Help A Reporter Out (HARO) is a network that compiles lists of writers' questions and e-mails them to other writers. It's like Quora or Answers.com, except that the answers are private and may be published in a glossy magazine.
Anybody can join HARO but obviously the service is more useful to some writers than others. Obviously the writers asking questions know what search engines are for. Obviously they already know people who can answer questions like '"The great majority of their questions are for specialists. They look for business owners and managers as well as doctors, lawyers, and dietitians. Some writers are also looking for answers from ordinary people who've had a certain experience--anything from "making the most of just one day at a major amusement park" to "surviving brain surgery." Others are looking for answers from a brain surgeon.
The writers aren't required to pay for answers. Many of them don't. Well...if they've not paid for the answer I gave them, that answer is likely to turn up as a blog post. It's something a publisher was paying them to research so it is probably something a lot of readers want to know about. I'm thinking of making it a weekly feature: Content I Offered or Gave Away for Free to Someone Who's Not Paid Yet. (Actually, the most common reason why my HARO content has not been rewritten as "interviews" in magazines is that the magazines demanded face pictures.)
So, why should readers look for answers here instead of at glossy magazine site? Here's why. Glossy magazines are funded by advertisers. The funding and the advertising can shape the content of the answers the magazines provide. That means that they might recommend some $500 product for use in a situation where soap and water would work better. That is not a problem for this web site.
Also, this web site may offer them a better visit experience.
Here's what I know about enhancing web site users' experience:
Keep it simple, safe, and respectful.
1. From time to time, visit your own web site using the oldest, slowest, klunkiest device you can find. Try to find one that's "not receiving updates" and is therefore, in some people's minds, "effectively unusable." People use those things. You want to be accessible to those people. So, avoid any bells-and-whistles add-ons that can be avoided. If your web site exists to sell clothes you probably need a lot of color photos showing what is meant to be worn, where, when, by whom, with what else. If it exists to sell music you can economize on the visual element and focus on the sound. If it exists to sell car parts, washing machines, or books, you don't really need either pictures or sound---all people need to know about your merchandise can be said with the letters, numbers, and punctuation marks on the keyboard.
You can add doodads like a map showing your store's address or a video showing how someone uses your product, if they work for your customers. People who can't watch movie clips or listen to music clips aren't going to hang out at a site that sells movies or music, so you can do what works. However, the more doodads you add, the more memory they'll use and the less well they're likely to work. If you have difficulties using Windows 95, remove some of the clutter.
Generally avoid
* anything that pops up, jumps across the screen, flashes, blinks, or moves in any way unless the customer clicks on a button to play a video
* recognizable images of people. Distant figures in a crowd are less problematic. Images of hands holding or operating a product are generally inoffensive. Images of parts of the body that might be considered sensitive or rpeeulsive are best avoided. Avoid photos or even drawings of any part of a human body in between the shoulders and the knees. Images of damaged body parts, even hands or feet, are also best avoided if you want to sell anything. The word "sunburn" is always preferable to a picture of a sunburnt arm.
* pale-colored text on a pale-colored background. In finding a balance between what does least damage to the eyes and what communicates information, black text on a white background and serif fonts are helpful. Sans serif fonts ar most effective as arty print fabric motifs, though they can work in one-word headings like "Item--Small--Medium--Large." Avoid displaying more than two or three words together in a sans serif font.
* showing large amounts of text as an "image" or "table." Large amounts of text are going to be printed so that people can actually read them, and they need to be easily formatted to fit the paper used.
2. If you use a hosting service like Google, Wordpress, Squarespace, etc., your site will have cookies. If you don't have the technical skills to create, build, and secure your own web site out of thin air, it's better to use a reliable hosting service. But don't add any cookies. If you do build your own site without any corporation's help, make it cookie-free.
3. You don't want to know any more about your customers than they've told you. There are ways to get people to answer marketing-type questions like "Where do you live?" and "Do you ever buy things for children?" but it's generally a good idea not to ask. The less information is customized "For You," the more trustworthy it appears to be.
* Never even mention ph*n* n*mb*rs.
* Not everyone has a blog feed but, for those who do, a "blog" or "news" page where any changes to your site show up in the blog feed is much nicer than automated e-mail. Some hosting sites, like Wordpress, offer the options of displaying new blog posts in my blog feed or in my e-mail...the blog feed is better.
* Some people live in places that have a doorman on duty to receive parcels from a delivery service all day. Most people don't. If you are really saving a lot of money using a service that delivers to the door and can't deliver to post office boxes, you can have separate shipping charges for those who put only a mailing address on the Internet. Never ask for anyone's home address. You look like a burglar just by asking.
* On the Internet no one knows if you're a dog...but it's good to assume that anyone who's willing to type bank information into a computer is a dog. Online payment services will be viable again if we get a federal law requiring them to pay all funds collected to the customer, on demand, using the customer's preferred method of payment which may include delivering cash. Until that happens, it's best to accept checks and postal money orders by mail, rather than taking responsibility for handling bank information online.
