 Hello and welcome to Sunday Morning Worship Services at the Church of Word Press. Thanks for getting up early this morning. Appreciate it. We'll try to make it worth your while. I am Tom Todorisi and I actually started out as a designer because I've always loved good design and I'm grateful that most companies understand the importance of a good professionally designed website and they're willing to pay for it. Not all, but most. And as designers tend to do, I've trolled around online looking at awesome websites for inspiration. But when I started looking closer I noticed something interesting. A lot of those professionally designed websites were filled with weak, even amateurish writing. Clearly, more thought was put into the colors and fonts than into the company's core messages. And that seems surprising to me because as much as a clean distinctive web design can help visually define the brand, I can't say I've ever responded or bought the company's product because I like their website design. On the other hand, it feels funny to admit that I have responded and bought stuff from ugly websites. You probably have, too. So I'm not sure I find this kind of curious, but it got me thinking. So if people are shopping online for things like jewelry, clothing, or photography, it's really the pretty images of beautiful things that help entice people and move the sale along. But most of our companies and most of the sites we work on, for example business services, don't have pretty products to show. So I asked what is strategically that helps engage people, helps them look around, click around, and eventually to buy. The answer seemed to be, it's the written word. And that's when I decided to become a copywriter. Which of course brought up all kinds of other issues. I mean, how do we really engage people? How do we actively sell these days without sounding salesy? And how do we engage people with a notoriously short attention span? And how do we stand out from competitors who pretty much sell the same thing? And these are challenges, yes, but there's some of the challenges we'll talk about today. But first I want to make a distinction between web copy on our homepage and our product and service pages versus web content on our blog posts and white papers. For our purposes, copy is for selling to people and content is for educating them. Generally speaking, and today we'll focus on writing web copy from three angles. The strategy, the pages, and the process. With business websites I've found that even more important than the actual wording is the strategy behind those words. And the first big picture strategy issue to consider is do we want a website for our company or do we want a website for our customers? Put another way, do we want a corporate style website that talks mostly about our firm and our vision or do we want an active marketing website to drive engagement, responses, leads, and sales? So let's read a slightly exaggerated example of the first one. With corporate websites sometimes we seem to think that this kind of stuff will impress people. It's an approach that focuses on what the seller supposedly thinks. It's all about we and our and us. But a true marketing website approaches things more from the buyer's perspective. It means digging deeper to understand what the customer is really trying to achieve and looking closer at their universe of perceived needs, unspoken needs, influence constraints, beliefs, and feelings. A good marketing website starts there. Now is that company more likely to make a genuine connection if they boast about what they're proud of or if they dig into what the customer is proud of? Okay. The inward-focused approach I find can be common when companies write their own web copy. But here's the thing, from the visitor's perspective, their own company isn't nearly as important. Well, that company is not nearly as important as their own child by an enormous margin. So start there. I've noticed that even a lot of designer websites focus on what they've done in the past versus what their customers are trying to achieve in the future. Now I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about our companies and our capabilities on our website. Of course we should. But it might be more effective if we start with what the customer is trying to achieve and then lead them to our product as the perfect solution. So let's say we have a residential real estate company and we develop some kind of technical innovation. Okay. And that's great. But maybe our technology advantage shouldn't be the main thing. Maybe make the customer benefit the main thing and then use our technology advantage to support that claim. Okay. So it's not just about what we offer. It's more about what you can have. Simply understanding that difference can bring our website copy to the next level. Another approach is to create a single benefit statement that covers both what we offer and what you can have. Here's the marketing paradox. Remember a company and its products are only relevant through the lens of the buyer's own perceived needs. But here's the thing. As business owners, as company employees, as company insiders, we naturally carry an insider's perspective and set of assumptions which can actually be a handicap when we're talking to outsiders or visitors. So part of our challenge as marketers is to go beyond how we see ourselves and even how we see our customers and refocus on how buyers see themselves. What was the situation that led to their online search for a solution? How do they see the various options out there? What questions are they stuck on? If that's where they're starting, that's what we need to start. Now strategically, there's one marketing question that every company must answer before starting any new website. Unfortunately, since that question is almost never asked, a lot of sites go spinning off in the wrong direction. And here it is. Are we mostly selling the idea of our product to people who hadn't considered it? Or are we mostly selling competitively to other companies, to buyers who are actively shopping? For example, the first company to develop collaboration software was selling the idea of online collaboration. But now there are a lot of similar products online and they're all competing by pointing out their own competitive advantages. So why is this