

When you do that, you speed up the decision-making process, you remove all those pauses when your prospects are figuring out what exactly it is that you really mean.

This is true for the look of your site, the navigation of your site and the copy you use to try and engage attention and close sales.

As much as we may hate to accept it, originality is usually the enemy of a smooth customer experience.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

Your site visitors make all the choices when it comes to browsing the Web.

No other medium gives users, readers or customers such control over their own experience. TV, radio and print present information in a very linear, controlled way. But on the Web, there is no telling how your next visitor will experience your site.

Where will they click? Which pages will they visit? It’s hard to tell.

Being sensitive to the fact that the user is in control, many sites simply present as many options as possible on their home pages. The thinking apparently being that the more choices you show on page one, the more likely you are to present something that connects with as many visitors as possible.

Perhaps this was the strategy behind Ford.com.

While a considerable improvement on how it looked a little while ago, the Ford homepage still offers almost forty links to other pages on the site.

In addition, no particular priority is given to any one individual or group of links. The choice is left to the user.

No emphasis or priority is offered. Ford is sitting back and saying, “You decide.”

The trouble is, when they take that position, they are asking the visitor to do all the work. The visitor is now required to scan those forty links and try to figure out what to do next.

Does anyone smell conversion drop-off?

Now look at a site that takes a very different approach. Take a peek at GetSmart.com.

They offer a variety of different ways into the site. But they also present some clear preferences.

Dead center on the page they say…

* Refinance, Home Equity, and more…

* Pay virtually ALL your bills online

* Organize all your online accounts

* Consolidate debt, auto loans, and more…

Four simple choices, three of which open with an active verb. In short, they tell you what to do.

Click on that first link. You’re taken to another page, with a variety of options. However, once again, they show a preference and tell you what to do.

* Refinance your existing mortgage

* Consolidate your debt

* Home Equity financing

* Purchase a home

For another example, visit TravelNow.com.

Again, you’ll see clear directions on what to do.

* Search for Hotels

* Search for Cars

* Search for Flights

* Stay Drive Fly

These sites support their users by offering clear instructions on what to do.

Does this preclude someone from taking his or her own path through the site? Not at all.

But for many users, particularly those who are there for the first time, finding these simple instructions comes as a huge relief.

Here is the heart of it. Just because your visitors enjoy an unprecedented level of control over their experience at your site, doesn’t mean that they don’t want some help.

Don’t simply give them numerous, passive options. Don’t leave them to do all the work.

Help them out. Express a preference. Tell them what to do.

You’re not being pushy when you do that. You’re being helpful.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

What does ‘the can’ mean? Well, its literal meaning relates to canned goods on supermarket shelves. If your can is up there among thousands of others, the label had better state pretty clearly exactly what’s in the can.

Sliced peaches? Peas? Coffee?

Really, it would be unthinkable for a can label designer to feel that any job was more important than simply describing the can’s contents.

So here’s the question…if your Web site were up on a shelf among tens of thousands of others (it is!), do you tell people what’s in the can?

How quickly can a first-time visitor find out exactly what’s in your ‘can’?

In general, I think most Web sites do a horrible job in this regard. If a Web group were given the job of designing the label for a can of chili, it would probably read something like this:

“Family Meal Solution”

And if they were sent away to improve on this, they’d come back two weeks later with something like:

“Robust Family Meal Solution”

It seems as if we go to extraordinary efforts to disguise what can be found in our sites. It’s almost like we turn all our cans around, so they are facing away from the aisle. We fill that first screen with the contents, the ingredients and other non-critical information… But we fail to achieve the most important task of all – telling our visitors what it is we do and offer. We don’t tell them what’s in the can.

Here’s a quick example.

I recently went to a site called plaidonline.com. The name and tagline that jumps out off the screen at you is this:

PLAID.

So Beautiful. So Easy. So Plaid.TM

Do you have any idea what they offer through their site, based on those words? Neither did I.

So here, drawing on my many years of copywriting experience and a sock-drawer filled with awards, is my suggested alternative:

PLAID

We Sell Craft Supplies.

