Online retail continues to grow, with a 58 per cent increase in year-on-year sales in 2007, reports Forrester Research. Online sales during the Christmas period are no exception. This year will bring good tidings to Europe’s online retailers, which will rake in €51 billion collectively between October and the year’s end — always the most important quarter for European retailers.

The largest online retail market is the UK, with 27 million online shoppers spending more than €700 each online during the Christmas shopping season — accounting for a record-breaking €20 billion in online sales. Germany’s online shopping spend has grown to €12 billion.

The categories that show the biggest uplift are the typical gift items — books, videos and DVDs, jewelry, toys, video games, consumer electronics and alcohol.

Despite a smaller Christmas season boost, the leisure travel category will claim the most online sales, accounting for 31 per cent of Christmas sales.

Forrester forecasts US consumers will spend (US) $33 billion during the 2007 holiday season, the time period from Thanksgiving to Christmas.

This represents a 21 per cent lift from the comparable holiday season in 2006. The reason for the increase? Consumers report being more likely to spend online across a variety of product categories ranging from jewelry to clothing and accessories.

Most consumers also expressed a continued interest in free shipping and a decreased willingness this year to pay for “frills” like gift wrap or rush delivery.

What you write is what you are, especially on the Web.

Yet many business owners only relate their online brands to logos and design, discounting the power of the written word.

Your business communicates its brand with every word you use on your website. Through language, we conceive a personality, set a tone and create expectations - for better or worse.

When communicating in person you have the luxury to receive verbal feedback, along with body language and facial expressions, in real time. And you can react accordingly. Your prospects also have the prerogative to peer into your eyes to decide if they trust you and accept what you’re telling them.

However, when potential clients visit your website, they don’t have the same opportunity to size you up. Your online visitors can’t look you in the eye, so they look into your words to help them decide if they trust your brand, your business and you.

All words are not created equal

The words you use on your website should project the personality of your products, services and business. Your words must form and foster a clear verbal identity, reflecting who you are and strive to be. They signify what you stand for and promise to deliver.

Consider the auto industry, with the following samples from manufacturers’ websites:

 ”Enjoy bold, spirited styling with an air of sleek confidence. A distinctive radiator grille nose hints at the power that lies beneath the hood. The highly characteristic tail, with dual tailpipes will put a look of awe on the faces of all those you leave in the dust. The SLK-Class is the ultimate combination of classic sporty personality and effortless poise and assurance.”

Mercedes positions itself to be the ultimate luxury vehicle.

“Do bear in mind that 0-100 km/h in 5 seconds limits your chances of actually spotting the BMW M Coupe on the road. For that you can thank a 330 hp in-line six engineered to peak at an astounding 7,900 rpm. Raw power is unleashed precisely through a short-throw, 6-speed manual and is kept in-check by massive compound, cross-drilled brakes.”

BMW boasts performance.

“Preventative safety features like Dynamic Stability and Traction Control (DSTC) help you, the driver, avoid accidents by evading them. And nothing is safer for you than no accident at all. So every Volvo is equipped with a variety of innovative preventative safety features, many of which are, of course, uniquely Volvo, developed by Volvo safety engineers over years of research, design and testing, both in the laboratory and the real world.”

Volvo purposely remains synonymous with safety.

Each individual message builds on its brand to create distinctiveness and value in a bid to engage the targeted audience. Hence, the words Mercedes, BMW and Volvo choose directly impacts their respective bottom lines.

What does your brand stand for?

Your words need to define who you are and what you sell, catering specifically to your target market’s needs. Moreover, your web copy requires a distinct and consistent voice that expresses the value of the relationship you’re seeking, accompanied by assurance. Only then can it truly forge an emotional connection with your prospects and established customers alike.

To build your brand with words, your web copy needs to take into account:

• Existing perceptions of your products, services and company

• The actual position you currently occupy on these fronts

Recognize the gaps between the two points and how they measure up to where you want to be.

The difference needs to be made up through your communications - from your policies, to packaging, to your web copy.

