Make Your Content PreSell

I bought Ken Evoy's "Make Your Content PreSell!" (MYCPS!) over the weekend and read it in two sittings. This is not a difficult read - Ken has his style of including funny little clip arts throughout the document. The entire ebook is 159 pages long - but most of that is filled with relevant case studies.

The premise of the book is that "content is KING". Therefore, you need to learn how to write. For the web.

Since I've been involved with online marketing, I've always kept a keen eye for how successful sites are written. Sentence length, layout, the flow of words - these are all important. But those are the technical details. In order to get a visitor to stay on your site, you've got to DELIVER.

In order to deliver good content, you have to be passionate about what you write or at least have a good knowledge of the subject.

I like the many case studies from actual live websites that Ken uses to illustrate his point. The only drawback is that the resolution of the screen shots is a bit poor. The book is in PDF format. But there's an easy workaround to this problem. Since he gives you the URL, you can just go online and look at the site yourself.

Another thing that could have been included in the book is more resources for learning how to write specifically for the web. For example, another book that I really enjoyed reading was Nick Usborne's "Net Words". You can find it on Amazon.com.

Okay, back to MYCPS! - I also think that Ken pitches his Site Build It (SBI!) products a bit too much. Once or twice may be acceptable... but this is done throughout the entire book.

Other than that, the book is a handy reference anytime you need to improve your site or when you're creating a new one. Another plus - for all that content, the price is only about US$10.