2012 is here. Happy new year!

Now, I’m no Nostradamus. I’ve got no psychic powers, as far as I’m aware. I’m not even a publicity seeking analyst. Not by trade.

But I am a working digital copywriter who keeps his ear to the ground. So why on Earth shouldn’t I share my predictions for the most significant copywriting trends of 2012?

Here goes.

A new set of rules will emerge for online marketing copy

Web copy used to mean written content for a website, as designed to be viewed on a desktop or laptop computer. Audiences developed certain habits in how they used this content, and copywriters have often tried to describe the best methods for appealing to those habits. Like this fella. “Make it easy to skim, anticipate users’ questions”… all that stuff.

Now the devices we use to read websites are diversifying. It’s not just smartphones. It’s Internet TV, it’s tablets, it’s games consoles and who-knows-what-next. Here at the beginning of 2012, use of these devices has reached a point where the web is all around us.

Perhaps we’ll need to design most “web copy” to be read aloud (i.e. in video). Perhaps text will get shorter and typefaces bigger, to accommodate reading on the TV. There’s already evidence that both these things are happening. One thing’s for sure: web copy conventions are changing in 2012.

Google Plus will take off and change SEO copywriting

There’s a lot of suspicion and dislike of Google Plus around. Personally, I like it. And given how deeply Google is embedding it within its services, it looks like the search giant will stick with Plus and make it work.

With its `+1′ buttons, and simply because Google is the West’s most popular search engine by miles, Plus has the power to change organic search results. +1 is a public recommendation of a web page, which already shows up in friends’ search results if you’re signed in to Google. That means with enough active Google Plus users, search results on Google will look very different.

If that happens, pages that are shared often will become much more valuable, and the rules of SEO will change drastically. And because we tend to share online the things we find entertaining and practical, I predict that corporate website copy (which is usually neither) will shrink further into the background. It won’t necessarily happen in 2012, but it will happen.

Demand for video script writing will increase

Video content is becoming ever more important to web users, and increasingly prominent in Internet search. SEO people are getting excited about it. And when SEO people get excited, demand for content follows shortly behind.

If you’re a digital copywriter who isn’t prepared to tell clients “I write brilliant video scripts,” you need to do something about that now. Go on, get your voiceover/script writing skills in order. You’ll make more money in 2012.

Email marketing will bring in much less cash

Email has issues. People are sending them far less often, because they’d rather share on Facebook and Twitter. Email is even getting a bad rep as a business time waster – and I believe it’s deserved. I spend way too much time reading and writing them, when often a phone call would be quicker and friendlier.

So while email marketing isn’t dying, copywriters probably shouldn’t put too much stock in this kind of work in 2012. One major brand I write for has definitely gotten much tighter with its email project budgets lately. What have you noticed?

Performance data will be easier to come by – so get some ready

The economy is still gasping for breath, and will continue to pant heavily this year. Corporations are still obsessed with efficiency, and probably always will be.

As a result, marketing plans in 2012 will be keenly focused on measured, meaningful results. And thanks to the dominance of online advertising, campaign performance is very easy to measure.

Copywriters who can prove their writing gets results, preferably with hard data, will get more work. That was always true of course, but it’s more relevant than ever in 2012. Ask clients for feedback and testimonials on successful projects, and always get performance data where possible.

Well, those were my tips for the copywriting trends of 2012. I’ll be back in December with another article that triumphantly celebrates their accuracy.

In the meantime, feel free to dissect or pooh-pooh them in the comments below.

The latest addition to the Think Tank is a free UI Kit PSD. The UI kit is made up of fully editable PSD vector shapes and includes elements such as buttons, form fields & sliders. Feel free to use it for any of your creative projects, either personal or commercial. I hope you find it useful.

Download the UI Kit

The UI kit is available as a downloadable .zip file.

Download: UltraLight UI Kit PSD

Copyright Information

This web UI kit is free for both personal and commercial use. We do not require any attribution, although it would be appreciated. Please link directly to this blog post for all sharing and you may not re-distribute or re-upload or this PSD resource on any other website.

The background used in the PSD was taken from subtlepatterns.com, which is a great resource for background textures and patterns. The fonts used are Open Sans & Open Sans bold, which are free Google Fonts.

