copywriting Archives - Shannan Seely Copywriting

How’s Your Website Doing?

Posted on by Shannan Seely

Hire a pro copywriter to audit your website now

I bet you could make a list. Your home. Your car (or pickup truck). Your retirement plan. Even your body.

You try to check on these important assets regularly. Annual audit, most likely.

And why do you do it? Well, you care about them. For possessions, you worked hard to earn enough money to acquire them. For your body, it’s highly important to be in tip-top shape.

“Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.” Jim Rohn

You want these assets to last, to be effective, to help you get you where you want to go. Broken or worthless is no help to you.

Had a website checkup lately?

Because this is an article about marketing, I’ve got to ask you:

When’s the last time you’ve done a checkup on your website? And actually had a copywriting pro review it?

Andy Crestodina of Orbit Media Studios examined the top 200 marketing websites, according to Alexa, and determined the interval between major website redesigns for each site.

The average timeframe for a website redo was 2 years, 7 months.

If you’ve been in “set it and forget it” mode with your website for more than 3 years, now’s the time to do a website review.

Steal Like an Email Copywriter

Posted on by Shannan Seely

Get inspiration from your inbox to reignite your enthusiasm for writing emails

This article is filled with gratitude to the office staff at the Parent and Family Programs at Rochester Institute of Technology. Here’s the story …

We moved our oldest daughter, Claire, to the college dorm last month. She’s enrolled at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, NY. And I feel like she was prepared, and we were prepared because of the Parent and Family Programs staff.

Well, true, Claire was organized. She kept her parents on track, but RIT was a positive influence.

Let me explain.

Initially, my husband and I scoffed at the emails we were receiving from RIT. Oh, this message is meant for helicopter parents. Adults who monitor their teenagers 24 / 7. Parents who are resisting the transition of their parenting role. Less micromanagement, more shifting responsibilities to their child.

Their boy or girl is a young adult, whether the parents are ready or not. Eventually, their child will need to do his or her own laundry.

But then we – okay, actually me, because I’m the one who reads the emails – came across information I didn’t know.

Valuable Information

The message recommended checking your health insurance to determine what coverage your student will have when they move to Rochester. Some health insurance plans have limited out-of-network coverage. Turned out, she needed in-state health insurance coverage for her out-of-state college student status. And the emails informed us about the options.

Thanks to the emails from RIT Parent and Family Programs, we learned this before she started college. My husband signed her up with the appropriate insurance. Yayy! Peace of mind. For her. For us.

I’m in the Parents of RIT Club

I continued to feel the emails were useful. Stuff I wanted to know. I felt like the emails were written to me personally. But I know I was one of thousands of subscribers.

Write as if you’re emailing one good friend, because that’s how people will get to know you, like you, and trust you. Henneke Duistermaat

How did the staff make me feel like they were writing exclusively to me? And why does this matter? Because you can learn from RIT’s emails. Even if you’re in healthcare, pharma or business-to-business. Because RIT completely looks at the reader experience. (I know, I know, they are a high-tech design school. But bear with me.)

You can do what they do. And your subscribers will be grateful.

You + This Copywriting Concept = More Sales

Posted on by Shannan Seely

Understand your prospect’s 5 stages of awareness to write more effective copy

Copywriting. Looks easy, but it’s not.

As marketers, we have problems when we write marketing copy, whether we do the writing ourselves or hire a copywriter, we agonize over this issue:

What do we say?

and

What does our prospect need us to say?

But a concept used by experienced copywriters can help us. Let me share the concept and show you how I applied it to website copy.

What’s the Concept?

The 5 Stages of Awareness of your prospect.

How to get inside a prospect’s mind

Before we write, we think about what we need to say. We know we need to focus on the reader.

We need to determine their point of view to persuade them to take action. So how do we do that? By listening to the prospect, which includes understanding the prospect’s stage of awareness.

The 5 stages of awareness is a scale. It shows how much your prospect knows about your products and services. The concept also shows how much the prospect knows about his needs, pain, and problems.

The concept was coined by renowned copywriter, Eugene “Gene” Schwartz. And he wrote about this in the book, Breakthrough Advertising. The book was published about 50 years ago, but don’t discount this idea of its age. The framework is foundational to good copywriting.

So you need to measure your prospect’s awareness level to write to him or her.

Why You’re Not Grabbing Your Reader’s Attention

Posted on by Shannan Seely

The nuance of selecting the right word

By Shannan Seely

“See, the best interpreters are part linguists, part diplomats. They have to know the politics behind each word,” Danny Hajek, National Public Radio reporter.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer.

