Tips, news and views from Green Light Copywriting

Can your content compete with 100,000 words a day? 10 September 2014

Read a lot? You certainly do. That’s according to research which suggests that each of us now processes an average of 100,000 words a day – in our leisure time alone!

That’s right. In our leisure time alone…so those 100,000 words don’t even include the barrage of information most of us contend with during our working day.

Can your content compete with that?

Now let’s look at business content in the context of all this. Quite clearly, that content has a lot of work to do. It has become something of a cliché to say that we’re all suffering from information overload. Yet clichés are often clichés because they capture a grain of truth. According to an article in New Scientist, we only have a finite amount of attention to give.

So what does it take to make the most of this limited resource?

It takes more than a nice suit

With content, it’s all about having personality and a clearly defined proposition. Effective business content (i.e. the type of content which builds a connection with the right people) is not simply about being well-dressed. Your content may be suited and booted with spot-on grammar and perfect spelling, but that isn’t enough any more. In place of bland, you need to look for a clearly defined point of view and a difference. Sounding the same as everyone else is not a great way to define yourself.

Maximise the minus

In the battle to be noticed, I’ve seen companies giving in to yet another risky habit… trying to win the race by creating excessive amounts of web content.

Yet saying more with less can be much more powerful. Take away some of your content and you could refine your message instead of diluting it.

The fact that we read more than 100,000 words in a day? It’s certainly surprising. But the real shocker is that so many businesses still aren’t adapting their content strategy.

Enough said.

Camilla Zajac, Green Light Copywriting, September 2014