Another journal

I feel like I’m saying this a lot, but writing copy for e-commerce is a lot of refining things to hone in on what works best for you and your customers. In my time writing product copy and producing e-commerce content, I have noticed the two biggest hurdles to clean and clear copy (other than problematic legacy copy) are tone and overly similar products. But these copywriting problems aren’t insurmountable.

Treat your customers like people

I think of this line from Cat’s Cradle often “It’s a revealing thing, an author’s index of his own work,” and honestly it’s the same with product copy. If you tend towards pedantry or if you think your customers are stupid, it’s pretty clear.

I’ve encountered product descriptions that were legitimately awful, like cringe-inducing terrible, or used some pretty questionable language regarding bodies and gender. The only reason the products were being purchased was that not everyone reads descriptions, the photos were good, or the product was unique enough customers couldn’t get it elsewhere.

 

Why are you even doing this

If you’re an employee writing descriptions for someone else’s product, I feel you and you can just skip to the next section.

The rest of you, though. For real, if you find yourself despising your customers, there’s a larger problem there that is your own journey to fix.

If it’s just that the bloom is gone and you are despairing and in a bad place, try to stick to the facts and limit your romance copy to a tweet length. Come back to it when you aren’t looking at the folks browsing your site as cretins you want to capture the dollars of.

It’s true, sometimes folks are going to ask a question that seems dumb to you. And it can be frustrating! Try to use that as a chance to not condescend, but educate. Can you use this to make your product description more clear? If yes, then try. If no, then deal with the issue individually if needed and move on.

 

If you hate the product

Friend, I have been there. There are some products that are the emotional equivalent of when you rub a cat’s fur the wrong way. But when it’s your job to write about products, even if you do not like them, it can be hard to summon the muse of “getting it done.” Here’s what’s worked for me:

 

Think of something very mean or funny

Absolutely do not type it into your CMS or company programs. It’s not worth forgetting you wrote beautifully salty copy and didn’t erase it before uploading. But, the process of using your fabulous skill to weave a dunce hat for a stupid product can cheer you up and sometimes even have a kernel of nice copy to start from.

 

Take it as a challenge

You’re a badass. A dumb product that shouldn’t have wasted resources is no match for your superior descriptive skills. It’s a battle and you will win

 

Who is this product for?

If you are utterly baffled by a product it can be hard to think of how to make it sound good. Remember, not everything is for you. So, who is this product for? Sometimes taking a step back and trying to realign how you see something is all you need.

Similar, but different products: the struggle

This can be less of a problem if you’re the one deciding what products your making or carrying. But that doesn’t mean you’re immune to the weirdest sort of writer’s block: how to describe two products that are only nominally different.

Good copywriting means you don’t have the same copy for different products. It also messes up your SEO to have the same copy on different product pages. Even if all the product details are the same, you need to figure out how to tweak the romance copy to make it clear for folks browsing how things differ.

 

Spot the differences

For an example, let’s say that there are two sizes of our imaginary Four Thieves bath bomb. Our short description of the original one was this:

Our dramatically oversized Four Thieves bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered to steal away your stress with a cleansing blend of essential oils!

Let’s pretend that Aesoap’s Bath now has a smaller version of this bath bomb. Same ingredients, but half the size. Okay, so we know we need to drop the “dramatically oversized” bit. How about this?

Our Four Thieves bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered to steal away your stress with a cleansing blend of essential oils!

Oh, that’s not that great. Sort of loses the momentum from the start. So, what are some notable things about this new product?

• Better for small tubs
• Half size of original
• Cheaper
• New version of a popular item

Things like price and newness should be indicated on the page already and it’s best to not add “this is new” copy unless you know you’ll go back and updated it when it’s no longer new. So that leaves us with “half size” and “better for small tubs.”

Tiny tub, big stress? Our Mini Four Thieves bath bomb has all impact of the original, sneaking its cleansing blend of essential oils into half the size!

Not bad! This is just the short copy, but now we’ve got the angle to take for the long description.

 

Check the packaging

If you’re handling things you don’t make yourself, then plop your similar products in front of you in a row and eyeball the packaging. Pulling the wrong item for an order is what distribution centres try to avoid, so there should be some indication in the text on the package of the individual differences. If it’s just that one wrapper is blue and one is green, I’m sorry, they are monsters.

Hopefully, there will be something you can use. Here are some things that are my go-tos to check:

• Fibre/ingredients
• Fit/size
• New version of old thing?
• New process of production?
• Maybe something about the product name can help you generate something?

Even nominal differences can be spun into a sentence that helps folks see why Item A is totally not the same as Item B. Remind yourself, you just need that one sentence.

 

See what the supplier does

If the products are from another supplier, look at their site or catalogues and see how they try to justify the similarities. Basically, this is the same process as looking at the packaging, but going deeper into their promotional materials.

I’ve encountered overly-samey products mostly in technical or specialised things and, luckily, suppliers LOVE touting technical achievements. Use this to your advantage and see if you can scrape a couple good facts to clarify the differences between the products.

Remind yourself, they had to have some reason to have made two things that are basically the same.

 

There are sometimes unexpected hurdles in copywriting. The obvious stuff you can look up, a lot of the time, all the technical terms and current trends. The rest of it though, it just gets easier with practice and being honest to your customer and yourself.

 

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

 

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

Now, with product categorization, we’re going to start getting into some real nerdery and therefore stuff I’m very stoked on. It’s also the kind of thing where you really need to figure out what works best for your products and your CMS. I’m going to try to be briefer and give you some good resources to check out and use as works best for your brain and what you’re doing.

Just what is product categorization?

It’s the rare online shop or shopper’s mood that browses endless unfiltered pages looking for the thing they want. Mostly, folks navigate to the top-level category that describes the thing they’re looking for and go from there.

Let’s look at our pretend shop again. Aesoap Bath doesn’t have a whole lot of products but what they do have can be categorized into:

• Bath
• Body
• Accessories

Once somebody navigates to a category (let’s say “Bath”) they then have the choice of going to a sub-category or filtering all the products in the Bath category right there. For a more text-adventure-y example, the person browsing either:

Chooses sub-category “Bath Bombs” and is presented with all the bath bombs available, in different scents.

-or-

Filters all products in “Bath” by clicking “Lavender” under the “Scents” filter on the sidebar and is presented with all bath products (bubble bath, bath oil, bath bombs) that have lavender in them.

 

That’s the ideal basic experience. You have categories and filters that help a potential customer find what they’re looking for. Why not have “Bath Bombs” as its own top-level category, if you know they’re a top seller? Honestly, you totally can! You know your customer behaviour best. Here are some reasons not to:

• You limit the shopping experience early on, meaning a person has to navigate out of a category, losing any filters, to see other products they want.
• If you follow that train of thought too often, you begin offering too many categories, which creates a paralysation of choice right at the start, not ideal when you’re trying to make sales.
• The Big Corporate Company who has site organisation you admire has “Bath Bombs” as a sub-category under “Bath” and they have way more resources to research this stuff.

This is all very skimming the topic, so we’ll check out some more in-depth resources.

