Sometimes you’ll need to write one description for an entire range of products – and then have to describe each product in the range as well.

To do this effectively, just remember that individual customers aren’t usually going to buy the entire range. More often than not, the range is another way of getting people to look at the products themselves.

This mean generating curiosity and pointing people in the direction of the products most likely to appeal to them.

For (an entirely fictional) example, we’ll take the new Touch Me range of shampoos and conditioners by HairPerfection.

Describing a range

The new Touch Me range by HairPerfection

What is it in HairPerfection’s new range of Touch Me shampoos and conditioners that gives you the silkiest, most touchable hair wash after wash?

Each one has a unique formulation of all-natural nutrients and vitamins, targeted at your hair type – ensuring each wash revives your locks and leaves you with luxurious and healthy hair.

Simply choose the shampoos and conditioners for your hair type and learn how our dermatologically approved formula can transform your hair after just three washes.

Ok, so maybe it’s a little over the top [It is. Ed.], but asking a question, telling the reader about something new and offering them a reward for reading further are all good ways to start.

Now, let’s write something more specific for the individual item.

Describing an individual product

Touch Me Soft&Shiny

Lather some luxury into your hair with the new Touch Me Soft&Shiny 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner. Added vitamin E will leave your scalp smooth while soft  coconut oil will make sure that lustrous sheen never leaves your hair. And with our new conditioner added in, it’s the only bottle you’ll need to take the best care of your hair day and night. For frequent use – and simply natural hair.

As for the other 9 kinds of shampoo in the range, you may have limited ingredients, but that only means you need to become a more versatile cook.

And don’t forget, customers already know what shampoo does, so find ways of telling them how great their hair will look, feel, smell and even sound when they caress it. Then they’ll know how  the product does its magic.

Next up… Gushing – when it’s good, and why it isn’t always so.

(See all posts in this series)

In the last 10 years we have lived through a revolution in the way we store our knowledge. But while we can now browse an entire personal library on an electronic device the size of a paperback, there has been a burst of creativity in that most traditional of bookish accessories, the bookshelf. Bookshelves today are modern art, engineering experiments and, of course, status symbols. And this is the subject of my new book, Bookshelf (Thames & Hudson, £14.95) which is inspired by the blog of the same name, a pictorial guide to the world’s most intriguing bookshelves, bookcases and things that look like them.

Bookcases and bookshelves – whether they are shaped like Mexican snakes, made of felt or hold books upside down (all of which can be found in the Bookshelf book) – provide a welcoming habitat. Alberto Manguel’s portrayal of reading at home in The Library at Night (2007) is one of the most evocative descriptions of how a collection of books becomes more than a pile of papers, how even the very smell of his wooden shelves relaxes him. This is the library as emotional sanctuary. Or to put it another way, e-reading is all very well, but wouldn’t you rather keep your Proust in a bookcase shaped like a polar bear?

So please do take a brief video tour of the book below. Especially if you like the idea of a circular bookshelf in your sitting room.

Alex Johnson is a journalist and professional blogger. He is part of the online team at The Independent and runs the Shedworking and Bookshelf blogs.

Imagine you have to say something about a dress. You need to write a description of between 50 and 100 words appealing to an audience of young women in their late teens and early 20s.

This hypothetical new mini dress features:

• Floral print
• A one-shoulder strap design
• A tie waist.

Now we need to think about how these features benefit the customer. One train of thought might follow the line that…

• A floral print is perfect for summer and those days outdoors
• A one-shoulder design is very fashionable
• A tie waist gives you a beautiful silhouette and accentuates your figure.

If your reader is looking for a dress (and even if they aren’t), this one gives them a whole lot of style for their money.

Now we’re almost there. We can’t leave our thoughts as a bulleted list, so we need to work them into a structured narrative. This is where your creative genius starts earning its keep:

Slip into this gorgeous floral print mini to really feel the power of the flower this season.

In a cool one-shoulder design with colours that just shout ‘Summer!’ you’ll make a splash wherever you go, while a tie waist transforms your silhouette for effortless elegance.

So for all those long, sultry days in the sun, strap on a pair of gladiator sandals and prepare to shine.

Yeah, I’m sold. Add to basket.

Next up… Writing about individual products vs. writing about product ranges.

Structure makes product descriptions easier to read, helps the reader understand them, and keeps you moving forward after you’ve written number 99 and are working on 100.

For most product descriptions, a quick lesson from Aristotle can come in handy.

Seriously.