important? Let's say we have a professional landscaping business and our homepage might try to sell hard-working homeowners on the idea of professional landscaping. Well, that's kind of fun, but here's the problem. The people you're trying to convince here, do-it-yourselfers who do their own planning and gardening, aren't online looking for professional landscapers. So they have no reason to ever land on your site. So who exactly are we talking to here? Chances are the people who are Googling Atlanta landscapers are higher income homeowners who are already convinced of the benefits of having a professional landscaper and are online searching to compare the various providers, right? So that's why it would be important to offer some kind of competitive advantage or unique approach to set us apart from the pack. So let's say we ask questions, jot down some notes, and it turns out that the head of the company is a master landscaper. So that might be a differentiator. But the problem with that is it's still about the company. How do we make this about the customer? What's the advantage to the homeowner? So how about this? Okay, so that's better. But let's keep going and take a closer look at homeowners who pay for landscaping, and we might find that they tend to drool over the pictures in home and garden magazines that let's us take things a step further. Okay, now we're getting somewhere. The headline has a strong emotional appeal to the sensibilities of that homeowner and then in the subhead, we tie that to a logical reason where we're the right ones for the job. So the point here is that unless you have a totally unique product to sell to that market or all your visitors already know you, then online marketing is mostly a competitive arena where we need to differentiate ourselves to stand out. And to do that in a meaningful way starts with asking questions, not just about the company, but about the customer. Here we do see a benefit, but we can't quite tell what the company is selling. This actually happens a lot. Job one for the top of the home page is to quickly make clear what we offer and maybe also who it's for so people know they're in the right place. Job two is to offer a unique approach that gives the buyers themselves an advantage. Okay, because we don't stand for something, message is simply we exist. Here are a few other ideas to help you. Web page copy hit its target. You can paint pictures with words including how that person is going to feel after they make the right choice. Plus it's not always about selling to people, it can be about empowering them to do something. And also we want to show them what obstacles are standing in their way so that we can show that we can solve that. In this case it's just a perception that getting certified will take too long. So this is more likely to connect because it's about that person stuck in their career looking for a solution. It's less likely to connect if we just make it about the college and their program. If we're trying to solve a problem for people we might first want to tap into their pain. If we're helping them achieve something it's about what we can help them gain. Here we address pain in the headline and gain in the subhead. So if we're marketing a product of service here's what I think it comes down to in the real world. And your copy show that folks that the things that are important to them are important to you too and that creates a bond and a cultural fit. I also see a lot of companies emphasizing that they've been in business and it's okay to mention somewhere we have seven years experience in web design but everyone has experience so is that really a compelling reason to use you? I also see headlines today like where are developers and we're passionate about what we do. I love the idea of that but I also love to know exactly how your passion is going to help me shine if I hire you. In any case we've been focusing a lot on that main homepage headline and banner because if we don't grab their attention with that we're not giving folks a reason to read any further. Now we'll go through the pages of a website one by one and with some rapid-fire copy tips and ideas that you may not have thought of. Now we generally plan a site based on three layers. The homepage is layer one with brief intros to the company's products, approaches and benefits. Layer two is mostly product and service pages and then layer three if needed can be pages that get deeper into topic details. Four readers are interested in digging that far. Home page, overall large blocks of text on home pages these days tends to scare people away so let's think in terms of smaller blocks of text 10, 15, 25, 50 words with headlines for each. In this limited amount of space there's really no room for fluff or wasted words. In fact every phrase should plant a seed drawing people closer to their own conclusion that our offerings are their best option and so the whole point of the exercise of course is to build temptation so that they want what we've got. Two, our homepage intros and highlights should mostly be aimed at first-time visitors and early-stage buyers, layer one. Prominent and enticing links can take them to full topic pages, layer two. Number three, for buyers who are just starting out there's probably an emotional component to their goal-seeking. So let's reflect those sensibilities by maybe offering some empathy and making an emotional connection. Four, your new visitors are generally start out by visually scanning your page. They will read prominent headlines but may or may not read your text. So let's make sure we put our most important benefits in those headlines for what I call a scanner-first approach. With those short attention spans today we want to play our best cards right up front where they can't be missed. In five, you probably have a call-to-action button but people may not be quite ready to buy so adding a second button in the header or just below it gives them another option. It can lead to what you might call a find out more page which can take various forms. This second layer page is kind of a next step for readers on your homepage. Use this page to expand on some of the themes on your homepage. Maybe tap into the most common issues or questions drawing people to the next step of working with us. And also maybe offer objective