Hey Siri: Some 50% of searches are voice search these days, according to comScore. So optimize for voice search.

Here’s how:

1. Ask ChatGPT, “What questions are XX asking about YY?”

People tend to pose voice searches as questions: “Siri, what time is sunset today?” Find out what your audience is asking by asking ChatGPT. Or click the Questions tab on a tool like SEMRush.

Then create pages, posts and other pieces with the question as the headline and its answer as the content.

2.Choose long-tail search terms.

Voice searchers don’t ask for simple terms like “LAX flight delays.” Instead, they’re more likely to ask a longer, more conversational, more precise question: “Will Flight 457 on XYZ Airlines be delayed out of LAX?”

Indeed, most searchers use three or more keywords in their searches, according to a study of 10 million U.S. internet users by Experian Hitwise. Consider that when choosing your terms.

3. Explain how to

The number of how-to searches has increased by 70%.

Check the search volume on terms like for “How to [your topic]” and choose the subjects your audience seeks help with. Use “How to [your topic]” for the headline, page title and page description.

4. Use conversational keywords

People write more formally when they’re typing into a search box. But they speak more conversationally when asking Siri to search.

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Reach more email recipients with this three-step process for writing subject lines:

1. Post your email in ChatGPT. Ask for three subject lines.
2. Test those subject lines in Omnisend’s email subject line tester. Use its suggestions for improving your subject line.
3. Choose the strongest element for the subject line. Use the others for the headline, deck or preheader.

That’s important. Because 69% of recipients mark emails spam based on the subject line.

Thank you to David Brierley of Sentry for sharing this tip. One thing I love about teaching is that I always learn from my brilliant students!

Learn my full system for writing subject lines that get opened and emails that get read, clicked and shared!

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It might be your CEO’s favorite email. Every policy wonk in D.C. sits by their inbox waiting for it to come. It’s the only newsletter I know of that has ever been covered — for formatting! — by The New York Times.

It’s Axios. And if you haven’t started stealing from it yet, started stealing from it now.
Here are four things to steal from — and one way to improve on — everybody’s favorite newsletter.

1. Report average reading time.

If your newsletter is short, you might boost readership by letting readers know.

This issue of Axios weighs in at 4.5 minutes. That would be a little long, if editors didn’t have a great formatting trick. (See No. 4.)

2. Run a short breaking news story.

This one’s one paragraph — one sentence — of 29 words long. Outwrite Axios: For clarity, chop your 29-word sentences in half.

3. Cover One Big Thing.

Email newsletter subscribers ding senders for underpromising and overdelivering. Give them less, and make it better.

Focus your newsletter on one story, and cover it well.

4. Pass the Palm Test.

Break your copy up with bullets, bold-faced lead-ins and links to make it look easier to read. The easier it looks, the more people will read it.

(And there’s your solution for the 4.5-minute newsletter.)

5. Pass the Skim Test.

Outwrite Axios: Can skimmers learn everything you want them to know about your topic — without reading the paragraphs? If so, you pass the Skim Test. If not, you need to keep working.

Axios breaks the newsletter up — but does not facilitate skimming — with emphasized words. Here’s what a skimmer would read:

Help skimmers get more from your message with a better strategy for emphasized words.

Are you ready to be loved by your recipients?

Boost open and clickthrough rates, readership and shares: Learn my full system for writing marketing emails and newsletters.

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Call it the envelope. Before they’ll open your email, your recipient considers four things: 1) the sender (or “from” name), 2) the subject line, 3) the preheader and 4) the preview pane.

If you’re just focused on the subject line, you could be ignoring 75% of the elements that could get your email opened — or deleted. Are you addressing your:

1. From line

When users review their inboxes, they look at the From line first to confirm that they recognize the sender. Then they look at the subject line to confirm that they want to open a message.

Indeed, more than two-thirds of email recipients use the From line to decide whether to open your message, according to a study by Campaign Monitor.

2. Subject line

The From line is how email recipients decide whether to delete your message. The subject line is how they decide whether to open.

Or so says Loren McDonald, chief marketing officer of J.L. Halsey, a marketing technology and services firm.