Whenever we’re doing search engine optimisation work on client sites one of the biggest issues we face is duplicate content pages. Many content management systems create several versions of a page with the same content, as there are many instances when these pages are required.  Duplicate content pages can however cause problems with the search engines as they are unsure which version of the page to list in their index.

The Problem

Consider for example a category page on an e-commerce site, in this case showing shoes. This might have a URL that looks something like this:

www.example.com/category/shoes

You are able to order the shoes category page by name, price or season, this however generates 3 copies of the page with the same content but slightly different URLs:

www.example.com/category/shoes?orderby=season
www.example.com/category/shoes?orderby=price
www.example.com/category/shoes?orderby=name

As discussed this now causes problems as the search engines see four pages when we only want them to list one. A secondary issue is that each of the pages will have some PageRank; ideally we want to concentrate all this PageRank on a single page to achieve a higher ranking.

The normal procedure with duplicate content pages is to redirect all the copies to the original page using a 301 (permanent) redirect. The problem here is that in the situation above this isn’t possible as the user needs to be able to view all versions of the page.

The Better Way – Canonical Tag

There is a tag which will tell the search engines to ignore the duplicate pages and pass all ranking value down to the original page.

<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.example.com/category/shoes ” />

The URL you need to use is the URL of the original page that you’d like to appear in the search engines.

Notes

There are a few points worth noting if you intend to follow this approach:

• It is recommended that you use absolute URLs in the canonical tag to avoid the chance of errors.
• The canonical tag will only work with pages that are similar; some changes are allowed such a different sort order for the content on the page. Too much change and the search engines will ignore the tag.
• The canonical tag can only be used across multiple domains, for more information read Handling legitimate cross-domain content duplication
• The tag is currently supported by Google, Yahoo! & Bing

Simple, humble.

If I could choose two words to sum up the best marketing campaigns in the world, those might do it.

Every little helps. Just do it. The world’s local bank. Think different. These are some of the world’s most powerful slogans. And there’s nothing about them you could call flashy.

Why is that?

Simple writing reaches more people. The idea isn’t to dumb things down. It’s more about using the plainest word, the clearest image, or the most straight talking argument.

The more people can understand your writing, the more people will receive your message. Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy both believed that. It brought them huge success.

Humble writing makes stronger connections. If you want to reach ordinary people, show that you’re one of them.

Really, there’s no need to show off. If you have a good product, the everyday benefits of buying it should be your focus. So don’t keep going on about how great your company and products are. Show people what’s in it for them.

These two lessons are worth remembering. Evidence to prove they work is all around us. Try visiting the web’s most popular blogs, for example. Read the most successful sales letters in history. Watch ads for the world’s biggest selling products.

What do you find? Simple language. The voice of an ordinary person, just like you or me.

The desire to be clever

So we know that simple and humble writing works. And as I mentioned earlier, copywriting legends Claude Hopkins and David Ogily were banging on about this kind of thing years ago.

So by now the world should be full of simple and effective writing, right?

Oh. Hmm.

There are two reasons why that hasn’t happened.

Firstly, people have this very strong desire to be clever.

We want to show how great we are. That we’re a little bit above the average person, even.

Naturally, this kills off any humility that might have graced our writing.

As a copywriter myself, I often fall into this trap. You only have to look at some of my previous posts here on Think Tank to see that!

I think a lot of copywriters have the same problem. We want to be ‘creative’ and to explore language to the full. We want to show clients we can do something really smart.

And there goes the simplicity.

Simple does not equal easy

There’s a second reason we fail at producing simple writing.

It’s to do with how we perceive ‘simplicity’. And it’s a huge mistake to make.

What many of us do is confuse simple writing with easy writing. Or bland writing. Or even dumb writing.

Actually, nothing could be further from the truth.

The fact is, if you can communicate an interesting concept in words that are (A) simple enough for millions of people to understand and (B) humble enough to connect with that audience, you’ll be on your way to being a great copywriter.

Because writing simple, humble copy is difficult. It’s not about treating your readers like idiots. It’s not about over-simplifying ideas. It’s (usually) not a case of writing down the first thing that comes to mind.

It’s about crafting words that can deliver a powerful message to lots of different people.

And that’s why people say good marketing is fiendishly clever – even though the words bringing it to life are really simple.

A few tips for simple and effective writing

Now that I’ve blathered on, here’s the useful part of this post. My five practical tips for keeping your copy simple, humble and successful are as follows.