Following are some key elements to help foster a relationship between your brand and your audience:

Word association
What are your core strengths? What do you promise customers? Invest time to determine what you’re good at, thus, focusing on your strengths. Your words then in turn establish a relationship with the customer by offering functional, emotional or self-expressive benefits.

Image
Your words have the ability to sway consumers to associate certain attributes to your brand. This can shift how you fit relative to competitors in your marketplace, potentially altering who you compete with. Some ingenuity can set you apart from the others to the point you can actually make your competition appear bland.

Character
Your words should take into account where you come from, who you are and what you stand for. This is your guiding light. Be authentic. One step outside your character could tarnish your integrity.

Culture
Your words should reflect the values that give life to your business. While you don’t need to list your core values, your words should draw on this symbolic frame. Ensure that it resonates in and around your business.

Personality
Your web copy needs to bring to light your business’ human characteristics, including everything from age to class to personality traits. Get creative with delivery. For instance, many businesses post employee photos on websites. But why not actually quote employees in your web content? It’s a great way to “put a human face” to your company and promote your own as industry experts.

Spirit
Do your words represent the emotional elements and values of your business? Demonstrate commitment and authenticity to create a spirit that’s not only engaging, but contagious.

Choose your words wisely

Make your words count. Failure to do so could result in a blotched brand. A confused customer equals a missed opportunity.

Never neglect the fact that words are the foundry of communication. They help us express, understand and learn. They are invaluable to influencing your audience’s decision-making process and loyalty.

Editor’s note: Business owners should check out The Big Makover, an event that promises to transform your company is just four days.

More than 750 million people age 15 and older – 95 per cent of the worldwide Internet audience – conducted 61 billion searches worldwide in August, reported comscore.

The numbers translate into an average of more than 80 searches per searcher.

Search activity across worldwide regions

The Asia-Pacific region, which includes large markets such as China, Japan and India, saw 258 million unique searchers conduct 20.3 billion searches. Europe reported the second most searchers (210 million) and searches (18 billion), followed by North America, with 206 million searchers and 16 billion searches.

The Latin American region demonstrated the heaviest search activity per person, with more than 95 searches per searcher in August. The search market in the Middle East-Africa region is the most underdeveloped thus far, with the fewest searchers (30 million), searches (two billion), and searches per searcher (70).

Top worldwide search properties
 
Google sites ranked as the top worldwide search property in August with 37.1 billion searches. Of those, 31 billion occurred at the Google search engine and five billion occurred at YouTube.com.

Yahoo! Sites ranked second with 8.5 billion searches, while Baidu.com, a Chinese language search engine, followed in third place with more than 3.2 billion searches.

Microsoft Sites ranked in fourth place worldwide, while Korea’s NHN Corporation, which owns Naver.com, ranked fifth with two billion searches worldwide.

Internet users who don’t speak languages that are written using the Roman alphabet can now test web addresses in their native language.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers — which is responsible for the global coordination of the Internet’s system of unique identifiers, such as domain names — has created a test that allows users to visit web pages with URLs in 11 additional languages.

“This is one of the most exciting times yet in the development of IDNs,” said Dr. Paul Twomey, ICANN’s President and CEO. “Internet users who speak the 11 languages of the test can play a key role in testing how IDNs operate, and help us move toward full implementation for all the languages of the world.”

Internet users around the globe can now access wiki pages with the domain name example.test in the 11 test languages — Arabic, Persian, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Russian, Hindi, Greek, Korean, Yiddish, Japanese and Tamil. The wikis will allow Internet users to establish their own subpages with their own names in their own language — one suggestion is: example.test/yourname.

The wiki pages can be accessed by typing example.test in the characters of one of the 11 languages, or by going to http://idn.icann.org.

“These wikipages are key to the test. We want to know how the URL displays in the Internet browser, if it works when you cut and paste it into the body of an email to a friend, and how all of this impacts the root zone,” Dr. Twomey added.

The 11 evaluation wikis will remain online until IDNs are fully implemented and the first top-level domain is introduced in the evaluation language.

