An inter­est­ing debate is rag­ing among copy­writ­ers and con­tent devel­op­ers about the dif­fer­ences, if any, between writ­ing copy for the web ver­sus writ­ing content.

Pro­lific copy­writer Nick Usborne con­ducted a sur­vey with his newslet­ter read­ers to dis­cover how many among them are copy­writ­ers, and how many are con­tent writers.

The result was split three ways: one-​​third copy­writ­ers, one-​​third con­tent writ­ers, and the final third both.

Actual titles aside, I think the results may be mis­lead­ing. Rea­son is, I believe all online copy is con­tent but not all con­tent is copy. Try­ing to dis­tin­guish the two is a problem.

Most web design­ers, web­mas­ters, and con­tent writ­ers develop text for web­sites in a way to edu­cate vis­i­tors. They hold the notion that “con­tent is king,” “con­tent increases search engine rank­ings,” “con­tent makes a web­site sticky,” and so on. That’s all fine and good.

But I believe con­tent fails when it strives only at inform­ing the reader, and thus lacks impor­tant ele­ments that take her “by the hand” and com­pels her to do some­thing — any­thing, includ­ing the sim­ple act of read­ing the con­tent in the first place.

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Core expan­sion is far dif­fer­ent than exten­sion. Exten­sion is often referred to as fran­chis­ing, licens­ing, line exten­sion, or branch­ing out — also known as con­glom­er­at­ing. In this con­text, I am refer­ring to expan­sion by division.

If you’re a spe­cial­ist in your field — which I hope you are after read­ing this book — and you offer only one type of ser­vice, you can expand from within by divid­ing your core (your prod­uct or ser­vice) into mul­ti­ple, smaller components.

This helps to do 3 things. 1) It doesn’t take away from your cat­e­gory or spe­cial­iza­tion. 2) It increases your hit ratio when tar­get­ing clients, since some of them might be inter­ested in your entire pack­age while oth­ers may be inter­ested in only a por­tion of it. And 3) it increases the aura of exper­tise you project because you refrain from spread­ing your­self too thin.

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There’s a debate going on my dis­cus­sion board about “clean design” vs. “clunky design” with your copy, and how it can or can­not affect response rates.

I’m talk­ing about odd lay­outs, incon­sis­tent type­styles, empha­sis using for­mat­ting (like under­lin­ing, high­light­ing, bold­ing, etc), “junk­ing up” copy, and so on.

For exam­ple, on a tele­sem­i­nar I was giv­ing last week, some­one asked “I see so much copy with poor design and bad gram­mar with spelling mis­takes — is it inten­tional or just plain bad copywriting?”

Which reminds me…

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