1. Write for your audience, not your own glory. This is really important. You aren’t writing about yourself. You aren’t writing about your business. What you’re really writing about is your audience. So think about who they are. Think about what they want. Think about how you can help them. Then write about that.

2. Be yourself. You want to be interesting? You want your writing to stand out? Try just being yourself. Relax that proud, business-like persona you’ve built up over the years. Write copy as though it were a letter to a friend. You’ll discover a style that’s unique and humble. You’ll connect better with your readers.

3. Write freely, edit carefully. If you want your writing to be simple and clear, never settle on your first draft. You’ve got to add polish. Think about how to make your key points clearer. Conjure up an image that puts your readers right there in the picture. Structure your argument so it flows from problem to solution. The best copywriters write and rewrite. It’s not that hard. Give it a try!

4. Chop up those sentences. Long sentences are harder to understand. Especially those with multiple clauses. Try breaking them up into shorter, simpler sentences. Say one thing at a time. Say it in the simplest way possible. More readers will make it to the end of the page, I promise!

5. Use shorter words. Go through every word of your copy. If there’s a shorter or easier word than the one you’ve used, change it. For example, in the second paragraph of this post I changed “most successful marketing campaigns” to “best marketing campaigns”. I edited lots of other bits too. It just makes things easier to read.

Just be careful not to leave out important meaning for the sake of simplicity. That’s where simple writing becomes dumbed down writing.

Let me know how you get on!

The way this works is when a change is made, a user will normally “Update” the repository and then “Commit” their changes to the repository. That’s in an ideal world, however we are all human and sometimes we may forget to Update or Commit our changes. This is when conflicts can arise with SVN not knowing which one it should look at. People have got round this issue in many ways, one of the more popular ones is to utilise some of SVNs built in features to email the people involved in a project when a commit has happened. Meaning they have no excuse when it comes to updating the repository and making sure conflicts don’t occur. In this article I’ll show you how to accomplish this!

Later, in another tutorial, I’ll show you also how you can link this with your Basecamp account to post messages to your Basecamp projects as well as sending the emails out!

To complete this tutorial, you’ll need some knowledge of SVN (and have access to your repositories files on the server), PHP and server commands.

Getting started with hooks

To get started with this, first we’ll need to make use of some of SVNs built in functionality in the form of ‘hooks’. Hooks allow you to inject small pieces of code into certain points of the system’s workflow. SVN has a selection of hook points but the one we’ll be dealing with is the “Post Commit” hook. This hook runs straight after a commit has taken place. To set the hook up you’ll need to login to your SVN server and navigate to the repository you wish to set email notifications up on. For me, this is running a Windows Server in our office and the repositories can be found at “D:\Repositories\REPOSITORY-NAME”, of course this may be different for you.

Once you’ve found the folder containing your SVN Repositories, locate and open the folder containing the repository you wish to set notifications up on. Inside here should be a few folders and files. The folder we are interested in is “hooks”, inside here as default should be a selection of TMPL files. These are the hooks files before they have been made active.

To activate a hook change the filename from .tmpl to .cmd, as mentioned above the hook we are interested in is the “Post Commit” hook, so locate the file “post-commit.tmpl” and change this to “post-commit.cmd” to activate it. Currently, the post commit hook won’t doing anything until we place a command in there. Copy the command below and place it into the post-commit.cmd file. Change the path to the php.exe to the location of the php executable file on your server. The second path is the file that will be run once a commit has taken place. This file can be used across all repositories that are setup to email users on commit, so bear this in mind when deciding where to place this file. It will need to be a location which is easily accessible for all repositories, once you’ve decided replace the file path in the code below:

Post-Commit Hook

"path/to/server/php-installation/php.exe" Path/to/php/notification/notify.php %1 %2

%1 and %2 are variables which the hook will pass into the notify.php file. More on these later.

