The ancient secret was never really secret.
It was the word.
Religious leaders used it.
Political leaders used it.
Salespeople, journalists, novelists and the legendary copywriters of Madison Avenue used it.
They used words to make people imagine, believe, desire, remember and act.
Then the web arrived.
And for a while, many people seemed determined to replace words with everything else.
First came the "wow".
In the early years of the web, most websites were made largely of text.
Then Flash made it easy to add movement, music, animated introductions and spectacular transitions.
A prospective client would look at a demonstration and say, "Wow. I want one like that."
There was only one problem.
Search engines struggled to understand what those websites were about.
Visitors struggled to find the information they needed.
Mobile devices eventually refused to display them at all.
The websites looked modern.
Until the day they suddenly looked obsolete.
Flash disappeared, but the temptation did not.
It simply changed clothes.
Today it may be a cinematic opening, an automatic carousel, a fashionable animation or a page so busy demonstrating technology that it forgets why the visitor came.
An image is not worth a thousand words when the visitor needs an answer.
Images can be powerful.
If you sell jewellery, furniture, fashion or travel, the right photograph can carry much of the desire.
But our clients usually do not sell objects.
They sell judgement, skill, experience, reliability and the ability
to solve a problem.
You cannot photograph those things directly.
A portrait can show a face.
It cannot explain how a surgeon approaches a difficult operation.
A photograph of a law office can show polished furniture.
It cannot reassure a father who is frightened about what a separation may mean for his children.
An image of tools can show that an electrician owns tools.
It cannot explain why his solution will be safer, cleaner or more durable than the one offered by somebody else.
For that, we need words.
Words do not decorate an offer.
They reveal its value.
There is a difference between a feature, an advantage and a benefit.
A website may have lightweight code.
That is a feature.
It may load faster because of it.
That is an advantage.
The potential client does not abandon the page before discovering why you are the right person.
That is the benefit.
The same applies to every profession.
A medical qualification is a credential.
The benefit is the confidence of knowing that the person treating you has dealt with your condition many times before.
A lawyer's specialisation is a fact.
The benefit is not having to spend the first meeting explaining the elementary realities of your problem.
People do not buy the mechanism.
They buy what the mechanism may change for them.
The great copywriters were not writing for an old world.
They were writing for human beings.
John Caples wrote his piano advertisement in 1927.
Claude Hopkins, Robert Collier, Rosser Reeves, David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert and Eugene Schwartz wrote before websites, search engines and artificial intelligence existed.
Their tools were different.
Their subject was the same.
- Attention.
- Desire.
- Fear.
- Credibility.
- Objection.
- Risk.
- Choice.
These are not relics of twentieth-century advertising.
They are stages in the private conversation a reader still has while deciding whether to contact you.
We cannot create desire.
We can only recognise it.
Eugene Schwartz explained that advertising does not manufacture the desires of a market.
Those desires already exist.
The copywriter's job is to understand them, intensify them and connect them to a credible way forward.
This changes the first question we ask when creating a website.
Not: What do you want to say about your business?
But: What is the right customer already hoping to find?
That distinction is enormous.
It is the difference between describing your ointment and talking about the itch.
Good copy begins before the writing.
Before writing a page, we want to know:
- What was happening in the customer's life before he began searching?
- What has he already tried?
- What disappointed him?
- Which words does he use when describing the problem?
- What does he fear may happen if he chooses badly?
- What proof would make your promise believable?
- What question is still preventing him from calling?
Research is not a preliminary chore.
It is half the work.
The money produced by a persuasive page is often proportional to the writer's understanding of the reader.
The headline has only one job.
To make the right person read the next line.
It does not have to explain everything.
It does not have to close the sale.
It has to create enough relevance, curiosity or recognition for the reader to continue.
The first paragraph then has one job.
To make the reader continue to the second.
And so on.
A long page is not difficult to read because it is long.
It is difficult to read when it gives the reader no reason to go on.
A page should rise like a story.
A persuasive page usually follows a quiet crescendo.
It begins with the reader's world.
It demonstrates understanding.
It introduces a different way of seeing the problem.
It explains why the author deserves to be believed.
It presents the solution.
It turns features into benefits.
It answers objections before they become reasons to leave.
It provides evidence.
It reduces risk.
Only then does it ask the reader to act.
This is not manipulation.
Manipulation hides something important.
Good copy reveals what is important in an order the reader can understand.
The visitor is alone.
This fact is easy to forget.
When someone reads your website, you are not standing beside him to explain what a sentence really meant.
You cannot see him hesitate.
You cannot answer the objection forming in his mind.
The page must do it for you.
That is why we write to one person, not to a crowd.
We use you, not an imaginary audience.
We use short sentences.
We leave space around paragraphs.
We use headings that allow a hurried visitor to understand the argument before reading every word.
We write as if a thoughtful person were sitting across the table from us.
Because, in a sense, one is.
And then there is the cliffhanger.
The best serial stories end an episode at the moment something important is about to happen.
The viewer wants the next episode because the story has created an unanswered question.
A website can use the same principle gently.
Not with tricks.
With progression.
One paragraph opens a question that the next resolves.
One section changes how the reader interprets the section before it.
One page completes an argument and reveals why the next page matters.
The reader never feels pushed.
He simply has a reason to continue.
I wrote a short book about this.
It is called La Magia di un Antico Segreto - The Magic of an Ancient Secret.
It is a concise guide to persuasive writing for professionals and local businesses.
It explains how to identify the ideal customer, create a meaningful offer, turn features into benefits, write headlines, answer objections, establish credibility, use testimonials and lead the reader towards a clear action.
Gabriela Fojt, a landscape architect in Florida, described it this way:
Not an ordinary book, but a clear guide to writing effective, professional website content.
More than three hundred professionals have already requested it.
You can request the Italian PDF free of charge.
Request the free guide. Write to [email protected]
Read Gabriela's complete review
But even the right words can be betrayed.
They can be buried beneath visual noise.
They can arrive too slowly on a mobile phone.
They can be placed inside code that search engines struggle to understand.
They can live on a website that needs constant repairs merely to remain online.
The word is the foundation.
The next question is what we build around it.
How we build a Timeless Website
Contacts: Gianfranco Viasetti - Email:
[email protected]