tips, ideas, insights here to help folks get closer to their goal. Because to be authentic, to build trust we can't just try to sell. We have to genuinely try to help. Good point. Product and service pages. There's an interesting trend for product and service pages to look just like home pages because when people are doing a search this may be the first page they land on and it's just more engaging than an ordinary WordPress text page. Next we said that early stage buyers tend to respond to the emotional aspects of a possible purchase. But if they're digging into second and third layer they probably shift it into logic mode comparing details for making a final decision. So let's mirror that with logical arguments and competitive advantages. And third, in this talking about our services we may also list the common problems or frustrations out there because if you address the issue they happen to be having and they'll love it that someone understands them. And finally since scanners often read headlines but not text consider the importance of subheads. These are secondary headlines to help bridge the gap between headline and text to help draw the reader's eye in. Blog posts. Overall our blog posts should not be promoting our company or our service but I think it's okay to maybe educate folks on the general benefits of the types of solutions we offer. For example cloud backups versus hard drive backups. But separately at the bottom in a box or in a bold font maybe include a set institute on how our product relates to the issues discussed in the blog post and maybe include a link to a product page to get more marketing value out of your blogging efforts. And finally when choosing blog topics don't write for do-it-yourselfers or your peers but rather about the issues faced by people or organizations that buy products or services like yours. Make sense? Likewise I don't think people go to our about page to read about how wonderful we think we are. Instead let's do a few things here maybe in different sections of our about page. First let's reinforce what it is in Excel who would benefits and our overall approach to helping customers rather than an inward focused mission statement. Plus maybe a bit about the nature structure and size of our firm. Short version. Next let's take the opportunity to tell our story. Not a detailed company history but rather what was some of the insights or lessons that we've gained in the course of our professional development and what were some of the episodes and obstacles that helped us acquire them. The more human your story the more other humans can relate to it. Finally we can have a separate section that lists relevant awards, badges, credentials and advanced degrees. If you're doing a bio page on each employee rather than a detailed resume let the personality show through. Two things on our contact page. One make sure people don't feel like they're going to be obligated or pressured if they give up their personal info. This will make them hesitate so keep your copy here friendly, helpful and low commitment. Second they're more likely to call or fill out your form if you let them know up front what next steps they can expect. This is more important than you might think. My recommendation on testimonial pages is to not have them. Instead pull out the very best bits and sprinkle them around our other pages and at least a medium sized font where people might actually see them. The best quotes relate to common customer issues and how we help solve them rather than just general accolades about what a wonderful company this is. That way we're letting our customers speak out in a way that does some of the selling for us. For the last part of our program ladies and gents we're going to talk about the copywriting process. It starts with what's called discovery or gathering information and that generally starts with the web writer interviewing the company owner or other key players about their company and what they want to achieve. A good writer digs deeper and asks questions that have never been asked before. Also I might ask the same question in different ways to get past the superficial answers and the first thing off the top of their head. If the company says they offer good customer service well don't stop there asking them to be more specific and you might come up with a meaningful nugget that you can get upon. So be a detective and try to follow different lines of inquiry when asking clients questions I might ask them to answer from their customer's point of view. I'll ask when customers are happy what are some of the things they say or even better if they choose not to buy from you or not to buy at all what might be some of the reasons. Ask what are the buyers most common obstacles, questions and concerns and issues so we can address those up front in our web copy. Is there any way this product saves time or money? Be good to know. Ask about competitors including their strengths and weaknesses and maybe we can find an advantage or a niche or even an unmet need. So you see how writing web copy isn't just explaining what our company offers it's the expression of a strategy and that strategy starts with meaningful connections between the company's strengths and what people out there are thinking, feeling and wanting. By the way I like to interview a company manager and a sales or customer service employee together because it's that employee who really deals every day with those customers issues and questions. Now more often than not when someone stands to start writing a web copy they open a document with a word or a new page and wordpress and they start typing. You know what? That's not the way to do it. Why? Because the actual writing isn't the first step it's the last step. What we first want to do is review our notes to see if any patterns emerge from that interview and next for each page or section of copy let's create a separate word document then let's rewrite all our notes but this time drop each of those benefit points into the appropriate word doc. When you finish you'll have several documents each containing notes for that appropriate web page. So don't worry about final wording yet but think about the connections you can make between the company's advantages and delighted customers. Then after we've categorized the points the next step is