Category Archives: Copywriting Thoughts

Instilling confidence and trust with your copy

This excellent post at Copyblogger talks about imaginary trolls that stop your customers and clients from doing business with you.

It is a bad, bad world isn’t it? Especially so on the Internet where every unscrupulous element can quickly set up a website and start executing his or her spurious activities to deprive you of your money. The situation is worsened by the fact that the Internet has no geographical boundaries and it is not bound by local jurisdictions. So someone in America can easily cheat someone in India and vice versa.

As rightly mentioned in the Copyblogger link, we are all haunted by our previous experiences whenever we want to buy something or subscribe to something. The imminent fraud is amplified when money is involved; you feel more stupid when you pay for something that you don’t get.

A person trying to sell a product or service on the Internet has to overcome a greater challenge compared to the actual world. On the Internet the only mode of communication is your website. You are not just fighting with mistrust you are also fighting with a zillion distractions. In order to the business on the Internet your website copy has to:

Engage the prospect
Dispel his or her fears and apprehensions
Lead him or her to carry out the transaction

How can you do that?

Have lots of quality content

The first thing that you can do is have lots of quality content on your website. Having lots of quality content on your website means that you are really putting your money and effort where your mouth is. You will put so much effort only if you are serious about your work and feel confident about delivering.

Aside from establishing a sense of confidence high quality content also helps you attract targeted traffic from search engines, blogs and social media websites.

Provide all possible solutions

When a prospect arrives at your website he or she is full of questions not only regarding what he or she wants but also regarding how well you can deliver. You need to answer all the questions your visitor can possibly come up with. Take for instance these questions:

Are you for real? Display your contact information prominently. A photograph may also help. A regularly updated blog is quite reassuring and if you are constantly interacting with your visitors, nothing like it. Create a strong social media presence so that your customer or client knows that your reputation is at stake if you don’t perform.
Is my money safe? How do I make sure that I will receive the product or the service once I have paid? Properly explain this procedure on your website and also clearly specify what your refund policy is in case something bad happens and the customer is unable to receive the product on the service.
Are you easily reachable? Make sure that you are just one call away in case the customer or the client needs to call you.

There might be many more questions; it depends on the kind of product or service you are providing.

Put visitors’ interest first

Okay, this reminds me to change my copy to (I am constantly learning and sometimes I teach myself). Highlight benefits instead of features. Handle the most pertinent question in the very beginning: what is the greatest benefit of your product or service? For instance, if I write your copy how is it going to benefit your business or your presence on the Internet? There are two things I am confident about:

Increasing your conversion rate
Writing search engine optimized content to increase your search engine rankings

Now, a person shouldn’t be bothered about how well I write and how I can juggle around words and how well-read I am. Can I really solve your problem? If you want to increase your conversion rate can I achieve that for you through my copywriting services? If you want more traffic from search engines can I do that?

Put your visitors’ interest first instead of blowing your own horn and feeling gung ho about what a great offer you have got.

What do your existing customers and clients have to say about you and your business?

For this you need a testimonials page where you publish all the great things your customers and clients have to say about you and your business. In fact your testimonial page is one of the most important aspects of your website.

The basic idea is that your copy should communicate a sense of trustworthiness and accountability.

Is email marketing content different from web marketing content?

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Of late I’ve been getting plenty of assignments that involve writing content for email marketing campaigns. Intermittently a few clients want to know what is the difference between writing content for marketing on the web and through e-mail. I’m sure they want to know whether I know the difference or not and I am writing this blog post to share my thoughts on the subject of writing content for email marketing as well as web marketing.

Fundamental difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing

Let me tell this at the outset that I am not writing this as a marketing person; I am a content writer who knows a thing or two about Internet marketing. Most of the things that I know have been learned by constantly working and interacting on the Internet with other professionals and also with clients hailing from different fields.

Marketing, as we will all agree, is an exercise to promote a product or service in order to increase business. It may involve running advertising campaigns, organizing events and distributing content that makes the recipients aware of the product or the service and its features. Of course I will be talking from the perspective of a content writer.

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign cannot be easily reused

An e-mail marketing campaign is most of the time a one-time affair, or there have to be long intervals before you send the same e-mail to the same recipients. Do it with regularity and it becomes spam. E-mail marketing is kind of push marketing even if you are using an opt-in e-mail list. It normally survives on numbers unless the targeting is phenomenal. The content for an e-mail marketing campaign, most of the times, is not reusable – you cannot send the same e-mail again and again. Every time you send an e-mail, there must be something new in it.

E-mail marketing content must always be to the point

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign must be concise, to the point, and use as direct a language as possible. Say your thing and get done with it. Remember that the person opening your e-mail would be having scores of unread messages in his or her inbox and it just takes one click to open another message.