The full introduction of IDNs will mean that people can write the whole of a domain name in the characters used to write their own language. Presently you can only use these characters before the dot, so .com, .net, .org and the like can only be written in characters from basic Latin. IDNs will change this so literally tens of thousands of characters will be available to the world.

Good business web writers write for the market, not for themselves.

That’s the point I tried to get across to a former colleague, who has a long history of reporting for various publications. He took exception to my most recent blog entry about ‘plain talk’, in which I stated, it’s important for web writers to put the flowery terms and egos away, and genuinely cater to websites’ audiences.

“Why dummy down my copywriting and limit my prose for others?” was the point he repeatedly made. To churn out his best work, he insisted, he must write for himself.

I respect his points, but speaking specifically about web writing for business, I don’t agree with his approach.

When you’re writing web copy for business, you are assembling the right words and messages to:

• Attract and qualify targeted consumers

• Engage visitors by catering to their emotional needs

• Give visitors relevant information to help them to logically justify their decisions

• Influence your visitors to make a desired action (i.e. make purchase)

• Reassure visitors they made the right decision

Writing for the target audience – and the desired action – is in the best interest of the client’s business.

Some copywriters actually write for the client, but that can be counter-productive. We’ve had several clients ask us to put their value statements on the homepage. But we’re quick to explain online visitors don’t want to read, “We’re dedicated to providing (insert generic speech here).” Potential clients want to know what you can do for them and what kind of experience they can anticipate.

It’s much like the many cases I know of where web designers created worthless website intros because misinformed clients requested them. Instead, web designers should educate clients on why this tactic is ineffective, and a waste of time and money.

If you’re writing poetry or want to be the next Bob Dylan, certainly, write for yourself. Writing for yourself is, after all, romantic and more satisfying for most writers. However, in the business realm, it isn’t in the client’s best interest.

 Write for the market, not for yourself.

Raising children helps hone your web writing skills.

They curiously ask questions and hang on your every word, forcing ‘plain talk’ in the simplest form.

While website content shouldn’t necessarily cater to toddlers, simple language does go a long way to promote readability and usability. In fact, when you’re writing for the Web, your language should generally hover within grade eight to 10 levels. But that can be difficult to achieve.

Kids naturally help refine communication skills. My son, who just turned three, asked me several questions today, including: what’s a hole? It took me a couple of tries to find the right words to give him clear answer. My initial response — “an opening” — just didn’t cut it as young children communicate in concrete or literal terms. 

Consider your website content. Is it overly complicated and abstract? Can you simplify sentences, remove dead words and lose the ‘in-house’ jargon that might not be understood by your audience?

It can take time to develop crisp, clear website content, but it’s a worthwhile investment. Your key messages gain strength as they compete with less fluff, helping you connect with more visitors.

Are web users stupid? That’s a questions frequently posed to me at workshops. No. In fact, web- and tech-savvy people are generally quite intelligent. But people don’t read website content, they scan it – plus they’re often busy and easily distracted. Hence, clarity and simplicity go a long way in engaging online visitors.

In turn, they spend more time on your site, increasing your opportunity to entice them into taking a certain action, be it to subscribe to your newsletter or reach for their wallets.

If we write too simple, won’t we offend visitors? That’s another question I’m often asked. Which do you consider clear communications:

• “Are you by chance acquainted with what precise period we’re at?”

• “Do you have the time?”

There’s a big difference between simple communications and poor communications. Clear website content promotes effective communications. It gets read, is understood and connects with people.

Alternatively, convoluted, jargon-heavy website content inflated with massive, multi-syllable words can alienate your visitors.

There is an exception to this rule, in the event you’re targeting a very specific group. For instance, a few years ago, as managing editor of a publication specifically geared toward aviation maintenance engineers, it was appropriate to include complicated technical terminology and internal lingo.

However, when speaking to broader groups, plain talk can significantly increase a website’s value, effectiveness and success. That’s why it’s important for web writers, when suitable (which is almost always), to put the flowery terms and egos away, and genuinely cater to websites’ audiences.

