The purpose of paying for custom writing services or hiring a freelance copywriter is to make money with content. Ideally, you want the amount of money you’re earning off that investment to be more than the investment.
1. Take the Time to Really, Seriously, Create Your Ideal Avatar
I’ve done at least one entire article on this, too, so I won’t rehash all the fine points. Let’s talk instead about why this is important.
For starters, when we write we almost always do so from the perspective of what’s going on in our own heads. We write in a way that appeals to us. The more you force yourself to think about your target audience, the more like them you’ll start to think, and you’ll start writing from their perspective.
Most clients don’t provide us with this. In fact, it can be a challenge getting any semblance of an idea of who is going to read what we write most of the time. We do our best, but there is a lot of guesswork involved. On those rare occasions when we are presented with a company’s ideal avatar, we can create some absolutely killer copy.
So, what about you? Are you going it alone? If so, you need as much direction going in as possible. Give yourself a break. Invest in some good resources, and invest the time to develop an ideal avatar so you can start approaching how you communicate with your audience from their own perspective.
2. Identify Your Audience’s Key Influencers
Hint: This is hard to do without an ideal avatar. ‘Nuff said.
You need to look at this from two perspectives: What are the positives and what are the negatives that are going to motivate your audience to act? What do they love? What do they hate? What is their biggest fear? What about your product or service will provide them with a sense of security? What will quell their fears and ease their pain?
Let’s just use a basic example. Let’s say you’re in the weight loss niche. What are the key influencers for people who are trying to lose weight?
Positives:
• Finding a diet that works
• Finding a diet that doesn’t force drastic lifestyle changes
• Finding a diet that lets them eat food they like and in good quantities
Negatives:
• Being failed by the diet industry
• Failing to lose weight on a diet
• Hating dieting in the first place
• Always feeling hungry and lacking energy while on a diet
Again, these are very basic examples. Your ideal avatar will give you loads more detail than this. Take this rough outline and see, though, just how a good story could develop out of this. Most dieters would give their right eye for a diet that worked and offered them a shot at permanent weight loss. The problem is that this promise has been made to them and broken repeatedly by the diet industry. They are distrustful of diets. What makes yours different?
Your job is to take all this data, everything you know about the people reading your copy, and jab persistently at the influencers while, at the same time, earning their trust.
3. Write Simple and Relatable Headlines
You can probably see the kind of progression these points are making. First, you develop your avatar, then you figure out what’s going to push their buttons. Next, you push them in the one part of your copy that most of them are going to read: the headlines.
Eight out of ten readers will read a headline. Of those eight, only two will routinely read further. Want to increase those numbers? Then you need to incorporate influencers into the headline. Make your headlines about the reader, not the product. Here’s an example of the difference:
Bad headline: New Scientific Discovery Promises Permanent Weight Loss
Good headline: Tired of Empty Promises from Commercial Diets?
You can get into the science later. People don’t care about science. They care that you understand that they’ve been burned before. See what that does? It makes you relatable, and it helps establish trust.
4. Seed with Well-Researched Keywords (but Don’t Overdo It)
Don’t be so fixated on a percentage of keyword density that you’re just pelting readers with keywords. Even if they flow organically, people will know what you’re up to. They’ll also find it tedious to read your copy. Talk to your audience, not at them.
Most marketers only guess at keywords. A little research into them could uncover a few that you probably hadn’t thought of initially. What does that leave you with? It leaves you with something to say that not every other marketer in your niche is saying. That makes yours a unique voice and positions you as an authority.
With these four strategies, you should be able to put together some very effective, high-converting copy. No matter what your investment, when you factor in money as well as time (and we both know that time is money), you want every penny and every second of your effort working for you.