Our company was the entire e-commerce unit for the largest retailer in the world.

As Lead Writer for Walmart.com’s Electronics Department, in three years I helped it grow over 400%, driving sales from $46 million to $189 million. Out of five sections (Sports, Apparel, Pets, etc.) Electronic was the busiest—so much so that I managed two junior writers. But that steep growth didn’t happen just by working harder.

The situation: all three of us wrote feature/benefits for some 20 items per day. Even at that rate Electronics weekly presented more new products for sale. The Head of Editorial asked me to devise a better system. The key: I realized that much of what we wrote would be needed again soon for a similar item.

Example: describing a camcorder with 20x zoom; why not save a great benefit phrase for a certain spec, and simply cut and paste a few days later when it appeared again? But how to keep track of everything? My solution: a huge easy-to-use Excel sheet Phrase Library. It had some 15 separate categories (cameras, camcorders, MP3 players…) and each was assigned 6 recurring product features (media type,  LCD screen size, zoom level). Then for each feature we gathered its frequent specs—4x zoom, 20x zoom, color view finder, etc. The best part about this plan was we could implement it incrementally, no need to stop item-writing. When I and my team came up with a great benefit phrase we’d simply save it in the correct library spot for later retrieval. At some 60 items per day, within two weeks we’d filled in most of the matrix. My phrase library boosted productivity by 30%, and Marketing asked me to show other sections how to make one.