The New Yorker is written at 5th-grade level. The New York Times at a 6th-grade level. The Economist at an 8th-grade level. They all have lots of subscribers, and I’ve never heard anyone say they feel “talked down to.” I read The New Yorker and the Times regularly, and their articles are well-written, engaging and often memorable. Yes, it’s because experienced, professional writers and journalists provide the stories, and editors  make sure facts are correct and copy is free of typos and grammatical mistakes.   But as it happens, well-written articles are structured in a way that 5th (or 6th etc.) graders could grasp. 

 Readability scoring criteria are based on:

• The number of sentences in an article.
• The total number of words in the articles.
• How many words per  sentence.
• How many syllables per word.

The lower the number, the better. I find the writing in The Times and The New Yorker engaging, clear and easy to understand. Keep this in mind as you write copy for your website and your blog.  Forgive me if this seems obvious, but good readability is an essential best practice. And if people buy products directly from your website, it’s a key element in driving profitability.

This post is written at a readability level that is somewhere between 5^th and 6^th grade.

How to Check the Readability Score for Your Copy

It’s easy to check your own readability score using Microsoft Word. I use Office 2010. These instructions are for Office 2007, but are easy to apply to 2010, as I did.  (This is copied from Microsoft’s website.)

First, set Word up so you can check readability scores: (link)

1.      Click the Microsoft Office Button, and then click Word Options.

2.     Click Proofing.

3.      Make sure Check grammar with spelling is selected.

4.     Under When correcting grammar in Word, select the Show readability statistics check box.

 To check Check spelling and grammar in Word (link)

1.      Open a Word document that needs to be checked.

2.     On the Review tab, in the Proofing group, click Spelling & Grammar.

3.      The Spelling and Grammar dialog box appears. The first suggested correction is highlighted.

 After you go through the proofing process, Word will display your readability score. Then you can go back to your document, edit and recheck until you reach the score you’re looking for.

P.S. There’s a reason I didn’t italicize or underline the names of the publications. I want you to focus on what is in boldface. Italics and/or underlining distract your eye and your attention away from boldface type. Also, don’t underline anything in your web or blog copy unless it’s a hyperlink. That’s a web best practice.

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Most visitors who arrive at your site from a Google search land on a page within your site, rather than on your home page. That’s one good reason to make sure you include breadcrumb navigation on your site. You’ll see it on many websites, in the upper left corner beneath the navigation menu. It shows your site visitor exactly where the page is within the organization of the website.

It’s an essential best practice for websites that visitors should be able to see, at a glance, how the page they’re on relates to other pages. Keith Instone’s navigation stress test is a great way to evaluate any page on your site for ease of navigation. There are three questions that users usually have when they land on a page on your site:

Where am I?

What’s here?

Where can I go from here?

The stress test shows you how well any page on your site answers those questions. The best way to do the test is to use a page deep within your site, perhaps several clicks from your home page. You print out the page in black and white, and mark it up by following Instone’s instructions. It will help you see where you need to add links to keep users oriented.

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I’ve just downloaded a free ebook from HubSpot, on Facebook Page Marketing (hope this link works for you–it doesn’t appear to be personalized). Hubspot is one of three resources that I rely on for current information about online marketing.

These links take you to resource pages for: HubSpot, Wordtracker and Citrix Online.  You’ll find links to webinars (both upcoming live session and on-demand recorded sessions), white papers, ebooks and more, on topics ranging from SEO and link optimization, social media marketing, content writing, and how to do your own webinars.

Wordtracker is especially savvy about the titles for the ebooks they sell, including 50 Kickass Keyword Strategies and The Web Content Recipe Book. I’ve just signed up for a webinar that HubSpot is offering, Website Redesign and Optimization.

Are there resources you especially like? Please post for sharing!