His Poetics was the earliest surviving play to use a three act structure, and it’s been a staple for writers ever since. Hollywood uses it often, and it’ll deliver the goods for your product descriptions too.

Here are just a few ideas to get your mental ball rolling.

Act 1

Begin with an exhortation or action:

“Try our new…”

“Take a look at this…”

“When you see…”

Set the scene:

“Avoiding kitchen nightmares is easier than you think…”

“Sitting in the sun on a hot summer’s day, there’s nothing better than…”

Juxtapose the product with a familiar idea such as:

“Autumn may rain reds and golds – but…”

“A dog may be man’s best friend, but yours is…”

Ask a question:

“Do you need…?”

“Is ___ letting you down?”

“Did you know that…?”

Act 2

Describe the product, relating features to benefits. Be specific and focus on what makes it unique.

“…With a three-button neckline and tie waist, our new sundress flatters your figure where it counts, while the embroidered floral detail and contrasting colours bring catwalk fashion to your wardrobe this season…”

Act 3

Relate the product to the customer’s life and add in a call to action. Suggest accessories, actions, situations that might complement the product, and play on the scene set in the beginning — or where you expect the product to be used. Also, talk beyond the sale by describing long-term benefits.

“…So order now and enjoy all the comforts of…”

“Next time you’re in the sun, don’t worry about ___, just make sure you have…”

“…It’s the perfect companion for…”

“…Just pick up a pair of ___ and a ___ and get ready to paint the town…”

These are just examples, however – there are many more ways to write a product description, and trust us, you’ll have to find them if you’re going to keep writing product descriptions.

Tip: Thinking about structure is important because the writing process for product descriptions isn’t always a simply creative one. Once you’ve written a few dozen and seemingly exhausted all your creative energy for the day, structure helps gives your tired brain a rational process to fall back on so you can write more… and more… and more.

Next up… Walking you through an example product description.

(See all posts in this series)

The product or its picture is in front of you, and you might have a few technical specs or details to hand. Now all you have to do is write about it.

Once you’ve written a few (hundred) product descriptions, you realise that the old adage ‘a picture is worth a thousand words’ just isn’t true. Because if it were, you wouldn’t be completely lost, staring at the same thing you’ve just written about five times, depicted in a different colour. Something obscure, like teal.

At this copywriting agency, we’ve all been there. In that dark, dark place. With a teal handbag.

Here’s how we tackled two items where the only easily describable difference was the colour:

And…

Now try it again for the same item in gold, gunmetal, zebra print and leopard print. It’s not easy, but we managed to do it by thinking about 4 things:

1. Audience

Who are you writing for? And what are they going to be interested in? Simple considerations like these are a good place to start.

For example, men are generally more interested in technical specifications than women, who may find something about the product’s look or feel more engaging (yes, I know it’s a cliche).

A younger demographic might be more concerned with wearing something trendy than wearing something practical. And kids don’t buy their own toys online, their parents do, which means you need to balance fun with healthy dose of safety information.

2. Setting

If you’re lucky, you’ll get a set of products associated with a specific occasion. Even if you have to write about the same heart-shaped pendant twice, if one version is for Christmas and one is for Mother’s Day, the setting changes (almost) everything.

So ask yourself questions like ‘What season is that dress designed for?’ Or: ‘Where is that tasty meal meant to be enjoyed?’ Or: ‘What sort of occasion would those diamond studs make a great gift for?’

Why? You’re not just trying to find an angle – when you imagine a product in a particular setting, it’s more memorable. And that’s good for retailers.

3. Features & benefits

What the product does, or what it’s made of, isn’t as important as how the product benefits the person who buys it.

Turning features into benefits helps potential customers see how the product relates to their own lives – and gives them good reasons to buy it.

A new shampoo may have new formula X, but it doesn’t mean much to the customer unless they know exactly what new formula X does for them – so if it makes their hair thicker and glossier, spell it out.

4. Brand

Don’t forget the brand. What are they about, what’s the image they want to project – and importantly – what are the words they use to describe themselves?

Picking up on an association between product and brand can often be enough to get you started if you’re stuck for ideas.

So how does it work?

If you’ve got to write about multiple products that are very similar, change the setting, adjust the audience and focus more strongly on an individual feature or benefit. A bold red dress may appeal to a different personality than a subtle cream shade, even if the design is nearly identical.

It’s not easy to maintain quality when you have to write about the same thing again and again, so you’ve got to conserve your ammunition. In other words, don’t use all your ideas up in the first description.

It’s still going to be hard.

Next up… Structuring your product descriptions.

