Steven Lewis's Blog, page 12

How much SEO should a web copywriter know?

If you’re engaged in direct response marketing online, it might make sense that your web copywriter understands some search engine optimisation (SEO). However, before auditioning a web copywriter for their knowledge of SEO, it’s important to be sure you are:

Clear on the objective of your pageInvesting in an SEO strategy, not just copywriting as a standalone tacticNot confusing copywriting with content writing



Is SEO the primary objective of your web copywriter?

The goal of SEO is to persuade Google and other search engines to show your webpages higher up the search results.

If better search ranking is your number one goal, your web copywriter should be knowledgeable about SEO.

However, what few self-declared “SEO copywriters” will tell you is that the importance of the words on a webpage is often grossly overrated. Google considers hundreds of factors when it ranks your website. Your copywriting is only one of them. This makes it limiting to consider copywriting in isolation of other search ranking factors.

This means you’re extremely unlikely to rocket up the search rankings just by employing an “SEO copywriter”. There are too many other factors in play.

If SEO is your primary goal, you should be looking to a specialist SEO agency to give you a complete strategy. The agency might recommend copywriting as a tactic, but they might prioritise other tactics.

(If you don’t have a good SEO agency, feel free to contact us and we’ll tell you what SEO agency we recommend to our clients.)

Are sales or other conversions the goal of your copywriting?

SEO copywriting is about persuading a search engine. Conversion rate optimisation is about persuading a human. These are not the same skills.

If you are looking for conversions — to persuade a human to take action, not an algorithm — your first call should be to a direct response copywriter.

Is your webpage even eligible for SEO copywriting?

Many landing pages have a particular place in a sales funnel. The designer of the sales funnel doesn’t want anyone to find the landing page from Google before they have been through other stages of the funnel.

For that reason, your landing page might be configured to be invisible to search engines (or it should be set to be invisible to search engines).

If your page is invisible to search engines, you don’t need your web copywriter to know any SEO.

Are you looking for an SEO content writer rather than a copywriter who knows some SEO?

They call it SEO copywriting but they mean SEO content writing

Copywriting is the craft of persuading a person to do something. If SEO is your goal, you’re likely to be looking for a content writer, not a copywriter.

Are your visitors coming from SEO — Google and other search engines?

If you’re buying your website traffic from Google Ads, Facebook or elsewhere — and you’re not planning to invest in an SEO agency — you’d get better results from a direct response copywriter than from SEO copywriting for your webpages.

Concise copywriting tips

Once a week we email concise, practical copywriting, lead generation and conversion optimisation tips to the inboxes of our clever subscribers.

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Recommended reading about SEO copywriting

Here are some of the best articles you can read on the topic of SEO copywriting are:

SEO Copywriting: How to Write Content For People and Optimize For Google from Neil PatelSEO copywriting: The ultimate guide from Yoast

The post How much SEO should a web copywriter know? appeared first on Taleist Agency.

How much did copywriting increase your sales?

How much will copywriting increase your sales?

Taleist has increased sales by as much as 433% for clients and doubled lead quality. However, the ability of expert copywriting to increase your sales depends on a number of factors.

The first factor is the quality of the traffic to your website. There isn’t much that copywriting can do if the wrong people are coming to your website. It’s harder to sell ice to Eskimos than Bedouins.

The second factor is the quality of your offer. If your product is low quality, overpriced or otherwise unattractive, your copywriter will be limited in their ability to optimise your conversion rate.

The third critical factor is how good your copywriting is in the first place. If you have great copywriting already, improvements will be made in smaller increments. However, unless you engaged a direct response copywriter in the first place there is a good chance that your copy is ripe for improvement.

How do I know if my copywriting is any good?

If you’re in any doubt that your copywriting is following direct response principles, get an expert copywriter to review your website or to review your landing page.

Where can I find examples of copywriting increasing sales?

Taleist has some copywriting case studies and there are many fascinating case studies of how copywriting for conversion rate optimisation in the book Making Websites Win by Conversion Rate Experts.