Indeed, 35% of email recipients use subject lines to decide whether to open a message, according to a study by DoubleClick. And 47% of people use the subject line to decide whether to open brand emails, according to a study by Chadwick Martin Bailey.

3. Preheader

Preheader text can have a dramatic effect on your email open and click-through rates: Some 24% of respondents looked at the preheader first when deciding whether to open an email, according to a joint survey between Litmus and Fluent.

4. Preview pane

Eight out of 10 businesspeople and more than half of consumers use preview panes to decide whether to open an email, according to Lyris Technologies.

That makes the preview pane one of the top elements desktop and laptop readers consider when deciding whether to open or delete your email message.

Are you using all of the tools at your disposal to get your message opened? If you’re just focused on your subject line, you’re ignoring 75%.

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Most Americans spend at least 8.5 hours a day looking at a screen, whether a TV set, computer monitor or mobile device, according to a study by Ball State University. Frequently, we use two or three of these devices at once.

That multitasking costs. According to a study by Stanford University, heavy multitaskers:

• Are more easily distracted by “irrelevant environmental stimuli”
• Can recall much less of what they’ve just learned
• Are much less able to concentrate on the task at hand

Now, where was I going with this? Oh, yes.

“The net is, by design, an interruption system, a machine geared for dividing attention,” writes Nicholas Carr in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.

As we “power browse” a dozen web pages at once, check our email 30 or 40 times an hour and text while driving, we become “distracted from distraction by distraction.”

So don’t count on your web visitors being all there when they show up on your web page.

“Psychological research long ago proved what most of us know from experience: frequent interruptions scatter our thoughts, weaken our memory, and make us tense and anxious,” Carr writes. “The more complex the train of thought we’re involved in, the greater the impairment the distractions cause.”

Links limit learning.

One study at Utah State University tested that theory. Mechanical and manufacturing engineering students studied machining lessons via:

• Linear web pages, where students clicked to move to the next page, like turning the pages in a book
• Linked web pages, where students navigated links on a page to decide which page to visit next

The results?

• Linear learning was faster. Students using the linear lessons finished their studies in half the time that students using the linked module required.
• Linked learning was less effective. Students using the module with links missed 33% more questions on a test than those using the linear web pages. Even simple linking was enough to reduce student scores by two grade points.
• Average learners struggled more with links. A-level students performed equally well with either module. But B- and C-level students fared much worse with the linked pages than with the linear module.

Why? A printed page communicates its argument line by line. That delivers a more coherent view of the world than do short chunks of hyperlinked text.

Plus, navigating links may divert mental energy that people might otherwise spend understanding complex information.

Screen reading cuts comprehension.

When 1 million North Carolina middle-school students received computers and internet access from 2000 to 2005, their math and reading scores declined, found Duke University economists Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd.

The reason: They were distracted by the web. (Hey, given the choice between spending the afternoon solving fraction problems or spending it on DumbWaysToDie, I’d go for the website, too!)

The web’s interactive nature also makes the medium harder to understand. After all, it’s not easy to focus on the text when you’re also clicking and navigating.

When participants in one study read Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” in hypertext, for instance, three-quarters had trouble following the story, according to researchers David S. Miall and Teresa Dobson. Just one in 10 who read linear text struggled to understand the story.

The reason? The web readers’ attention, Miall and Dobson said, “was directed toward the machinery of the hypertext and its functions rather than to the experience offered by the story.”

More so on mobile

These problems are multiplied when people read on mobile devices. Mobile web visitors pay less attention to your message, spend less time on it, read more slowly, understand less, remember less and are less likely to act on your call to action.

The communicator’s bottom line?

This is just one more reminder that humans — adults as well as kids — get distracted when reading your messages online.

The solution? get to the point faster, organize better, make it easier to read and more skimmable.

____

Sources: Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, W. W. Norton & Company, 2010

Christine Hailey, “Hypermedia, multimedia and reader cognition: an empirical study,” Technical Communication, Aug. 1, 1998

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This just in: “Readers” actually don’t do much reading.