(See all posts in this series)

If you’re going to write product descriptions professionally, you face one fundamental challenge – you may have to write hundreds, and quite possibly thousands of them.

And they all have to be unique, or you’ll bore your readers and get hit for duplicate content by Google.

That means you’re going to need inspiration by the bucketload. And because the lightning strike of genius doesn’t hit the same spot twice, you’ll need to find your inspiration in the products themselves – even the apparently dull ones.

Every product has a voice

A fluffy toy isn’t going to speak to its audience in the same way as a fashionable new dress, just like crimson doesn’t speak the same language as teal – even if you’re trying to sell them to the same group of people.

For example, this purple butterfly pillow conjures up one image…

…but it has a different character from even its pink cousin…

As you can see, looking for the product’s personality helps you find a unique way of writing about it – instead of simply listing its benefits and features.

Wrapping your head around this helps you…

• Differentiate your descriptions from one product/category/retailer to another
• Develop different styles between different ranges of products
• Emphasise product benefits in new and inventive ways.

Don’t forget the brand

The product description isn’t just about the product, it’s about the brand. This adds a secondary layer to the voice of your product. It doesn’t need to be overt in every description, but knowing the values of a product’s parent brand can give you good ideas and shape your descriptions — and it’ll definitely keep your client happy.

Next up… I’ve got a product, where do I start?

(See all posts in this series)

That’s why we’ve put together this 9-part guide to writing product descriptions.

Aimed at freelance, agency and in-house copywriters, this series of posts shows you how  to write descriptions that will sell more products and improve the search performance of your website.

Why we’re sharing these ideas

We love product descriptions because they allow our copywriters to cut loose and have a little fun — and that keeps them happy.

Over the last couple of years, we’ve written descriptions for women’s fashion, fluffy toy brands, jewellers, bathroom suppliers, voucher sites and many individual retailers.

Thousands of product descriptions later, we’ve developed a way of working that gives retailers a better quality of product description than they’ll find at the content mills.

Some of our descriptions have been sassy, some have been cute; some have been written to make your mouth water, others to turn that teal handbag into an object of desire.

We’ve also read plenty of terrible descriptions as we’ve learned our craft. Any help we can give retailers and brands to up their game is sure to make e-commerce sites better places to visit.

4 reasons why product descriptions matter

Product descriptions are much more than just window-dressing. They can help you by…

1. Increasing sales
A good product description doesn’t just tell you that a new dress will look great, it tells you how it will feel. It won’t just give you good reasons to buy it, but it’ll give you the confidence to click ‘add to cart’.

2. Boosting SEO
Search engines index text. Product descriptions give your site more of it. And good product descriptions help you drop in targeted keywords and internal links in along the way.

3. Getting visitors to spend more time on your site
When a customer invests their time in reading a description for an item, they’re more likely to buy it. A good product description is usually fun, always easy to read and ideally makes your customers smile — encouraging them to read more, explore more and buy more.

4. Keeping customers coming back – and sharing
Some of the greatest product descriptions don’t just sell, they entertain, making customers ask the question: ‘I wonder what they’ll say about the next one?’ – which keeps them coming back for more. And with social sharing happening at a single click, a good description will also get shared on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and other social networks – which also gives a boost to your SEO.

Let’s write some product descriptions…

Now it’s time to crack your knuckles and get to work. In the posts that follow, we’ll go into detail about how to write product descriptions, where to start and what we’ve found works.

Next up… Finding a voice for your product or brand.

(See all posts in this series)

Make that both earlobes. I hate arty talk with a venom.

You might think these traits are a handicap for a writer. I used to think so too.

But the moment I admitted to myself that I could no more write a novel, short story or poem than I could spontaneously generate maggots in a jam jar – well, it was the turning point in my career.

Instead of wasting my time trying to cultivate the kind of creative imagination I couldn’t achieve and didn’t want, I switched my attention to the nuts and bolts of writing — the words, and the ways you can put them together.

From then on my stuff began to read less like other people’s and started to sound like the way I think.

It wasn’t a case of ‘finding my voice’. I just stopped looking for clever things to say.

Why creativity puts people off writing

There’s snobbery in all the arts, and writing is no exception.

Imagine a Top Trumps deck in which the cards represent different genres of writing.

The most valuable card would be The Novel, surrounded by a entourage of power trumps that placed Poetry and Drama in a rank above History and Biography.

The least desirable cards in the pack would be things like Copywriting, Technical Writing and Trade Mag Journalism.