How do you want him to feel when he visits and reads the copy on your website? Like you’re speaking directly to him? So he feels like you understand him, can relate to his concerns and have the knowledge to solve his problems?

Do you want him to think, “These people get me!”

Many writers inadvertently fail to foster these feelings online with a prospective customer. Let me explain the three reasons why and how you can fix it. Continue reading Why You’re Not Grabbing Your Reader’s Attention

Three Tips You Can Use Today to Break the “Curse of Knowledge”

Posted on by Shannan Seely

Have you been the new kid on the block, so to speak?

If so, you can probably relate to the dilemma we faced when we moved from Kansas to Central New Jersey four years ago. We needed to learn in only three days the ins and outs of attending a New Jersey public school. Our two daughters would be enrolling in an intermediate school and an elementary school.

So we went online. We visited the school district’s website.

This is what we saw:

Where do we navigate first?

The website is not designed for a novice to the New Jersey public school system.

Where’s the Parent’s Handbook? What will I find in the Parent Portal? Where do I find information about how to prepare for the first day of school? How do I know the information I find here is updated? Some of the text states “Updated on Sept. 15, 2010.”

I felt lost.

The website creators did not have me in mind. They were unaware what the customer experience would be for a profile like me: a new parent of the school, new to New Jersey, with two children.

Website creators assumed visitors will have the same level of understanding that the creators have. But we didn’t.

Chip and Dan Heath call this assumption the Curse of Knowledge. In their book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, the New York Times bestselling authors state this natural psychological tendency happens when we assume everyone has the same level of knowledge as we do.

“Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has ‘cursed’ us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind,” wrote Chip and Dan Heath.

Here are three ways business owners and marketing agency directors suffer from the Curse of Knowledge and how to combat it: Continue reading Three Tips You Can Use Today to Break the “Curse of Knowledge”

Ask These Three Questions Before Hiring a Copywriter

Posted on by Shannan Seely

Your boss has had enough. He agrees with you that there’s too much writing work to do and not enough in-house peoplepower (combining men + women + power) to do it.

He asks you to find a copywriter. In the long term, hiring a professional will ease your work load, but in the meantime, you have a new assignment in your job description. Find the right copywriter. Your manager may make the final decision, but he’s depending on you to do the homework.

Who do you recommend to hire? It’s important to choose the right one, not only to look good for the boss. You’ll be the main contact for the copywriter, so find someone you prefer to work with.

Three Important Questions

Let’s look at the three important questions to ask before hiring a copywriter. Continue reading Ask These Three Questions Before Hiring a Copywriter

Do These 6 Things Today to Makeover Your Writing

Posted on by Shannan Seely

All those ideas swimming in your head are finally on paper. The draft of the sales copy is saved in a file. You wrote your email. A chapter of the book has been written. You realize you’re not done, but it feels good to have completed the first draft.

Ready to make your copy 50 percent better? Thought I’d share some tips everybody can use to improve their writing today.

First, let’s take a look at two ways to describe a city’s landmark.

“The location is Western Australian. In the city center, just near a road, stood a monument about dead men and boys, some really young. A really hard time was had by them. It was a very long time before the community simply went back to a routine of school, work and marriage, but not seen by outsiders.”

Confused when reading the description? Already bored you to tears? Yes, it was mind-numbing to read.

Let’s see the description with exquisite detail. Read how M.L. Stedman portrayed the city’s landmark in her book, The Light Between Oceans, voted the Best Historical Novel by 1.5 million voters on Goodreads.

“… hard-bitten experiences that marked any West Australian town. In the middle of the handkerchief of grass near the main street stood the fresh granite obelisk listing the men and boys, some scarcely sixteen, who would not be coming back to plow the fields or fell the trees, would not be finishing their lessons, though many in the town held their breath, waiting for them anyway. Gradually, lives wove together once again into a practical sort of fabric in which every thread crossed and recrossed the others through school and work and marriage, embroidering connections invisible to those not from town.”

Now that’s an example of award-winning writing. How did she do that? We may not strive to win prizes for writing the best novel of the year — well, we may not all want to write a novel — but we can improve the writing we do, every day.

Six Tips to Makeover Your Writing

Use the active voice
Avoid the use of intensifiers
Use definite, specific, and concrete language
Create and use a personalized style sheet
Read your copy aloud
Ask another person to read your copy

Continue reading Do These 6 Things Today to Makeover Your Writing