Category Archives: Copywriting and Content Writing Tips

Why your website content should pre-sell

Pre-selling assumes that your customers are usually on your website to find answers to their questions or problems, and not to buy. The difference between selling and pre-selling is how you present these answers.

Pre-selling is just the opposite of selling, which is perceived as something that pressurizes you to buy. Pre-selling recommends subtly through one or two links in the informative content, building rapport with the reader and positioning you as the expert. Wouldn’t you be ready to listen if your trusted consultant recommended something to you? And that’s what pre-selling does. Pre-selling works because when people think you’re selling, their defenses go up; but in pre-selling, people are ready to listen.

Just about anyone is capable of doing the hard-sell on a product or service on the Internet. What makes the difference between a consistently successful online business and the ones that are looking for a quick buck boils down to the website’s ‘tone’. Every website speaks to its visitors and when the visitor reads the content, it should create the impression that the website knows what it is talking about.

Depending on how this content is expressed, it can establish you, the website owner as an expert. Rather than publish yards of running text that most visitors on the move are unlikely to read, the content must be presented as informative bite-sized pieces. Obviously no visitor wants to buy without knowing more about the product or service. To reach that fine balance between no information and the overdose, “pre-selling” is the answer.

Around 400-800 words is acceptable for pre-sell content to position you as the expert even as you gently pre-sell your visitors on your product or service. Here are some benefits of pre-selling:

Ever wondered why NASCAR, Wimbledon, the Olympics, etc. always start on time? It is because they are pre-sold. When you pre-sell, you set a deadline. On that date, you’ll have your product or service out with no excuses
When you pre-sell, your project is already funded. Which means – you don’t have to get all stressed out. What you need to do now is create compelling content and attractive packaging!
You get a good look into your customers’ behavior for your product or service. Based on this information, you can tweak and tone before you launch your product/service.

Your next thought is probably about what you can pre-sell – here are some ideas:

Books – can be pre-sold long before you write them.
Products – obviously
Seminars and workshops – you probably know this already. Some marketers pre-sell a series of these ahead.
Consulting sessions – where your customer pays you before the event
Membership sites – can be pre-sold even before they exist.

Just imagine how motivated you will feel to deliver when your first customer pays you!

How to make your content more informative

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There can be various purposes for publishing content on your website or blog but when you want to generate business from your content, you need to impart the right information as clearly as possible. What’s right information depends on how your customers and clients perceive your content, not you, unless there is a parity.

Whenever you are writing content (or working with a content writing service) for your business you should step into your customers’ shoes. This means not only presenting the greatest benefits of your product or service, but also addressing their concerns before they raise them themselves. This means highlighting even the negative aspects of your product or service. But this doesn’t mean you’re conveying something negative about your business: you are simply informing your visitor so that he or she can make the right decision. Here are a few things you can consider to make your content writing process informative:

List all the benefits: What do your customers gain when they purchase your product or service? Don’t go on a boasting binge. For instance, if you want to avail my content writing services it doesn’t matter much to you if I’ve done my higher studies in linguistics or if I read abstract literary classics in my spare time. You are interested in knowing whether I can consistently provide you quality content or not, and if yes, what system I have in place to ensure it. Additionally, what benefit you get by working with me and not by working with another content provider?
Who might benefit the most: Don’t try to sell your product to everybody under the sun (although this seems very desirable). When you are selling, you’re not selling a product or a service, you’re selling a benefit, a usage, a value. So whereas selling combs to bald men may seem quite smart, you are simply cheating people and when they realize it they’re going to have a really bad feeling about your conduct. Help people make a better purchase decision.
Clearly mention if there are any drawbacks: You may think, what am I talking about? Am I trying to help you increase your sales or lose your prospects. The truth is, if you think there are too many drawbacks then may be you should reconsider your offer, and if you think their are more benefits then drawbacks then your customers are going to thank you for informing them. Don’t let your customers find out what your product doesn’t do — tell them on your own and also tell them when a particular feature will be available in case it is currently missing.

The importance of call to action

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“Call to action” means telling your visitors in plain words what they should do, now that they are on your page, as nicely explained in this blog post at Copyblogger. It can be like, “Contact me now”, or “Go to this page to know more”, or “Subscribe to my newsletter” or even “Buy it now!” and so on. It may seam very simple, but it actually increases your click-through rate.

An average visitor to your blog or website is highly distracted due to hundreds of things competing for his or her attention. So while creating copy we shouldn’t assume that he or she will understand what you want him or her to do on your website. If you want to make a sale, display your “Buy now” link or graphic as soon as possible. If you want someone to subscribe to your newsletter or RSS feeds, tell them to subscribe. People like to be told what to do, and sometimes they just do it when they see a call to action word. This is a tried-and-tested fact. Our mind is trained to follow instructions.

Make an offer your customer or client cannot refuse

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The blog post I just read calls it The Godfather Guide to Direct Marketing: Make Me an Offer I can’t Refuse. Although I’ve neither read the book nor seen the movie (I know, I know) but I can totally relate to the expression and this should be consistently kept in mind while preparing promotional literature. Offer something great and highlight it. It should be bigger than your company name. It should be the first thing your customer or client see as soon as he or she comes to your website or unfolds your brochure.

