March 8, 2007

I recently read Guy Kawasaki’s book, Rules for Revolutionaries. It’s quite a good read even if you aren’t a tech start-up chasing Venture Capital.

He really pushes his reader to focus on getting the product to market first, and then revise and make improvements. Sitting around waiting for things to be perfect produces interminable delays and a lot of lost dollars. This really encouraged me to get my business off the ground.

The website has a few small errors sprinkled around the place which I have been figuring out how to correct. One of them is causing me a lot of pain, and that’s writing copy. I’m horrible at phrasing sentences in a way that causes a product to sell.

Case in point, it was pointed out to me yesterday that the copy on my home page needed a change. I had embarrassingly forgotten to mention on the front page that my tailors had worked for two Presidents of the United States. (They’ve also served many ambassadors and Fortune 500 executives. They clothe pretty much the entire US embassy in Thailand from the ambassadaor down and the recommendations from them have helped them build a very impressive client list.)

I’ve put it up there now but I still have the sense that there is room for improvement.

Three small things you don’t want to do when writing copy:

1. Make spelling mistakes. ( “Their good - were better!”) Brian Clarke has a great post about this.

2. Write things that noone cares about ( “Our desire is to be the number one bla bla blaaa”)

3. Ramble. Don’t.

I’ve always been of the opinion that chaining employees to desks would be a great guarantor of productivity. That, and beating them around the head with rolled-up newspapers. So when I saw
the article 5 reasons why you should treat your employees like dogs my hopes were raised, albeit briefly. No abuse here!