Concise copywriting tips

Once a week we email concise, practical copywriting, lead generation and conversion optimisation tips to the inboxes of our clever subscribers.

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Recommended reading about copywriting and how it increases sales

Here are some of the best books you can read on the topic of direct response are:

Overdeliver by Brian KurtzBreakthrough Advertising by Eugene SchwartzAnything by legendary direct response copywriters Joe Sugarman and Gary Halbert (generally published by his son Bond Halbert)

The post How much did copywriting increase your sales? appeared first on Taleist Agency.

Is a copywriter truly objective or subjective?

A good copywriter is truly objective at the beginning of the engagement. That’s because it’s your copywriter’s job to stand in for your most skeptical prospect.

When your copywriting project starts, a good copywriter will ask you difficult questions. Many of those questions will start with “why”.

It might feel like your copywriter is challenging the quality of your business, but a copywriter who where your weaknesses are can counter them in your direct response marketing.

Your copywriter needs to be truly objective about your competition, too. What are they good at? What are they bad at? In what ways might they be better than you?

The more your copywriter knows about your strengths and your weaknesses, the better they can craft persuasive copywriting. It’s why research is the most important principle of copywriting.

When does your copywriter stop being objective?

Once your copywriter has absorbed all the research, all the good and all the bad, that’s when they become much less objective.

Your copywriter will become evangelical about your product or service. Your copywriter will believe fervently that you are better than the competition.

That’s because any doubt will creep into the copy. And you need your copywriter to have no doubt that you are the obvious best answer for your prospects.

Concise copywriting tips

Once a week we email concise, practical copywriting, lead generation and conversion optimisation tips to the inboxes of our clever subscribers.

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Recommended reading about copywriting

Here are some of the best books you can read on the topic of direct response are:

Overdeliver by Brian KurtzBreakthrough Advertising by Eugene SchwartzAnything by legendary direct response copywriters Joe Sugarman and Gary Halbert (generally published by his son Bond Halbert)

The post Is a copywriter truly objective or subjective? appeared first on Taleist Agency.

What is direct response marketing?

Direct response marketing is sales material issued with a measurable goal of getting the reader, listener or viewer to take a specific action.

Copywriting on a landing page might be calibrated to persuade the reader to make a purchase, pick up the phone or fill in a contact form.

The landing page is the marketing.

Making a purchase or filling in a contact form would be the direct response.

As soon as you add a call to action to your marketing collateral, you’ve entered the world of direct response.

Direct response marketing and copywriting

Direct response is the difference between copywriting and content writing.

Content writing is the creation of written content. Copywriting is the creation of written content that has an intent to persuade. This is why copywriting is the type of writing associated with direct response marketing. Content writing is associated with information and education.

The difference between a landing page on a website and any other page of a website is that the landing page is likely intended to be the only page the visitor needs to read before making a decision to take an action.

Writing a landing page takes skills in direct response, so getting a copywriter to review your landing page can help with conversion rate optimisation.

Concise copywriting tips

Once a week we email concise, practical copywriting, lead generation and conversion optimisation tips to the inboxes of our clever subscribers.

If you’d like to join them and claim your head start, you have only to enter your details below.

First name*Email*

PhoneThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
















Recommended reading about direct response marketing

Here are some of the best books you can read on the topic of direct response are:

Overdeliver by Brian KurtzBreakthrough Advertising by Eugene SchwartzAnything by legendary direct response copywriters Joe Sugarman and Gary Halbert (generally published by his son Bond Halbert)

The post What is direct response marketing? appeared first on Taleist Agency.

What is the most important principle of copywriting?

The most important principle of copywriting is research.

The single-minded goal of a copywriter is persuasion.

Your copywriter has one goal: for their copywriting to persuade a particular person (or type of person) to do a particular thing. It’s why copywriting is central to conversion rate optimisation.

