Enthusiasm is wonderful, if it’s sincere. Faking it — on or off the Web — comes across loud and clear.

In decades past, sales teams started off each week with pep meetings to stir up excitement. The overly-inspired salesman then jumped from door to door, entertaining his prospects as he pushed his goods.

Under the influence of artificial enthusiasm, he was a fast talker and wouldn’t take no for an answer. Prospects eventually resented the high-pressure pitches.

Today, those tactics aren’t tolerated for even a second. And that’s about how long it takes for an online visitor to click the back button.

People are sick of spam, and “We’re the best in the business!!!!!” reeks of rubbish. You’re stating: “We’ve got nothing to say, so we’re going to compensate our shortcoming with hype.”

Genuine enthusiasm is powerful. It’s contagious. But if you fake it, you will be called on it. And fast.

The Web can be a cold place. Web types dissect a myriad of stats: visits, page views, bounce rates. These are important and valuable tools, but one must not forget a customer is not a cold statistic.

People have feelings and emotions, which will sway them toward your business – or away from it.

Every online visitor brings you his wants. If you take the time to know him and understand his needs, you can provide web content that will engage him, alleviate his concerns and doubts, and entice him to do business with you.

Treating people like stats, on or off the Web, is an attitude that inflicts insult and may not be forgiven. Treat each prospect as a VIP. Show them respect.

Content Convergence and Integration 2008 is coming up from March 12 to 14 in Vancouver, B.C., which promises to help content professionals find more strategic ways to manage content.

This is integral in the new digital world where content gets created and syndicated, integrated, repurposed and redistributed.

Content professionals, from Web to marketing to technical communication professionals, can discover and tap into new techniques to stay ahead of the curve.

Does your web content truly focus on your clients, or is it ‘all about you’?

Webcopyplus recently consulted a couple of IT firms. Business owners who are tech-savvy tend to feel most comfortable explaining the solutions they sell in a rational, linear and feature-centric manner.

IT businesses, or any businesses for that matter, need to take a step back and view their web content from their customers’ perspective.

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Have you ventured ‘outside the box’ today?

Many businesses claim they’re innovative when it comes to the Internet, but few seem to demonstrate it.

Most stay on the cushy path, eagerly following cyber herds with the tried-and-true. “Why take a chance?” After all, going outside the box can be downright scary.

One group that relentlessly ventures into the unknown is “an ideas studio” named Burnkit, which is made up of 14 “thinkers” in Vancouver, BC.

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Webcopyplus recently had the pleasure of participating in a creative session with Canadian marketing communications consultant Brian Follett, who ingeniously demonstrated the value of branding.

He talked about a plain, white Styrofoam cup on one end of a line, followed by several other cups, each more elaborate than the prior. The last cup was a Starbucks cup.

“Each one’s filled with brown liquid,” he said, promptly pointing out few would pay for the first cup, but many pay upwards of $5 for the last cup.

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Using the right words in your web content can make a powerful first and lasting impression.

Making a mark is especially important on the Internet, where your website is up against more than 100 million other eager competitors.

These few fundamentals can help grab your visitors and persuade them to take a desired action.

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Clever entrepreneur and author Seth Godin posted an interesting piece on editors today. His point: the easy route for editors is the safe route, which avoids trouble – but also eliminates success.

“Sometimes, a great editor will push the remarkable stuff,” stated Godin. “That’s his job.”

I wholeheartedly agree editors often take the trouble-free route, which can result in lame material. However, it’s often not the choice of editors, but rather the suffocating layers of policies and bureaucracy enforced by the poor soul’s boss, department or company. Editors are, frankly, politicized and homogenized into submission.

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Poorly structured web content is misleading and wastes millions of hours daily. For today’s 1.2 billion Internet users, that translates to frustration. For business, it means missed opportunities.

Is your website optimized for visitors? If your site contains complicated navigation, confusing classifications, self-centric web copy, outdated information and counter-intuitive designs, probably not.

It’s All About the Customer

What you want to say is not important; it’s all about what the customer wants to do. What is he or she striving to attain or achieve? That defines a task. It might be to find a real estate agent, book a hotel room or purchase software.

If the task is completed on your website, your visitor wins — and so do you.

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European web designers are churning out poor text legibility, unclear menus and confusing task flows, reveals a recent study by Forrester Research.

Nine top European web design agencies offered two of their best reference sites to the research group for rigorous review. Forrester reported it was surprised at the blunders, which it stated “are all well-researched usability problems, often with known solutions.”

The research group went on to state: “Customer experience experts can fix these problems by simply applying scenario design principles and better standards for text fonts and sizes, and by using web analytics to identify task-flow problem spots.”

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