9 Can’t Fail Copywriting Strategies for Every Entrepreneur
Updated on February 29, 2020
As a business owner with a website or blog, you know about the power of great content.
Great content can help you build your website or blog’s audience, who can then be converted into paying customers. This is why you want great content for your online real estate. Great content can help turn your website into a money-making machine.
But wait. How can you make sure your written content has the strongest possible impact?
While great content is certainly a must-have to attract visitors and produce results for your online business, copywriting is what gets your readers to take a specific action.
What is the difference between content marketing and copywriting?
Content marketing specifically relates to the platforms you use to share your content. These platforms could be your blog, podcast, video channel, and/or email autoresponder.
Copywriting is the writing that gets people to engage with the specific call-to-action you present on your website. Your call-to-action could be to make a purchase, download your ebook, subscribe to your email list, or contact you about interest in a specific product or service. Copywriting can be found in your sales copy (landing page or email), advertising, or direct marketing.
The Power of Effective Copywriting
Good copywriting can be used to bring hundreds of thousands of dollars into your business. You already know this, which is why you want to learn the best possible copywriting strategies to implement in your business.
The world is online now — it’s where consumers spend the majority of their time. So it’s no coincidence that more and more financial transactions are being done online. That’s probably why you’ve chosen to build your business here!
This also means that the competition for people’s attention online has increased significantly. It’s a battle, and the most creative and compelling content wins.
Of course, methods like funny videos and great graphics are very effective when we are talking about online conversions, but effective copy is still needed to close out the sale.
Effective copywriting taps into the emotions and imagination of the individual reading the words on the screen. As they reading, they view their life from the outside looking in and think about how their life could be greatly improved. Effective copywriting moves them to want to act immediately — they need the results that are being described.
This is exactly the type of reaction you want when people read what you’ve written. You want your copywriting to be so persuasive and compelling that the reader believes they must partake in what you are offering.
What Makes For Great Copywriting?
Ok, we have briefly gone over why effective copywriting is a great conversion method for your marketing and sales initiatives. There is no reason to further sell you on copywriting — you get its importance and want those conversion results.
So let’s get into the things you need to pay attention to when writing or reviewing your own copy.
1. Feed The Reader’s Desires
There’s no way that you can write effective copy if you don’t know the desires of your audience.
You must understand what it is that they want to achieve in their personal lives, business lives, or both. Many people want to make more money. Other people want to be successful. Maybe they want to free up time and space to focus on things that matter to them. Everyone’s desires boil down to wanting to experience some improvement in their lives.
Understanding this, you must dig deep into what your audience specifically wants and illustrate how your product or service will help them achieve their desired outcomes.
Good copywriting takes the reader through where they’re at, explores what is keeping them from getting to where they want to be, explains what direction they could be heading in either by themselves or with your help, and proposes how their desires will be satisfied with your help.
Example: Bob has been having trouble turning his website into a passive stream of income.
He doesn’t really understand SEO, content, or online advertising, but he desperately wants to be successful at online business because he feels he must make more money. Knowing there are many more people who have similar desires to Bob, you create a training course showing people how they can develop their websites into money-making machines.
You create a powerful piece of sales copy on your landing page that outlines the problems that people like Bob are having, and how your training course will help them make money within 90 days. Tapping into their desires by communicating that you know exactly what they are going through leads to a rush of people signing up for your training course. Demand is so great that you must add extra dates for people to participate at a later time.
2. Discuss Their Pain Points
Establishing an emotional connection with the reader should be your main focus. Once you have built this connection, you will be able to guide them towards taking the designated action you have talked up in your copy.
To make this work, you need to talk about the pain points the reader is experiencing.
As you describe the different scenarios and how they affects your reader’s personal life or business performance, they will nod their head in agreement — what they’re reading completely describes their situation. Since you know exactly what they’re going through, it’ll be much easier for you convert them into a customer.
Example: As an online sales strategist, you know that your target market has a problem converting leads into customers.
Within your sales page, you talk about the exact problem they’re experiencing, and give a glimpse into why the problem is occurring. When they see that you know how to guide them towards a solution, the demand foryour services may be too much for you to handle, so be prepared.
