5 Key Factors That Make Good Webcopy Great

by | Jan 18, 2018 | Our Blog

 

The start of the month in internet marketing land should be called copytime. Every website out there is looking for brand new copy, from blogs to social media posts to web copy. Of these three important types of copy, only one is going to represent your website day in and day out. While none should be ignored or written off with any type of nonchalance, I personally believe that webcopy should be the most scrutinized of the three.

After all, many blogs are informal. Social posts aren’t meant to serve as your doctorate. But web copy, this is what the people are looking at when they get to your site. And not only that, it’s what the search engines are looking at when they rank your site. So, it’s easy to see why webcopy should be carefully crafted, but it’s not always so simple to see how it should be crafted.

Five Points to Keep in Mind When Creating Copy for Your Website

Here are five things that you want to keep in mind as you sit down to write your web copy:

1. Capture. The first thing your copy needs to do is capture the attention of your viewers. If you have some bland, boring headline followed by copy that drones on and on, you’re going to bore visitors right off your site (if not to sleep!). Be a little provactive, a little funny, stir it up. The average person browses dozens of websites each and every day, what is going to make them stay on yours?

2. Portray. Your webcopy should be very clear in conveying your value proposition. Visitors need to know exactly what makes you different from your competition. Why should they spend their money with you when there are 50 million other sites selling the exact same product or service? If you can’t answer this, then how can you expect your customers to understand it?

3. Stand Out. People don’t really have time to read everything you write. Even if you’re the most interesting writer in the world, eating a nice juicy steak is more interesting. You aren’t going to compete with reality, so make your content easily accommodating in that you have all key points standing out for quick scanning. Headings and subheadings are a must. Numbered and bullet lists help people get the information they need, do what they have to do and then get on with their life. You aren’t inviting them over for tea, you’re inviting them to learn what you have to offer them and then convincing them to take it and leave.

4. Describe. Description is vital for many products and services, yet so many marketers buy into the “picture is worth a thousand words” ideaology of content creation. Pictures are amazing, yes (videos are even better), but you need the details, features and benefits of your products and services in writing. Why? If nothing else, for the search engines and to rank for keywords, but trust me, there are still people out there enjoy reading everything they can about a product before making a purchase. Remember, an informed consumer buys more.

5. Perfection. Finally, it’s vital that your webcopy be absolutely free and clear of errors. No spelling mistakes, no grammatical errors, no txt spk. You want to convey authority on your site and nothing will lose it faster than mspelling a werd or too or making grammer errors or having poor punctuashun?

Overall, webcopy is to a website what a salesperson is to a brick-and-mortar location. You wouldn’t hire just anybody and send them out there uninformed and unpresentable, don’t do that with your webcopy.

Redeveloping the Headline – How to Generate and Narrow Down Headline Ideas

by | Jul 25, 2015 | Our Blog

Ever wondered how professional copywriters, ad agency creatives, and online marketers arrive at killer headlines that draw readers in and have them pulling out their wallets like nobody’s business? Wonder no more, because today, we’ll be taking a look at exactly how many of those headlines come to be.

The Process

One of the things that too many people don’t understand about headline writing is that it is a process. Just like anything else worth doing for your business, proper headline writing takes up time and concerted effort. The misconception that time spent on headlines should be relatively smaller compared to, say, the time spent to write a sales letter, is probably rooted in the fact that the final product where headlines are concerned is fairly small.

A small final product doesn’t mean a small effort, however. The next time you’re writing a headline for your email, sales letter, or even just your next blog post, try this:

Sit and write 25 to 50 headlines. Don’t stop until you’re there. How do you come up with so many ideas? Go bigger than you think you can, go more ridiculous than you think you can. In this initial phase, we’re too often already wearing blinders and filtering out ideas that could be developed later on if we gave them a chance.

Even if any idea seems too risque, “out there,” or bold, jot it down to get the juices flowing. A big mistake many people make when trying to write their own headline copy is that they don’t actually write ideas down unless they think they’re “good enough.” Most people aren’t able to visualize in our heads as well as we can do on a piece of paper, and you’re doing yourself a disservice by not letting the process take its course out in the open.

Once you’ve got your ideas on paper, go through the list one by one and ask yourself if there are other directions you can go with it (variations, slight changes, etc.), or if the idea just wasn’t up to snuff and needs to be eliminated. In this stage, you’ll drop out the weaklings while simultaneously developing your stronger ideas.

When working on variations and trying to pick out your top contenders, here are a couple of things to keep in mind:

– People generally buy on emotion: things like love & acceptance, the want for wealth and popularity, etc. are almost always elements of a successful headline. Don’t hesitate to push a bit with your headline, oftentimes a (not-too-misleading) shock means that people will stop and read.

– The age-old trick about including numbers of tips, tricks, and steps into a headline holds true. People like things that sound logical, specific, and easy, so “3 easy steps to eliminating acne at home” is likely to perform better than “Here’s how to eliminate acne at home!”

Finally, your overall champion of a headline, once you’ve narrowed it down to 2-5, will probably not be able to be determined by intuition alone, especially not without experience, so get ready to split test, split test some more, and then split test again.