Welcome to Week 6!
Some of you had an extra breather last week, while some of you had a steep tech-filled learning curve to negotiate. This week, we’re bringing the focus right back to your people again. Whether your site has been up and running for a while or it’s brand spanking new, this week’s task is very valuable, highly effective and a good indicator of whether your site will “work” once it’s launched.
This Week’s Task
Here’s your task for Week 6 of the 12WC: Put yourself in the shoes of a reader and edit, amend and tweak your website content to within an inch of its life. Or until it elicits the response you want it to!
This Week’s Advice
A bit like a gift, the wrapper is always important – it must be shiny, attractive and make the recipient want to open it up and find out what’s inside. But it is what’s inside the wrapper that will make a difference to the recipient – or not.
It’s the same with your website – the wrapper (design, layout & visual elements) all have a part to play in attracting a visitor to look more closely but it’s the contents (your copy) which will determine whether what you’re offering will make a difference to your reader or not.
Here are a few suggestions to follow to ensure your website copy does the job you want it to:
Make sure you lead with the answer to “What’s in it for me?”. A first time visitor to your site should instantly know what they’re going to get out of your site. In an ideal world, if your website title doesn’t make it clear what this is, your tagline definitely should. And if that doesn’t, then you need to make sure your high level pitch from week 3 features somewhere near the start of the page so that a reader knows what value they’re going to get by sticking around for a bit longer on your site.
Determine what action you’d like a reader to take at the end of each page. Now make sure it’s clear to them how/what to do when they get there. It’s always useful to finish each page or section with some sort of instruction or hint as to where you suggest the reader goes next. It can be as simple as a “Read more” link or “Sign up for updates” or “Check out the details here” – but whatever it is, make sure you leave some sort of suggestion as to where to go and what to do next at the end of every single page of your site.
Ensure each sentence/paragraph passes the “So what?” test. As with the question “What’s in it for me?”, you also need to answer the “So what?” question with every paragraph (even sentence) on your site. As you’ve probably heard, most people scan websites these days, looking for pertinent information before committing to reading through swathes of text. What this means for you is two-fold:
- Your text should be formatted in a way which enables people to scan it quickly & easily so as to pick out the pertinent, important information.
- The text you do include needs to be relevant and valuable – which means you should be able to justify why you’ve included the sentences and paragraphs you have in every instance…which means passing the “So what?” test!
The “So what?” test is a way of putting yourself in your reader’s shoes – what difference does this sentence or that paragraph make to them? Why have you included it? Is it even relevant or interesting to your reader? Or did you just include it because it’s something you want them to read, not necessarily something they would want or need.
Get strategic feedback. Sometimes asking for feedback creates more hassle, stress and frustration than it’s worth which means people don’t bother doing it and if they do, they ignore it! If you do it strategically however, it can save you from weeks and weeks (or months and months) of heartache, wondering why your website isn’t performing as you wanted it to. This week, why not seek feedback from the following people:
- Somebody within or as close to your target audience as possible
- A non-techy, web-unsavvy user
- A trusted person who always tells you the truth, even if it’s not what you want to hear
Don’t just ask them to look at the site & tell you what they think in general terms, ask for specific feedback about different aspects of your site (you can ask each guinea pig to focus on different things) – you might want to ask them about usability, ease of navigation/finding their way round, persuasiveness or “compelling-ness” of the copy, the overall look & feel of the site, whether they understood what you’re offering, whether there was too much or too little content and more specific questions on both the overall usability of the site plus the information you’ve included.
Take a peek at linguistic techniques such as NLP. The way you use language can have a dramatic effect on the response and the responsiveness of your readers. One of the most valuable skills I’ve learned in the past few years is NLP (neuro linguistic programming). I learned it to help effect greater change in my health coaching clients but from a copywriting and marketing perspective it’s been a massive benefit and something I’d highly recommend studying.
Suggested Resources
Article by Michel Fortin, a good place to start which outlines some of the emotional buttons a copywriter uses to elicit the desired response – it’s also worth checking out the most popular posts on the site for more great copywriting resources: How To Capture & Captivate Attention
Article series on Copyblogger, an excellent series from one of the definitive resources on the web about writing content for the web : Copywriting 101
Free book by Claude Hopkins, a classic but indispensable book that all copywriters and marketers (you!) should read: Scientific Advertising
Book by Joe Vitale, a really good introduction to the power of persuasive writing utilising numerous NKP-based techniques: Hypnotic Writing
Share Your Progress
As you know, there’s a prize draw at the end of the challenge for anybody who participates and shares their progress each & every week here on the blog, so make sure you bookmark this post and let us know what you achieved this week as soon as you’ve completed the task.
Sponsors
The prize bundle currently includes prizes from the following 12 Week Challenge sponsors:
Previous Weeks
- Intro: What It’s All About
- Week 1: What Are You Going To Offer & To Whom?
- Week 2: Create Your Game Plan
- Week 3: Identify Your People
- Week 4: Brand Yourself
- Week 5: Creating Your Online Stage (aka Your Website)
