It amuses me that whenever I run a successful campaign with great web copy, I find a few dozen copycats mimicking certain parts of my work. Invariably, however, they merely copy the words but fail to duplicate the strategy or tactic behind the words, which is what really makes the copy effective. The writing strategy I employ in every web copy piece that I write is founded on three relatively simple rules.
Rule 1: Don’t Make Your Website Look Like an Ad
Depending on which source you believe, the average person is exposed to anywhere between 1,500 (Media Literacy Report published by UNICEF) and 5,000 (Charles Pappas, Yahoo! Internet Life columnist) advertising messages per day from TV, billboards, radio, the Internet, and practically everywhere we turn. That’s an average of 3,250 advertisements per day.
“It’s a non-stop blitz of advertising messages,” Jay Walker-Smith, president of the marketing firm Yankelovich, told CBS News recently. He estimates that we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 ads a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today.
Therefore, the last thing we want to see when we land on a website is yet another ad. Additionally, since most of us have been inundated with ads for most of our lives, we have developed instinctive mechanisms to tune out commercial messages.
Yet many online businesses seem to go out of their way to make their websites look like ads, billboards, or other commercial media. Don’t fall into this trap, because if you do, you’ll turn away potential customers. Always remember that consumers don’t hate advertising—it’s bad advertising that they detest. It stands to reason, then, that your website should engage your prospects, it should provide the solid information that they are looking for, and whenever possible it should have an editorial feel to it. Above all, it should be free of hype. Why? Because people usually go online to find information. Few people log on saying, “I can’t wait to see ads, and I can’t wait to buy stuff!” No, that usually doesn’t happen.
People go online to find information. That’s why they call it the information superhighway. Even if they are shopping for something—say, a DVD player or an antiaging skin care product—they are generally seeking information, not advertising, about those products. There is a myth that the Internet is an advertising medium or one big shopping channel. It’s not.
Here’s the first distinction between offline advertising copy and effective web copy. Web copy needs to provide good information that appeals to the target audience; that is, ideally, it must not look or feel like a sales pitch.
Editorial-Style Web Headlines
Don’t Buy a DVD Player Unless It Meets These 5 Criteria
How a Simple Formula Has Been Scientifically Proven to Cure Cancer
and Virtually All Diseases
[Courtesy of 1MinuteCure.com]
How to Sell Your Home Fast at Top Dollar—Even in a
Soft Real Estate Market
“Topical Botox”: The New Way to Erase the Look of Wrinkles and Lines
from Your Skin—Without Injections
[Courtesy of TransformationAntiAgingCream.com]
Can Streaming Audio Really Double Your Website Sales?
A recent Internet research study says you can.
What You Don’t Know About Foreclosure Could
Cost You Much More Than Just Your Home
[Courtesy of SurviveYourForeclosure.com]
11 New Breakthrough Cures That Transform Your
Health and Well-Being—and Add Years to Your Life
Not All Miracle Cures Are Created Equal
How to Tell if a So-Called “Miracle Cure” is Scientifically
Proven—or Utter Falsehood
Now You Can Separate Healing Facts from Myths
An Amazing Little-Known FDA-Approved Therapy for Pain Relief,
Smoking Cessation, Weight Loss and the Healing of 350 Diseases
[Courtesy of ScienceOfAuriculotherapy.com]
The World’s Richest Source of Cash—and How You Can Tap Into It
to Start or Grow Your Business
Melt Away Cancer From Your Body
Using Nothing More Than Your Fingertips?
Where does the selling come in? It comes from expertly crafted copy that tilts the website visitor’s favor toward your product or service. In other words, avoid blatant sales pitches; instead, provide irresistible information that slides smoothly into a sales pitch for your product.
Why? Because people online do not want to be sold to. A study conducted by web usability experts John Morkes and Jakob Nielsen (reported in a paper titled Concise, Scannable and Objective: How to Write for the Web) showed that web users “detest anything that seems like marketing fluff or overly hyped language (‘marketese’) and prefer factual information.” If web visitors ever do get sold on something, they want to be engaged and finessed, not bombarded by blatant advertising.
The operative principle here is engagement. Just as a high engagement level—not just the number of likes—is an important indicator of a healthy Facebook page, so too must a website have a high engagement score.
It bears rep...
