Anything You Want

You should feel pain when unclear

Email blasts are the best training for being clear.

CD Baby had about 2 mil ion customers.

When  writing  an  email  to  everyone,  if  I  wasn't  perfectly  clear,  I'd  get  twenty

thousand  confused  replies,  which  would  take  my  staff  al  week  to  reply  to,

costing me at least $5000 plus lost morale.

Even  if  I  was  very  clear  but  took  more  than  a  few  sentences  to  explain

something, I'd get thousands of replies from people who never read past the first

few sentences.

Writing that email to customers—careful y eliminating every unnecessary word,

and  reshaping  every  sentence  to  make  sure  it  could  not  be  misunderstood—

would take me al day.

One unclear sentence? Immediate $5000 penalty. Ouch.

Unfortunately, people writing websites don't get this kind of feedback.

Instead, if they're not clear, they just get silence. Lots of hits but no action.

I  see  new  websites  trying  to  look  impressive,  fil  ed  with  hundreds  of  puffy

unnecessary sentences.

I  feel  bad  that  the  people  behind  those  sites  haven't  felt  the  pain  of  trying  to

email  that  text  to  thousands  of  people,  to  directly  see  how  misunderstood  or

ignored it is.