Three good resources for figuring out e-commerce product categorizing

Like everything we’ve been going over, categorization really depends on your own personal variables. I think these three articles have some good things to keep in mind as you figure out or refine categories and filters.

 

The basics of categorization

This three-point post on WebsiteMuscle gives a really clear and quick definition of categories and filters. It also gives a basic outline of the process of categorizing, with this tip that I think is super valuable:

Speaking of which, be sure to categorize products for your e-commerce site based on the terms your customers use. This may not be the correct or technical term used in your industry, but who cares? If it’s not the term your target market uses, you’ll lose customers.

 

A more in-depth look at categorization

I really like the explanation and examples used in this post from Baymard warning about over-categorization. It also goes over “product types” and has some reports backing up their observations.

Even if you’re a very small business with very few products, the advice they give is a good thing to keep in mind. Having these terms and thoughts in mind will also help you find why certain sites work for you and why some don’t. Remember, knowing what you don’t like is just as valuable as knowing what you do!

It’s possible that the content management system you’re using doesn’t even have an option for filtering a category because some CMS are obstinate and weird. If you do have the option for filters, though, this is a paragraph I want to frame:

Because filters are combinable they afford the user much greater customization power over the product list, yet it is the user’s category scope that determines which filters are available to begin with. This interdependency between categories and filters can make them look all the more alike, yet actually just makes it even more important to correctly distinguish the two, as misimplementing one hurts automatically hurts the other.

 

The design of categorization

Beyond just what gets slotted into a category, how that category looks to the person browsing makes a big difference. This brief post at Shopify has some good visual examples and tips of what tends to work best.

They look at both the category page and the product page and offer advice on text and image balance, which is (like everything) so variable on the product. What’s nice is that they understand this, adding at the end:

It’s important to note that there are no magic numbers here. What works for one business may not work for another.

Haha, sorry, there are no shortcuts beyond paying someone else to do it for you (and then there are no shortcuts for them).

 

Real talk, I’m partially limiting what I’m saying about categorization because I have opinions and love talking about categories, but it’s something that is difficult to talk about theoretically. It can also be difficult if you’re trying to re-organise legacy categorization that was in place for a long time, or that you didn’t build yourself.

There are so many variables in categorizing products! But, if you’re doing your research and thinking about what experience you want to give a shopper and how best to talk about your products, then you’ve got the tools to categorize correctly.

 

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

I keep harping on making your copy something that answers a customer’s question or provides them with what they’re looking for. The first chance you get to do that is when they look at the search engine results for whatever it is they’re looking for.

This is where all that “being clear and truthful” stuff really comes into play with those SEO keywords and phrases. We’ll go over some vocab then look at a couple of my favourite resources for wrapping your brain around search engine behaviour.

Some Search Engine terms and things about them

Like with all this e-commerce stuff, it’s nice to learn the “right” terms for things so you can look up (read: Google) answers to your problems more easily.  A lot of this stuff is the sort of thing you already know, whether you know it or not because if you use the internet, you’ll have encountered it!

 

Page Titles

A page title is basically what it says on the tin. The quick definition is that it’s the title of the web page (obvs), which means it’s the big blue letters you see on a search page or the little letters in your browser tab. If you’re looking for more information, Moz has a really good description of page titles and tags with examples. We’ll use the imaginary Four Thieves Bath Bomb as our example here.

A lot of product and content management systems for e-commerce will automatically set your product name as the page title, which is helpful but not always ideal. Generally, page titles are best between 50 and 60 characters long (you can always check using a character counter) and, when it comes to products, the format that seems to be the favourite is:

Product Name – Some Keywords | Brand Name

Think of it from a potential customer’s perspective: if you’re looking for bath bombs and one mentions right there in the title some scents you’re interested in? You’ll be more likely to click it.

Those secondary keywords can include things like:

• Supplier (if they’re a brand folks look for specifically)
• Textures or fibres (soft, 100% wool, silky, etc.)
• Scents or flavours (vanilla, flower garden, etc)

Think about those keywords that you did research on earlier. Look at them being used again! If you’re in control of your page titles you can also adjust product names to make more sense outside of the context of your shopping site.

Remember that nobody is really into word soup, so try to keep things coherent. So this isn’t ideal:

Allerleirauh Textured Scrubby – 100% Cotton, Soft | Aesop Bath

It’s also too long by a little bit, so let’s just tidy this pal up:

Allerleirauh Exfoliating Face Cloth – 100% Cotton | Aesoap Bath

There, that’ll look way better when it shows up on a search results page. And, this is also one of those opportunities to see if maybe your product name could be optimised. So much of managing an online store is thoughtfully refining how you do things to make it easier for folks to find what they want.

 

Meta Description

The meta description is the grey text that shows up under the page title on a search results page. Let’s look at our Four Thieves Bath Bomb result again:

Does that text look familiar? It’s the short copy we figured out earlier! There’s a bunch of tips about meta descriptions over at Yoast, with links to more articles about their changing ideal length. Since things seem to be in flux a bit, the current recommended meta description length is 155 characters.

Like with page titles, some content management systems will automatically grab text for a meta description. And just like with page titles, it’s not always ideal. But, if you’ve done all the prep work and figured out your short descriptions, then you can just pop them in the meta description and be set.

Don’t worry about meta tags

Back in the old, bad days of SEO, meta tags must have meant something. Nowadays though, they’re sort of just a thing search engines have grown out of caring about. So don’t stress adding keywords, if your CMS has a field for them.

Actually, there’s one place meta tags can be really useful. In some content management systems, like certain builds of Magento, the internal search looks at meta tags along with product descriptions. That means you can put keywords and phrases into your meta tags that you can’t otherwise shoehorn into product descriptions, for more control over what users see when searching your site.

This can be useful especially for esoteric categorisation, like temporary product categories inspired by popular media. It’s also good for sneaking in words and spellings you personally hate, but that customers use all the time.

 

SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

I felt incredibly dumb when I realised “SERP” just means “Search Engine Results Page.” It’s the thing your preferred search engine gives you after you type something into the search box.

A lot of the results are just the same blue page title and little grey meta description we’ve been talking about, but you’ve probably also encountered the more exciting “features” on a search engine results page, like pictures and graphs and business hours. Moz explains different SERP features here, with a lot of helpful images.

Here’s a sentence that might not have made sense a while ago: “Learning how to optimise the short description on your PIP, and what you can customise through your CMS, allows you more control over how your product appears on the SERP.” Jargon is so dumb, but also helps us more quickly convey the things we’re trying to convey. Just like keywords.

Some tools to ease the suck of SERP

Let me be honest here: search engine algorithms are weird and wild and unknown. They’re also always changing! It’s a constant arms race between a search engine trying to serve relevant results and people trying to game the system to get their not-quite-relevant results to the top.

It’s frustrating when you just want potential customers to find your products so you can make money to live, but the way to get there seems labyrinthine or inaccessible. From what I’ve experienced, the best course of action is the same as in most of life: be clear and be honest. And try to enjoy yourself where you can.

These tools and sites are useful for understanding basics and keeping on top of all those changes that keep happening with search algorithms.