Not everybody is dying to do business with you or awed at the marvelous things you’ve done with your products or services, but how do you solve my problem? For instance, I’ve been thinking of buying a slightly higher-end digital camera for a couple of months, I don’t want to buy a cheap brand and I don’t at the moment have the needed cash to buy a reputed brand like Canon, Sony, Nikon or Panasonic. This is my problem and I’ll immediately buy the camera if a vendor offers me a good solution. There must be thousands of customers like me and if the vendors are not addressing this problem I think they are losing a big chunk of sales. The answer to my problem would be being able to pay in easy, multiple installments and that would be an irresistible offer for me.

But what if you don’t have an immediate offer?

An offer doesn’t always mean giving something tangible. If it is not a direct consumable then it can be some emotional benefit. The point is, your message should answer the question “What is in it for me?” immediately. We’re all besieged with problems and consciously or unconsciously we’re looking for solutions. I’ll revisit my problem again with a new angle. Diwali, one of the greatest Indian festivals, is approaching fast and such festivals bring lots of moments that you would like to capture with your camera and you won’t miss them for the world. It’s a time when families get together and since we live in different cities and even countries, such gatherings are all the more special. Personally, I’d like to click my daughter enjoying a phooljhadi (a tiny firecracker you can hold in hand). An ability to click such moments can also be an irresistible offer for me. Make it so genuine and enticing that I buy the camera at the cost of another expense.

Of course this means you cannot target every customer or client under the sun with that single offer. There might be many who can spend the money but are not crazy about buying a camera although once they have it they can make good use of it. Then there might be some who despite having the ability, and a flicker of desire to buy the camera, are going to spend the festival alone or are not particularly attached to their families and friends. This is where targeting comes. Narrow down your target and you’ll sell more. Don’t worry about losing sales by not offering everybody something; you’ll compensate that by narrow targeting.

A good thing about online copywriting is that you can always perform split-tests. Prepare different pages for different targets and observe how they perform. With pay-per-click advertising it is even easier to see the results quickly.

How to never run out of blog topics

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There are torrents of ideas when you start a new blog and in fact you’ve got so much to write that you feel like publishing multiple posts in a single day. You have to forcibly stop yourself just to maintain a semblance of regularity. You start dreaming about featuring in the top 100 blogs of your niche and your traffic graph actually throws buckets full of encouraging numbers at you. It’s like a dream run.

And then you begin to wake up.

It’s not a sudden awakening. You toss and turn around, you try to keep the dream going. 5 posts a day get reduced to 2 or 3 and 2 or 3 get reduced to 1 and then, to your horror, you begin missing entire days. After sometime, it doesn’t even remain a horror, you have nothing new to write and you have lost enthusiasm. You wonder how come all those successful bloggers keep coming up with one killer post after another with phenomenal regularity and to add insult to the injury, they not only write great stuff for their own blogs, they also write awesome guest blog posts for other blogs. What are you missing?

First of all you have to realize that everybody runs out of topics, eventually, even the greatest of bloggers. So how do they get new topics? Here are a few things you can do to keep the streams of blogging ideas flowing:

Be a part of the community

When you work alone there is a far greater chance of you running out of blogging ideas. Visit other blogs in your niche and pay close attention to what people are talking about. You get lots of new ideas when you interact with people.

Give priority to building a community

It’s hard to run out of steam if you’ve got a vibrant community on your blog. It’s always very encouraging when people give feedback, whether positive or negative.

Encourage your visitors to ask questions

Once you’ve developed a community, encourage your visitors to post questions. If you write about a product or a service believe me, people will have unlimited queries, and every query can be turned into an engaging and useful blog post.

Get active on social media

Lots of interaction and stimulation takes place on websites like Twitter and Facebook. People are constantly posting interesting tidbits that can be easily turned into great blog posts. Even small exchanges can be transformed into full-blown blog posts with some effort.

Get ideas from your existing blog posts

Lots of sub-topics are hiding in your existing blog posts. Go through your old archives and try to revive your old blog posts with new perspective. A lot changes in a few months. You can also re-write your older posts with some new twists.

Add value to blog posts and articles appearing on other websites

Use websites like AllTop.com, Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon and PopURLs to find new content relevant to your field and see how you can derive new content out of them. Don’t worry about always writing longish blog posts. Even if you have one paragraph to add, link to the original content page and add your bit. This way it won’t seem daunting. Besides, sometimes when you think of publishing just a single paragraph, it’s easier to writing a long blog post.

Learn and share continuously

Learning doesn’t just help you blog non-stop, it also improves you as a professional, but that’s a different point. It’s great fun learning new things about your niche and them sharing them with your readers.

The key to NOT running out of blog post ideas is realizing that everybody does, and you constantly have to keep this in mind and plan accordingly. How do YOU make sure that you don’t run out of topics?