That persuasion can only be achieved by copywriting on your landing page if the copywriter understands:

The person they are trying to persuade.The thing they are trying to persuade them to do.

Understanding those two things is accomplished by research.

What sort of research should a copywriter do?

Research: the most important principle of copywriting.

Who is the target reader?

Age, sex, location, political leanings… We need a picture. Research will bring it into focus.

What does the target reader want?

A copywriter’s research must take them deeper than what’s on the surface. Yes, the reader wants a back scratcher because they have an itch, but why do they have the itch and why haven’t they been able to solve it before now?

What does the product or service do?

The more comprehensive a copywriter’s understanding of the product or service, the more features they’ll be able to put to the readers in their copywriting.

What are the benefits of the product or service?

It’s often said that people don’t buy features, they buy benefits. In truth, they buy both, so a copywriter’s research has to take in the benefits of the product or service.

The more research your copywriter is able to do, the greater the chance of coming across the “big idea” that will unlock your conversions. At Taleist we have a seven-step research process for copywriting a website.

Concise copywriting tips

Once a week we email concise, practical copywriting, lead generation and conversion optimisation tips to the inboxes of our clever subscribers.

If you’d like to join them, you have only to enter your details below.

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The post What is the most important principle of copywriting? appeared first on Taleist Agency.

What is conversion rate optimisation?

Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the art and science of turning more leads into clients by refining the steps in a process.

What is a conversion?

A conversion is anything the client wants the lead to do. Common examples of conversions you might optimise for include:

Buying somethingMaking an enquiryViewing a particular page on a website

However any conversion you can measure can be optimised. And it’s important to do that measurement, if you want to generate sales leads.

How does CRO work?

An expert in conversion rate optimisiation will look at every step in the process from first contact with the lead to the point at which a conversion could occur.

The CRO specialist will take data at every point, measuring what percentage of leads make it to each point in the process.

Small improvements in the number of people making it through each stage can add up to significant improvements in the overall conversion rate.

The work of optimising conversions involves forming a hypothesis as to what is causing people to drop out at every stage then creating an alternative.

At the top of the funnel, a new Facebook ad might bring more people into the funnel. At the bottom of the funnel, a change to the shopping cart might lead more people to complete their purchase.

The art of CRO is forming those hypotheses and coming up with new creative — designs, copywriting and offers — to test.

The science of conversion optimisation is the analysis of the data to determine what’s working better.

Conversion rate optimisation frequently involves making changes to design and the copywriting on landing pages.

What is the 80/20 of conversion rate optimisation?

Because of the requirement for data to inform decisions, CRO can only be done at its most scientific where there is sufficient data. For websites, that usually means a minimum of thousands of impressions.

You can, however, perform conversion optimisation without masses of data, but you are turning up the dial on the “art” side of the science and art of CRO.

You might, for instance, ask for an expert opinion on your landing page because your landing page copywriting is the 20% of your conversion process that will give you 80% of the opportunity for improvement.

Conversion rate optimisation tips

Every week we send out a single, succinct CRO or lead-generation tip. Want yours? All you have to do is enter your name and email address.

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The post What is conversion rate optimisation? appeared first on Taleist Agency.

How to generate sales leads for a small business

To generate sales leads for a small business, you need to follow a version of this sequence.

Determine what you want your sales lead to do

Lead generation funnels are built bottom-first. Is this lead going buy now, call you, email you, book a demo…?

Choose your lead source

Will you be pursuing traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn, SEO, Google Ads…?

Create your offer

Next, you need an offer that will compel your lead to do what you want them to do.

Decide on your single call to action

Give a lead multiple options and you’ve created a sieve not a funnel.

Get your copywriting in order

The copywriting on your landing page must drive the lead to the conclusion that your call to action is the logical next step for them.

Generating sales leads for small businesses will cost money

If leads were beating a path to your small business without any effort on your part, you wouldn’t be reading this page to generate sales leads for your small business. Even if it’s just your time, you need to have a budget for generating sales leads.

