| PDF file full of content that was published years ago to the Internet I strongly suggest that everyone write down this sentence-fragment and analyze it carefully, because it describes the borked way many people perceive value for things and you should specifically avoid framing things you write for your business such that they align with this value system. For example, for a similar offer, I might have gone with microcopy like "Get the New York Times best-seller" [enter your email address] Button: "Send me my copy." NYT best-seller turns the "It's old!" objection on its head: it is now social proof of its value. (This depends on whether its a NYT best-seller, which I don't know off the top of my head. If it isn't technically, there are other ways to phrase that: sold X00,000 copies, etc.) "Get" is (testably!) a stronger verb that "Download" because people have positive associations with possession and non-positive associations with bits, particularly people who expect their bits to be free. "My copy" activates those covetous neuroreceptors that really like exclusive ownership of things. People really like that, even the same folks who will yak your ear off that data cannot be owned: for example, almost all of them will beam with pride when saying "my favorite band" as if they have a particular claim to feudal loyalty from the people whose music they most frequently don't pay for. But the point is much, much broader than microcopy on particular pages. It informs how you'd go about executing on a "content strategy" -- for example, if you just take the date off stuff you put into WordPress and stop calling them "blog posts" and start calling them "comprehensive guides to X written by our experts" customer perceived value will go through the roof. Seriously, this is testable. I will publish more extensive commentary on the strategic implications of this for software businesses later. (Notice how much better that sounds than "I will blog about this.") |
Man, I hate it when people do this. No offense to you, of course--and I'm sure your advice is backed by good data and provably worth quite a bit of money--but man do I hate it.
I can't tell you how many times I've been looking at a post and tried to find the date, whether to figure out what version of a product someone was likely talking about, or to cross reference against some other post, or to consider the post in light of other events at the time.
I realize why it's done, and I realize that this is another one of those "you are not the typical user" issues, and all that. But it's still frustrating.