Recently I’m concentrating more on learning new things about marketing, copywriting, etc. I realized that I’m putting more time on producing content rather than marketing it.
When I was upgrading my skills about copywriting, a thought hit my mind. Hence, this post.
If you analyze the most common traits of successful bloggers, they’ve all one thing in common. They’re excellent copywriters.
They know how to put words in the content strategically, so as to persuade the readers to trust them, opt in or to become a customer.
When people hear the term copywriting, the sales copies keep swirling in their heads. But the fact is, copywriting can be adopted in every part of your life.
It reminded me of a story by copywriting wizard David Ogilvy.
David was once walking down the street.
There was a blind homeless man, begging for money with an empty donation cup. He had his sign board read – “I am blind, please help me”. Empty.
David stopped for one moment and rewrote the sign – “It’s a beautiful spring day, I can’t see it”. When he was returning from his office in the day, the beggar was overflowing with money.
Rather than saying that I’m blind, the latter words played with the people’s imaginations.
It produced a sense of empathy in the minds of the people. That text read the most painful experience he’s having right now.
This is just an example to show you how powerful the words are.
Here are the strategies
Define your audience
For whom are you writing? You should be super-specific.
You should learn to define the reader you are writing for. Define the reader of your blog based on demographics, interests, gender, age, etc.
For example, this is how I define my readers.
“Most of my blog readers are male, from the United States. Most of them aged between 18-32, and they all have a blog. Apart from this, their interests are technology and photography. Most of them are employed and are into blogging and internet marketing for extra income stream”.
How I came across this definition?
It’s from Google Analytics. Just go to Audience -> Demographics, and you should be there.
Once you know the demographics and psychographics of your audience, you find it easy to tailor your content, so that they find it appealing and they can relate to you.
Without knowing the audience properly, your content will not deserve the right attention.
By not knowing your audience properly, you’re selling hamburgers to veggies.
Without good headlines you are broke
Any good copywriter knows the importance of writing good headlines that attract people to click on.
First, when readers come across the title of your post, they think “What’s in it for me?”. That’s where you clarify their doubt by crafting good headlines, and enticing them to click on.
David Ogilvy, one of the great copywriters originally developed a headline crafting method called 4u’s.
You should create that sense of usefulness in your headline. It may be like, presenting the most appealing benefit that readers get from reading your post.
As you can observe in the above screenshot, Apple Watch is marketed greatly.
The single most appealing benefit that users get buying an Apple Watch is that it increases their productivity and helps them to glance things faster than to pull out their phone from the pocket.
You should make people feel that your content is worth reading.
Unique: In what way your blog post is unique? What can people get in your post, that they won’t get anywhere else on the web. Will your post be yet another piece that they encounter daily?
In marketing terms, it’s called Unique Selling Proposition. Clearly showing the uniqueness of your product or content, and showing your consumers how you stand out of your competitors.
Showcase what’s unique inside your post.
Everyone gives tips on how to write a good post. But the above article title from Problogger gives you a feeling of uniqueness; and yeah, it’s one of the must read articles for you.
Urgent: Creating a sense of urgency in your headline, tricks people to click on.
For crafting this type of headlines, you just need to ask this question after writing your post.
“What is the importance of this post, now?”
This kind of urgency should force people to read your content, now.
Ultra-specific: When you are looking to attract laser targeted audience to your site, it’s important for you to be ultra-specific in headlines.
Let your readers know what exactly they’re going to get from your post.
Your headline may contain numbers to satisfy this criteria.
- 5 Tips to Stay Healthy While Traveling in Ship
- How to Earn $1000 in 60 Days From Micro Niche Sites?
Readers should exactly get to know, what are all they are going to get reading your post.
Content strategy
Most of the copywriters follow a golden rule of copywriting. It’s called AIDA.
It says that your content should contain the elements that gain,
- Attention
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Attention: can be gained by good headlines and introductions for the post. It just lets your readers hook into your post.
The attention of the people can be gained by following the 4 u’s formula for headlines, described earlier.
The recent trend in copywriting for gaining attention and interest is story-telling. Human brains are wired to relate and get involved in your story faster.
People tend to forget the facts and information that you’ve provided to them. But they will never forget the interesting stories that you presented to them.
Stories may be of personal experience, an incident, or even an imagination. All that matters is holding the attention and interest of the audience.
Incredible stories are damn effective cuz of the fact that it sparks the imagination power in your readers’ brains.