 

Moz

Like most sources out there, Moz is selling something. They’ve got SEO tools and lessons you have to pay for, but they also have a pretty comprehensive free series of resources for learning about SEO. They’re a go-to for up to date character limitations on the SERP and keeping track of current practice.

That’s the nice thing about companies that offer both paid and free resources, especially if they’re trying to place themselves as the primary knowledge source of an industry: they keep things up to date on the free stuff because they have to update the paid stuff.

 

Yoast

Like Moz, Yoast has both free and paid courses and tools. I’m personally super fond of their WordPress plugin. It’s got lots of options and good walk-throughs to gently teach and guide you in optimising your content for SEO value. The free version is honestly robust enough for most folks as well.

The last team I worked with I got set up with Yoast so they could start learning keyword density and finessing things like the metadata at their own pace. Their simple red/yellow/green light system for content SEO is intuitive. Another bonus is that their documentation is good and lots of folks use Yoast, so you can look up answers for things that might be confusing to you.

Their most utterly valuable tool is their Real Time Content Analysis tool. It’s basically like a tiny version of how their plugin works, and it’s how I made the fake search engine snippet for the fake product in this post. You can plug your content in and see what’s working and what’s not, check the length of your page title and meta description, with fast and clear feedback on what you can improve.

I super recommend at least playing with the Real Time Content Analysis with any of the copy you’ve been working with while reading these posts. I think doing is a huge part of learning and I’ve found the system they use is pretty intuitive for most folks I’ve shown it to.

Check your work

Okay, you’re all loaded up with facts and resources, and you’re making changes and progress in updating and optimising the SERP of your products. But you’ve got one last thing to do: check your work.

It’s recommended to do your checks quarterly. That gives pages time to be crawled by Google, and for user behaviour to interact with the changes you’ve made. And anyway! You’re working for the lasting and holistic betterment of your site, that takes time. Give it at least a week, preferably two, after you’ve made changes, if you’re feeling antsy about something.

Get out your list of keywords and phrases you want to start getting better at, then switch to private (Firefox) or incognito (Chrome) and start searching. You want to be in private or incognito so that your own browsing history doesn’t influence your search results.

And if you’re not seeing your products, just append your company name at the end of your search, or look for specific product names. It’s okay if you’re not coming up on the first page! What you’re really looking for is a general feel of how things are naturally ranking and what your products and pages look like to a random user.

Just like when you were researching keywords, see what folks who rank higher than you are doing and see if it’s something you can apply to your own content. It’s a never-ending cycle of learning about how people browse and how you want your content and products to be received.

 

Next, we’ll be diving into some more granular product management and site optimisation, stepping away from copywriting and SEO (well, nothing is ever fully away from SEO).

 

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

 

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

It was way too late in my working life that I learned what a PIP is. I’d been optimising PIPs for years without realising it because I didn’t know that “PIP” just means “product page.” You know, the thing with the pictures and the info that has the buy button.

One of the problems with being or working in a small business is you don’t learn all the acronyms and words for the tools or things you’re working with. That doesn’t mean you don’t know how to use them, but it can hinder your ability to learn how to use them better because you can’t search for information more precisely.

Even if you do feel like you’ve done ALL the research and your brain is bursting with all the stuff you know, take a gander at the linked resources. I’ve found that there’s value in not only learning a new thing, but learning a new thing and thinking “that’s stupid, I hate that.” Knowing what doesn’t, or won’t, work for you is as important as learning what will.

Some e-Commerce terms and things about them

I’m not going to give you an exhaustive list of words to know. There’s a nice e-commerce glossary at Demac Media that should give you some jumping off points for further research, but we’re going to just look at a couple terms that will help you out with the basics.

 

CMS (Content Management System)

Dang, that sounds very intimidating but it just means “how you put things onto the web.” So if you are using WordPress, Etsy, Shopify, Magento, whatever, you’re using a CMS.

There are a whole bunch of content management systems out there and you’ve already probably put lots of thought already into the one you’re using and why you picked it. All the advice I have here is take a couple hours each month to just search around and see if there are any good articles, tips and tutorials on getting more out of the CMS you’re using.

Some CMS are very straightforward, some are labyrinthine, but there are always updates and cool things you can learn to make using it easier or less stressful. One of the wonderful things about the internet is that the answer to what you’re looking for just might not have been posted yet. Wait a couple months and it may appear.

 

PIP (Product Information Page)

I personally call this the product page but it’s also known as the product detail page, product selling page or about a half dozen other things that convey the same meaning. If you are linking someone to a product, you’re linking them to the product’s page.

There is a very thorough breakdown of product page elements over at Econsultancy, with lots of visual examples and clear explanations of what goes on a page and why.

Here’s my main advice about the product page: If possible, set up your content management system to keep romance copy and product details like content and care in two separate fields, because nothing is worse than updating what something is made of and introducing a Big Ol’ Typo to the main stuff. Or deleting the main stuff.

It may feel frustrating as heck sometimes to keep things modular, but it can make a huge difference when you get to a point where you have lots and lots of products (and it makes using a CSV to import or change product copy a dream). If you’ve ever had over a dozen product tabs open, making granular changes in each one because sometimes suppliers are so dang stupid, then you know what I mean.

 

Short Description

Wait, we already did this, right? And we needed a super long description, so what is with this short description junk?! Well, some content management systems and product pages have an area “above the fold” for a bite-size bit of product description. That’s the short description.

Let me back up, “above the fold” is the stuff you see before you scroll, a term holdover from newspaper days. If a product page has a lot of images, or if you’re on mobile, then there’s not a lot of room for all that romance copy and the product details. A good product page has the “BUY ME” button above the fold, so a solid short description is your first chance to get someone to buy your product.

It’s also a very useful thing once we start looking at how your product appears on a search engine page. Some examples and a longer description of the short description (haha) are here at Modern Retail.

On the product page, sometimes a short description stands alone, just sort of hanging out next to the image. More commonly there’s a little “read more” link that either unscrolls the copy or jumps you down the page to a longer product description.

Using that e-commerce vocab

Remember what I said a little earlier about keeping your romance copy and your product details separate if your CMS allows it? Partially that’s so any selling points in your product details don’t get lost if the product page is buttoned up and only showing the short description. That’s all three vocab words in a paragraph!

But really, let’s look at what I mean. We’ll use the product description we put together when learning about romance copy, here’s the whole thing for reference:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses.

Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial, and general cleansing properties. Gorgeously gloomy grey, with warm top notes of clove and lavender that float dreamily above purifying white sage and rosemary and the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor.

Okay, now let’s look at that same copy with two different types of CMS managing the product page.

 

The Etsy (the fadeout)

Etsy seems to show about eight lines before fading into the “+More”. So what does our copy look like with that?

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses.

Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial, and general cleansing properties. Gorgeously gloomy grey,
+More

 

Not bad! The Etsy product page has ingredients listed in the right sidebar, so that’s more info above the fold. I got rid of that extra carriage return after the first paragraph to tighten things up and bring some of the more directly descriptive copy above the fade.

 

The Farmer in the Dell (short description stands alone)

For this, think of any product page that has the product image, the buy button and social media links above the fold, with only a tweet-length bit of text for the copy.