This makes it more important to highlight the greatest benefits of your product or service at the top of the message. There should be minimal scope for confusion and misunderstanding.

It is debatable what should be the length of an e-mail marketing campaign. It depends upon what you want to convey and who is your target market. For instance if you are a real estate company selling real estate property then your customers will naturally prefer to read more and more before deciding to call you. On the other hand a less important product (for instance, an MP3 player) may not demand that much attention to detail. So write your content according to your market and the product or service you are offering.

E-mail marketing content should be personal

Content for an e-mail marketing campaign also needs to be personal because an e-mail is a personnel message. It is like knocking at somebody’s door in order to convey something. So the least you can do is address that person by his or her name. Even if the e-mail is going to a business e-mail address it will be opened by a person. Create a sense of familiarity.

Content for a web marketing campaign

A web marketing campaign stays where it is as long as you keep it. The content written for a web marketing campaign performs for a longer time. I am not implying that you don’t need to update your web content; I just mean to say it can stay up there for a longer period of time.

You don’t need to be as personnel as in the case of an e-mail marketing campaign because when it comes to your website it is not you who are knocking at people’s door but the other way round. People coming to your website are already inclined towards reading what you have published on your website. They have either found you on a search engine or have clicked a link on another website.

According to me the greatest difference between e-mail marketing and web marketing is that web marketing content is re-usable and it performs for a longer period of time whereas e-mail marketing content is usually created for a one-time affair so you have to make the maximum impact in the very first attempt otherwise it all goes waste. Web marketing content can be altered and tweaked according to the response you are getting; you cannot do this with e-mail marketing content, it’s like the bullet that has been fired and now you can do nothing about it.

Where do you draw the line regarding being polite to your clients?

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Being polite is good in general. One should always be polite. Politeness can be an invaluable asset to you if you work as a freelancer. But where do you draw the line? There is a big difference between being polite and being obsequious.

Just refunded a client’s advance because he wouldn’t listen to reason. I had sent him a document yesterday; today he replied that he could have done a better job himself. He said the writing was mediocre, it didn’t make sense and it was needlessly complicated. This happens when you don’t have anything to say and you just want to write the 300 words you have promised. I quickly went through the document to check what he was talking about.

Let us assume that I have crossed the threshold of writing faulty language. Assuming there are no errors in grammar or otherwise here is how you would say that a document communicates what it needs to communicate:

The headline that captures the attention of the visitor by offering exactly what he or she is looking for.
Quickly explaining in the first paragraph how your service can make a big difference and help your client tremendously improve his or her business (or whatever you intend to improve).
In the second paragraph you briefly talk about your team, the individual experiences and qualifications of your team members and their levels of motivation and commitment.
In the third paragraph maybe you explain the tools that you have to carry out the service and your total command over those tools.
In the fourth paragraph you normally talk about the work you have done so far.

This is the basic information you give when writing about a service. You can write it boringly, you can write it interestingly, or you can do the simple plain talk. I kept the language simple (I usually avoid clichés and jargons), to-the-point, and focused to the need of the client’s prospective clients. My main concern was to keep the message simple and captivating for the layman.

Anyway, upon receiving the client’s response I quickly wrote to him and offered as many re-writes as required to make the content acceptable to him. After a couple of minutes, he said he had no time to explain and he needed me to refund. I immediately refunded without further explanation.

Should I have tried to reason out? After all we started on a good note and he wanted my services on an ongoing basis. My experience says I shouldn’t have tried to explain further because such clients are normally quite impatient, they don’t respect your time and effort, they are quite unpredictable, and they have no clue what exactly they want and I think this is the basic problem with them. Besides, whether they are happy or not, they never provide you regular work simply because they themselves never get regular work due to the way they treat their work and their own clients.

If you want me to work for you the least you can do is clearly define your requirement. You must know what you want to convey and who are your target audience?

Now, you may argue that what is the use of me being a copywriter if I cannot make out how you want to convey your message and I will totally agree with your argument. If you think that I am a capable copywriter then you should leave it up to me how your message should be conveyed and if somewhere we disagree then there should be enough scope for alterations and further discussions. You hired me because somewhere you felt I can provide you what you are looking for. In case I don’t then there must be some communication gap, either from my side or from your side. All I can suggest to you is, let us fill the gap and see the completion of the project.

If a client is not satisfied I don’t offer excuses; I simply offer a rewrite and if I cannot figure out why the client doesn’t like the work I try to get more information. I try to do it as politely as possible even when the client is not polite. But even after that if the client shows a negative attitude I have no choice but to fire that client.