* Always remember that Internet transactions are never really private. People transact legitimate business far more often than the illegitimate kind, so yes, just as there are lots of people who have left their cars parked with the doors unlocked and the windows down, and still found their cars in the same place when they came back for them, there are also several people who have typed their real names, home addresses, and credit card access codes into a computer and never been robbed or even harassd. Nobody can afford to assume that that will happen again. Your responsibility is to avoid collecting data that someone else might be able to steal from you and use to harm people. So just don't touch credit cards. Period.
* So, discourage any use of real names. You can't stop the clueless from using part or all of their real names as screen names, but you can set up interactive forms that prompt people to type in a screen name, not just "name," which prompts some people to type in their real names without thinking.
"Safe" should be understood, not to mean "sheltered from having to read opinions that differ from your own," but to mean "not exposing any personal information to anyone who might use that information 'against' you in any way."
4. Paying attention to what people do choose to tell you, during a conversation = good. Trying to find things out about people outside of that conversation = bad. So, if you have a large enough and diverse enough inventory (as it might be of books or music) that you can suggest something for each individual customer, be sure to take your suggestions from their correspondence or published content for that day, NOT yesterday. Don't be like that idiotic program Amazon used to have that kept trying to sell me the book I'd reviewed the day before. Hello? Sometimes people's other recent Internet activity consists of trying to unload things they already have and don't want to keep. Durrrr!
5. Even if your product is regulated differently in different States, it is better to publish that information than it is to ask inappropriate questions. If your site spells out something like "Alaska residents add __ shipping fee" or "Regular model $500, Special California Earthquake-Insurable Model $750," people may agree that an extra charge is reasonable, or may be motivated to change it. If you ask questions before stating a price, you create an assumption that your pricing system is discriminatory, and even if you offer the best deal in town people may feel proud of paying more, somewhere else, rather than taking any benefit from preferential discrimination.
6. It's a good idea to avoid using "sales personnel" (real or virtual) or anything that looks like a "sales funnel." Paying people to do research about a product can be a good way to create a predisposition in favor of that product, assuming that its customer reviews are good. You need to understand, though, that the nature of the Internet guarantees a lot of "Looky Lou's" who are never going to buy your product. The Internet is where teenyboppers can gawk and giggle at products designed for people with different kinds of bodies than theirs, without embarrassment. It's where people on strict diets can look at pictures of steak or ice cream while taking meal replacer drinks or tube feedings. It's where wheelchair dwellers play fantasy football. It's even where hack writers are being paid to read about your product so they can write about how someone else's product is better. And it is also where you can conceal, and then forget all about, your resentment of those people while building an informative site that will predispose some of the gawkers to consider your product if, say, they ever get a job requiring them to use something they're not interested in using at home. Informing, rather than trying to push for a sale, is the key to those potential future sales.
7. Customers are adults. They can deal with an occasional mention of a sensitive topic, as long as the sensitive topic is not being exploited to manipulate them.
If you do feel tempted to post something about abortion, homosexuality, or transgender-ism, try this: Replace the content with an equal amount of content on the topic of either "castration" or "colostomy." If your immediate reaction is "THAT's not going to boost sales!", chances are that the topics people feel more comfortable pontificating about aren't going to boost sales, either. If your reaction is "Yes, my market niche is 'All Offensive Content All the Time,'" go ahead and use the big hot-potato topics, and why not use coprophagy, too, while you're there.(I will not visit your site. I prefer to limit my gross-outs to images of fungi or caterpillars.)
If you're not trying to exploit the sensitive topic but to respond to questions you've been asked, as a doctor, a philosopher, a religious teacher, etc., to explain your views on the topic to readers, it's probably best to do that in a private letter. Save a copy in case you want to answer another letter. If you become a successful author in an appropriate market niche, you can publish it as a pamphlet--"Dr. Whatever Answers Readers' Questions About Coprophagy."
(What's coprophagy? It's destined to be the next fad after fashion victims have the opportunity to discover that the human body does not digest insect bodies. As a food fad it will burn out even faster.)
8. Diversity costs nothing as long as it's not producing a strained, and counterproductive, overall effect. As a bookseller, for example, you want to stock books by and about members of ethnic minority groups. For most large groups there are several good ones to choose from and you're not even limited to books whose titles might as well be "Me, Me, Me, Boring Little Me, a Member of Group X with No Talent for Writing." But if you succumb to pressure to "represent" some newly selfconscious tiny group, you may get stuck trying to sell copies of "Me, Me, Me..." at the expense of space from, and the benefits of, selling Shakespeare and Thoreau and Tolkien and Amy Tan and Ngaio Marsh.
