Copywriting is the verbal content we read every day in advertisements, blogs, product packaging, and just about every other place where words are written for the purpose of promoting products, services, or ideas. Copywriting done for a business’s website content should have one voice and should be written from the perspective of the business to inform, persuade or educate the reader. You want all of the content on your site to read like it was written by one person even though different parts may have been written by your marketing department, a sole proprietor, executives, or a professional copywriter. You don’t not want your readers—including current and potential customers—to be confused by what they read and be driven away from your site and to a competitor.

I read an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month about internet readers finding “serendipity” while surfing. The idea behind the article was that people who read newspapers are more likely to stumble upon stories and information, than people who seek out specific topics on the internet. The narrower the sources of information, the less likely readers are to come across content that varies from their defined parameters.

Unlike business websites, newspapers and magazines are laid out so that readers have to pass by articles on topics that may not have interested them in the past but catch their eye and entice them to read about something new or unexpected. You are less likely to get that sense of serendipity—the fortunate “finding” of interesting things—from most blogs or websites. This is especially true in the case of readers who use search tools to find sites about specific topics.

Whether in print or on-line, even the best writers can only have proficiency within limited areas of knowledge. A business blog writer, for example, may have other interests that he/she can talk about, but it’s unlikely that a single writer or a single website/blog can cover the breadth of information available from a collection of writers on various topics typically found in magazines and newspapers.

Even if you don’t receive a newspaper every day or don’t subscribe to magazines, you can still find serendipity online with a little effort. The solution is to actively seek out a variety of writers on a variety of topics everyday. Don’t get all your information from a single source, and find perspectives online that you agree with as well as ones that challenge your convictions. Social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook can be bountiful repositories of links to articles or websites, thanks to your friends and followers who just couldn’t resist sharing something they found. It’s the internet equivalent of cutting an article out of the newspaper and pinning it to the bulletin board in your office.

There is a lot of content on this World Wide Web, find the bits and pieces that interest you, make an effort to read something that may capture your eye but not your heart, and enjoy your search for serendipity.

The Wall Street Journal article The Search for Serendipity by L. Gordon Crovitz from the 4/5/2010 issue is linked below.

Wall Street Journal Serendipity Article