In 2012, I escaped my corporate job to found Enchanting Marketing. I had discovered I love writing and I love teaching people how to write even more. I help small business owners and solo flyers find their voice and share their ideas with gusto, so they can captivate, educate, and inspire their audience. I created this list with 5 book recommendations as a mini-course on writing for the web. There’s little overlap between the books; they all complement each other. Happy reading and happy writing!
I wrote...
How to Write Seductive Web Copy: An Easy Guide to Picking Up More Customers
This is the book that taught me how to write for the web. It’s essential reading if you want to engage web visitors and lower bounce rates.Web visitors are in a hurry. They’re not reading a web page like they’re reading a novel. Their reality is closer to racing passed a billboard at 60 or 70 miles an hour.
Krug explains how we can write for such hurried readers so that we can offer them the right information at the right time and capture their attention, so they want to learn more from us, about us, and about our products.
Since Don't Make Me Think was first published in 2000, hundreds of thousands of Web designers and developers have relied on usability guru Steve Krug's guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design. Witty, commonsensical, and eminently practical, it's one of the best-loved and most recommended books on the subject.
Now Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don't Make Me Think a classic-with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it's still short, profusely illustrated...and best of all-fun to read.
Content design is about creating content (not just written content but any type of content, including maps, infographics, and images) that best serves users’ needs, and it’s key to getting found and read online.
This short guide in plain English features many examples of how to create content that pulls readers towards a website (rather than just pushing content outwards). I especially like the chapter on the science of reading as well as the chapter on job stories and user stories.
I love how practical this guide is. It’s written by someone who’s clearly been knee-deep in the trenches of content design.
Between 2010 and 2014, Sarah Richards and her team at the United Kingdom’s Government Digital Service did what many thought impossible: they took over 400 separate government websites and transformed them into a single site designed to effectively serve its users. In doing so, they defined a new discipline: content design.
Content design isn’t graphic design or just copywriting under another name. Content design focuses on what content best serves the users’ needs, whether it be the written word, infographics, visuals, videos, or charts.
At the core of content design are the needs of the users—and this means determining what…
This book is a comprehensive guide on copywriting and selling by a legendary direct response writer. It’s not specific to writing for the web but covers the basic principles of persuasion such as how to sell on emotion and help people justify a purchase with logic. It also includes many useful writing tips such as how to write the first sentence and how to sow seeds of curiosity to keep readers engaged.
I’ve probably highlighted more quotes in this book than in any other book on writing. Highly recommended!
Great copy is the heart and soul of the advertising business. In this practical guide, legendary copywriter Joe Sugarman provides proven guidelines and expert advice on what it takes to write copy that will entice, motivate, and move customers to buy. For anyone who wants to break into the business, this is the ultimate companion resource for unlimited success.
A lot of what we write online are explanations. In blog posts, we explain our ideas. In sales copy, we explain how our products or services help make our customers a little better.
This book discusses the common pitfalls of explanation, and it teaches you how to really explain something so your readers feel enlightened.
Lee LeFever is probably best known as the co-founder of Common Craft, where he wrote scripts for animated explainer videos. However, the advice in this book is equally applicable to written explanations. Improving our explanation skills is key to writing better online.
Your guide to becoming an explanation specialist. You've done the hard work. Your product or service works beautifully - but something is missing. People just don't see the big idea - and it's keeping you from being successful. Your idea has an explanation problem. The Art of Explanation is for business people, educators and influencers who want to improve their explanation skills and start solving explanation problems. Author Lee LeFever is the founder of Common Craft, a company known around the world for making complex ideas easy to understand through short animated videos. He is your guide to helping audiences…
For writing online beyond your own website, I highly recommend this book. It presents both the big picture and the nitty-gritty of content marketing for small businesses.
What I like about this book is that the authors understand that as a small business, you can’t do everything and be everywhere. So, choose where you want to be and create content that captivates, educates, and inspires your audience.
WINNER: Small Business Book Awards 2016 - Community Choice - Social Media Category
WINNER: Small Business Book Awards 2014 - Community Choice - Marketing Category (1st edition)
Make sense of content marketing in the digital world with this award-winning, practical guide to using content to grow your business and raise your brand.
From websites, white papers and blogs to tweets, newsletters and video, content is king in the digital world, now more than ever before. Get it right and you have a huge opportunity to connect with clients and customers in ways they appreciate and trust - they will be…
My core value is realistic education—learning from each other’s errors and successes, but with full awareness of the difference between the determined past and the uncertain future. We can benefit from uncertainty, which I’ve been doing for a living as an engineer, academic researcher, and inventor. I make use of knowledge and science as much as possible, but I also know that strategic decisions for the uncertain future require skepticism and thinking to deal with the differences in a new circumstance. With my core value, I am passionate about sharing insights and knowledge that our formal education does not provide.
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even benefit from uncertainty by skeptical thinking, strategic decisions, and teamwork based on enlightened self-interests.
This bottom-up thinking is thought-provoking for leaders who wish to build teams rather than herds. The insights in the book will help you to be better prepared for the unexpected, less likely to conform when you…
Trial, Error, and Success: 10 Insights into Realistic Knowledge, Thinking, and Emotional Intelligence
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success. They didn't teach you this in school, even though you should know why the rigid laws of physics don't rule nature and don't inhibit your free-will decisions to try, fail, and succeed. As a guide to success, this book shows how skepticism, prudent use of science, and thinking lead to strategic decisions for the uncertain future.
Presenting real-life examples, the thinking in the book combines sharp analyses with broad analogies to show:
How to identify realistic knowledge and avoid harm due to overgeneralized concepts.
How to create new knowledge and solve…
This practical book takes you through a 6-step process to write your own web copy.
I decided to write this book because I found that many coaching clients struggled with the process of writing their own website copy. How do you go from a blank page to a persuasive website? None of the books on the market seemed to offer this kind of advice, so I wrote this book. This is more a workbook than a textbook. Each chapter includes one or two assignments, helping you plan, write, edit, and optimize your web copy so you can convert more website visitors into leads and customers.
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