Archive for the ‘online copywriting’ Category

Web conversion techniques learned from a cockfighting hen

Friday, June 18th, 2010

It’s really pretty funny.  I’ll be walking back to the house from releasing the crackens, ehem I mean chickens, and if I stop a moment inevitably I’ll feel a bump against the back of my foot.  I know who the culprit is.  Roo Roo, as my children call her because of her rooster-like cockfighting moves, is always tailing us around the yard.

While the other chickens keep a relatively wary distance from us unless we have food, Roo Roo just sticks right behind us, bumping right into us if we stop suddenly.

She’s one of the chicks my kids hatched last year in an incubator.  And we speculate that she may have imprinted on us.  By imprinting, I mean the way that baby birds take the image of the first creature they see when they hatch and stick it in the box in their brain labeled “Mama”.  And from then on that creature is their mother hen.

The way Roo Roo tags along and jumps onto my kids’ laps and shoulders indicates a level of familiarity beyond the average chicken-human connection.  Imprinting is the only explanation, short of a bizarre chicken quirk of personality.

Now, as usual, there’s a great web writing lesson here.

Just like Roo Roo imprinted on us and follows along diligently, you want your website visitors to do the same thing.

You want to imprint your company – your image – in their brains in such a way that they place you in the box labeled “beloved source of vitamins” or “my home for healthy products”. Or best of all, “the only place I’ll ever go to buy . . .”

And then they keep coming back to you to shop.

How do you do this? Two things:

1. Imprint on Your Visitors With Good USP Use

Your unique selling proposition (USP) is key to your success.  It’s what defines you from the rest of the crowd.  It’s what makes your customers love you.  It also may be what makes some people decide you’re not what they’re looking for.

And that’s okay.

You want to figure out who you’re selling to, who you can really help solve a problem and then focus on them with laser-like precision.  When you do so, when you get specific about what you offer, you’ll make them feel like you really understand them and can really help them.

Inevitably some people won’t quite connect with what you’re saying.  And the nice thing with the web with 1/5 of the world’s population buzzing around is that you can still find enough ardent fans to do very well.

So to define your USP ask yourself these questions:

-         Who is my ideal customer?

-         What is their primary pain I can help soothe or their burning desire?

-         How does my service or product help them do this? Which features help it do this?

-         How does my company do things differently?  How do we make the shopping experience more successful, more of a pleasure, less rife with obstacles?

-         How do I do this differently or better than my competition?

-         How is my competition articulating the way they help and how can I define myself from this?

Consider the tone of voice, the personality you want to establish for your company.  And what kind of relationship you want to establish with your visitors.

And then try to put this together in 3 sentences at the very most. Whew! That’s the tough one.

By doing so, you’ll define your USP.

But once you figure your USP out, don’t just rest on your laurels. Get it out there.  Online conversion expert Bryan Eisenberg notes that one of the main strategies top converting websites use is making sure their USP is highly visible not only on their home page but on their internal pages as well since these may be the landing pages people come to first.

So scan your home page and make sure that in those 3 seconds you’ve got to make an impression on a visitor you can tell them why they should stick around.

And then look at your internal pages for similar references that keep your visitors with you.

2. Develop content that supports your USP beautifully.

Not only do you need to state your USP up front, but make it ring true.  Now I’m not going to get into product formulation or customer service here since that’s not really my area of expertise.

What I can talk about is how you underscore your USP by providing information that both defines you and makes your customers and visitors happy and satisfied.

Solicit feedback from your customers, research keywords diligently, keep a close eye on Twitter and then simply make sure you provide quality, interesting, helpful, entertaining content on your website.

A couple months ago a potential client asked me, “With content, isn’t it more about quantity than quality?”

Unfortunately, grey hat SEO folks have pushed things more in that direction by using optimized content mills to get Google rankings.

But that’s changing now.  Too many people were frustrated with searches that ended on top ranking web pages filled with semicoherent optimized babblings with no substance.  Google picked up on this and shifted things with the new algorithms they introduced in May.

So be prepared to see better results for your good content from Google.  But better yet, happy visitors who decide to buy from you and customers who keep coming back.

When you provide this kind of service that connects people to your solutions and their happiness, you make your USP more than just a few sentences. You make it your way of doing business and your presence on the web.

