So you’ve got a website and hopefully your customers and target market find it easily (a whole other topic), but once they do find it what sort of experience do they have? Does it project a positive image of your business or turn them off? Does it engage them or bore them? Is it easy to read and use or painful and frustrating?

One of the key things to ensure about your website is that it is persuasive – the language, the images, the layout and the usability all combine to appeal to and convert your website visitors into customers.

A key part of this is the language you use, here are some tips to help get it right:

• Don’t bore them with information all about you, particularly on the home page – it should be about them – what’s in it for them?
• Talk direct to the reader as “you” rather than referring to “them” or “our customers”.
• Don’t overwrite, keep your text content short and sweet, people don’t like having to read lot’s of text on a web page
• Use bullet points to list important information
• Tell them the benefits to them, don’t make them guess
• If you do have a lot of content to get across on a page use sub titles to break up the content into different topics

There are some good examples of how to do this in the article “How to write persuasively“. Have a critical look at your website and homepage – do you think it is persuasive from a customer point of view?