I think we pick these values up at school. ‘Good’ writing is stuff like Shakespeare, Austen, Dickens, Orwell and what-have-you.

Bad writing is… well, if you want to read that stuff, that’s your guilty secret.

(In 1994 I was in a tutorial led by Robert Crawford. When he asked which of us had ever read a Mills & Boon novel, my hand was the only one to rise).

But I digress. The point I’m making is that we’re conditioned to admire the creative imagination first, and the words as some sort of servant to it.

That pisses me off, because I think it puts lots of people off writing.

People like me who might not have the creative imagination to write a novel or a book or a play, but who love the sounds, texture, patterns and shapes of words.

And who lose that love because they direct their energies at cultivating an imagination they don’t have, tilling it vainly for ‘literary’ ideas. They become failed poets, failed novelists, failed short story writers — when they could have been some of the most sparkling, engaging communicators out there.

So next time you find yourself cudgelling your brains to create characters you don’t want to meet, scenarios you don’t care about or poetry that does clever things with metre and nothing to the heart — then stop. Whip out your pen and jot down some bold, bouncy, brilliant prose about the stuff that really interests you — whether it’s beer, girls, or the migratory habits of fish.

And while you might not get fêted as the Next Great Literary Genius, you’ll have an audience of appreciative people who like your stuff — and the satisfaction of becoming the writer you want to be, instead of the thinker you think you ought to be.

The session kicks off at 1pm, but if last year’s Q&A is anything to go by there will be plenty happening from about 12.30pm onwards.

So if you have any questions about breaking into copywriting, either as a freelancer or as part of an agency, then log in tomorrow.

If I can’t answer your question, there’s a whole panel of people who can.

The page you need to be on is here. See you there!

I don’t mean that she waddled or had webbed feet or begged people to chuck bread in her bath. She didn’t.

But she could smile in a way that made her upper lip look ever so slightly like a bill, gaze at you with warm, gentle eyes and say ‘quack’.

Maybe you had to be there. And maybe you had to be in love with the girl. But I had never seen anything so endearing.

Sadly, there was a fly in the ointment. Not only was the girl the best duck impersonator on the planet, she was also extremely clever.

A lot cleverer than me. And that’s why she got a place at Oxford University and I – not bright enough to follow her – went up to St Andrews instead.

Play tiddlywinks – it gets you cheap lifts

I loved St Andrews, but there was no escaping the fact that it is well over 400 miles away from Oxford. And while I once got a cheap lift down to see her by agreeing to represent St Andrews in an inter-university tiddlywinks match, I couldn’t really drop by every weekend.

So we wrote each other letters instead.

Of course, the girl was much better at writing love letters than I was. That wasn’t difficult – I remember writing her a twelve-pager at the age of 17, divided portentously into ‘Part The First’ and ‘Part The Second’. I doubt she ever stopped laughing long enough to read it to the end.

But while I continued to make a bad fist of my letters two years later, the ones she wrote to me at St Andrews turned me into a minor celebrity – if only in the eyes of the day porter at my hall of residence.

I discovered this fact one night when I staggered back to the hall in the early hours of the morning, slightly drunk, and discovered I’d been locked out.

I rang the bell and the porter appeared. Unusually he was covering the night shift.

“What’s your name?” he asked, opening the door.

“Ben Locker,” I said, glad there wasn’t an ‘s’ in my name to slur on.

“Oh, so you’re The Beautiful Mr Ben Locker,” he said, a smile cracking open his face like a hinged watermelon. “I always look forward to your letters.”

Now, before you run away with the idea that this blameless hall porter used to read my love letters, stop. He didn’t.

He just used to read the envelopes.

I would blush to type them all out

And I don’t blame him. The girl I loved wasn’t the sort of girl to settle for a simple name and address on the front of her envelope.

Instead, she used each one to send me up – affectionately (I hope) – as some sort of fantastical hero. Three times a week or more I’d get the prized envelope addressed to “The Wondrous Mr Ben Locker”, “The Enchanting Mr Ben Locker”, “The Handsome Mr Ben Locker”. (There were many better ones, but I would blush to type them out here).

And the result was a chain of smiling people from the porter’s lodge at her college, right through every mail handler and postman and porter who handled the letter from Oxford to Scotland. And I bet they all wanted to open those letters.

All because of what she’d written on the envelope.

So next time you want someone to open a letter, whether it’s a billet doux or a sales letter to win orders for a new line in office stationery, think about what you put on the envelope.

If it’s plain “Mr Jones” then you’ve lost the opportunity to make a hero of your recipient.

And a hero always opens his letters.