If you let the CMS automatically select the short copy (which some do), they tend to limit it to 160 characters. That would make our short copy this:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend…

Not great. So bring up your favourite way to count characters and let’s refine this. I just use Excel, because of course I do, but Word Counter has a nice little online tool. It counts as you go, so you can fiddle. Remember, you want to get the key info up there right off the bat.

Our dramatically oversized Four Thieves bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered to steal away your stress with a cleansing blend of essential oils!

And we got it in 149 characters! All we’d need to change in the longer romance copy further down the page is chopping out the first sentence so there aren’t too many jarring phrase repeats.

Even if your content management system doesn’t have a field for your short description, it’s worth thinking about what it would be and setting that aside for later.

Figuring out how to crop out chunks of existing copy is useful not just for short descriptions, but for posting on social media. A nice thing to have is a spreadsheet with all your copy in it, both long and short product descriptions, so you can pull as needed and so you have a backup in case something terrible happens.

 

It’s especially useful when you start trying to improve what your product pages look like when they show up on in web searches. We’ll be going over that next!

 

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

 

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

When I was fishing around on Twitter for subjects to cover for these guides, my best friend, who is also an e-Commerce management nerd asked me, “What do you use to guide your SEO rich content? Like how do you source keywords to optimize?” And it’s a good question and one I think we need to go over a little earlier in the overall game.

If “SEO” is still kind of a foreign concept to you, that’s okay. It just means “search engine optimisation” and basically is the fancy word stand-in for “improve the odds your pages and products show up when people look for them.”

In the same vein, “keywords” is just “words or phrases folks use a lot when looking for things like your product.” Like, you sell bath bombs, but “fizzies” is going to be a keyword, because different people use different words and use search engines in different ways.

There are lots and lots of places talking about SEO and what tools to use and what their fancy methods are. I super suggest Moz as a good jumping off point for learning the basics.

This is going to be a long one, so strap in.

What SEO used to be

When I was first really introduced to SEO as a concept was when the site developer of the company I was at said we needed more “SEO keyword rich articles” on the site. We were given a list of keywords that someone who did SEO analysis for a living had decided were good choices for us and I wrote dozens of posts just jam-packed with the keywords and variations of the keywords.

Later, we learned the keyword density was too high and so I had to go back and strip out a lot of those words I’d been told to just pack in there. It felt very illogical at the time (the list of words to use wasn’t even that relevant) and like a long-form version of those Etsy product titles that are all like “ORGANIC BATH BOMB PINK BATH FIZZY RELAXING BATH SOAK”.

Basically, when all the search algorithms were little digital babies, you could trick them by stuffing keywords into every bit of copy and code. Sort of like how folks will lie about what’s in a food to get a picky kid to eat it. But, like those tricked kids, search algorithms have grown up and gotten smarter.

What SEO should be

What I eventually learned, as I started teaching myself some SEO basics, is that there’s a happy medium between making copy look tasty to a search algorithm without deception or excess, and making that copy also appealing to your human customers.

If you’re doing it right, you can drop in keywords that will bring your content up when customers are looking for something like it, while also truthfully and clearly conveying information and emotion about your product. And even if you don’t care a whit about SEO, or how high your pages rank, knowing what keywords are right for your product helps you better sell your product. It can also help you see what other variations of things similar to your product folks are looking for that you might not have thought of or considered as desired!

Knowing your keywords helps you write clearer copy, honestly. Eventually, this creates a really positive and fulfilling feedback loop; your customers are finding what they’re looking for, you’re getting the customers you’re looking for and you can make sure your customers are finding what they’re looking for, and so on, recursively.

First: what are your customers looking for?

As always, this is going to vary by what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to. There’s honestly no one “right” answer and that’s awful, I’m sorry, I know it can be overwhelming. So let’s use this imaginary, folktale and myth-themed bath and beauty company that I’ve apparently named Aesoap Bath to work out paths of approach.

 

What are you selling?

Oh, that’s easy. Aesoap Bath sells the following:

• Bath bombs
• Shimmer oil
• Soap
• Chapstick
• Balm

Okay, good start. But! That’s just the categories of products. What else are we selling? I’m talking about common ingredients, themes, and yes—feelings. If we’re trying to be more comprehensive, then we need to add the following:

• Folktales, fairytales
• Myth, mythological creatures
• Handmade bath products, handmade beauty products
• Essential oils
• Relaxing soak
• Invigorating fragrance
• Moisturising, soothing, hydrating

And so on. For real, just make an embarrassing list of words. Sometimes what feels like the dumbest thing is actually a really powerful search term. Why? Human brains are eternal mysteries.

Who are you selling to?

This is sort of a Mary Poppins bag of a question, like, there’s a lot that can be inside it. There’s a term, “customer segments,” that can get pretty brutal and gross feeling because it splits your customer base up into things like age, income, and gender.

Personally, I think it’s a load of garbage on both emotional and business-logical levels. Business-logically: if you’re crunching numbers, previous customer behaviour better predicts future customer behaviour more than mutable divisions that don’t properly account for the actual spectrum of humanity. Also, hard segments mean you could be hiding products from potential customers who might be interested in those products personally, no matter where they’re segmented.

So, let’s go into this thinking like people who like and respect the people they want to sell things to. Here are some things to consider:

• Do your customers use the internet a lot? (Are memes, trends and slang familiar to them?)
• Are your customers part of a group that has specific cultural or linguistic habits? (Are you going to need to code switch to reach a different base?)
• Is your customer base folks that aren’t often catered to? (Are there ways your customers can feel seen?)
• What price range do your customers mostly shop in? (What is going to be a splurge for them that you need to sell differently?)

All of this thinking can also feed into how you write your product descriptions and site content. Be honest about who you’re selling to and what you’re selling, not just to your customers, but to yourself.

Next: Hook up with a dream team of SEO resources

Thinking about what you’re selling and who you’re selling it to by making lists is a way to objectively look at your products. Like with writing product descriptions, you’ve got to be able to step back and try to see your products from the point of view of your customers (and potential customers). It’s a hard thing to do when you’re probably sick of looking at something, so that’s why we’re looking at these little tricks.

But now we’ve got our raw info to work with. Now, to use that info to do my favourite thing: RESEARCH!!! I’m excited.

 

Who else is selling it?

Listen, if you’re a small business, you do not have the resources, time or energy to pour into intense and dedicated SEO research. But you know who does? Bigger businesses. I’m not saying copy them. Why would you do that? Nobody is selling exactly what you’re selling to exactly who you’re selling it to. Trying to copy someone else is pointless and looks thirsty in a bad way.

What you want to do is look at bigger companies, or more successful companies, who are selling similar things to you and learn from them. Here are some things to make note of and ask yourself:

• What words are they emphasising? Look at their copy (including ads and banners!), what terms and phrases are used frequently?
• Are they using different terminology than you for similar products? If so, are they alternating it with more familiar wording?
• If they have reviews on their site, see what words their customers use to describe the products.

It may seem like a time suck, but treat this like skimming a boring canon book for a class. Don’t overthink it, just make note of what words are popping out. You’ll notice trends within brands or across brand types that you might not have thought of for your own products, or that you think are stupid and want to make note of avoiding. Honestly, learning what information you don’t want to convey is just as important.

