An online presence is the difference between customers discovering your site and customers not knowing you exist. But good copywriting is the difference between one-time visitors and loyal return customers.
Here’s the problem: if you’re like many businesses, you’re unwittingly culling your following, and your weak copywriting is the weapon of choice.
If your copywriting is more like a murder weapon than a main attraction, here are a few essential copywriting tips to turn your site around.
Be Active
You know the basic English sentence structure, right? Subject, verb, object.
So why aren’t you writing your sentences that way?
For most copywriters, this comes down to the critical difference between active and passive voice. In active voice, the subject performs the action, while in passive voice, an action is performed on the subject.
For example:
- Active voice: Over one-third of applicants failed the entrance exam.
- Passive voice: The entrance exam was failed by over one-third of applicants.
Or, in website terms:
- Active voice: We wrote this post to help you work smarter.
- Passive voice: The post was written by us to help you work smarter.
Happily, active voice is also direct and easier to understand, two tenets of successful website copywriting.
Start the Conversation
Direct, easy-to-understand writing also resembles the way people naturally talk, which makes it easier to write conversationally. Real talk: it pains English teachers the world over, but conversational writing is essential to websites. The reason is simple.
When you’re trying to market to a user who can’t see you in person, you need to be able to talk to them. To put a finer point on it: when so many businesses are trying to reach customers online, your best chance of reaching through the noise is to make your customer feel like you’re addressing them directly.
You’ll notice, for example, that this post relies heavily on “you” and “your”. That’s Rule #1 of writing conversationally. The idea is to draw your viewer personally into a story. Make it easy for them to picture themselves performing an action.
Make It Like Your Milk: Skim(mable)
While reading habits vary widely when people are offline, people are quite consistent in their online reading habits. Or, rather, what they don’t read online.
When reading a webpage, site visitors only actually read about 20% of the content. This is especially true of high-literacy readers who don’t need to read the whole page to get the whole picture.
It’s not that people can’t read. It’s that they don’t want to.
Here’s the problem: if your site isn’t skimmable, readers can’t…well, skim it. And if they can’t skim it, they won’t read it. Keep your site the same way you keep your milk: skim.
The best way to do this is to break it up. Keep your paragraphs short— no more than three or four lines. Break up sections with headers. Use bulleted and numbered lists when you can. Hint: if it looks like a block of text, it probably is. Break it up.
Words to Lose: Jargon, Bureaucratese, and Corporatese
Ya basic.
Or, rather, ya should keep it basic.
And in your heart of hearts, ya know jargon, bureaucratese and corporatese ain’t basic.
You’re probably inclined to protest: but I’m a lawyer/doctor/engineer/nurse/technician/high-level businessperson! I need jargon!
No, actually, you don’t. Here’s the thing: even if you’re talking to experts, experts aren’t reading every word you write online. They’re only reading about 20% of it. And jargon makes it way harder to skim.
Plus, most of the time, you’re not talking to experts. You’re talking to average people. And average people don’t want to wade in pompous language.
Examples of words and phrases to ditch include:
- S.W.A.T. Team
- Core competency
- Scalable
- Negative feedback loops
- Benchmarking
- Paradigm shift
- Quarterbacking
- Variable geometry
- De-risk
- Rigorously disentangle
Also, drop these crutches like the bad habits they are:
- Hidden verbs (take a look, make an adjustment, take into consideration)
- Noun clusters
- Sentences long enough to make Charles Dickens cry
Don’t know about you, but last time we took math class, geometry wasn’t variable. Does anyone know what de-risk means? What’s the difference between average and rigorous disentanglement? And wait, rewind, who called the SWAT team? Why did they call the SWAT team? Is it the actual SWAT team?
No one knows what you’re saying. Stop saying it that way.
Want More Killer Copywriting Tips?
Now that you know how to kill it (your copywriting magic, that is, not your audience) you’re ready to take your site to the next level.
And if you need more tips to take your copywriting from meh to man that’s awesome, check out the blog for more great tips.