What’s the grade level of your website content? Many word processing programs have the ability to provide you these stats, or you can run it by a child and find out how it fares. Just have a sweet or two ready for payment.

By the way, this article is written at a grade 9.5 level, which is between Reader’s Digest (grade eight) and Newsweek (grade 10).  

For any business - online or not — the odds are stacked against success. In fact, sources indicate as many as nine out of 10 businesses fail within five years.

Having the fortune to work with a host of successful businesses - from independent designers to global service providers - you start to recognize winning characteristics.

But what are the treacherous traits that are responsible for the demise of most businesses? Based on an accumulation of notes over the years, following are answers by some of the most renowned business experts of our times.

1. Undefined values
Entrepreneurs need to define their values, which guide all decision making, insists iconic motivational speaker Tony Robbins. If you know what you value most and truly want out of life — be it love, health, success, freedom, power, or comfort - Robbins noted you’ll find you can make more effective and rapid decisions. He added: “Your beliefs determine whether or not you feel like you’re meeting your values - they can either limit or liberate you.” Where do you start? Ask yourself this question: “What’s most important to me in my life?”

2. Business plans don’t target a market
The biggest mistake most companies make when writing a business plan is not having a target audience in mind, suggests Michael Miller, author of 75 non-fiction books. Ultimately, he said these businesses end up creating something generic, without a purpose or defined goal. “Looking at it another way,” noted Miller, “if you don’t know who your audience is, you really don’t know why you’re creating a plan – and a plan with no purpose is a plan for failure.”

3. Just dabbling
Learn every detail of your core business because the market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance, stresses motivational speaker and self-help author Brian Tracy. In contrast, below average performance pays below average rewards, failure and frustration. His advice: “Read all the magazines in your field. Read and study the latest books. Attend the courses and seminars given by experts in your field. Join your trade association, attend every meeting and get involved with the other top people in your field.”

4. Being afraid to lose
Failure inspires winners, and failure defeats losers, wrote Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki. He noted: “The greatest secret of winners is that failure inspires winning; thus, they’re not afraid of losing.” Kiyosaki explained there’s a big difference between hating losing and being afraid to lose. “The main reason over 90 per cent of the American public struggles financially is because they play not to lose,” he stated. “They don’t play to win.”

5. Fear of being judged
The fear of being judged, looking stupid, being wrong, failing or taking blame lurks just beneath the surface in the clever disguise of caution, claims marketing innovator Kay Allison, founder of Energy Infuser. And when you can’t put the full force of your enthusiasm and passion behind a new idea, she suggests that idea will be dead on arrival. “One thing I’ve learned is that whatever I focus on grows,” offered Kay. “So if I focus on the anxiety that gnaws in my belly, it gets so big that it’s paralyzing. On the other hand, if I focus on what my next appropriate action should be, it gets me into motion.”

6. Ignoring your gut instinct
Writer Malcolm Gladwell stated in his national best seller, Blink: “…if we are to learn to improve the quality of the decisions we make, we need to accept the mysterious nature of our snap judgments.” He went on to say, “We need to respect the fact that it is possible to know without knowing why we know and accept that — sometimes — we’re better off that way.”

7. “I can do it all” syndrome
If you don’t focus on your strengths and hire others to take care of the rest, you’re in trouble, says Mark Wardell, business author and Founder of Wardell Professional Development. “To be good at business does not mean you have to be good at everything,” he stated, suggesting business owners need to place more value on time. “When you invest your money, you expect it to return a profit,” explained Wardell. “Your time works the same way. When you invest rather than spend your time, its value increases dramatically.”

8. Pointing fingers
When you point a finger at someone, warns NFL coach Herm Edwards, three fingers always point back at you. “When you’re involved in something that fails or in something in which a mistake is made, more often than not, you’re to blame, too,” he wrote. “It’s just easier to blame the other guy, and this is a device that most people can see right through.” Before assigning blame, Edwards says it’s always best to ask yourself what you could have done differently yourself that might have avoided the error or mistake in the first place.