If your plan is to create an online sales funnel to generate leads, your copywriting is going to be critical.

Put simply: the copywriting on your landing page is the only way to get a return on your investment in advertising or marketing that drives leads to your website.

You can send the hottest, most bothered traffic in the world to your website, but if those people aren’t persuaded by your copywriting, your money is wasted.

The first four steps in creating a sales lead funnel for a small business are critical. Your thinking here must be sound. But without persuasive copywriting, you won’t convert any of the leads you generate.

Who can help a small business generate leads?

Digital ads agencies are on the front lines of bringing in sales leads for small businesses. Their expertise in generating sales leads for small business tends to be in locating and collecting the right visitors to your website, whether they’re coming from Facebook, Google or elsewhere.

What happens after those leads are on your site, however, will be determined by your copywriting, which is why you should either have a specialist write your landing page or at least review the copywriting on your landing page.

The whole process of ensuring as many leads as possible convert to business is called conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

One actionable lead generation and conversion tip every week

We send out one lead generation tip every week. These emails are short, thought provoking and practical.

Want yours? All you have to do is enter your name and email address.

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Recommended reading on how to generate sales leads for small business



10 Ways to Generate Sales Leads if You Don’t Have Marketing Support (from Hubspot)How to Get Sales Leads Online Fast (Tips for B2C) (from Crazy Egg)

The post How to generate sales leads for a small business appeared first on Taleist Agency.

How to generate sales leads online for a small business

To build an online lead generation funnel for a small business, you need to follow a version of this sequence.

Determine what you want your sales lead to do

Lead generation funnels are built bottom-first. Is this lead going buy now, call you, email you, book a demo…?

Choose your lead source

Will you be pursuing traffic from Facebook, LinkedIn, SEO, Google Ads…?

Create your offer

Next, you need an offer that will compel your lead to do what you want them to do.

Decide on your single call to action

Give a lead multiple options and you’ve created a sieve not a funnel.

Get your copywriting in order

The copywriting on your landing page must drive the lead to the conclusion that your call to action is the logical next step for them.

Generating sales leads for small businesses will cost money

If leads were beating a path to your small business without any effort on your part, you wouldn’t be reading this page. Even if it’s just your time, you need to have a budget for generating sales leads.

If your plan is to create an online sales funnel to generate leads, your copywriting is going to be critical.

Put simply: the copywriting on your landing page is the only way to get a return on your investment in advertising or marketing that drives leads to your website.

You can send the hottest, most bothered traffic in the world to your website, but if those people aren’t persuaded by your copywriting, your money is wasted.

The first four steps in creating a sales lead funnel for a small business are critical. Your thinking here must be sound. But without persuasive copywriting, you won’t convert any of the leads you generate.

Who can help a small business generate leads?

Digital ads agencies are on the front lines of bringing in sales leads for small businesses. Their expertise tends to be in locating and collecting the right visitors to your website, whether they’re coming from Facebook, Google or elsewhere.

What happens after those leads are on your site, however, will be determined by your copywriting, which is why you should either have a specialist write your landing page or at least review the copywriting on your landing page.

The whole process of ensuring as many leads as possible convert to business is called conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

One actionable lead generation and conversion tip every week

We send out one lead generation tip every week. These emails are short, thought provoking and practical.

Want yours? All you have to do is enter your name and email address.

First name*Email*

EmailThis field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Check out our privacy policy

The post How to generate sales leads online for a small business appeared first on Taleist Agency.

Should you put your prices on your website?

Updated 24 September 2019: “Should I put my prices on my website?” I get asked it all the time. It’s not a yes/no question in a services business. It depends on your industry, your competitors and your business goals. Here are some things you need to think about to help you decide whether you should put prices on your site or not.

Scroll to the bottom of the post for a transcript

So should you put your prices on your website…?
Is your price within the range charged by competitors?

If your price is more (or less) than your competitors, you need to communicate why, which might be better done in person. And if it’’s much more expensive, you definitely need a website that supports that. You’’re not going to sell an Armani jacket on a website that makes you look like Kmart. (Did you know we review websites?)