 

Google Trends

Okay, with a list of keywords and phrases in hand, let’s go to Google Trends. We’re going to refine that list some and get a better idea of what is worth pursuing. With Google Trends we’re just going to dial in a couple phrases from the list for our imaginary bath and beauty company:

• Bath bombs, bath fizzies
• Handmade bath products, handmade beauty products

What I’ve found Google Trends is good at is letting me know what variables of keywords aren’t worth worrying about and how most folks spell or format a word or phrase. Two good examples are:

• I learned an acronym we were using was actually more common in trading card games, so we made the switch to writing the phrase out and using other variables.
• There was a compound descriptive word we used that most folks searched for as two separate words (though there were regional differences), so we integrated the version folks used more into things like page titles.

There’s a lot of functionality in Google Trends, as a tool, but we’re just looking at the straightforward plugging-in-of-words. For the first search, let’s drop in “bath bomb,” “bath bombs,” “bath fizzies,” and “bath fizzy.”

 

It’s nice because you can limit your search by area, time etc. For how I personally use Google Trends, I cast my net wide. And we can see here that variations of “fizzy” don’t really get searched for much. So, even though I scraped that term from a popular bath and body place, it’s not a term folks use a whole lot so I don’t need to integrate a (new and weird to me) phrase into my copy.

It also looks like the plural version of “bath bombs” gets searched more. From my experience, folks search for the pluralised version of things more than the singular. Except when they absolutely don’t. It’s weird! Language is amazing.

Searches also surge around the winter holidays but that’s an obvious thing. However nice to keep an eye on, because sometimes sales don’t accurately reflect when people want something.

 

Now to the next terms! We’re looking at “handmade bath,” “hand made bath,” and “hand-made bath.” I didn’t add “products” to the end of these terms because it doesn’t matter and leaves things open for “bath and” or “bath bombs.”

 

Wow, hyphens can just hang up their hat, huh? Well, now that we know the consensus on how to present “handmade,” let’s look at one more term: “handmade beauty.”

 

This is really cool! See, even “English” varies a whole heck of a lot across regions. There is one phrase for a product where I used to work that is what’s standard in UK English but is absolutely a different thing in US English. Language! You can click on those dots and lines on the right and see what the breakdown is by region if you want, too.

We’ve got what we needed from Google Trends though, clarification of best terms to use. Now, on to what I consider one of the pillars of serving good SEO.

Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Full disclosure, the awesome web and design manager at my last employer just sent me raw spreadsheets of our external search term results every month and then I plugged them into a workbook I’d built that would compare keywords and terms between previous months and pull out low performing terms. That is, well, probably a lot more involved than what you’re probably wanting to deal with.

Even so, you should be using Google Analytics and Google Search Console, they’re super useful tools. This walkthrough on Backlinko takes you through setting up GSC and hooking it to your Analytics.

Once you’re set up, what you’ll want to do is go to the Performance Report of that walkthrough and check out the section on finding terms with low CTR (click through ratio). You can do this to see what’s working well too!

Some webmaster tools also show you your incoming search terms, they’re not as flexible or robust as Google’s tools, but if all the Search Console and Analytics stuff is overwhelming, it’s okay to not dive in right away.

However you’re getting the info, what you’re doing is looking for terms that:

• You know you should be getting more traffic from.
• You didn’t realise were bringing folks to your site.
• Could be improved using what you’ve learned from your earlier research.

 

Please also enjoy the weird stuff that people have typed to find you. There will be some mind bogglers, I assure you.

Now, since this is an imaginary company we’re doing all these comparisons with, I can’t show you screenshots or give real examples pulled from the dash of external search terms that brought people to Aesoap Bath’s site. So let’s pretend one of the terms not getting good click-through is “shimmer oil.”

With some of my earlier research, I’ve learned that “shimmer body oil” is a term used more widely and also allows me to use the keyword “body oil” which outperforms every “shimmer” variant by an embarrassing amount. Sweet! That’s a smart and simple fix that could make a big difference.

Other good resources

The other key pillar of serving good SEO is, in my opinion, internal search terms. If you have any access to how people search within your site, look at that info. Even if your site tools shows how many results come up for a term, type that in yourself and look at what comes up. If someone searches “hydra” and gets the twenty products that say “hydrating” in them, with your Hydra-themed face mask all the way on page two, then you want to put a pin in that to deal with later. It’s good to step back once in a while and see what your customers are seeing.

If possible, what you want to do is sort terms from most to least frequently searched, then limit that by what has the least search results. You know your products so ignore the things that you know only have one or two relevant products anyway and notice what should be brought up far more results than it is. Or is bringing up none at all!

For our imaginary example, let’s say that folks are searching within the site for “crow” a lot and only getting one of three possible products in their results. After a look, turns out I was using “corvid” instead, like a pretentious dummy. Easy to correct.

On the face of it, internal search terms may seem more like a general site optimisation task, rather than a general SEO thing. But, if you’re trying to create a holistic copy and content experience—one that serves what people are looking for when they’re looking for products like yours—then you need to be aware of what both potential customers and folks already actively browsing are searching for.

Implementing all this

Remember, all this is was just research gathering. You were using tools to refine your list of keywords and to expand it to include things you wouldn’t have thought of. Now you have a better idea of what folks are looking for and how to help them find it.

Now, don’t go wild with power! Unless you’ve learned you’ve obviously been going down the wrong road (like with that acronym issue I personally encountered), implement your new keywords and phrases on the pages or products that need it first and give it two weeks to see how it shakes out.

It’s a weird and organic process because you’re trying to improve the odds that folks will find you while also making your product and site copy more enjoyable. I think it’s worth the effort to create an enjoyable experience for the customer even if (especially if!) they’re just looking to get in, buy something and leave. Make it easy, make it clear, make it fun.

 

Next, we’re going to look at how product information is laid out on a page and learn some more cool terminology for things you may not need to be worrying about.

 

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

 

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

Last time, we looked at the romance copy, how long it needed to be and how to get the pieces to build it. For that, we used a pre-made list of product details that was ready to be dropped into the product description. Now we’re going to look at what should be going in your product description, the meat-and-potatoes of your copy.

The short of it is: be honest and be clear, which is frankly what you should be aiming for in general, especially as someone owning a business.

What should be in the product details?

I’ll be honest, some folks just don’t read the romance copy. They skim like little search engine bots, grabbing only the keywords. Your product details and associated bullet points or small sentences may be the written text someone sees. That’s a super legit way to browse! Lists are just easier for some brains. Also, there’s subjectively boring stuff that is just straight descriptive and doesn’t need to be part of whatever microfiction you’ve written about your product for the romance copy.

The kinds of things that need product specifications vary beyond imagination. I picked two types of products that cover some basics, but you should always scope folks selling similar things to learn what you like and don’t like in product details. Other than the stuff that you basically legally have to have, most information in product details is up to you.

For our examples, we’re going to stick more imaginary items from our fictional folktale and myth-based bath and beauty shop. One is an oil based body shimmer and one is a textured face scrubber.