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You’re blogging regularly. You’ve keyword-optimized your blog for Google. You’ve commented on other people’s blogs to begin building reciprocal links.  Are your efforts paying off? A recent post by Dawn Foster in WebWorkerDaily (12/17/2010) explains how to find out whether anyone reads your blog. Here’s what she has to say:

Google Analytics Provides Capabilities You May Not Be Aware Of

Most web site owners and bloggers probably already use Google Analytics, and Dawn recommends looking at the reports for traffic sources, keywords, content, and using “In-Page Analytics,” which shows you your site page and points out where people click on the page. In another blog post, 5 Simple Ways to Get More Out of Google Analytics, Dawn also recommends using Google Alerts to email you updates on any search terms you want to monitor.

You can also set up Analytics custom reports via the “My Customizations” menu and use the report templates for all your Analytics accounts and blogs.

Feed Analytics tools show traffic from feed readers

Feed readers don’t pick up the coding for Google Analytics (GA). That means GA won’t show you traffic from subscribers to your blog feed. Analytics from Feedburner can provide that information.

If you haven’t set up a news feed for your blog, follow the Feedburner link above to find out how.

Learn Which Posts Got the Most Attention on Social Networks

Postrank shows you how many times your content has been posted or commented on in Twitter and other sites, and ranks posts to show the most popular ones. You have to join first, and import feeds into your account.

You can see which posts have gotten the most attention on Twitter, using bit.ly to shorten URLs and checking how many people clicked on the link and retweeted it. BackTweets performs similar analysis for any URL, not just those generated by bit.ly

Find Links to Your Blog, Blog Post or Web Site

Finding links to a URL shows you how many blogs or sites have linked to your blog, blog posts or your web site. You can do that by entering the following in Google’s search box– link: yoururl.com (be sure to leave a space after you type link:).

What do you do to learn whether people are reading your blog? If you have any favorite tips or tools, please share them.

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I’m revisiting William Zinsser’s  classic, On Writing Well, in preparation for a writing workshop I’m teaching in a couple of weeks. I’m enjoying re-reading a book that taught me a lot early in my career. Here are a few tidbits:

“Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual–it catches the eye befor it has a chance to capture the brain. Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas a long chunk of type can discourage a reader from even starting to read.”  When I write marketing copy, my longest paragraphs are no more than six lines.

“Credibility is just as fragile for a writer as for a President. Don’t inflate an incident to make it more outlandish than it actually was. If the reader catches you in just one bogus statement that you are trying to pass off as true, everything you write thereafter will be suspect. It’s too great a risk and not worth taking.” Same goes for advertising claims… and blog and Facebook posts.

“Surprisingly, often a difficult problem with a sentence can be solved simply by just getting rid of it.” I have another guideline: when you’ve fallen in love with the cleverness of something you’ve written, you probably should delete it. 

Briefer is better, so I’m signing off for now.

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The elevator pitch is an adventure in selling yourself or your products. What I do doesn’t fit into the categories most people think of, and I’m still working on my pitch.  I recently received an e-newsletter from the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan, authors of Switch and Made to Stick, with tips for “Giving a Great Elevator Pitch.”

One tip particularly caught my attention: “If your topic is complex, use the anchor and twist format.”  The core of the advice is that you start with something people are already deeply familiar with, and show how you provide something new or different.

They provide an example–getting the message out that CPR is almost as effective without mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Chest pumping alone works pretty well. The American Heart Association chose to call it “CPR lite” or “CPR for dummies.”

CPR is something most people understand. Many people are intimidated by the process, and worry that they won’t do it right. And they’re reluctant to do the mouth-to-mouth part.

To help people quickly grasp the new concept, the AHA started with something familiar, CPR,  and added the new twist–chest-pumping alone can get the job done.

Take a look at a fun article in Inc. that the Heath Brothers recommend: “You Know What Your Company Does. Can You Explain It in 30 Seconds?” It’s a walk-through of the process as led by Dave Yewman and Andy Craig, co-owners of Elevator Speech, a consulting firm.

If you have any tips about how you developed your elevator pitch, I’d love to hear them and share them here.