Creating the PHP

Now we’ll take a look at notify.php, as mentioned earlier this will be the file that run on the post-commit hook and will send us the email. Start off by creating the notify.php file in the location you decided on in the post-commit.cmd file. Once created open the file and place the following code into the file:

PHP

#! /usr/bin/env php
<?php

$repo_path     = $argv[1]; // retrieve repository path - this is the %1 passed in the post-commit hook
$rev           = $argv[2]; // retrieve the revision number of the latest commit - this is the %2 passed in the post-commit hook

$revision = trim($rev);

// retrieve details about the commit
$author   = trim(`"Path/to/visualsvn/server/svnlook.exe" author {$repo_path} -r {$revision}`);
$date     = trim(`"Path/to/visualsvn/server/svnlook.exe" date {$repo_path} -r {$revision}`);
$message  = trim(`"Path/to/visualsvn/server/svnlook.exe" log {$repo_path} -r {$revision}`);
$changed  = trim(`"Path/to/visualsvn/server/svnlook.exe" changed {$repo_path} -r {$revision}`);

// the date format returned isn't very pretty so we explode out the returned string to get a nice date
$date = str_replace('(', '', $date);
$date = str_replace(')', '', $date);
$date = str_replace(',', '', $date);
$bits = explode(" ", $date);

// this will display something like: Tue, 01 Nov 2011 – 12:20:59
$date = "$bits[3], $bits[4] $bits[5] $bits[6] - $bits[1]";

// Put each file that has been changed into an array
$temp = array();
$temp = explode("\n", $changed);
// Make the codes more readable
// A  => Item Added
// D  => Item Deleted
// U  => Item Contents Updated
// _U => Item Properties Updated
// UU => Item Contents and Properties Updated

// variable ready to hold formatted list of files to display in the email
$files = "";

// loop through the changed files
foreach ($temp as $tmp)
{
	$bits = explode(" ", $tmp);

	$action = $bits[0];
	$file = $bits[sizeof($bits)-1];

	// work out what has happened to this file
	switch ($action) {
		case 'A':
			$act = 'Added';
			break;
		case 'D':
			$act = 'Deleted';
			break;
		case 'U':
			$act = 'Updated';
			break;
		case '_U':
			$act = 'Updated';
			break;
		case 'UU':
			$act = 'Updated';
			break;
	}
	$act = str_pad($act, 12);
	$act = str_replace(' ', ' ', $act);

	$files .= $act . $file . "\r\n"; // add to the $files variable ready to put into the email
}

$email_subject= "SVN: Revision $revision";

// explode the repository path to allow us to get the repository name
$repo_ex = explode("\\", $repo_path);
$reponame = end($repo_ex);

// build the email body given all the data we have on the commit
$email_body = '';
$email_body .= "Repository: ".$reponame."\r\n";
$email_body .= "Author: ".$author."\r\n";
$email_body .= "Date: ".$date."\r\n";
$email_body .= "Message:\r\n";
$email_body .= "-------------\r\n";
$email_body .= $message."\r\n";
$email_body .= "-------------\r\n";
$email_body .= "Changed Files:\r\n";
$email_body .= $files

// email contents have been built
// build the headers
// then send the email!

$headers = "FROM: noreply@example.com";

mail("svn@example.com, svn2@evoluted.net", $email_subject, $email_body, $headers);

?>

Once saved, amend the email addresses in the PHP mail function at the bottom of the page. Make some changes to some files within one of your repositories and commit the changes. All being well you should receive an email shortly.

This isn’t instant and sometimes depending on the size of your commit (i.e. adding lots of files at the start of a project) it may take a little while longer to compile the commit and send the email out.

Further Development

While this is a great and useful tool to have in your arsenal there are a few other things that can still be done. Are you using Basecamp for your project management? We can easily integrate the above script to post a message to basecamp and to post it to the associated project within Basecamp.

We could also take this one step further and create a web interface for use on your local server to automatically set up the repository for you (even setting up the post-commit hook for you) and even (if you are using it) linking it with a Basecamp account.

Stay tuned for the next part in this line of tutorials where we will look at implementing some of the features mentioned above!

“Who the hell reads the About page on a company website?” a fool asked me recently.

“I do,” I answered. If I’m thinking of signing up to something online – especially if it’s a small company I’ve never heard of – I go straight there.

I look for answers to important questions. Does the company physically exist? Are they credible? Why should I choose them over the thousands of other options Google just gave me? If ‘About us’ helps me out with these, and I like what I read, then I’m much more likely to use the website.

But if About pages are so useful, why do people think nobody reads them?

Maybe it’s because so many are deathly, deathly dull.

You click on them, you start reading, but pretty soon you’re wondering why you bothered. Instead of building customer confidence, badly written About pages make their owners sound like amateurs, or worse.