 

Look at your product objectively

When you’ve been working with products from conception to production, you’re intimately aware of all the tiny details and it’s tough to remember that your customers aren’t.

It may seem obvious to you that the textured face scrubber has finished edges because picking the right thread for the overstitching was a pain when the dye lot changed halfway through production, but nobody else knows that. There are some ways to trick yourself into thinking of your products objectively.

 

Head customer questions off at the pass

Customers are going to ask weird and obvious questions and they are often going to ask a lot of the same ones. Use your product specifications to reduce the number of folks asking how many face scrubbies come in the pair. They are absolutely going to ask you about it anyway but it’s nice when you know you’ve totally said it already on the product page.

The other side of that coin, however, is listening to your customers when they ask questions because they’re often asking because you were wrong in assuming something was clear. Here are some subjects I’ve seen folks asking about that are good to consider including in product specifications:

• How many are in the package, or how much is there?
• How do you wash it or care for it?
• How big is it?
• Does it work with [logical other item]?

What customers ask is going to vary depending on your customers and what you’re selling. Try to cover your bases and be open to adding or clarifying your product details as your curious customers ask obvious questions.

For our imaginary products, here are answers to what customers might ask:

• Oil-based body shimmer: comes in a 20ml glass roll-on bottle
• Textured face scrubber: comes two to a pack, machine wash & air dry, six inches square, can be used with your favourite face wash or just water.

 

What can’t we see clearly from your product image?

Product images and proper image descriptions for accessibility are their own thing. They’re a huge part of the product page but still exist outside of the product description. When it comes to product detail copy, consider what isn’t clear in the main product image or any additional images and what might be visible but is a key feature to mention.

Like with customer questions, it can be exasperating if you think something is obvious in the product photos but the reaction is that you never showed it. Keep in mind that sometimes folks don’t notice additional images, or see the images at all. Some examples of what folks could miss noticing in your photos:

• The inside or back of a product (think shirts with the tag printed inside or pre-installed picture hanging hardware)
• Fit (apparel specific, really but is it clear that a style hugs the body, or that it’s not lined and the images edited for modesty?)
• Colour variance in different lighting situations (the nightmare of still images of anything shimmery or holographic)

With our imaginary products, there isn’t too much to worry about, but we should note the following:

• Oil-based body shimmer: green, purple and pink micro-shimmer (which is info that might just do better in the romance copy anyway)
• Textured face scrubber: stitching on finished edges varies.

What needs to be in the product details?

Here’s the disclaimer! I’m not a lawyer. If you’re a business person, you should have a lawyer and you should also do your due diligence and be up to date on FTC laws (and FDA, if applicable). They have great plain-language guides for everything, including online advertising and marketing.

The information I’m sharing is just what I’ve learned and observed while trying to be the person who made sure a company properly disclosed information in their copy.

Like I said before, be clear and be honest. Nothing makes me hotter under the collar than looking for something’s country of origin and only learning that a product is “designed in [U.S. City].” Pal, that is great, thank you for sharing, but you also need to say where the product is manufactured. It’s a law and also your customers are going to ask you anyway so be up front.

 

FTC and FDA Regulation

Now, I’m gonna make the assumption that all product labels follow the Fair Packaging and Labelling Act as is appropriate for whatever item they are. Here’s a simplification of the basic requirements:

• What is it? (“a statement identifying the commodity, e.g., detergent, sponges, etc.”)
• Who made it? (“the name and place of business of the manufacturer, packer, or distributor”)
• How much of it? (“and the net quantity of contents in terms of weight, measure, or numerical count (measurement must be in both metric and inch/pound units).”)

For cosmetics, you need to look at FDA labelling laws as well. Here are the ultra basics:

• Name of product
• Identity
• § 740.10 warning (cosmetics with unsubstantiated safety)
• Net quantity of contents
• Directions for safe use
• Warnings
• Name and place of business
• Ingredient declaration
• Any other required information

 

Well dang, that is awesome, that’s basically some stuff we already went over, just clarified. So, updated, the info we need is:

Northern Lights:

• Oil-based body shimmer
• comes in a 20ml/0.676 fl. oz. glass roll-on bottle
• This product contains no preservatives. Store in a cool, dry, place and use with clean hands.
• This product contains essential oils. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using products with essential oil.
• Helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed oil, vitis vinifera (grape) seed oil, fragrance, tin oxide, mica, iron oxide

Allerleirauh Textured Scrubby:

• Textured facial cleansing cloth
• Two pack
• Machine wash warm, lay flat to dry
• Six inches (15.24 cm) square
• Can be used with your favourite face wash or just water.
• Stitching on finished edges varies.

 

For this imaginary business, which I guess I have to name now, all items are made by hand in California. That means we can just append the following to all products:

Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA.

 

Country of Origin

FTC has some pretty strict, but clearly laid out laws regarding claiming or implying “Made in the USA” on things that are not, in fact, made in the USA. That’s what that “designed in” nonsense I was complaining about earlier tries to circumvent.

If your product is an automobile, textile, wool or fur item, then any U.S. made content needs to be disclosed on the label. If it’s made in the States but from fabric from Mexico, then you need to say that on the label too. You don’t have to say it on the product description, from what I understand, but dang, why not?! For that face scrubby, let’s amend the “made in” text to this:

Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA from fabric woven in Mexico.

There’s a lot of weirdness with some brands around the country of manufacture disclosure. Just, be honest and straightforward.

Ingredients and fibre content

It’s good to say what things are made of so your customers can make informed decisions. And if you’re dealing with cosmetics or textiles then it’s the law.

Cosmetics labelling, I linked to earlier, but here’s the ingredient section specifically. It’s not as easy-read as FTC, but I think they do a really good job explaining a whole lot of info.

Textiles have specific content labelling requirements, there’s a good plain language guide here. It gets INTENSE. There’s so much fibre content law and so many people lie all the time. I’m not even dipping into it.

 

Okay. Let’s put it all together then and see what our final product specification copy looks like for these imaginary products:

Northern Lights:

• Oil-based body shimmer
• comes in a 20ml/0.676 fl. oz. glass roll-on bottle
• This product contains no preservatives. Store in a cool, dry, place and use with clean hands.
• This product contains essential oils. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using products with essential oil.
• Helianthus annuus (sunflower) seed oil, vitis vinifera (grape) seed oil, fragrance, tin oxide, mica, iron oxide
• Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA.

Allerleirauh Textured Scrubby:

• Textured facial cleansing cloth
• Two pack
• Six inches (15.24 cm) square
• 100% cotton
• Machine wash warm, lay flat to dry
• Can be used with your favourite face wash or just water.
• Stitching on finished edges varies.
• Handmade by Aesoap Bath in California, USA from fabric woven in Mexico.

Writing product details really just comes down to being truthful with your customers and anticipating their questions. Oh, and complying with any specific laws.

 

Next time we’re going to look at how to take all this delicious copy we’ve created and seen how we can optimize it to include those useful SEO keywords while maintaining a basic respect for the customer.