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Like most Americans, I’m horrified and sickened by the disaster in the Gulf (which is not, as some seem to think, a “natural” disaster). And I’m enraged by BP’s response.

BP CEO Tony Hayward’s performance this week in front of Congress provided further proof of BP’s sociopathic inability to empathize with the incalculable destruction the company has wrought–the deaths of 11 people and injuries of 17, the destruction of livelihoods, and the massive killing of wildlife and fouling of the ocean and wetlands. My heart aches as I write these words and consider what is continuing to happen.

In the June 9-22 edition of Knowledge@Wharton, two management professors — Hamid Bouchikhi of the ESSEC Business School in France and John R. Kimberly of the Wharton School — share their recommendations for what BP should have done. And they know what they’re talking about. They wrote a book on how BP handled the 2005 oil spill at the Texas City refinery. The company apparently learned nothing from the 2005 experience, nor from the actions of other companies when faced with crises of their own making.

One of the most interesting recommendations they make is that BP should have acknowledged its moral responsibility first, before dealing with legal liabilities. Taking moral responsibility for one’s actions–what a novel idea!

They also point out how Perrier took responsibility and showed they cared about their customers when they recalled all product in 1990 when traces of benzene were found. “While the recall hurt the company’s sales and market share badly, its broad and dramatic action showed that it cared more about its customers’ health and its reputation with them than about immediate sales and profits.” And they ask the question that we have all been asking:

“When are BP managers going to show that they too care as much about the environment and the communities as they do about profitability? “

It’s a question that all businesses, and we who are shareholders, need to be asking.

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For this post, I’m drawing on my training and certification as a personal life coach, although I don’t coach for a living any more. I’m a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach (CPCC), credentialled by the Coaches Training Institute (CTI) and completed about 300 hours of training and supervision. One of the core concepts in my training was to help clients find the “compelling way” in the process of clarifying their values. Living your values is the foundation of having a fulfilling life. Fulfillment is not something that you have to wait for, something that has to be delayed until you reach a goal. Instead, you can make the path towards the goal fulfilling in itself, because you know you’re moving closer to what you ultimately want.

Writing Your Blog: Do It or Lose It

For example, I have a goal of building my consulting practice. Blogging is one of a variety of ways to share things I’ve learned as I’ve worked on projects for clients. But for the past several months, I’ve let my blog languish. I told myself it didn’t really matter that much, and that I was too busy with client work to take the time to write blog entries faithfully. The downside of my neglect is that there’s now a gap and that I’ve  lost continuity and connection with regular readers. In addition, I lost the rhythm of writing regularly.

The thing is, I love to write. But that requires goals,  ideas, and a sense of direction. And every time I’ve sat down to write a blog entry, I’ve simply lost steam. Pfffffft.  In client work, writer’s block has never been an issue. If I’m stuck it’s almost always because I don’t have enough information on the topic, the goal or some other aspect of the project. For this blog, I wrote an entry a few weeks ago, and came up short on ideas and energy after that. Until today.

Finding the Compelling Way to Keep on Writing

Today didn’t just spring up out of the blue, though. Instead, I’m finding a Compelling Way for myself. The values that I’m focused on are learning, communicating, and connecting with people. Business is a wonderful way to do that, as well as to express my talents and generate money to fund other things I value and enjoy.

 As I see these words on the screen, they look so simple-minded. But sometimes simplicity is the key.

So I returned to my learning process, and was browsing Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox: Current Issues in Web Usability this morning. I was reading the Top 10 Information Architecture Mistakes, where Nielson mentions the need for consistent global (sitewide) navigation on every page (it’s usually the links you see in the bar at the very top of a page). It was then that I realized that although the site I was putting the finishing touches on meets that requirement, it needed local navigation on every page–a way for visitors who arrived directly at a lowerl-level page from Google to know where that page fits in the overall structure of the site. So I went through the site and added breadcrumb navigation to every page.

