You could go broke spending tons of money on advertising if you can’t convert the visitors on your website into buying customers.
Great copywriting is the key to turning website visitors into leads or customers. If you are not a writer, then you should hire a professional copywriter to write copy for your web content. But a great copywriter can cost you an arm and a leg. In other words, they’re very expensive!
But if you have moderate writing skills and don’t mind writing, you can certainly produce compelling and persuasive copy. Just follow the proven copywriting tips and tricks of the professionals!
Below, I will share with you some good practices I have learned from various great copywriters.
1. Thoroughly understand and know everything about your target audience
To have success, your writing must resonate with your target audience and stirs their emotions. In order to do so, you must first do your research (surveys, emails, interviews, and feedback from sales) and find out as much information as possible about your target audience.
Here are some important information you would need to find out about your target audience:
- Demographic information such as age, sex, income, educational level, company size, etc.
- What are their pain points or problems?
- What are their fears, concerns, and desires?
- What keeps them up at night?
- What’s their budget?
- Where do they want to be?
- How would you characterize their personalities?
- What are their pet peeves?
- And on…
With this information, you could build a persona. A persona is essentially a fictitious character that best represents your target audience. Sometimes, you might need to create 2 or 3 different personas if you have different segment of customers.
2. Craft a Compelling and Seductive Headline
The headline is the most important element in copywriting. A headline can make or break your copy.
With a compelling and seductive headline, you can instantly captivate the visitors’ attention and draw them further into your copy.
On the other hand, a bland and boring headline could just easily make the visitors hit the back button and instantly disappear from your website. As a result, no sales and no leads for your business.
Here are some tips to help you write great headlines:
- Make a promise or convey a compelling benefit for the visitors. What’s in it for them?
- Ask a question.
- Make a bold declaration.
- Start the headline with, “How to…”
- Make a list, i.e. “10 novel methods to….”
I want to emphasize again the important of a strong headline. If you are stuck for ideas, you could always check out magazines such as Cosmopolitan to get some inspirations. As you know, Cosmopolitan magazine employs some of the finest copywriters to write for them.
3. Use Simple and Concrete Languages and Words
Please save the readers from any headaches by avoiding fancy jargons and complicated words and languages. In order to persuade the audience, they must clearly understand what you are selling and why they should buy from you.
As such, use simple words and languages that your target audience could understand without their head spinning. Also, it must be concrete. Replace qualitative qualifiers with quantitative qualifiers. Don’t say things like, “Our product saves you lots of time.” Instead say something like “Our products cut your wait time by 10 hours.”
4. Use words that stir the audience’s emotions
Try to use words that are vivid and can stir the audience’s emotions. As you know, people buy mostly on emotions. So use lots of strong action verbs and try to vividly paint a picture of how their lives will be transformed by using your products or services.
5. Use lots of “You” in the copy
Face it. People don’t care about how great your company is or how great your products are. They care about themselves. They want to know what you can do for them.
By using lots of “you” in your copy, you make the audience feel more connected.
6. Ensure your writing is scannable and digestible
Reading on the web could be difficult for most people. As a matter of fact, most people don’t read on the web. Instead, they scan and skim, trying to quickly capture the main points.
As such, your writing should be easy for them to digest and scan through.
Follow these tips to give users a good experience of consuming your content:
- Use short paragraphs. Each paragraph should be no longer than 5 sentences. It’s best to keep each paragraph 2-3 sentences.
- Use lots of bullets. Bullets make it easy for people to scan and digest.
- Use subheadings generously if your copy is long. Make sure the subheadings are bolded too. The presence of subheadings make it easy for people to quickly know the main point of each section.
- Mix in a few images and photos to make your content more interesting. Long amount of texts can get boring. So, try to mix in a few images here and there. But make sure the images are relevant to the message. Don’t use cheesy looking stock images that have no relevancy.
- Use font size of at least 14 pixel. I’ve seen so many web content with such tiny texts that it hurts my eyes to read them.
- Limit the width of your content to 600 pixel or less.
7. Emphasize the benefits
Rather than expound on the features of your products, you should instead emphasize the benefits of your products or services. First, understand the pain points or problems that your target audience is dealing with.
Then address these pain points by clearly describing how your products or services solve their problems and what benefits they will gain if they use your products or services.
8. Follow SEO Best Practices
Writing for the web is more tricky in that you have to account for the search engines as well. By following on page SEO best practices, you can get your web pages ranked higher on the search engines so that more people could discover your content.
The most important aspect of on-page SEO is making sure you do your keyword research. Figure out what keyword phrase you want to optimize for each webpage. You could use the free Google keyword research tool to do your keyword research.
The keyword phrase should meet the following requirements:
- High number of searches per month
- Low level of competition
- Relevant to your target audience and to your products and services
Once you have identified the keyword phrase you want to optimize your webpage for, be sure to place your keywords in appropriate places such as the headline, the beginning of your content and toward the end of your content.
Additionally, you should incorporate your targeted keywords in the “alt” tag for all the relevant images on your web page. By following best SEO practices, you give your web page a much better chance of attracting targeted visitors.