It can be difficult, even for a seasoned web copywriter, to make them creative and interesting. After all, not every organisation has a vision to “reach for new heights and reveal the unknown”. Not all companies have a history that starts with a poor Swiss orphan boy landing in England hundreds of years ago.

That’s why we all need a bit of inspiration sometimes. Here are six of the best About pages I’ve found on the Web – and they’re full of great copy and page design ideas.

1. IGN

“About us, in 140 characters or less”. That’s the heading of the first section of IGN’s page, and it’s a guideline many companies would do well to follow. Give us the essential stuff first, make it easy to digest, and then let us dig deeper if we want to. Visit the page.

2. Hot UK Deals

A good About page doesn’t necessarily have to give your company’s history or stats. It’s really there to reassure readers that you’re a credible outfit. Hot UK Deals’ About page focuses on how transparent and open it is, because that’s what the company believes its users might have concerns about. What will reassure people about your company? Read HUKD’s About page.

3. Fancie

Here’s an example that shows you don’t need a huge name to write a great About page. it’s simple, charming and doesn’t waste anyone’s time. Check it out: we’re given the company’s story, vision, product info and a testimonial, all in five short paragraphs. Perfectly baked. See how it turned out.

4. 37signals

I actually preferred 37signals’ old About page, which required much less scrolling. But this is still a great example of how to make a company history accessible, with its graphical timeline of milestones that’s very easy to dip in and out of. I just wish they’d made it shorter, and focused more on 37signals’ own achievements. Take a look for yourself.

5. HBO

At the centre of HBO’s About page, surrounded by concise info on its various programming and services, is a single summary sentence. A company needs confidence to be so brief – perhaps the kind that comes more naturally when your brand is already enormous – but if you can pull it off, customers might just have more confidence in you. Read the page.

6. Tumblr

Tumblr is all about simplicity, and this extends to the blogging service’s About page. Look how easy it is to simply scroll down the page and get the flavour of each neatly compartmentalised section, without actually having to do too much reading. That’s great web copy. Have a read.

As you can see, I like straightforward About pages where the most important information leaps out at me from the screen.

But what do you think? Are my examples really the best About pages around, or have you seen better? Share in the comments below.

It’s not always their fault though. We’re all at the mercy of the creative brief.

Sometimes web copy needs to be conservative to be effective. Like on certain law firm websites, where the punchy style loved by so many copywriters isn’t respectable enough.

But other times, we’re just doing the best we can with a really crappy brief. In these cases, the end product is probably going to be crappy too.

Here are 5 types of creative brief I receive all too often, and why they stink.

1. The 50 word brief

It is possible, in some cases, to write a good brief in 50 words – but I’m talking about the kind of thing where the client just can’t be bothered to write down their ideas. What does this mean for us copywriters? More work, as we chase answers and try to piece together the information we should’ve been given in the first place. Copywriters know how to write copy. We don’t know what you want to achieve until you tell us. So, you know, just tell us.

2. The clueless marketer’s brief

Some of the poorest briefings I’ve received have been from seasoned marketing professionals. The worst thing about this scenario is that it’s difficult to hand-hold them through the process – because you both know it shouldn’t be that way. These bad briefings are either woefully light on detail (because the client is too busy, or too lazy) or they’re full of fuzzy marketing terms. All you can do is ask lots of questions – and when no useful answers come back, make the best of a bad job.

3. The brief by committee

The problem with a really, really long brief is lack of focus. I’ve had briefings to write single web pages that were over six pages long. The instructions came from a veritable committee of company directors who all wanted to have their say, but ended up contradicting one another. The answer? Decide on clear objectives before briefing your copywriter. Bigger isn’t always better.

4. The copycat brief

Note to clients: we’re not called copywriters because we simply copy other writers. The idea is to sell what’s unique about your products. And yet I’ve received briefs that were nothing more than a collection of other web pages pasted into a Word doc. How can you beat the competition if you sound just like them? You can’t.

5. The aimless brief

This has to be the hardest thing to deal with. The client just doesn’t know what they want. To make up for it, they often throw in unhelpful words like ‘dynamic’ and ‘engaging’. Oh, you want your copy to be engaging? That’s a first. All a copywriter can do is suggest ideas and try to steer the client down a path we think will work – which rather defeats the object of a brief.