And no, it doesn’t take any great copywriting talent to write a simple line like that. In fact, the temptation to ‘copywrite’ can often get in the way of clarity at a time like this.

Remember, visitors come to your site with the hope of being able to achieve a specific goal. They want to do something. They want to get a task completed. Whatever the dominant tagline or copy block on your home page may be, it needs to be written with a view to helping your reader get started towards achieving her task.

Don’t think of your home page as ‘ad space’. Think of it as one can, on a long shelf, in an aisle in a huge supermarket that stocks millions of cans.

Don’t assume that everyone knows what it is you do. They don’t.

Don’t assume that every visitor will take the time to dig deeper and work out for themselves what you offer. They won’t.

The responsibility to describe the contents of your site is yours alone – and you need to achieve that within the first two seconds.

Job one is to tell people what’s in the can.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

This isn’t the first time I have written about the benefits of inserting a human voice or presence into your online communications. And I make no excuse for writing about this again.

Site visitors crave the sense that someone is there, within and behind your Web pages, your emails and newsletters.

Dealing with the bare technology of online interactions is a cold experience for many, or even most of us. It makes us feel anxious. Technology isn’t warm. It has no heart. It neither understands us, nor cares for us.

For many Web sites, whether for businesses or organizations, we simply plug in and play the bare technology – the super-duper means of information delivery. All the site visitor sees and feels is the design, the interface, the links and the clicks. The experience is about as warm and human as banking with an ATM machine.

And then we sit in our expensive offices and wonder why it is that we get such terrible conversion rates on our sites, why so few people continue to open our emails or read our newsletters.

Well, perhaps it’s because we’re bringing an ‘ATM’ style to the most interactive, vibrant, networked, warm and essentially human communications space imaginable.

But what if you enabled your visitors to catch just a faint scent of humanity in your site? What if you did a few small things to show that your business is more than just a cold room, filled with servers? What if you showed that the heart of your business is about people, and not technology?

Would that be such a bad thing?

In fact, it would be a very good thing. Your readers, prospects and customers will feel relief, they will smile, feel reassured. And they are more likely to sign up, to register, to buy and come back.

Can I prove this? No, not with certified, verified figures, charts and signed affidavits. But I have corresponded with and listened to so many business people who know very well how ‘being there’ and ‘being human’ has helped them online. They have seen how conversion rates, sales and levels of customer loyalty can rise and fall in response to the level of ‘humanity’ expressed through their sites.

Here are a few, very simple examples of how different businesses have sneaked a little humanity into their sites and emails.

- A second level page at 1800Flowers.com features a photo of the CEO Jim McCann, and a personal message to his customers. (You might consider this to be an unoriginal and mundane idea. Well, do you have an equivalent page on your site? Would it harm you to give it a try?)

- At iQVC.com you can see how they have included images of and short messages from a variety of hosts and experts. (Are you too cynical to believe that visitors can really relate to paid ‘hosts’?)

- At Foolmart.com they use simple words and phrases that tell you right away that a ‘real’ person wrote that content. Have a look at the text for their Customer Service Pledge. See how the word ‘leap’ and the phrase ‘burning questions’ transforms this from corporate-speak to something very human and a lot more credible.

It’s not hard to take a few steps that will add a sense of humanity to your sites, emails and newsletters. You can do this with images, a few carefully chosen words or a combination of the two.

And if that works for you, take an audit of all your online communications. Take a look at all the places where you could add a more human voice.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

The sad truth is, general Web users would love it if all our sites looked like Amazon.com.

They’d immediately be familiar with the interface, they would know how to find what they wanted, and they’d find it a breeze to check out and complete the purchase.

Or, if your site is crammed full of thousands of pages of content, make it look like Yahoo!. That’s what FindLaw.com has done.

The trouble is, the creative spirit hates to copy the work of others. We want to make out own mark, do something different, be original. And the more creative we are as individuals, the greater that compulsion becomes. As a result, we build flash homepages, with unfamiliar scroll bars and use strange icons in place of familiar words like ‘Home’ and ‘About’.

Or designers make a compromise and build a traditional homepage, but with a different look. They’ll move the navigation links from the left side to the right side – anything to look different!