A Passion for Learning, Teaching and Communicating

And I think my inner logjam is clearing out. Because I’m excited about how much such a simple thing has improved the site, in the absence of side-rail links. And as I sat down to blog about the usefulness of breadcrumb navigation, my enthusiasm for this blog has returned. For me, the compelling way is to learn and share, using my ability to write.  

What’s Your Compelling Way?

When you’re feeling stuck and your energy for something is at a low point, consider what might be a compelling way for you. What is fulfilling for you? What could draw you to the path that will take you to your goal?

(FYI–here’s the breadcrumb nav before and after)

Without breadcrumb navigation, you don't know where you are

Breadcrumb navigation (enlarged) shows you where page is in relation to whole site

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Last month I received an email from someone pointing out many mistakes on my own web site. A couple of these were really bad mistakes. I have a section describing classes I’m offering at PVCC, our community college. I gave the same description for two entirely different classes, and got the date wrong on one of them.

It brought home the importance of having somebody else look at your site, or any new content that you’re publishing. It seems like such a no-brainer, but in the jet-stream of business, which moves so fast, it’s tempting to just get it done and publish it. That’s something I never do when the project is being printed, where mistakes are permanent. For print, at the very least I ask someone to proofread. It’s vital to do the same thing for electronic.

That’s because credibility is at stake. Studies done at Stanford showed that typographical errors erode the credibility of a site. Typos raise questions–”If this business can’t be bothered to proofread, what else are they sloppy about?” I covered this study at greater length in an earlier blog post.

In the class I recently taught on web site best practices, students, all of whom were owners or stakeholders of business sites,  reviewed one another’s sites. Having a fresh pair of eyes looking at their sites revealed things they’d completely missed. They found the experience highly valuable and identified changes that needed to be made.

So, if you’re not ready to do user testing on your web site, ask a friend or colleague to take a look and tell you what they see.

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I’ve just finished teaching a class at  Piedmont Virginia Community College (PVCC), co-sponsored by the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, on Best Practices for Your Web Site. In the process of teaching, this recommendation became part of the list: use Google Analytics or any full-featured site traffic log tool to track what goes on at your web site.  It’s critical to know how your site is being used, so you can make changes to reflect what you learn.

Web site analytics provide data that tells you

• What keywords people have typed into Google that brought them to your site.
• What pages on your site they have visited.
• How long they spent on those pages.
• Whether your site is doing a good job in carrying out your business and marketing strategy.

Why does it matter, and how can you use analytics information? Here’s an example. Yesterday I was making a few changes to a client’s web site, innerconfidencecoaching.com.(Normally this would be confidential information, but site owner Jeannie Campanelli is very generous in sharing knowledge and I know she won’t mind.)

I looked at the Google Analytics data for the site, and noticed that the keyword “blue heron” had brought a lot of traffic. There’s a page on the site devoted to the blue heron as a totem animal. I was a bit surprised to see what is going on. Jeannie is a life coach whose specialty is in working with women who are ready to strengthen their inner confidence and create more fulfillment in their lives.

Of the many keywords that bring people to her site, “blue heron symbolism” is not one I would have thought of. But there is a possibility that the people who are interested in the symbolic and spiritual dimensions of animal totems may be good candidates for the kind of coaching Jeannie does.

However, the “bounce rate,” the percentage of visitors who come to that page and leave from that page without visiting the rest of the site, is high (x% of visitors bounce in and out of  the site on that page). That suggests that we need to make changes on the page to create more engagement for these visitors, enticing them to check out  worthwhile content elsewhere on the site.

As a start, I added a link to allow them to sign up for a newsletter. We will develop a strategy for that page designed to create an ongoing  relationship with visitors through subscriptions to Jeannie’s newsletter, and other free content that can pave the way for a coaching engagement.

Google Analytics is a powerful tool, and it’s free. You sign up for an account and Google provides a snippet of tracking code that you paste into every page that you want to track. You’ll begin to see data within 24 hours of placing the code on your site. You should also submit a site map to Google, following the instructions provided on their web site

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