to prioritize those benefit points in each of our word docs. Okay? What's the most important point on that page maybe mark it as an A second most important would be a C B other points could be C's. Okay? Also consider where you might just delete your lowest rank points to not distract from your strongest material. Now we're finally ready to start the actual writing. First for each web page the most important point or benefit can be expressed in the made headline. The second most important point should make it into a subhead. The text would include a support for those points as well as other items from your list. So if we do it right we should end up with a lean initial copy draft that is strategically on target. That generally doesn't happen when we're just writing off the top of our head. Next we go back and see what we can improve or polish our copy. Can a certain point be made more clearly or more succinctly brevity is more important than it's ever been. No longer sentences or real long paragraphs. Our first sentence should intrigue people to read further. A vague or obvious opening line and you could lose them right there. And for our last line sometimes I like to circle around to that emotional connection to set up the call to action that follows. Next use a active voice starting some sentences with the word you or an implied you for example get unlimited online backups versus we offer unlimited online backups. And remember that smart people today will respond to specific benefits rather than vague promises or claims. Finally let's keep the tone of our writing friendly and authentic and informal as if we were having a conversation with that particular reader and an authoritative corporate voice which actually tends to create distance between the company and the visitor. We haven't focused on the SEO aspects of web writing so far but everything you read about SEO today starts by appealing to humans rather than search engines because well written engaging copy will get people to read, click, share and come back again and that's Google's algorithms. Plus adding third layer topic detail pages over time as well as blog posts makes Google happy and gives us opportunities to add more keywords one or two per page use several kinds of lines and text. To attract ready to buy shoppers we want to focus on more specific what they call long tail keyword phrases rather than broad single words and if your primary keyword simply doesn't work in your main H1 headline as is often the case when we're writing for humans then use it in your H2 subhead but don't over do it with keywords otherwise we end up with unreadable silliness like this. Okay one last section let's finish up now if you're thinking of writing copy for your own site but this seems like a lot of steps and you just you know feel like you just too close to it well you know that's why there are professional writers or if you're designing a site for a client and you want professional written copy to go with your professional design that's where there are copy writers. Plus of course if you're a designer you know that waiting for the client to cough up their copy and content can bog down the entire project as important as this is clients struggle because they're not writers anymore than their designers right but when you do choose a copy writer remember that conversion optimized marketing writing is a specialty among writers so it's very different than say log writing. Anyway we start with an initial talk and a decision over the project scope so the writer can do a cost estimate. If the web design firm is bringing in a writer that writer can either work directly with the client and be paid by the client or the writer can be part of the dev team and be paid through the agency in that case copy writing will be a line item in the web design companies initial website proposal to generally the writer does the writing first as they determine the sections of copy needed to convey the right series of messages and then the designers design around that or the designers can design first and the writer writes to fit the various copy sections though letting the message drive the design really makes a lot more sense if we're trying to build a persuasive case for something. We talked about the interview there if you find that the writer only asks questions about the company and not about their customers for their time and find another writer. A good writer will dig deeper and make a stronger connections rather than simply parroting back whatever the business owner says just in nice awards. Five if you have a limited budget consider having the writer just write the home page and other prominent sections of the site and finally once the writer has completed their first draft of copy the client of course will have a chance to review it and suggest revisions if something seems misleading or certain wording doesn't seem to ring true in their industry and other than minor word changes it's probably best if the client doesn't try to rewrite the copy themselves but rather explain to the writer the reason for the change and the writer of course will submit one or more additional drafts of copy until the client is happy and signs off with the final approval. In the case if you're hiring a writer the fact that we're aware of some of the issues we talked about today will make you a better point person for that copywriter. My smart colleague Kathy Drewen the main organizer here at WordCamp offered this interesting insight. Hopefully today we can agree that the visual part of a website will certainly super important takes the reader and the company only half the way there. Earlier asked three questions how do we proactively sell these days without sending salesy? Well by honestly focusing on what the customer is trying to achieve rather than just what the company thinks of themselves. Next, how do we engage an online audience with a notoriously short attention span? Well by putting important benefits in intriguing headlines in our first approach to a layered website. And then finally how do we stand out among competitors who pretty much sell the same thing? Well by zeroing in on that one main benefit approach or insight that shows that we understand our buyers better than anyone else. Anyway I want you to do me a favor next time you look at a new website and say