Our Messages Tend To Not Be All That Clear
I want to now speak on the topic of the value of clarity in our messages. This is vital to effective communication. We often don’t focus on this anywhere near enough, and you would struggle to even find some good examples of clear messages on poker websites.
Be careful not to cloud over your message and make it less effective
Other lines of business tend to pay more attention to this although they can mess this up as well. The big money does tend to follow the clear messages though, as this is something that the top pros in the business do understand quite well.
We on the other hand design our own copy, and certainly lack the training and education that top copywriters tend to have, so it may be expected that we won’t have the top notch focus that the top professionals do. However this doesn’t mean we can’t look to improve here.
Even the best poker affiliate sites tend to suffer a lot here, just looking at the hodgepodge of info on sites like Poker Listings can leave us dizzy. There is a tendency to want to do way too much on our web pages, and particularly on our home page, and this can serve to really muddy the waters.
How Do We Define Clarity Here?
People come to our websites with specific interests and purposes, which is the case as well with all web site visits. If you go to the Poker Stars website, you go there to either sign up for an account there or to get more information on why you should do so.
So when you go there, the focus is obviously on that, as it should be. We could say that they could improve their presentation by making it more enticing, but they don’t suffer from a lack of clarity, as their message does indeed match the objective of visitors and matches it perfectly in fact.
This is a great example of the element of clarity at work, there’s no question when you go to this site that playing poker with them is what it is all about. When you go to a car manufacturers’ site, you are going there because you have an interest in buying one of their cars, and this is understood and made very clear when you visit them. More clarity at work.
So how do we compare in the clarity department with our poker affiliate websites? Well not particularly well generally speaking, especially when we hit them with an experience that leaves you feeling that you are in Times Square.
So How Can We Make This Better?
Our websites do involve more complex presentations then the ones with a singular purpose that I’ve used as examples do. We do offer several things on our site, and sometimes too many of them in fact.
This doesn’t mean that there is no work to do, and in fact this requires even more focus, as it won’t come easily or naturally like it does at a poker room site. We can present several things, but we need to do so in as clear a way as we can, to convey simply to our readers what we have to offer them and why they should check one or more of them out further.
As we’re doing this though, we do need to prioritize our messages in terms of their overall importance to the functioning of our site. This is why I emphasize focusing more on revenue generating content over that which simply serves as entertainment value and keeps people on the site longer.
Even with prioritizing though, we’re still going to need to focus on being clear. A big part of clarity is simplicity. This does need to be balanced with looking to provide the information that people will need to proceed, as well as what is needed in order to influence them to do so.
As a rule though we do tend to complicate things too much, especially on our home pages, ending up putting way too much content and detail there and serving to detract from the cleanness that we should be instead pursuing.
Sadly though in a way, a lot of this comes from seeking to optimize our pages for search engines, but there are other ways to do this effectively besides putting way too many words on the page. That is indeed a consideration in our business though and we do need to look to balance this, although this doesn’t mean that clarity should get thrown under the bus here.
In the next article I will go into some examples of how to handle this balancing act more effectively.