Writing website copy for a web design and marketing company

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From now onwards I will be regularly discussing the online copywriting and content writing projects I am currently working on. No, I’m not going to divulge the details of the client unless he or she desires to do so. So if you are my present client or my prospective client you need not worry. I will simply share with you the things that I am experiencing and learning while writing.

I have written for many web design and marketing companies so it is becoming kind of a repetitive job. There is a great temptation to open pre-existing documents and simply rehash the material, but that won’t be ethical and it also won’t be good for my self-esteem as a writer. Even if I have written 20 times for the same sort of business I start from scratch whenever am writing for a new client. Of course the things are the same and they are offering the same service. So how do you differentiate?

That is a challenge as a writer. Writing for a web design and marketing company mainly involves writing on three themes:

Web designing
Web development
Internet marketing/SEO

To describe and sell these services one uses almost the same language and the same pitch. In order to come up with unique content I try to imagine myself being a part of the team. Every team is unique, that much I really understand and agree to. Every business team has a unique message to convey. There is something that motivates us. I try to catch that feeling. Now you may wonder why get involved so much if a company is paying you just $90 to do three pages? Well, it is not about those three pages and those $90, it is about getting involved with your work. Anyway, I am digressing.

This is something that always works: I forget about all the work I have done so far for similar clients. For instance, while working on this present content writing project I’m not thinking about the other similar projects I have worked upon (besides, there is always an interval of 2-3 months so there is also the possibility of forgetting what you have previously written). I consider it my first most assignment for a web design and online marketing client. Of course I utilize the experience, but that’s it.

SEO tips you should know as an online copywriter

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As an online copywriter you not only have to write well you also have to write search engine friendly content because the search engine crawlers are as important as human visitors for every website and blog. You have to make sure that your content is easily accessible to the search engine crawlers and most of your pages are index and ranked for the right keywords.

This can be really difficult if you have no clue about what sort of search terms users are using to find the website or blog you are writing for. You can use your common sense, advice from your visitors and friends and keyword analysis tools like WordTracker and AdWords to find out all keyword combinations and phrases that you may prefer to optimize your content for.

Once you have made a list of relevant keywords and key phrases you start building your content around them and this is where SEO tips can come handy for you as an online copywriter. Here are a few things you can take care of while generating content for your website or blog:

Create highly relevant content

It is a misconception that if you use your keywords in your copy again and again it will fetch you higher search engine rankings. Of course the keywords and key phrases must be present on the page in order to get some ranking for that page but they don’t have to occur needlessly. As an online copywriter you should know how to creatively use keywords and key phrases to come up with compelling and interesting copy. Stick to the topic, don’t write less and don’t write more than required and stick to the subject; this is very important for SEO. Nothing compares to relevance.

Use keywords and key phrases in the title

The title is a unique identity for your webpage; it tells both your human visitors and the search engines what sort of information that page gives. By merely looking at the title people should be able to make out whether they want to read your webpage or not. The title of your webpage also appears wherever its link appears; for instance, if somebody sees your link on the search engine result page he or she will see that link with your page title as the hyperlink. And they are more prone to clicking the link if they see the expression they have just used do conduct the search.

Even if some other blogger or website publisher links to that page there is a great possibility that he or she will use your title as the hyperlink. So you can easily make out how important it is to have a unique page title for every page on your website.

Use headings, subheadings and bullets to organize your content

Headings, subheadings and bullets help you organize your content logically and it is easier to quickly go through your webpage both for human visitors and search engine crawlers. When a particular webpage is being crawled your headings, subheadings and bullets are closely considered and checked for relevant keywords and key phrases. They basically sum up the entire message of your webpage and in fact a person should be able to make out 50% of your message by simply going through your headings, subheadings and bullets.

Focus on the main points in the beginning itself

People are in a great hurry on the Internet. They don’t want to read the entire page in order to make out what you intend to say. They would rather read the first headline or the first paragraph and if they cannot make out what the page represents they quickly leave to explore other websites. Hence it is extremely important that you come to the main point as early as possible and most preferably in the first paragraph. This also gives you a chance to use your important keywords and key phrases in the beginning of the webpage without sounding spammy. Webpage crawlers generally don’t go through the entire page; they read the first 250-300 words and then move on to the next page. So the expression "save the best for last" doesn’t hold good for an online copywriter who intends to write SEO content.

Do lots of interlinking

This doesn’t come under the realm of copywriting but wherever possible link to other pages under the same domain because it helps the search engine crawlers find other pages easily. A network of interlinking makes every page under your website or blog indexable.

SEO is not merely an online copywriter’ job because it also involves tweaking the source code and including the necessary meta tags. But as an aware online copywriter with little study and learning you can provide complete SEO services to your clients besides writing content for them.