What’s the worst creative brief you’ve ever received? What should copywriters be doing to help our clients provide better instructions? Tell us in the comments below.

Search Engine Optimisation is mostly a numbers game.

The right combination of keywords, inbound links and HTML coding equals virtual alchemy for web traffic figures.

Even web copywriting has its formulas. The SEO experts I work with say a good web page contains around 250 words of original content. Target keyword phrases should appear 3-4 times. Each page should target prioritise a single keyword phrase.

But this is where the maths ends and the writing skill begins.

Unlike links and meta tags, web content has to appeal to another audience besides search engine robots – the customer.

It should make the reader feel like Number One.

That’s very difficult to achieve if we’re shoehorning SEO keywords in all over the place.

We’ve all seen pages that have been a little ‘over-optimised’. They’re ugly, they read badly and they definitely don’t sell.

So what’s needed is a way to fit in our 3-5 keywords, while still producing good writing. A little grease for your SEO shoehorn, if you will.

Here are 5 simple techniques I use often.

1. The heading is gold

Putting our target SEO keyword phrase into the page heading (e.g. H1 or H2) is a must.

Let’s imagine we’re writing for a plumber in Sheffield. On the home page, we’re probably going to target ‘plumber Sheffield’.

Including that phrase in our page heading has lots of SEO value. It also tells our customers that they’ve found what they were looking for.

Best of all, it’s very easy to do. Just put it in a short and positive phrase, like “Your Quality Plumber, Sheffield.”

Don’t worry about having a comma or preposition in between the two words – Google largely ignores them. It’s not quite as good as using the exact phrase, but it does give us the quality of language we’re looking for.

2. Give the reader what they want

Let’s stick with our Sheffield plumber.

The very first sentence of our page’s body copy is a great place to put our SEO phrase and keep it sounding natural.

Why? Because it’s the topic of our page. Our reader searched for ‘plumber Sheffield’, and we need to give them what they want immediately.

A simple opening like “Looking for a reliable plumber in Sheffield?” does everything we want it to. Our SEO phrase sounds nice and natural, and we have the perfect lead in to talk about why our plumber is great.

Another possible opening might be: “J Davis is a Sheffield plumber known for x, y and z.” In fact, there are countless ways to get our target phrase into the opening sentence of our copy – you can probably think of even better ones yourself.

3. The paragraph closer

Now we’re into the body of our web copy, including our SEO phrase starts to get a bit trickier.

We can’t just keep making statements about our Sheffield plumber, or we risk irritating the reader.

The solution is a nice paragraph closer. And it’s very easy to do.

Here’s how. We’re bound to have a paragraph in our copy that lists some of the benefits of working with our plumber, right? A part where we talk about his experience, the range of problems he can solve, or something similar.

By ending that paragraph with something like “You won’t find a better plumber in Sheffield”, we get to round off our list nicely and include our SEO phrase.

Other possibilities could include “That’s what makes J Davis the best plumber in Sheffield” or “No other plumber in Sheffield offers so much”. Again, you can probably think of even better ones yourself.

4. The call to action

Every web page should end with a call to action. The part where we invite the reader to click through to the next page, contact us or make a purchase.

The call to action is also a great place to summarise what we’ve said on our web page. It reinforces the reasons why the reader should act.

This makes it a great place to include our SEO keyword phrase.

A call to action that goes something like “For a free quote from the most experienced plumber in Sheffield, contact us now” ticks all of our boxes. It summarises our copy and it asks the reader to act.

It also gives us the third instance of ‘plumber Sheffield’ within our body copy. Mission accomplished!

5. Don’t forget HTML title tags

The HTML title of our web page might not strictly be classed as web copy – but it’s probably the most important place to put our phrase from an SEO standpoint.

We need to keep our title short and put our phrase at the start. Something like “Plumber Sheffield – J Davis Plumbing Ltd”, for example.

No need to worry about natural language here, either. In today’s browsers we can hardly see page titles, so their only real value is for SEO.

So there you have it.

We’ve got 3 non-spammy instances of our SEO keyword phrase in the body of our web copy. We’ve also got a well optimised page title and heading.

Depending on how good our other SEO techniques are (and the quality of the sites we’re competing against), this could take us to the top of Google.

And it was incredibly easy, wasn’t it?

Now all we need is some great copy to go with it. But that’s for another post.