 

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

 

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

Writing product copy is weird. You’re trying to sell a stranger on something in a very short amount of words while also upholding like, a brand voice. Sometimes you’re writing about products you hate or have no opinion about (which is worse!). Too often you’re writing for a company or person that hasn’t solidified their brand voice but thinks they have a brand voice.

And a lot of times? A lot of times you’re just a person who has to write product copy and site content for something you’re doing and you don’t know where to start. I’ve spent the better chunk of my adult working life writing this stuff and it honestly doesn’t stop being a strange game that gets stranger every day.

All that said, I’ve been doing this for so long I forget that not everybody knows the basics. So, let’s start going over some basics. We’ll start at the top.

 

Product Descriptions: Length and Structure of Romance Copy

The framework of this particular post is from a twitter thread I wrote a while ago after seeing some pretty junky copy. I don’t want to be mean, so all products and the copy I’m going to mention here is totally made up stuff.

Before anything though, let’s go over some vocab. Different places call all these things different names, it’s frustrating.

• Product Description: The sum total of all the text next to or under the product image when you’re looking at a product page. We’re talking the stats, measurements, fancy descriptive words, all of it. This is not to be confused with the plain ol “description” which is really just part of the whole.
• Romance Copy or Description: This is the fun stuff that sells the personality and possibility of a product. Think dreamy scent descriptions on a bath bomb, or what’s basically a short story in a lifestyle clothing catalogue.
• Product Specifications or Details: Here’s where the hard facts go about a product. What oils are in that soap, what that sweater is knit out of and how to wash it.

These are the two main components of a product description. Depending on where your product is posted online and how you’re putting it up there, there will be different terminology and sometimes sub-categories. But them’s the basics.

Outside of forgetting to follow rules like disclosing country of origin or use and content disclaimers, product specifications are straightforward. The romance copy is where product descriptions fall down the easiest.

How long is good romance copy?

The general suggestion is that product copy should be somewhere longer than 300 words and shorter than 600 words. That’s a lot! That’s like, microfiction a lot. No worries, you don’t have to write 300+ words of product description if that doesn’t work for you. But, it does need to be longer than a tweet (and yes, I mean the current 280-character length) though, for REASONS I’ll get to a little later.

How long should your romance copy be? It’s going to vary by product so ask yourself the following:

• Do I have detailed or robust product specifications to convey as well?
• Are there statements about the product or brand (like use instructions, health disclaimers or community give-back programs) that need to be included?
• Is the product conveyed with clear pictures, like lifestyle and detail images to provide visual information beyond “item on plain background”?

If you’ve got a “yes” on any of the above you can shave off a sentence or two. Too much text is too much. This article on Content26 has some examples of copy that is too long and copy that comes up short. It really does vary by product, customer and what the product page looks like.

For our example item, let’s say it’s a novelty shaped bath bomb with two product images that just show it from slightly different angles. Here’s what text has to be included for the product details:

• Top notes: Clove and lavender.
• Middle notes: White sage and rosemary.
• Bottom notes: Camphor.
• How to use: Drop the whole thing (or use just half!) into a bathtub of warm water and relax into the soothing oils and fragrance.
• Ingredients: Sodium bicarbonate, citric acid, potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar), magnesium sulfate (Epsom salt) coconut oil, Vitis vinifera (grape) seed oil, fragrance, iron oxide.
• Disclaimer: This product contains essential oils. If you are pregnant, nursing, taking medication, or have a medical condition, consult your physician before using products with essential oil.

BAM, right there is 85 words. With some generous rounding, you only need to write 200 words of romance copy to round out that product description. And honestly, for most folks? You don’t need that much. A lot depends on how your product page looks and at what point the copy visually just appears too long.

What information goes in romance copy?

Relevant facts, brand and product themes and engaging descriptions are all good fodder for romance copy. Even if your pictures are good (and your image descriptions are good), someone should be able to picture the product from the description.

 

Dressing up details

Keep hard numbers (like material content) and use facts/tips (washing, care, etc.) out of the romance copy unless it’s a key selling point (85% unicorn hair). Looking at our example bath bomb, some good selling point info from the product details are the scent notes, so we’ll pull that into the romance copy as well. It’s okay that it’s mentioned twice!

How can we turn a basic list of facts into fun copy? With descriptor words! So, this:

Top notes: Clove and lavender.

Middle notes: White sage and rosemary.

Bottom notes: Camphor.

Can be turned into this:

Warm top notes of clove and lavender float dreamily above clean and purifying white sage and rosemary with the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor underneath.

And that’s another 25 words!

One thing to remember is a good percentage of folks aren’t going to read all of your romance copy or all of the product description. So important stuff should go in both places, both to repeat important information and display it in two different ways (both within sentences and in a bulleted list).

 

Stay on brand

What your romance copy is for is to give the customer a feeling for the product. What it’s good for, how it can make them feel, fun facts. Think about product descriptions you’ve read that made you laugh or put something in your shopping cart. Why did it work for you?

If you have an overall company, brand or product theme, you’ve got an easy way in. For our bath bomb example, we’ll say the company specializes in folktale and myth-themed bath and beauty products. That means the product has a couple of anecdotes and history snippets we can include:

• Inspired by the Four Thieves Vinegar tale about robbers protecting themselves during the Bubonic Plague with a magical blend of oils.
• The essential oils used in this bath bomb are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial and general cleansing properties.

And we can spin that into this:

One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses. Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial and general cleansing properties.

And that’s 65 more! What are we at now, close to somewhere around 100 words? NICE. Oh dang, and there’s still another thing we can add? NICER.

 

Describe me like one of your French girls

What we’ve got left is just straight describing the product. Here are some things to know about our pretend bath bomb:

• This bath bomb is shaped like one of those bird plague doctor masks
• This bath bomb is dark grey and large.

Not a lot of info! But enough to work with. Let’s see what we can do, using some of those descriptor words like we did with the scent description:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is a gorgeously gloomy grey and moulded to look like a plague doctor mask.

Sweet, 19 more words. Okay, let’s start putting this together.

What’s a good romance copy structure?

If you do it right, almost any sentence pulled from a piece of copy can stand on its own and sell a product. Treat it like an essay or article and get your primary deets up top—which you should be doing anyway, because who knows how things get cut up on a search engine result page.

Here’s a good basic structure:

Fun, short intro sentence! A slightly longer statement that utilises useful wordplay that intrigues and informs. Finish up with drier details or useful product facts.

Okay, let’s see what components we’ve built earlier.

• Warm top notes of clove and lavender float dreamily above clean and purifying white sage and rosemary with the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor underneath.
• One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses. Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial and general cleansing properties.
• This dramatically oversized bath bomb is a gorgeously gloomy grey and moulded to look like a plague doctor mask.

Now, let’s string them together with a couple more phrases to liven it up and some cleaner grammar:

This dramatically oversized bath bomb is just what the doctor ordered! One of the oldest cleansing and protective scent blends is Four Thieves Vinegar—a blend, the story goes, that was used by four dastardly and enterprising robbers for protection as they stole valuables from plague-struck houses. Our Four Thieves bath bomb is only looking to steal away your stress with a blend of essential oils that are known for their antiseptic, antibacterial, and general cleansing properties. Gorgeously gloomy grey, with warm top notes of clove and lavender that float dreamily above purifying white sage and rosemary and the sharp, cleansing tang of camphor.