So develop your USP, make it visible and then substantiate it with more solid content.  Before you know it you’ll feel a bump bump bump of all the visitors and customers who have been following you around and are lining up to do business with you.

Just like Roo Roo, our besotted cock-fighting hen does when the objects of her affection pause to look around.

If you want to improve your copywriting for both homepages and content in general, check out this great web copywriting course that helped me get going online.

What are your ideas about developing a USP?  How has it helped your business and conversion rates? And if you have a Roo Roo-like story, please share it!

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Lies!

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Lies!

My daughter was caught lying.

It was a simple issue – she had gone online to look at videos when she was supposed to be working on her Japanese.  But instead of fessing up, she concocted a story about using Google to find a definition for a Japanese word.

Now it’s a small thing in some ways.  Kids are notorious for playing when they’re supposed to be buckling down.

 But it’s huge in its ramifications. The major transgression here was her lie.  And trust isn’t something you can play with.

For years, she’s trumped her younger brother in many a dispute because she has a reputation for honesty.  Often we’ve used her spotless record to prod him to be more forthcoming.  He’s had to work hard to make his arguments hold water since he has such a tendency to embroider the truth.

But my girl – she’s been reliable . . . until for some fluke – today.  Or maybe not . . .

See that’s the terrible consequence she faced when she stepped into the world of fabrication.  She no longer has that credibility with us.  All the past was left in doubt.  And even more significant . . .

Everything she said from now one would have to be backed up with evidence.  We couldn’t just take her on her word.  She’s going to have to work hard to regain this trust that took so little time to disintegrate.

This is the importance of truthfulness in advertising. 

As people get to know you, they begin to trust you.  And that trust transfers over not only to the immediate sales letter you just sent them . . . but to the next one and the next one.  It builds up.  It makes selling easier.

But be caught lying – even in one small bit – and that trust is shattered.  You’ve got mountains to climb to get back there.

Garden of Life’s Jordan Rubin hit this when his Ph D was questioned.  Tiger Woods’ sponsors faced this when his integrity showed some cracks.  I’m sure you can come up with plenty of examples yourself.

Now, I bring this up for a very specific reason.  As a copywriter, I work to create rapport between the market and the person I’m writing as (the company CEO, health expert in residence, etc.)  As a copywriter, I’m used to putting words in people’s mouth.  It’s like being a speechwriter when you write a sales letter for somebody.  I don’t fabricate any of the info I put together – but in some ways I’m putting on a façade as I write in someone else’s name.

But what happens with social media?  What happens when you hit Twitter or comment on forums or blog in another person’s name?  Can you still do this?  Is it a breach of trust?  Does the public assume that some tweets are carefully crafted by professionals-for-hire?  Are they okay with that? Or if I write in someone else’s name is that a lie?

And I’ll add an even stickier layer with a recent large online revelation.  Copywriter James Chartrand revealed that he was actually a she.  She had taken a male penname because she found she got more, better-paying clients when she presented herself as a man.  In the Copyblogger blog where she told the truth, her self-disclosure was taken with a warm round of applause.  But how about her clients?  Was there fallout?

Plenty of copywriters (like Michael Masterson) take pen names – I’ve thought about it myself to protect my privacy.  (Full disclosure:  I don’t.) But how does this factor into the age of social media, transparency, and relationship-building.

As James (or Jamie, now?) made it clear:  It’s only a matter of time before someone uncovers the truth if they really want to.  You’ve got to be prepared with an explanation.

On one hand, I feel that if the idea of using a professional writer in social media makes you feel conned, you’ve got a certain naivete about the world.  As much as we feel buddy-buddy in chat rooms, it’s not the same as really getting to know someone.  Face to face.  And to expect that it is the same is not understanding that we’re still communicating through the safe distance of our machines.

But as copywriters, we also write to tap into people’s emotions – again, building trust and asking people to let down their defenses.  And it’s not something to take lightly.

I don’t have a conclusion here.  I’m trying to sort through this myself.  I’m working on marketing projects that require tweeting and intimate-feeling emails.  And so much of this is new, it’s hard to find tested results and best-practices.

 But it’s an important question for us copywriters to broach as we move online and then into the social realm.   I’m asking you to help me and all of us tuning in here to sort through this.  What do you think?  What guidelines do you use for online honesty?  I’m all ears.

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