3. Make Your Offer Exciting
It is important that your copy uses a lot of a evidence to illustrate the effectiveness of the solution you’re proposing, but you mustn’t make it boring.
When all that the reader sees is statistics and numbers, it is hard to keep their attention. This shouldn’t be the case if your objective is to convert a reader into a customer. People’s attention spans are significantly shorter in our digital world, and you must catch their attention immediately.
If the headline or URL used to get the reader to click was exciting, then your body of content and copy must be the same. You aren’t just educating the reader, you are supposed to be evoking exciting visions in their head that make them interested in your product.
Your copywriting should make the reader feel full of eager anticipation. You have to make them feel as if they have stumbled along some secret treasure — and they’re now eager to open the treasure chest.
Just remember that when you are offering something, you actually need to be able to produce it. Don’t make bold promises that you can’t keep just so that people will take you up on your offer.
Example: You have an accounting business and tax season is about to begin.
Most people hate taxes, unless they are expecting a tax refund. In order to increase the amount of tax returns you process this year, you send out an email to existing clients explaining in detail how you can multiply their return within six months, if they choose you as their tax preparer.
You have just made a usually boring time of year exciting! People always want more money in their pocket, so you have given them a reason to take action.
4. Simplify Your Writing
Don’t be that person who thinks being persuasive means that you must use big words and long complex sentences to prove your point. All that does is confuse the reader. Someone who is confused won’t be willing to engage with your offer, because they won’t even know what you’re talking about.
Your sentences need to be short and clear.
This helps the reader follow what you are saying and fully comprehend the message. As they’re reading, the information is being processed, which helps them move closer to making a decision.
Example: Your target audience is millennials.
This is a group of people who traditionally like the information they read to be short and concise, yet informative. You utilize this formula, breaking everything down into very short paragraphs, and your word count for the entire copywriting material doesn’t exceed 1000 words.
You follow up with those who opt-in to understand why they chose to become a customer. They respond that beyond the value illustrated by the offer, they liked that the information clearly communicated what they would be receiving, without overselling the benefits.
5. Provide the Reader with a Story
Who doesn’t like to read a great story that transitions from somebody’s meager start to their moment of abundance and success? A great story makes you want to be the main character, whose transformation deserves a story of its own.
Your copywriting should take people on this journey.
The story you tell should be one that demonstrates the results that can be achieved by using your product or service. You need to show people that they need your help if they want to achieve their goals.
Take them through the story of someone’s life before finding your product or service, and then illustrate how their life changed drastically once your product or service was discovered. The impact that your product or service can have needs to be felt for them to want to experience it themselves.
Example: Tom was a guy who always had it tough in life.
He wasn’t a very good student in school and he bounced around from job to job. Even though Tom had a difficult life, he was always optimistic that things could change at any given moment, if he stayed focused and never gave up. He would study different ways to make money online and decided to try affiliate marketing. Instead of trying to do it on his own, as he had always done in life, he decided to get some help from the experts at our company, who had success with affiliate marketing.
After going through our training and implementing our strategies, he made $150 in his first month. Not life-changing money, but proof that he can make money as an affiliate marketer. Every month the money he brings in has increased as he has learned the ins and outs. After 9 months he is making at least $4000 every month. Still not life-changing money, but it is a significant improvement on his previous income of less than $200 every month.
If his trajectory keeps going this way, he will be making six figures within the next year. All because he took our training courses and learned how to become an effective affiliate marketer, without having to figure it all out on his own.
6. Focus on Value
Readers don’t care about the features of your product. Every product that we use has features, so who cares about them? What readers want to know is how your product will make their life easier or better. They have purchased things before that didn’t add any value to their life, and they’re tired of wasting money on non-essential things.
You must illustrate the value that comes with purchasing your product.
Don’t oversell when communicating your value. If your product is worth more than the money it’s being offered for, all you have to do is outline the specific ways it changes people’s lives and the readers will be sold. After all, you already know their desires, so you’re just illustrating how those desires will be satisfied, for your audience to see.
Example: Your content writing strategy guide has helped bloggers increase the traffic to their blogs, become guest writers on popular authority sites, and learn how to write ebooks and training.