Desire is something, that you need to create in your readers’ mind. It may be about the product or teasing them to opt in for your newsletter by providing valuable content.
In this case, more research is needed as you can’t simply win the hearts of your readers. High quality, well-researched content will push your readers to take action.
Finally, it’s your time to ask your readers take action. You have provided value to your readers, now you have the full authority for including the call to action.
It may be asking your readers to subscribe, share the content, or buy a product.
When readers finish reading your blog post, they ask themselves “what’s next?“. You need to guide them. Ask your readers to take the next step, or present takeaway tips if the post is informative.
Be short and concise
Once you have finished writing your content, just read it loud in the shoes of your readers. Just make sure that the text makes sense, and delivers the message clearly without any redundancy and cliches.
While proofreading, make sure to get rid of all the unwanted fluff and clutter. Transform passive voice to active ones, so that your message will be delivered clearly and shortly.
You should spend at least half the time of writing to proofreading your posts thoroughly. It’s the one that decides whether your audience love the content or not.
Make your content easier to scan for your readers. This can be done by shortening your sentences, and providing good whitespace between the paragraphs and shortening them, so that it improves readability.
Why your readers say NO?
These are the only 4 reasons why people say no when you pitch them a product.
Usefulness: When your blog readers won’t realize that the product you are pitching is useful for them, they’re not going to buy from you. You exactly want to highlight the astounding benefits of the product, and how it will be beneficial to them in a practical way with examples.
Time: Maybe they are rejecting your product, because of lack of time to setup the product when they initially purchase it. You must showcase the simplicity of the plugin, configuration, etc.
Urgency: You need to create that sense of urgency to buy the product NOW by presenting the time bound factors and advantages they’re gonna miss.
Perhaps you could subliminally seed the cons of procrastination in their mind. If you’re not creating urgency in the minds of the people, your audience are more likely to procrastinate.
Money: If you fail to prove that the product you are promoting is actually worth every penny they pay, it is likely that they won’t convert.
Presenting the benefits of the product and actually making them realize that they are actually leaving huge money on the table by not opting in for the product.
Learning to address these things, and making them buy your product irresistibly, converts your readers to buyers like crazy.
At first, when you pitch the product to your customer, their resistance against the product will be high.
If you include a call to action there, they’ll likely say no. It’s your duty to work all the 4 factors that make people say NO to your product, and lower their resistance and finally make them buy your product.
Proofread
While writing money posts, I can’t stress enough about how important proofreading is.
You need to proofread your content at least 2-3 times, to ensure that you are making your product irresistible for your readers to buy, and clearly describe the practical benefits.
While proofreading, make sure that you clarify all the doubts and questions, that’s holding back your prospect customer in converting.
It’s also important to shorten the paragraph by getting rid of all unnecessary words and making the content look simple and concise.
Get rid of redundancy. By saying the same things again and again, you may act like my granny.
It’s important to choose a quiet place for proofreading, and mindfully carry out the process.
Include effective call to action
Call to action or CTA is nothing but your call to your readers to take some action. Maybe it’s opting in the newsletter, or buying a product. It’s a one line call to take the action.
Call to action text maybe – “Buy now”, “Subscribe now”.
Pro tip: Creating a sense of urgency and including bonuses in the CTA, works great.
Before including CTA at last, you need to have already convinced your people to say yes.
You need to include CTA, only when you’re sure that your readers have no resistance against the product, and they are likely to optin.
This can be achieved by just wearing the socks of your readers and going through the content or copy you wrote.
It’s also important to explain your readers, what are all the next processes, once they click on the CTA button. What stages they are rolled into. And also describe the immediate product, file, they’re getting.
For example, you can say like – after opting in for the newsletter, just confirm your email, and you’ll only receive one newsletter a week starting from today.
Answer the FAQs
Just ask yourself. What are all the questions that spark in your audience’s mind once you introduce them the product. Like, if you are promoting a WordPress plugin, you can ask questions like.
- What happens if the plugin gets deactivated?
- How this plugin stands out of the other plugins in the competition?
- Is the plugin really worth the money?
- Does this plugin supports {major feature}?
Final words
You just need to make sure, to take time and realize all the questions that come in your readers’ mind according to their interests, condition, way of interpretation, and answer them honestly.
The same strategy applies when you write content. Try to cover all the things you are writing about. This prevents your readers clicking back to SERPs to find content other than yours, that answers their query.