Is everyone else doing it?

If everyone else has their prices on their website, you could lose out if you don’’t. If someone gets enough pricing information from cruising your competitors’’ websites, they’’re probably not going to jump through some extra hoops to get that information from you. They’’ll take the negotiation to the next stage with your competitors.

If someone gets enough pricing information from cruising your competitors’’ websites, they’’re probably not going to jump through some extra hoops to get that information from you. They’’ll take the negotiation to the next stage with your competitors.

Need some Google love?

Could you do with more visitors finding you through Google? Putting your prices on your website can help with your search engine optimisation.

We have in the past offered business book ghostwriting. That’’s something people search for, but the same people also search terms like ““how much is a ghostwriter”?” By putting indicative fees online, we become an answer to that question. That means Google sends those people our way because they can’’t send them to our competitors — they don’’t have any ghostwriting fees information online.

How do you feel about tyre kickers?

Maybe you do charge a premium and you’’re sick of wasting time on people who won’t pay what you’’re worth. In that case, you might as well filter them out. If you charge more than the average bear and you’’re worth it, you don’’t need to waste time talking to people who don’’t have that kind of money or any interest in paying it.

Not so fast, though. The other side of that is that you might have potential customers who don’’t think they want to pay your fee but that’’s only because they don’t know how much value you’re going to bring.

When you don’’t publish your prices so people have to make contact, you have a chance to sell them the value you provide. Otherwise, the number might do all the talking in the absence of any context.

What’’s it worth?

If pricing information in your industry is scarce, people might be willing to “pay” for it by giving you their email address. Once you have their email address, you can follow up–.…

That follow-up doesn’’t even have to be manual. You can put them into a marketing automation sequence. Mailchimp will do that for you for free with a simple autoresponder.

If you do decide to put your prices on your website…

If you decide to put your prices on your website and you’re not the cheapest, your website copywriting needs to work hard to prove value. You need testimonials, case studies, data…

Do you know what the price is?

This question came up recently and was a new one on me. The client is launching a test version of its product. It has no idea yet what the market will pay, so it hasn’t set it’s price. Right now, it just wants users.

Should it have a pricing page?

Now, this case is different from the others because there’s no way to actually put the price on the website because no one knows what it is. But the client could have a pricing page, which would necessarily have nothing more than “contact us for pricing”.

My view was that it would be deceptive to have a page labelled “pricing” in the menu when you have no intention (because you can’t) of fulfilling the implicit promise of that page.

What do you think?

Should you put your prices on your website?

from

Taleist – Using storytelling and journalism to help companies stand out

Transcript

Steven Lewis:

Should you put your price on your website? It’s a great question. It’s one that applies mostly to services businesses. In product businesses you would probably expect to see a price on a website. When it comes to services, there’s a lot of debate as to whether you should put a price on the website, or not. There are a number of things you need to consider.

Firstly, is your price comparable to your competitors? Somebody who arrives on your website and sees your price, might well have spoken to, or seen the websites of other people in your industry. If you’re a lot cheaper, or a lot more expensive, that’s something you’re going to have to explain, and it’s something that your website is going to have to support.

If you’re more expensive than your competitors, then your website has to look higher quality and more premium than your competitors. Your copy has to explain that away.

If that’s something that you’re worried that your website doesn’t do, or you can’t do in the copyrighting, you maybe be better of holding back and waiting, until you have an opportunity to talk to somebody, so that they can get a feel for you, and you can talk to them about why your price is different from your competitors.

The second thing to look at is, of course, whether all of your competitors are listing their prices on their website. If they are, and you don’t, that could knock you out of the running. When somebody goes online to do their research, they find a few people in your industry.

They look at the prices. They come to your website. You don’t have your price on. Maybe they’re not even going to bother to call or email you, unless they’re so impressed by your website, or they’ve been referred to you, or they’ve had some other sort of recommendation of you. You could knock yourself out of consideration, if you’re not providing the information that everybody else is providing.

