So you have a web site and a blog, but why? What do they do for you?

Most businesses have a web site as a brochure to showcase their products, as a shop to sell their products or as the actual product itself (eg entertainment or other content).

Apart from personal web sites which could have any purpose, most business web sites are created to sell products or services. They can do this using hard sell or very softly, building relationships, which the blog approach is well suited to help.

The test of whether a business web site is successful is not how much traffic it attracts, how many page views or even how long a visitor spends on the site, but whether it leads a target group of potential customers to take a specific step to buy. This could be sending an email or making a phone call. These are the actions we aim to achieve, as we are selling services which we tailor to each specific client’s needs.

In the past weeks we have received such contact from potential clients precisely matching our target profile, which has led to meetings, quotations and ultimately, we hope, actual business.

What sells us to these clients? The words on our web sites. They persuade the client that we are credible and lead to that all important contact so that they approach us rather than thousands of other suppliers also promoting themselves online.

Taking the process forward, meeting, negotiating and quoting depend on our inter-personal skills, but without that initial contact we wouldn’t have these leads.

Preparing your web site so that it not only persuades potential customers to contact you, but ensures they are the customers you want to attract (and not time-wasters) is critical to selling products and services successfully online.

But you have to know what you are setting out to achieve before you start.

Read this article comparing writing for business with comedy in the ecademy 100K Business Venture newsletter.

When writing for business, we usually like to impress our readers, who are likely to be potential customers, employers, employees or industry peers.

Long words with many syllables can make us appear knowledgeable and experts in our chosen field, but how do readers know that we understand them? Also, they can intimidate readers who don’t know what they mean or mark us out as show-offs to those who do.

Using short, everyday words can make our writing more accessible and easier to understand. Using long words and difficult language can actually create a barrier which readers have to break down before they can understand what we are trying to say to them.

If it’s too much of an effort, many people will just give up and not read over-complicated writing.

There will always be occasions when it is appropriate to use certain long words, but where there are two words of equal suitability, the shorter one could be the better choice.