Indeed, just 19% of participants in a Harris Interactive poll read articles word-by-word. Many more skim mostly headlines (34%) or the full article (25%).

That means 67% skim, and 81% don’t read, online news.

Why?

People don’t have time to read online news thoroughly. Instead, they’re more likely to be skimming a text for specific information like a phone number or selectively reading to reduce the amount of time they spend with your information. Whichever “reading” technique or “reading” method they use, they are actually not reading much at all.

Beyond news

It’s not just news. People skim and scan text in other online channels and devices, as well:

• How people read on the web: They don’t; so make webpages scannable
• Do people skim, scan, read emails? Just 19% of email newsletters get read thoroughly
• People are skimming text on tablets: Insights from Poynter’s EyeTrack study
• People skim through the text of blog posts: They read 3.5% of the words on the page
• Eye tracking online shows where people look: Change how people see your page with 6 eye gaze patterns

Reel in your readers

So how do you catch these skimmers and scanners? According to the Harris poll:

• Hook them with your headline. A catchy headline (54%) tops the list of elements that convince skimmers to read.
• Wow them beyond words. Interesting pictures (44%) and compelling infographics (28%) are also strong lures.
• Draw them in with data. Interesting data or research that supports the article, which drew 43% of respondents to read, was the only content element that made the list.

Bottom line: Draw skimmers and scanners in with display copy and images. Don’t expect to reach them with paragraphs.

___

Source: “TV is America’s Preferred News Mode Overall, but Online is Matching or Outpacing it in Some Segments,” Harris Interactive

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Readers are busy. Fluff takes space. Space takes time. So let’s cut the fluff and get on with it.

To cut the fluff, aim for a fact-to-fluff ratio of at least 1:1.

How do you find your ratio?

Pass the yellow highlighter/red pen test.

Try this test:

1. Highlight all your abstract claims, ideas and concepts with a yellow highlighter.
2. Underline all your concrete evidence — fun facts, juicy details, examples, anecdotes, case studies, statistics and so forth — with a red pen.

What should your copy look like? At least as much red as yellow.

Remember what Texans say about people who are “all hat, no cattle.” Too many pieces of corporate web pages are just that — puffy, overblown chest pounding with little solid evidence to back up the claims.
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What does most corporate web copy look like? A sea of yellow broken only by the occasional speck of red.

To improve your ratio:

1. Increase fact. Add “proof” in the form of hard evidence — statistics, analogies, facts, examples, stories, testimonials — to all your claims.
2. Reduce fluff. Cut hyperbole, adjectives, adverbs and other puffy prose. Strip your copy of “marketingese.”

Here’s how:

1. Increase fact.

What convinces people to do business with your website? According to research by the Nielsen Norman Group, it’s facts, not fluff:

1. Level of detail: 41%
2. Layout: 16.7%
3. Visual design: 14.5%
4. Features: 8.2%
5. Tone: 6.8%
6. Deals: 4.4%
7. Price: 3.8%
8. Can’t be classified: 2.7%
9. Brand: 1.9%

“Visitors overwhelmingly prefer detail. But they don’t want to be overwhelmed by it,” says Kate Meyer, user experience specialist with Nielsen Norman Group.

If your web page is seriously lacking in the kind of detail that makes visitors want to work with you, increase fact.

Make like a lawyer. Prove your claims. Dig up concrete details — numbers, comparisons, examples and third-party testimonials, for instance — to prove your assertions.

Remember what Texans say about people who are “all hat, no cattle.” Too many pieces of corporate web pages are just that — puffy, overblown chest pounding with little solid evidence to back up the claims.

Don’t let that describe your web page.

2. Reduce fluff.

The second way to improve your fact-to-fluff ratio: Reduce fluff.

“The more florid the descriptions, the more users tune them out and go elsewhere. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it.” — Jakob Neilsen, principal, Nielsen Norman…
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Cut hyperbole, adjectives, adverbs and other puffy prose. Strip out “marketingese.”

This promotional language reduces reading, according to Kara Pernice, Kathryn Whitenton and Jakob Nielsen, in How People Read on the Web.