The strategy guide has literally turned unknown bloggers into authorities within their fields, and they’re making great money in the process. Showing how your product has greatly impacted the lives of others provides all the value that is needed for your readers to understand why they must purchase your product.
7. Show the Results
You can write a sales pitch full of compelling language, but it means nothing if there aren’t results being provided to back up your claims. Too many people have fallen for great sales pitches that turned out to be scams, so generally people’s level of skepticism rises when huge results are being promised.
Prove to readers that all that you promise has actually occurred with other people.
Provide real case studies and testimonials. You want to take away apprehensive thoughts by proving the legitimacy of all the great results you promise.
If you are claiming that you can produce a specific result for the reader, you must use people you have helped in the past as proof. Let them provide the positive feedback verifying how your product or service helped them become successful.
Example: Lisa is a customer of yours who has benefited immensely from your service. You ask her if she will provide a testimonial for your website, and she agrees.
Lisa was a struggling speaker, who could barely earn any money in the profession. She didn’t know how to engage with her audience, and she didn’t know how to speak effectively. She would ramble on and on instead of moving her discussion along smoothly.
She hired your services as a speaking coach and began to transform as a speaker. Your company helped Lisa work on her delivery, perfect her talking points, and become a storyteller instead of a fact teller.
Now Lisa is booking more engagements, and is ecstatic about how much she has grown as a speaker. She becomes one of your company’s most enthusiastic spokespeople, happily providing a testimonial on your website, and encouraging other speakers to use your services.
8. Make the Call to Action Urgent
When people read your writing, you want them to take a specific action. This can’t happen if you don’t tell them how to take this action. Let it be know that this exact opportunity won’t exist for very long.
Time constraints place more value on your offer.
If the reader is serious about producing better results in their life or business, they will act immediately. Placing urgency on your call to action also helps to weed out the time wasters. People who make the purchase immediately are often willing to work harder in order to ensure their money was a good investment.
You don’t want to make your offer urgent just so that you can make money quickly. This means that you aren’t focused on providing value to the customer, and instead only want to make money at their expense.
When placing urgency on your offer, focus on the reader’s current position and their desired position. Communicate that the longer they wait to make a change, the less time they will have to make a change as time goes on.
Example: If you are having a mastermind weekend in Bora Bora, let it be known that availability is limited.
Set the max attendees to 15 people and stipulate that a deposit has to be made by a certain date in order to have their spot reserved. Those who are serious about joining the mastermind opportunity will reserve their spot immediately.
If you put the effort in at this stage, then you won’t have to spend a great deal of time marketing and trying to sell the mastermind getaway. You will be able to focus on making the weekend as valuable as possible for your attendees, instead of worrying about trying to fill your last five available places.
9. Offer Something Free
People love free stuff. When you offer something of value for free, it helps your sales efforts. But the free offer does come at a price — subscribing to your email list.
Your free offer should be used as the gateway to convert the reader into a customer.
Anything that you offer for free is just a way to create a warm lead. Your goal is to turn those freebie receivers into paying customers. As they get placed in your sales funnel, you must nurture them from prospect to customer. This is why your free offer has to be valuable, as it makes the conversion effort an easier process.
Example: If you are offering consulting sessions, offer your ebook that talks about how consulting increases a business’s growth, for free.
Within the book you should include examples of how you helped other companies improve the performance of their business. And remember that they had to use their email as collateral to download the ebook. Now you can follow up with them after a week to see what they thought about the ebook, and if they had any further questions. Eventually, as you continue to build trust and establish your expertise, booking a consulting session with you should be a no brainer.
Using Copywriting Effectively
Even though copywriting is all about selling your product or service, you must remain honest about what you can actually provide for people. Internet scammers are real, and people fall for well written and marketed scams all the time.
Be honest with people. Let them know that those who had success with your product or service did so because they put in the hard work and listened to your advice. Purchasing your product or service won’t produce miracles (unless you are in the business of selling silver bullets — in which case, why haven’t you let us in on it?!) The only way to achieve success is by being persistent every single day.
The strategies provided for you can be used to take your sales from almost nil to explosive growth. The purpose of copywriting is to convert readers into customers. When your copy is written to educate, engage, and convert, you will never have trouble keeping your sales pipeline full.
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