1. What is your objective, what do you want to happen? Do you want more sales, reduced employee turnover, renewals by members? Be specific about your objectives, and if you can attach time and dollar values to them so much better.

2. What response of readers or listeners is necessary? What action should they take? What thoughts do you want them to keep in their minds? Do you want to reinforce existing thinking or behaviors? What do they need to do in terms of your objective?

3. Why would they respond to your message? It's all very well for you to have objectives, but you'll also have to offer something that provides value in their terms. Think of commercial broadcasting, which combines free entertainment with advertising messages.

4. What message content will motivate them to act? What subjects will provide that value to them?

5. How will you present that content? You can entertain, inform, consult, challenge, solve problems, and more.

6. How often will you have to repeat message? In many cases, you'll need to make multiple contacts to get response you want. Stockbrokers making sales calls, for example, figure on an average of five to seven contacts before a prospect becomes a potential client.

7. If you quantified your objectives, does value of meeting objective exceed cost of communicating? In a marketing context, for example, how many sales do you have to make to pay cost of your advertising campaign?

Going through these steps will start us on right foot, because it pushes us to think about responses. And, when we're focused on responses, we're much more likely to communicate effectively.

What do you do? What benefit can you offer them? Why should they choose your service or product? What does it cost? How can they contact you? Where are you located? Brevity & Clarity Your website has to communicate a lot of information and to make matters worse, you are going to have limited space. Ideally, your customer won't have to scroll on any page (all your information will fit in a single window) and that single view will need to contain more than just words. The design and navigation elements take up about a third of a window, and you should leave a bit of room for white space (you don't want to overwhelm customer). As a rule of thumb you should expect to have about half window free for text.

How you are going to fit all your information in such a confined space? This is where writing skills come in - choose your words very carefully.

Websites can be an extremely powerful piece of marketing collateral. You can reach millions of potential customers for as little as a few hundred dollars. Unfortunately, your competitors are all doing same thing - it's a level playing field but there are a lot of players.

It is important that your message is structured and well thought out, otherwise your site will be a mess and no-one will bother to read about your business. If your message is clear, your site will be simple and easy to use. It's all in words.

* Glenn Murray heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney (02) 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit www.divinewrite.com for further details.

* Glenn Murray is an advertising copywriter and heads copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.