So:

• Cut hyperbole. Minimize modifiers.
• Avoid marketingese and other empty, puffy prose.
• Present information without exaggeration, subjective claims, or boasting.

That’s important.

“The more florid the descriptions, the more users tune them out and go elsewhere. Sadly, the web is so smothered in vaporous content and intangible verbiage that users simply skip over it,” writes Jakob Neilsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group.

“The more bad writing you push on your users, the more you train them to disregard your message. Useless content doesn’t just annoy people; it’s a leading cause of lost sales.”

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Here’s an interesting dichotomy: Killing time is the killer app for mobile devices. But mobile users are in a hurry and “get visibly angry” at verbose sites that waste their time.

Why?

“Even relaxation is purposeful behavior,” according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen. “In information foraging theory, users seek to maximize their cost/benefit ratio. That is, people want more thrills and less interaction overhead.”

Sadly, interaction costs are inherently greater in mobile — all that swiping and scrolling and trying to remember what you can’t see on the screen adds up.

“Tolerance of padding on mobiles is a lot lower,” counsels the BBC in its writing news for mobile screens guidelines. “So people are even quicker to drop out. You have to get their attention instantly; grab them from the first sentence. It’s too easy to click away.”

So how do you give mobile readers more thrills and less interaction overhead? Cut the blah-blah. Readers won’t put up with filler on their phones.

Cut the blah-blah.

Nielsen once saw this electronic sign in an airport hotel lobby:

Really?! you might ask. This flight monitor will actually … monitor flights?

“Because the monitor’s meaning is obvious to anyone who has ever been on an airplane, the sign adds nothing,” Nielsen says. “Worse, it wastes people’s time as they ponder the cycling text, assuming that it will eventually say something important.”

After all, Nielsen points out, the sign could just say:

Avoid information pollution.

Call it information pollution — “excessive word count and worthless details” that make it hard for people to get good information.

Information pollution not only wastes time, it steals audience attention.

“Each little piece of useless chatter is relatively innocent, and only robs us of a few seconds,” Nielsen says. “The cumulative effect, however, is much worse: we assume that most communication is equally useless and tune it out, thus missing important information that’s sometimes embedded in the mess.”

So cut the fluff.

“In particular, ditch the blah-blah verbiage,” Nielsen says. “When writing for mobile users, heed this maxim: If in doubt, leave it out.”

Filler = bad.

Nielsen also sees this kind of “useless chatter” at the tops of many web pages.

“The worst kind of blah-blah has no function; it’s pure filler — platitudes, such as, ‘Welcome to our site, we hope you will find our new and improved design helpful,’” he says.

“Kill the welcome mat and cut to the chase.”

Filler of all kinds irritates mobile readers. Consider this response from one participant in Nielsen’s mobile usability studies:

She felt duped because she didn’t get enough payoff from her investment of time and effort.

Cut to the chase.

“Let’s clean up our information environment,” Nielsen says. “Are you saying something that benefits your customers, or simply spewing word count? If users don’t need it, don’t write it. Stop polluting now.”

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Lede or lead?

You won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary. But the alternative spelling lede was supposedly created during the linotype era so as not to confuse lead with the strip of metal that was used to separate lines of type.

The word lede still looks weird to me. But even if you prefer the spelling lede, remember: Leads lead the reader into the body of your piece.

So what types of web content leads should you try?

4 types of web leads to try

Web content’s not a newspaper story. So instead of news leads, try these four types of web leads:

1. Snappy synthesis

Don’t bury the lead under all of the W’s and H’s. Instead, steal a trick from The New York Times, and try snappy synthesis. Synthesize your subject matter into a short, snappy sentence like this:

2. Stakeholder benefits

Don’t write about us and our stuff. Instead, draw readers in by focusing on how they can use, or benefit from, our products, services, programs and ideas. Here’s how that looks:

3. Data point

Can you illustrate the gist of the story with a startling statistic? If so, try a lead like this, from Visa’s Reading Is Fundamental program, for your web content:

4. Illustration

Show, don’t tell. Illustrate your essential point with an example like this, from an H&R Block survey of kids about taxes:

