Does Your Website Pass the “I” “We” “You” Test?

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Two Perspectives - Yours and the readers, chose the readers.

Two-Point Perspective. Write from the readers perspective on your website. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As the use of websites to promote our brand and generate leads intensifies too many of us fail a basic but critical test which dramatically impact the performance of our sites.

You will know by now that Google wants everyone to focus on content, yes, that’s the boring bit we have to produce which goes on those lovely well designed web pages we’ve paid for. For most of us writing copy is not something we do as a profession, but there is something simple we can do which will help us connect with your audience even if we aren’t confident about writing copy.

The most influential is the “I” “we” “you” test. What does that mean? This is simply the number of times
you use the terms “I”, “we”, or “you” on a single page of text. The ideal ratio is 1 “I” “we” to every 6
“you”. Sadly for most web sites the ratio is the complete opposite. Why is this important? As a visitor to a site I want to you to be writing from my perspective about thing of interest or benefit to me and about things that might or should be important to me. Its a basic marketing principle that you should always write from the prospective of the reader not the writer. The reason for this is simple when we write from our own perspective we get to focused on what is important to us, which in most cases is not what is important to the reader.

For example writing on your web site “we’ve been established for 25 years and we offer the best in class widget, our quality makes us different” Well lovely, but frankly I’m just not that bothered. However, if you wrote “As a user of widgets you’ve probably found that the biggest problem is inconsistent quality. So you’ll be looking for a supplier who can give you guarantees about the performance of the widgets you need”. Well you know what; I’m interested.

The two short extracts are talking about the same thing but from a completely different perspectives and it’s the latter which employs “you” that speaks from a potential purchasers perspective which engages the reader, and that is the perspective you must have to get the maximum performance from your site.

Now then why don’t you nip over to your website and see how you fair in the “I” “we” “you” test.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Laurence Ainsworth
Laurence Ainsworth founded Exigent Consulting in 2002 and since then has performed a number of successful turnaround more recently he has worked with businesses to utilise Social Marketing to drive sales performance, customer loyalty and brand recognition. He is skilled at working with, and getting the most from, owner managers.

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