Far too many books by White male writers were published, and some of them were not only boring but vile, in years gone by when books by women and non-White writers were viewed with prejudice. Now publishers are scrambling to try to make the list of books in print reflect the demographics of the real world. Since White male writers had about a thousand-year start on everyone else writing in English, that now results in
(a) discriminatory publishing policies, many of which are still boiling down to "We want to see manuscripts by women and members of ethnic minority groups. If you're a White man you must send us ten dollars just to get a rejection slip." I'm a woman, at this time of year I have enough "color" that strangers aren't sure which language to speak to me, and I find these policies disgusting. Winning a contest for some specific type of writers and writing--"Biracial Writers on Their Biracial Experience" or "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Memoirs by Members of the Michigan Group," is one thing. (Though even then, please, can we admit that the differences among the Michigan Group, the Canada Group, and the New York Group were produced by variations in word usage and we all had basically the same disease?) But "Everybody But White Men Will Be Considered, Black Women Preferred, Black Lesbians Guaranteed Preference, White Men Pay for Rejection Slips" is tacky. Some of The Nephews are, by now, White men, and they deserve equal treatment with the rest of humankind.
(b) low standards for the coveted handful of Black lesbian writers, who were tiresome enough to read, often enough, when they were Audre Lorde and I'm not sure why anybody should bother reading the new ones who are less talented than Audre Lorde. These days anyone who happens to be a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller can use a computer program to spin a whole book out of "I is a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller. I never reads nuffin cos nobody else look like me dig. Never goes nowhere nor talks to nobody needer. So all I gots to say is I is a bisexual Laotian-American wheelchair dweller and I also gots bowel trouble. And I iz tryna sell my body for drugz but that aint workin less I finds me a rich White dude who beez into coprophagy." Right. I admit it. I made that up, but if you think it's impossibly bad, you should read some of the "poems" that win those prizes White men have to pay $10 to be snubbed by. Due to contractual obligations my parody is actually cleaner than some of the winning drivel I've read, but not worse.
Don't do these things. It's not a sin to be born White and male. It is a sin to be so prejudiced, and make others so prejudiced, against Laotian-American wheelchair dwellers that you mistake the worst writers in that group for the best.
9. Strictly limit non-text content on your site. Fifteen years ago, as the early "content farms" (where so many of us hack writers were so contented) broke up, we all thought we wanted Google Ads, which at that time were modest little ads for weird Internet-based stuff nobody wanted. Now an ing number of my e-friends have Google Ads on their blogs, and...Google Ads now advertise more interesting products. Which is a pity and a shame, because the way they advertise those products is so counterproductive. The ads are irrelevant, distractig, browser-crashing. A person who had not been following these writers for many years wouldn't even try to read their posts.
The site that used to be Twitter, now known as X--the crossed-out cancelled site, the site that used to be so much fun for so many people--recently revised its terms of service, in a weaselly way that ought to be illegal, to admit that they;ll censor honest content that adversely affects their advertising. They want to make X all commercial all the time, like television. So they're selling lots and lots of ads! And they're getting lots of views...from advertisers! And, hello, where have all the real people gone? Back to reading each other's blogs the way we did before we joined Twitter, of course. X is no longer useful to us. And, hello, we're the people who don't already work for the advertisers, who might some day have bought some of their junk. Elon Musk is a genius but he's also very young. Because he's a genius there is still hope that he will learn, some day, what a mistake this was. Possibly someone else could, meanwhile, launch a site like the original version of Twitter--calling it something like "Tweetsy"--block access from countries where anyone is still squalling for censorship, which are cordially invited to sink in their own wretched pit, and earn a comfortable profit selling small friendly ads to Americans who remember that Original Twitter really worked for everyone who used it.
Don't let outside advertisements eat your web site. I'm in favor of advertising as long as it's not allowed to damage the primary content. Do consider dropping into your content a keyword that supports an advertiser's content, but, unless the advertiser is paying all the expenses of maintaining your site, don't make your site about the advertiser or their products. Do insist that, if you allow lipstick ads at all, you're going to display images of women looking much nicer because they're not making their mouths the focal point, because a woman is not a lamprey eel and is likely to look her best when she's not trying to look like one. Do reject ads for toxic products that ought to be banned--and do consider joining boycotts of sites that accept that kind of ads. No matter how much they're paying, advertisements for cigarettes, for alcohol as something to drink, for "pesticide" poison sprays, for "medications" that are known to make significant minorities of patients sicker, for politicians whose parties fail to denounce censorship, or any other evil thing, can only harm your site.
10. Don't invest too much in the Internet. Until the right to freedom of online "speech" is solidly guaranteed by law, you have to think of your web site as something that's likely to be destroyed just because a competitor, or the opposition party, or somebody you never even considered as opposition before, has paid somebody to pull it down. A censored site is a dead site, and a censored Internet will be a dead Internet, but some people don't care about that. Save your own copies of your own material and always be prepared to go back to publicizing your work in the post-Internet world. And never pay a penny to any corporation that offers you a contract that they reserve the right to change to suit themselves. If they want to make hosting profitable, let them come out to where you are and take a blood oath to defend freedom of speech with their lives.
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