Copywriting – Plan in Order to Succeed

It is vital before you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) to create the copy you need for each webpage, you understand exactly what you’re trying to accomplish.

You already know you need to increase direct sales, build a subscriber base, circulate information, as well as provide technical support.  But in order to do this, you’ve got to make sure your web copy can help you to achieve these goals.

It’s important to narrow down who your ideal customer is and just what it is they really want.  It’s not good trying to write copy to appeal to everyone – you’ll find out pretty quickly the message will get lost and ultimately it will appeal to no-one.

Once you know who you are writing for, you need to find and craft the words that will bring these people to you.

It’s also important to remember – without a detailed plan, it’ll be almost impossible to know who you are targeting.  Without a target, you are likely to miss out on those people who are willing and eager to pay for your help and expertise and by targeting a specific segment of your visitors and focusing on their problems, it becomes a lot easier to create the copy that will answer their questions.

It is therefore vital you become an expert in relation to every single benefit your product or service offers.  Then, once you are able to determine who you need to target, you can begin to search them out.  So start building a profile of those people who will benefit from your help the most.  Once you know who they are, then begin by repeatedly using strong web copy, and the most magnetic of the benefits your product can offer as bait.

Once you’ve found your target audience, you must develop a strategy for writing your copy.  In order to do this, the best way is to do the following:

1.    Write about what exactly the customer wants.
2.    Determine your writing’s ‘tone’ – how your copy ’sounds’ to your targets.
3.    Make sure your copy is easy to read and understand with minimal jargon

You need to think about all three of these things in equal amounts – don’t allow any one of them to overshadow the others.

How to Write Effective Copy for the Web

In order to write effective copy for the web, there are additional considerations you need to be aware of when write copy for the web in additional to sales copy, namely copy that will help you get indexed in the search engines and correctly linked to/from other websites.

The first two areas you need to look at are the page title and the META description.  Both of these are usually the first two things that a person will see when searching the web for a particular product or service.

NOTE: This doesn’t actually apply to all search engines or directories as some won’t show the META Description at all, instead showing a snippet of the content from your site, but for the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) they will use META Descriptions if they are there.

Some other areas you should focus on in order to write effective web copy are:

Heading  Tags (H1 – H6) – This will relate to specific subjects within your site.

Hyperlinked Text and Title Attribute – These are frequently displayed as a “tool tip”.  Which is a short message that will appear when the pointing device (cursor) pauses over a particular object?

Alternate Text (ALT) Tags – These are display when an image is not able to be shown due to a server error or if the user has turned off the ability to show images in their browser. Be careful not to stuff these with related keywords.

META Keyword Tags – Unfortunately, due to severe abuse by unethical marketers and uneducated consumers these are not as strong as they use to be.  In fact, most search engines will no longer be looking at these as a relevancy factor during their search.  So it is important that you make sure the keywords you use in this tag are to be found in the visible content for the page.

So effective copywriting for the web can only be achieved if you carefully research your keywords and keyword phrases, which I talk more about in this article.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, if you don’t know what it is your target audience is searching for, how can you hope to write copy that they’ll be interested in reading? Simply, you can’t and you won’t.

In the next article I’ll go over some other essential components for effective copywriting, including writing headlines that grab your visitor’s attention.

See you then.