Five Secrets of Sparkling Website Copy
Entrepreneur.com is one of Peppermint’s trusted sources for keeping up to date with what’s trending. It’s a reliable provider of eye-catching content and it invites a bunch of experts to share their insights with its readers. So, when a link to an article about the secrets of making your web copy ‘pop’ dropped in the mailbox, we thought it would be worth reading and sharing with our clients.
Rebecca Rubin, founder of The Pursuit of Fabulous shares her insights into making your website copy sparkle like an entertaining dinner guest. As she points out, you don’t want your content to be compared to a “an egotistical expert” who constantly talks about himself with letting you get a word in; you want your copy to be more like the charming entrepreneur who wants to know all about you and also happens to be an expert in something you need help with.
Rubin has come up with five tips to guide web content writers keep readers glued to the page, rather than boring them into escaping to a website elsewhere.
Clarify your goals
Before you start to write, define what you need the piece of writing to do. Do you need it to sell a product, comment on your blog posts, or subscribe to your newsletter? Rubin says that clear goals lead to clear copy. Also, if you know what it’s intended to do, it is easier to measure its success.
Know your audience
An obvious one, really. However, it requires some thought. It is easy enough to know your audience’s basic demographics, but do you know what motivates them, what they want from life, what they do for fun and what their cultural references tend to be? When you have a more rounded view of your audience, you can start speaking their language and create content that they can relate to. When they read your website, they’ll feel you know them like a friend.
Don’t be an egomaniac
Your audience isn’t terribly bothered about you, or what makes your company/product so great – they care about they need right now that you can help them with. Yes, you want to sell your products, but don’t make your content too ‘product-promotion’ focused. Use language to put the spotlight on your customers – use ‘you’ not ‘we’—and interrogate your copy and ask it if it really helps your customers. If the answer is ‘No’ – bin it!
Keep it brief
Don’t pad out your content just for the sake of it. Keep paragraphs short, easy to read and avoid industry jargon. Also, keep your use of language at the appropriate level for your audience.
Show don’t tell
Pictures, infographics, pithy quotes, customer testimonials and puns are all ways of engaging the reader and keeping their attention. Vivid images help your reader visualise what you’re trying to say, which makes it easier from them to grasp it and follow your call to action. Try the idioms section of thefreedictionary.com for or searching through some of the ‘pun’ resources on the web for inspiration.
If you feel your website copy could do with a polish and you’d like some professional help, contact Jade Thompson on T: (+34) 951 316 553 or jade@peppermintcreate.com