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.

More often than not, most webpages will be found via a search engine.  This is very significant, as it means that the person reading your site has either been looking for you or someone like you.  So that puts them in control as they are focused on finding a particular product, service or piece of information.

So anyone visiting your site for the first time that has found it via a search engine will have a few questions in mind.

“Have I come to the right place?”

“Will I find what I’m looking for at this page or site?”

“Do I trust this person or company?”

So it’s vital you answer these questions in both your headline, any sub-headlines and as early in your body copy as possible.  It needs to be able to secure a response from this first time visitor immediately.

In order for this to happen, your writing needs to provide answers so that the visitor knows exactly what they are looking for.

What is important when writing any copy for the web is that you reassure any visitors that they are in the right place, and that they should continue to read on.

Visitors Are Important to You

You’re sitting there reading the line above thinking “Yeah Einstein, no kidding!” but you’d be surprised to know how many businesses completely miss this point. (How many companies have you dealt with that had awful customer service? Yeah, I’ve dealt with more than a few too!)

So in order to produce great copy, you need to get into your customer’s mindset as best you can to try an anticipate the questions they might need answering.

Normally, there are four questions a visitor will have that need to be answered.

1.    What am I doing here?
2.    How do I do it?
3.    What is in it for me?
4.    Where do I go from here?

If your site’s design and navigation can’t provide an obvious answer to these questions, then you should look at using copy in order to explain them and simplify your navigation as much as possible.  It is important that the answers to these questions should be obvious to all your users, and not just those visiting your site for the first time.

What is important to remember is that half the visitors to a site will not try to bother with working things out for themselves, and the other half may not even succeed.

Next, when planning, focus on your core audience. You won’t be able to reach everyone, so make sure that the copy you produce addresses your site’s most important visitors directly.  So, spend time explaining what the site can do for them in particular.  If you want to make it more effective, then don’t use words which would only be looked at by people that won’t be interested in what you’re offering.

If you’re targeting more than one type of visitor to your site, then either direct them to different pages or a different site.  What you should remember is that a visitor will go somewhere else if they do not feel your site has something of value to offer to them in particular.

So when providing them with facts, let the facts speak for themselves.  It is important that you make your descriptions compelling, although not excessive. Many visitors to sites will skip a site if they feel it is too full of hype (just bear in mind that some hype will almost certainly be necessary in order to excite your visitor).

In the next article, we’ll talk more about planning to succeed and how to write effective copy for the web.

See you then.