Five Top Tips To Help Your Words Sell

[With thanks to Kathy Lawrence of Wrightwell Editorial Services for this Guest Blog Post.]

You’ve got a fabulous looking web site, not to mention amazing products and services to sell. But are the words you’re using working hard enough to convince your audience to buy?

Here are a few tips to help you make the most of your web content.

1. Who’s reading this stuff?

Surprisingly, your web site is not about you. It’s about your customers. And especially about the people who are not yet your customers but could be.

The key to selling is to make your potential customers feel like you are answering their needs, their wants or their desires.

Tell your visitors why they would want your product or service. How it’s going to fix that problem, make life simpler, save time and money or add a little luxury …?

If you’re not sure if you’re doing it right, then stand back from your site and put yourself in the shoes of your customer. Just ask “So what?” about everything you’re claiming for your offering.

At the same time, weave in your case for being just the right supplier to meet that need.

To make that task easier …

2.  Read this free paragraph on attracting attention now!

Your web site is an advertisement for your business. Would you start an ad with the words: “Welcome to my advertisement?” So don’t start with “Welcome to my web site”.

Make your first words on the page much more exciting. Write something enticing and yet informative to encourage your visitors to read on and click through.

It’s sale time right now. Just drop into any store site and see what it says on the front page.  Here’s one: “Up to 70% off Debenhams biggest sale now on”. That one line manages to be exciting as well as mention the company name, adding extra search engine appeal.

And talking of search engines …

3.  Stay calm and optimise

As I’m a writer I’m certain your priority is to create high-quality content for your site. But no one’s going to read it if you don’t find ways to bring in visitors. So you do need to ease keywords into your writing to attract the search engines. What’s needed is balance.

There’s some great advice elsewhere on this site about finding your keywords. When you’ve gathered the terms you need to get onto your site, try to work them in naturally without going all out on repetition. It actually makes your writing more interesting if you use different terms to describe your offerings throughout your web site.

Another way to keep the search engines happy is to add links to other pages on your site from each page. You’ll already have tabs along the top or down the side. Now you can also include interesting text links to spirit your readers away to another page full of great headlines, exciting offers and reasons to buy.

Remember though to ..

4.  Speak as one

The faster your web site grows, and the more people who are writing for it, the more opportunity there is for it to start to become confusing and confused.

A great way to address that issue is to create a house style guide for everyone to follow so that you appear to be writing as one.

Here are a few things to think about:

• Are you going to talk about your business as “We”, “I” or only by company name? This is a particularly tricky one for micro-businesses. You may be only one person, but do you want to seem bigger than that?
• How formal or casual is your language going to be? Chatty or traditional? What will work best for your readers?
• US or UK English? On a basic level it’s about deciding whether to –ise or –ize, but on a grander scale these are two different languages in many ways. Who are you trying to attract? Whom might you alienate?
• How long are your pages going to be? And your paragraphs? Mixing up the lengths of sentences can keep the writing interesting, but make your copy too long and visitors will move on before you’ve made your point

Before you hit that Publish button …

5.  Read it again

I know as an editor and proofreader I’m in the business of being picky, but I’ve just changed my mind about buying cardboard boxes from a web site simply because the writers can’t spell. A little voice says “If they don’t give attention to detail in their marketing, where else will the quality fail?”

Some potential customers won’t be worried about poor spelling, bad grammar and accidental mistakes, but why risk losing those that do?

If you’re the author of content that’s about to be published, ask someone else with a good grasp of the language to read everything you write before it goes live. If there’s no one willing and able, then try printing out what you’ve written and re-reading it. Simply looking at your words in a different medium will help you see it in a new light.

Offer to do the same for your colleagues. You don’t have to mention that they’re remarkably poor at writing – just say everyone needs help with reading for typos. Just as I hope Anneve will do for me before publishing this guest blog.

How about a task or three for the week?

• Read through your whole web site and check for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors
• Check if your headlines on each page could be more exciting
• Replace any “click here” type links with more interesting text

Kathy Lawrence is a marketing writer with over 20 years of experience in copywriting, journalism and editing. She is constantly rewriting her Wrightwell web site in the light of advice she gives and gleans from others. She also writes a business writing advice blog.