9. Fighting change
Accept change, insists Jack Welch, former GE CEO and best-selling author. “Business leaders who treat change like the enemy will fail…” he stated. “Change is the one constant, and successful business leaders must be able to read the ever-changing business environment.” Accordingly, it’s important to promote an openness to change by teaching colleagues to see change as an opportunity — “a challenge that can be met through hard work and smarts.”

10. Neglecting points of contact
Consider every point at which your company makes contact with a prospect: your office, receptionist, website, business card, sales call and so on. Business advisor and bestselling author Harry Beckwith stresses the need to study each point of contact, and improve each one significantly. Otherwise, it may be your only one — or even your last.

11. Wrong packaging
Author Robert G. Allen, who is credited with making many millionaires in the U.S., cited an “info-preneur” who spent years and tens of thousands of dollars creating a product called Compact Classics, which condensed all the great classic fiction and non-fiction books into a two-page format. No one bought it until it was re-titled to The Great American Bathroom Book. Allen reported: “The idea caught on and millions dollars later, the idea is still pumping out cash.”

12. Culture of bureaucracy
Good to Great and Built to Last author Jim Collins warns businesses to avoid bureaucracy, which he calls “the cancer of mediocrity.” He explained: “Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy…” The solution? Build a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship to get a “magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.”

13. Narrow-mindedness
The late Napoleon Hill, credited for influencing more people into success than any other person in history, wrote: “The person with a ‘closed’ mind on any subject seldom gets ahead.”  In fact, he noted, intolerance means that one has stopped acquiring knowledge. “The most damaging forms of intolerance,” he documented, “are those connected with religious, racial and political differences of opinion.”

Editor’s note: Business owners should check out The Big Makover, an event that promises to transform your company is just four days.

Entrepreneur.com has teamed up with Microsoft Office Live to publish the eBook “I Hate My Website!: 10 Easy Ways to Improve Your Website Plus 9 Disastrous Moves to Avoid.”

Here are the highlights:

• Have a basic plan. Before starting a Website, ask yourself these key questions: Who are my customers? What are they looking for? What are my competitors doing? What do I want to get out of this Web site?

• Keep it simple. Do not cram your Web site with features and information that may make it slow to load and difficult to read. If users cannot easily find what they are looking for, they will look elsewhere. Users will appreciate a fast-loading, informative and easy-to-use site.

• Pay attention to content. A Web site is one of the best ways for businesses to highlight themselves without any marketplace interference. While you can be creative with your Web site, make sure it includes some basic information such as About Us, Contact Us, Testimonials, News/Announcements and Media Coverage. These sections are your chance to promote your business’ strengths, core competencies and differentiating factors from the competition.

• Update frequently. Nobody likes going to a Website that has months-old information. If content is not updated, why would customers want to return? New content is easy to create through formats such as blogs, surveys and polls, and newsletters.

• Pay attention to the users. Tracking customers might seem difficult, but it is actually fairly easy. All Web-hosting companies should be able to provide free reports about site traffic. This data can show important trends, such as where site visitors are coming from, how long they stay on the site, and what your site’s most popular pages are. This information can then inform future revisions to your site.

• Attract users. Most search engines easily allow you to submit a Web site to their database so that the site will appear in search results. Look for the “Add URL” or “Submit your site” buttons. To make sure the site does not appear at the bottom of the results, focus on including as many relevant keywords and links as possible into the content of the site.

If you want to take your business to the next level, check out The Big Makeover, which promises to transform your company in just four days.

A new survey of U.S. home computer users shows that the replacement of PC software by websites has already spread far beyond early adopters in the U.S., with over a third of U.S. home computer owners using at least one web application to replace software that was previously installed on their PCs.

“Most industry observers talk about ‘Web 2.0′ applications as something that’s coming in the future, but our research showed that some web apps are already spreading rapidly through the PC user base,” said Rubicon Consulting’s Michael Mace. “Most computer users are very practical. They don’t care if a software program is installed on their computer or built into a website. If it solves their problems, they’ll use it. The barriers to adoption of web applications are very low.”

The Rubicon study comprised feedback from more than 2,000 U.S. home PC owners during the summer of 2007.