well that's a good site I want you to stop and look closer and ask well is it actually a smart business website optimized to engage people in an illicit response or is it simply just a nice looking website design? So separate the strategy from the aesthetics when you judge your new site and you will learn some very useful and interesting things. In the meantime you can jot down your URL here for slides and a phone little e-book and if you have questions later on copywriting come up for a card. Anyway I know that was a lot to throw at you but thanks for sticking with it. Luckily for you that's all I got. Any questions? Yes. Blogging mostly focuses on the topic that you're blogging about whereas a marketing writer is focusing on the audience and is doing some research doing some thinking asking some questions about where that audience is starting so it starts with just a totally different approach and rather than just coming up with information about a topic it's more from outside looking in. What type of? What type of both? Generally you've got a copy for the front pages of your site and you want a marketing copywriter but if you're looking for somebody to do blogging then a content writer. There are some people that can handle both but they really are two different types of writing. Somebody writing a sales page would be a marketing copywriter and there are some differences if it's a landing page from an email campaign you want to connect the two and brevity is really important on a sales page and you want to drive them as closely as possible to responding. Well both kinds of writers today should be able to do SEO writing and for some companies SEO is part of the strategy for some companies it's not and if it's not I would say don't do it just for its own sake because the more you focus on search engines you've got to pull away a little bit from humans but that is part of the writer's challenge is to try to integrate both. Long tail keywords that would be instead of like a broad term might be slippers. If you're searching for slippers whereas a long tail phrase might be pink bunny slippers so that is more specific the person who's looking for slippers is just kind of looking around but somebody who's searching for pink bunny slippers is probably what they're looking for and are probably closer to buying than the person who just wants to see what's out there in slippers. Probably it's a fair question no we shouldn't make them up but we can edit them because very often you'll end up with maybe a paragraph but like I said we want to pull out just the very best parts of it because again short attention spans people aren't going to read through a paragraph but if I can get that quote down to seven or nine words and put it in a big font people will read it. That's what we're looking for and also if the client is going to be asking their customers for testimonials maybe we can prompt them to get them to focus on some specific problem that customer was having and then how we help solve it is just more useful than some testimonials that are just very broad David? Good point excellent point Right Right Yeah I wouldn't include the testimonial without a full name of attribution and it's also a good idea to shoot an email to the person who gave that testimonial and show them the edited version and say is this okay? Okay Which is why there's kind of a movement away from on-site testimonials and rather having links to actual review sites that you can't scan quite as easily I think it helps to break it up a little bit with just totally different sections whether it's separated by a line or maybe different color boxes or even think about how today's home page is structured and you've got different physical layers of information and that way it's not all crammed together and it's just more easy to read if you've got separate sections and that way you can separate what you do from your story and it doesn't all run together Yeah I think so and how you do that is up to the design or some of it could be in a sidebar if you've got sidebars Right The home page and then what I'll do is the intro the subhead on product pages and then the closing which leads to a call to action so that way the most prominent parts of the site have some marketing and then the client fills out the rest which sometimes cannot be a bad idea if it's highly technical and it would just take so long for the writer to get up to speed on the high level of technology the client is talking to their own customers That's the designer's job Every writer is going to handle that differently some do it by page some will do it quote the entire site but it's going to take at least a few hundred dollars at least to do the home page and the discovery because even if the writer is just writing the home page they still have to go to the discovery process to make sure they're saying the right thing so usually even on a reduced project it's still going to be a little bit higher and then additional pages are going to be a little bit less between 500 and a thousand the discovery process well I don't generally need to explain the process to them I'll just tell them I'm going to ask you some questions and then basically it's my job to ask the right questions and then to take those answers and to do something useful for them and to know what I get out of that interview that is useful and what is not because very often I don't start getting the good stuff until the second hour of the interview and there are some writers who won't go that far they say okay this is what you want to say that's what I'll write well what's that really worth because you need somebody who sees it from the point of view of somebody who's not the company owner that conversation with a client is probably the first step that's a good point here's 50 pictures of my own products here's one so great sure that's a really good point it's hard for anyone to separate ourselves from our own point of view so you kind of have to hold them through that a little bit and you might ask them questions and they might hesitate on that a little bit but you kind of have to explain to them yeah because they figure it's my site it should be all about me well that's fine and I find that even though companies start I guess it's time well I guess the word cam train reached the station so thank you you