The third consideration, regardless of whether everybody else is putting their prices up online, is whether you could use a bit more traffic from Google. In my experience, for instance, I offer a ghostwriting service. A lot of the traffic to that service comes from people asking, “What does a ghostwriter cost?”

Because I’ve got some information about my fees on the website, I attract traffic. On the whole, ghostwriters don’t talk about their fees online.

If you’re in a business where people don’t put their fees up online, you could win the war for getting traffic from Google by providing a good answer for Google searches, to that question of, “How much should somebody in this industry cost?”

Another consideration is whether you get a lot of tire kickers. Going back to my ghostwriting example, I found that I got a lot of people making inquiries in the early days, who couldn’t afford somebody to help them to write a book.

One of the biggest reasons, therefore, that I put my prices online, was so that people could come online, they can see how much ghostwriting a book cost, and they won’t go and bother to get in touch with me, if that wasn’t in line with their budget. I got a lot fewer inquiries, but the inquiries I got were of a higher quality.

If you find yourself getting a lot of tire kickers who just don’t have the budget or the interest in paying what you’re charging, you could find it a really good idea to exclude them and that hurdle, by putting up your fee.

On the other hand, you might be in a business where people think they don’t have the budget for that, but they don’t understand all that you do and the value that you bring. You may, therefore, want that opportunity when they make the inquiry, to have a chance to talk to them, and say, “This is what it costs, but this is why it costs that much. This is what you’re getting.”

Another idea is to give people the price, but to, if you like, charge for it. Again, with the ghostwriting example, I have a page about the fees. But if you actually want to know what the fees are, you have to give me your email address. In return for that email address, you automatically get sent a PDF with the discussion of ghostwriting fees, and why they are what they are.

I’ve got your email address. I can do some marketing to you if I want to, and you get a valuable piece of information you can’t get from a lot of ghostwriter’s sites. Again, you might find that’s a way to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and also, to give you a way of gathering email addresses from perspective clients, so that you can do some marketing to them.

There are other considerations when it comes to putting your price up on your website. These are just a few of them, but they give you some sort of idea of the fact it’s not a yes or no question. It’s to do with your industry, your business strategy, and what you stand to gain by putting the price up, versus what you might lose by putting the price up.

When you start to run the question through those sort of filters, I think you’ll be able to come up with an answer for yourself.

The post Should you put your prices on your website? appeared first on Taleist Agency.

The surprising role of children in copywriting

You know who can really help you with your copywriting?

Your children.

Don’t have children? Borrow some.

Here’s why…

The goal with copywriting is to pitch your writing at a 12-year-old’s reading level.

That’s not because your audience is 12.

It’s not because your audience is stupid.

It’s because your audience is busy and distracted.

And the chances are you’re interrupting them in the middle of something else.

You’re a distraction on top of a distraction.

The less work it is to read what what you write, the more your busy, distracted audience will take in.

I had a client who like to drop into his writing phrases like “cross-modal attention shifting”.

Given enough time, you could probably work out what cross modal attention shifting is.

But do you want to?

Or are you likely to walk away from a piece of writing that takes that much effort to read?

THAT’S why we aim for a 12-year-old reading level — so fewer readers walk away.

Writing simply makes our audience better-informed because they will have taken in more of the useful information we’re giving them.

And better-informed people BUY.

CONFUSED people stick with what they’re already doing. They DON’T buy.

If you don’t have a handy child at home, just imagine yourself talking to one.

Do they get what you mean when you invent a word like “learnings” — “Hey Jane, what were your learnings at school today?” Or would they use an actual word like “lessons”?

Do they LEVERAGE Instagram or do they just USE it?

Simple writing can be frightening because it gives us fewer places to hide by trying to look clever. However, it makes our audience feel clever.

If you focus on making your audience feel clever, you’ll see the benefits in your conversion rate.

Ready for some more conversion optimisation suggestions?

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