3 types of web leads to avoid

Don’t treat your web content as a news story … but don’t bury the lede, either. Here are three types of leads to avoid:

1. Abstraction

To draw readers into your web content, write web leads that are concrete, creative and provocative. That means dry, boring, abstract leads like this aren’t a good choice:

2. Background

The background section — aka the blah blah — belongs in the third paragraph. So keep definitions, history lessons and other broader context like this out of the opening paragraph:

3. Welcome text

According to the Nielsen Norman Group, nonessential introductions like this one cause readers to skip your lead:

Ledes should lead

Whichever lead approach you choose for your web content, make sure it’s concrete, creative and provocative. Make sure your lede leads readers into the story — instead of leading them astray.

Regardless of how you choose to spell it.

Learn more

• Learn more about lede (or lead) writing.
• Find out how to organize your message.
• Perfect the paragraph that comes after the lead: the nut graph.

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I don’t know about you, but one of my goals in life is to never write anything that makes my readers throw up, resign or forget where they parked their car.

But that’s actually possible when writing for the web.

That’s because screen reading hurts your web visitors’ eyes, backs and brains.

1. Screen reading hurts readers’ eyes.

Reading on the screen is hard for a simple reason: Our eyes weren’t made to stare at little beige boxes all day. When reading online, your readers face these special eye problems:

• Light. Reading online is like reading with a flashlight shining in your eyes. And you know what happens when you spend your day staring at a lightbulb.
• Blinking. People blink less often when reading online than when reading print. That’s a problem, because blinking is what keeps our eyes moist and relaxed. They also open their eyes wider when reading on the screen. That makes their tears evaporate faster and leads to dry eye.
• Scrolling. The human eye has a normal reflex called optokinetic nystagmus. That’s scientist talk for the way our eyes flit across the screen to follow scrolling type. That constant jumping up and down can wear your readers out, cause eyestrain and cause readers to feel a little seasick. (So you can cause readers to throw up from what you write online.)

• Sore or irritated eyes
• Trouble focusing
• Dry or watery eyes
• Blurred or double vision
• Sensitivity to light
• Shortsightedness

In a 2020 study, more than 9 in 10 the respondents experienced at least one symptom associated with digital device usage.

Mobile matters: Cases of screen sightedness have increased by 35% since smartphones were introduced in the 1990s.

“I’ve had people come to our clinic saying they were going to quit their jobs because they couldn’t take it,” says David Grisham, optometry professor, University of California at Berkeley.

Not exactly the purpose of our intranet, is it?

So you literally can make people resign based on what you write on the web.

Is yours a site for sore eyes?

2. Screen reading hurts readers’ bodies.

Americans are experiencing more back, neck and shoulder problems because of their handheld devices, the American Chiropractic Association announced recently.

Plus, Americans are getting insomnia and body clock confusion from screen reading at night, according to Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. (Another one of my goals in life is to never write anything that makes my readers feel as if they’ve just stumbled off of a flight from Boston to Bhutan.)

Screen reading also causes nausea, headaches and muscle degeneration from sitting, according to the American Cancer Society and The Mayo Clinic. So yes, reading that web page does make your butt look bigger.

Is your site a pain in the ass?

3. Screen reading hurts readers’ brains.

But as writers, our biggest problem is this: Screen reading hurts your brain.

This is your brain on the Web: Constant problem solving (To click or not to click?) plus divided attention (You’ve got mail) lead to cognitive overload.

And cognitive overload, according to Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brain, leads us to lose the ability to think and reason.

In fact, a study by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London showed that online multitasking temporarily lowers your IQ more than smoking marijuana does. (And, from what I’ve read, is not nearly as entertaining a way to get stupid.)

“Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle,” Carr in The Shallows. “That’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.”

This problem multiplies on mobile.

(So, yes, you can make your web visitors forget where they parked the car.)

So how can you write web content that makes readers click instead of gag? Get to the point faster, organize better, make it easier to read and more skimmable.

___

Sources: Bahkir, F. A., & Grandee, S. S. (2020). Impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on digital device-related ocular health. Indian journal of ophthalmology, 68(11), 2378–2383.

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