And writers are no better. We’ll look for other ways to say familiar things in a different way.

Some writers say ‘Entry Page’ instead of ‘Home’, or ‘Go to Checkout’ instead of ‘Buy Now’. Is this a problem? I don’t have figures to prove my point, but my guess is that conversion rates drop off whenever you give a reader reason to pause. And when you say “Entry Page’ you are giving your readers pause for at least as long as it takes for them to wonder to themselves, “I wonder if that means the homepage?”

But the issue of familiarity goes beyond the words we have come to expect on the Web. We should also keep in mind the many words and phrases that our prospects have grown to recognize from the offline world.

If you sell directly from your site – and that includes selling newsletter sign-ups and registrations – spend some time looking at the junk mail you receive each day.

Also, take a look at those small cards that drop out of the magazines you receive. Check out the language.

Limited Time Offer. Save. FREE. Reply now. Special Offer. Call 1-800-000-0000. Offer expires May 22. Free Gift. Trial Offer. Guaranteed. 30-Day money back guarantee. Subscribe.

And so on.

While you may not see all of these words and phrases in abundance online right now, you might want to try a few.

A sense of familiarity can cross boundaries between media. All of the terms above are also use successfully on TV and radio. So why not on the Web?

Learn from the hard-won experience of others and use terms and words that your consumers are familiar with, whatever the source.

When you do that, you speed up the decision-making process, you remove all those pauses when your prospects are figuring out what exactly it is that you really mean.

This is true for the look of your site, the navigation of your site and the copy you use to try and engage attention and close sales.

As much as we may hate to accept it, originality is usually the enemy of a smooth customer experience.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.

Your site visitors make all the choices when it comes to browsing the Web.

No other medium gives users, readers or customers such control over their own experience. TV, radio and print present information in a very linear, controlled way. But on the Web, there is no telling how your next visitor will experience your site.

Where will they click? Which pages will they visit? It’s hard to tell.

Being sensitive to the fact that the user is in control, many sites simply present as many options as possible on their home pages. The thinking apparently being that the more choices you show on page one, the more likely you are to present something that connects with as many visitors as possible.

Perhaps this was the strategy behind Ford.com.

While a considerable improvement on how it looked a little while ago, the Ford homepage still offers almost forty links to other pages on the site.

In addition, no particular priority is given to any one individual or group of links. The choice is left to the user.

No emphasis or priority is offered. Ford is sitting back and saying, “You decide.”

The trouble is, when they take that position, they are asking the visitor to do all the work. The visitor is now required to scan those forty links and try to figure out what to do next.

Does anyone smell conversion drop-off?

Now look at a site that takes a very different approach. Take a peek at GetSmart.com.

They offer a variety of different ways into the site. But they also present some clear preferences.

Dead center on the page they say…

* Refinance, Home Equity, and more…

* Pay virtually ALL your bills online

* Organize all your online accounts

* Consolidate debt, auto loans, and more…

Four simple choices, three of which open with an active verb. In short, they tell you what to do.

Click on that first link. You’re taken to another page, with a variety of options. However, once again, they show a preference and tell you what to do.

* Refinance your existing mortgage

* Consolidate your debt

* Home Equity financing

* Purchase a home

For another example, visit TravelNow.com.

Again, you’ll see clear directions on what to do.

* Search for Hotels

* Search for Cars

* Search for Flights

* Stay Drive Fly

These sites support their users by offering clear instructions on what to do.

Does this preclude someone from taking his or her own path through the site? Not at all.

But for many users, particularly those who are there for the first time, finding these simple instructions comes as a huge relief.

Here is the heart of it. Just because your visitors enjoy an unprecedented level of control over their experience at your site, doesn’t mean that they don’t want some help.

Don’t simply give them numerous, passive options. Don’t leave them to do all the work.

Help them out. Express a preference. Tell them what to do.

You’re not being pushy when you do that. You’re being helpful.

Nick Usborne is a copywriter, author, speaker and advocat of good writing. You can access all his archived newsletter articles on copywriting and writing for the web at his Excess Voice site. You’ll find more articles and resources on how to make money as a freelance writer at his Freelance Writing Success site.