 

And there’s your romance copy! Next time, we’ll look at what needs to be in the product specifications half of a description, how that varies by product and audience, and what you need to make sure you disclose.

 

This post was originally published on my Patreon. Patrons get early access to posts and their support keeps me going on a lot of levels. Thanks, y’all!

Mirrored from B.Zedan.

After I did the Pattern January challenge on Instagram, I turned a lot of those patterns into fabric at Spoonflower. You can learn a little about it and download a PDF of my faves in this public Patreon post, or check out the fabrics that are available here. I really love pattern design and it was really gratifying to end up with physical items in the form of fabric swatches. After I got a second round of swatches, some folks were asking about the process of making a pattern for Spoonflower, and since it’s intimidating but super easy, let’s go over the process of creating a design and uploading it to Spoonflower.

Before anything, my personal recommendation for pattern design is Krita. It’s free, it handles a million kinds of files, and it’s got some great tools for tiled pattern design. Even if you have another preferred drawing program or process, bringing your file, or your elements, into Krita to help visualise how a design repeats is invaluable.

I am going to make a version of the print in Trudy’s dress from episode 14 of season one of Miami Vice, because of course I am. I wasn’t able to get a super clear shot of it, but enough to get an idea of the spacing and the pattern of the individual floral elements. I traced what I could see and sort of projected what the lines would do, to get a feel for the pattern.

Since I don’t want to straight copy the pattern, I took what I learned from tracing and built my own floral elements. I just went with five because the wide spacing between them means I can repeat an individual flower with only slight tilt variations and the eye won’t be like “TOO REPEATY.”

I was mostly into this pattern because I knew I could replicate that screentone feel thanks to one of Krita’s brushes. Little fiddling and, perfect.

 

Okay, now let’s see how it tiles. Krita has an option under “View” that is called “Wrap Around Mode” you can also just press “W” because Krita is awesome. It’s only basic tiling, but you can draw and move and work wrapping from edge to edge like a sphere and it’s basically wizard magic.

 

That looks okay! Let’s save as a PNG (my personal preference, do your thing, but make sure you read Spoonflower’s posts on preparing an image and resolution) and navigate over to Spoonflower where you already have an account, possibly filled with patterns you keep almost getting but keep feeling anxious about.

 

Okay, you got this. Go to Design on the top bar, then Upload. This seems basic but I lose my place super easily on this site for some reason. If you get turned around just to back to the main Spoonflower page and that dang bar should be right there. All this part is super straightforward, as is the upload page itself. Just make sure:

• Your design is within the specs
• It’s YOUR design

 

Once your image is uploaded, you end up at the individual design page for that image. From here, you fiddle. You can see that for this first go I experimented with a half-drop repeat, instead of the basic tile that I’d previewed on Krita. Spoonflower has a great explanation of the repeat options here.

What fabric size you’re viewing your pattern at makes a difference as well. You’ll see that I’m looking at a whole dang yard. I know this is a large pattern so I want to see how the elements cover a whole yard. You can also look at (and order) an 8×8 inch swatch, or a fat quarter (which is 21×18 inches). I suggest cycling through the different fabric size options to get a good gauge on things before moving on.

After I fidddled a bit, I felt like this design was too crowded and not as spacious as the original design I was working from. So I went back into Krita and gave all the elements some breathing room. That’s more like it!

 

Back on the design page, I chose “Upload Revision” from the menu on the left of this pattern’s design page. Some info on revisions from Spoonflower here.

You just shove the right file up in there, tell the nice site “Yes, I realise this will change my design and remove any fiddling I did before,” and you’re good to go. If that looks about right it’s now time to fiddle in earnest. Here’s what my final file looks like in the design pane.

Whoa, that is big. Getting a swatch would be hilarious, because I wouldn’t see the design at all. Wait, it’s also blurry?! The file is fine, so why? Spoonflower has a whole article on that too, and they reassure me,

Files which are more rectangular than square or which are set up to print very large will often preview in our low-res preview window looking blurry even when the original sources files are nice and clean. Please be assured that we always print from the file that you uploaded, not the low-res preview of your file. As long as your file looks crisp and clean before upload then, it should print well with us.

Cool. So, say I decided I didn’t want a super oversize pattern? Then I can click that little “Smaller” button under the bold Design Size and make it a more petite pattern. When I like the size it is, I click the “Save This Layout” button and that fiddling is locked in.

 

To answer a question I was asked on Instagram about pattern scaling, customers do not have control over design scale, that’s all on you, the designer. This means you control how your work is available (rad!) but if you want a pattern available in multiple scales, you have to upload or make different versions (boo!). That’s what I did for one of my Pattern January patterns. It’s available as both Brushy Chevrons and Big Brushy Chevrons, which is about 2x the scale of the first.

Here’s what they look like as swatches in person:

Getting an idea of the scale is pretty key. Early on in playing with Spoonflower (and I mean early on, I’ve been playing with it since 2008, holy moley) I def messed scale up and got things too big or small. Thank goodness for swatches.

Before you go and order your test swatches (which you have to do to make the pattern available for general sale), go and fill all that good good info out at the bottom of the individual design page.

 

Yes, the colour swatches are weird and don’t always reflect the colours and, unlike every other field, you have to click “update” to lock them in. It is weird. Choose the thumbnail that conveys your pattern best, fill in all your deets, the tags area will give you options if the tag you entered isn’t acceptable for whatever reason. Spoonflower is a very helpful site.

Okay, so you’ve got your pattern, you’re all settled, lets get some swatches!!! As a designer, you can get a swatch for $5 USD. That can super add up if you’re looking to get swatches of several patterns (I think I had like, 18 swatches I needed for Pattern January?!). Don’t stress though, Spoonflower got you. You can make a collection of your swatches and get a sampler. You get one big ol’ swath of fabric with all the swatches on it nice and neat.

A post shared by B. Zedan (@bzedan) on Feb 20, 2018 at 11:18pm PST

I highly suggest you also get the Spoonflower Sample pack when you order your sampler. It’s a little box of clearly labelled and thoroughly described swatches of the fabrics, wall papers and wrapping paper available at Spoonflower. Seeing how colours print on something, and seeing how a fabric feels makes a huge difference. It even comes with a small card listing the hex colours of the printed dots on the substrates, so you can truly compare and contrast how something looks on your monitor to how it will print out.

 

Spoonflower shipping is wildly cheap for the no-rush option ($3 for me!!). But my sampler did take one million years (like, over two weeks) to print and ship. Worth it, honestly. Once you have swatches in hand you can decide you’re good to go, or that you need to fiddle some more. Watch out though, the satisfaction of holding a design you made in your hand is truly addictive.

Spoonflower has a robust help section, but here are the articles I’ve found helpful, and that I’ve linked throughout this post.

• How to Prepare Your File For Fabric Printing
• How big should my image be?
• What are the repeat options?
• Revising your design
• How do I know what my design will look like?
• How can I get swatches at a reduced price?
• Spoonflower Fabrics

Mirrored from B.Zedan.