Follow these simple steps to create your pattern. We have used a simple geometric bird design in this tutorial that you are free to download.

1. Create the pattern you wish to duplicate

This can be any shape or size you want to fill your area. If you want a seamless background make sure your shape is symmetrical. When you are happy with the shape or design, drag the whole shape into your swatches panel to create a new fill.

You can also use seamless patterns created in Photoshop. Open the psd, png, or jpg file in Illustrator and then drag it to the Swatches panel. Use it as a fill the same as any pattern. Start with a high resolution image for best results.

2. Fill your shape

Select the object you wish to fill, and click on the new fill you have created in your swatches panel.

3. Scale, move or rotate your pattern

You can easily transform the pattern within your shape, by moving, scaling or rotating it. Select the shape containing the fill pattern. Go to the Object Menu and click Transform, here you can select move, rotate, reflect, scale or shear.

Select the transform option you want to use. When the transform box appears, ensure you click Patterns in the options, this way you are only scaling the pattern and not the object.

4. Edit the pattern swatch or customize an existing swatch

To edit the pattern swatch, click and drag the swatch onto your art board. Once you have finished editing your pattern, you can either replace the swatch you have edited by clicking alt and dragging it over the previous swatch, or you can create a new swatch by simply dragging the pattern into the swatches menu as before.

A cornerstone of good copywriting that I’m sure we’re all aware of is “Sell benefits not features”.

But what if we’re writing about a product whose main selling point is a new technological feature?

Say, for example, I invent a new kind of frying pan. It’s called the ‘Fry Man 3000’ and it’s coated with an amazing combination of titanium, carbon fibre and rubber. Nothing sticks to this thing. Its molecular structure means even abrasive contact with metals can’t damage it. Best of all, its cooking surface features the image of a friendly robot face.

Sounds quite impressive, right?

Well, technology often does sound impressive – but mainly to people who are interested in technology.

This is why a lot of innovators fall into the trap of talking about the features of their products, instead of their benefits.

I think my titanium and carbon fibre technology is amazing because I invented it. Unfortunately for me, my potential customers just want to know how it makes them a better cook.

So when I fail to tell them this, the Fry Man 3000 will surely flop – just as many impressive products have before it.

Successful tech copy doesn’t mention technology

The most successful web copy sidesteps this problem by hardly talking about technology at all.

Instead it talks almost exclusively about benefits. And to prove it, here are three web copy examples that advertise some of the world’s top selling electronics products.

“Great times with family and friends. Get-off-the-couch fun whether you’re 5 or 95. This is what Wii™ is all about.” – Nintendo Wii (extract from Nintendo.com)

Nintendo did such a good job of hiding Wii’s clever motion sensing tech (which includes accelerometers, infra-red pointing, Bluetooth and more) that many ‘hardcore’ gamers considered system dated upon launch. Yet by selling Wii as the system anyone can play, Nintendo annihilated its rivals and sold 80 million systems worldwide. That’s the power of selling benefits over technology.

“Choose what to watch and when to watch it – Sky+ means there’s more time for the family to spend together.” – Sky+ box (extract from Sky.com)

Inside the Sky+ box is a clever hard disk-based video recording system and software that manages your recordings for you. Does Sky ever mention this? Yes, but they lead with compelling benefits like being able to pause live TV. Sky+ first launched 10 years ago and Sky have barely updated their marketing messages since. Why bother? Sky+ has developed a near-monopoly on UK TV receivers.

“With the tap of a button, you can wave hello to your kids, share a smile from across the globe, or watch your best friend laugh at your stories.” – ‘FaceTime’ video calling on iPhone 4 (extract from Apple.com)

FaceTime is a great example of a specific technological feature being turned into a simple and memorable benefit. Read about FaceTime on Apple’s site and you won’t see even the camera mentioned until you’re halfway down the page. And that name – just an everyday phrase meaning a face-to-face meeting. No wonder Apple made $7bn profit last year.

Say what it does, not what it is

So, what do all of these examples have in common?

They envision how the product will fit into our lives and they help us imagine it.

They make technology sound completely natural and essential by talking about us, not about how the product works.

And ultimately, they connect on a human level – not a technological one.

To put it as simply as possible, the challenge is to forget about what your product is and start thinking about what it does for the customer. Forget about science and think about people.

With that approach, perhaps even the Fry Man 3000 could be a multi-million seller.