You’ve got about 2.5 seconds to grab the attention of your readers. Can you do it? Here are some helpful tips when writing sales letters, blog posts and articles. All your content should speak to search engines and to the people reading the content as well. Here are some tips to help you get more traffic and make more sales.
Break Up Your Web Copy With Headings
Instead of one long and continuous block of text that may be lost on an impatient visitor, break things up so the article is scanable. This way, people are likely to see something that catches their eye before they have cybertsurfing attention deficit disorder and simply surf off your page because it doesn’t catch their interest quickly enough. Headings also appeal to search engines, especially if you use h1, h2 and h3 tags with relevant keywords in them. Never sacrifice quality content in favour of search engine optimisation, though.
Why?
No matter how many hits you get a day, if your copy sucks people won’t stay.
State ROI Up Front
What return will people make on their investment? Whether it’s a time investment made (such as taking the time to read the article) or a monetary one (such as clicking a buy now button), people need to know why they should spend any time reading what you have to say. You want to grab someone’s attention with a title and then tell them straight away what they’ll gain from staying tuned in. Your first paragraph has to make the reader sure they’ll miss out if they don’t continue to read.
Are You Asking Questions?
Why ask questions? Piquing curiosity is huge. If you ask an interesting question that’s relevant to your target audience, people will read on to find the answer.
Relevancy
Keywords tell search engines that you are relevant to the topic at hand. People also need to see headings and words that help them understand they’ve arrived some place that will give them useful and / or valuable information. After you’ve written something such as a blog, an article or a sales page, consider going through and tweaking it after you’ve written it by following these tips and you just might see a jump in conversion rates.
About Sean Rasmussen
Hi Sean,
This is an area that I really don’t do well in. My titles and headlines are not as attention grabbing as they could be. I need to find a way to make my content more interesting so that people will want to read it.
Still, I am a work in progress and I’ll definitely get better. I’m certainly learning a lot from reading your blogs.
Maybe a course in copywriting comes in handy? I guess I have a new niche to research. Not to use it, but to learn from it.
Hi Sean
On my list of to do’s is a copy writing course as I would like to explore that area of Internet Marketing and really home my skills.
I found keyword research quite a struggle. It isn’t something that I picked up naturally or easily. I had to go and sit with one of my YOTA buddies for half a day while he talked me through the process. Even though I had started doing the MS tutorials, I was stumped on certain areas.
Once shown I felt more confident yet still not exceptionally good at them.
There are so many important things to remember in this vocation and probably the most demanding.
The quality of your copywriting will make or break the process of converting your visitors to customers. As has been stated many times before, make your content easy to read by breaking your text into paragraphs, plenty of whitespace and eye-catching headings. As Sean say, you don’t want cybersurfing attention deficit disorder
to kick in before you catch your visitor’s attention.
WordPress makes implementing a lot of these strategies very easy. All the advice you give just ties together. I’m a teacher and I have always loved creating exciting worksheets for students and I have had pride that they have been good, interesting and easy to interact with. I find that setting up my page isn’t a huge challenge, but there are so many little decisions which need to be made which can have a huge impact.