Don’t Be Boring
Nobody sets out to be boring. Few people have a driving ambition in life to go passed unnoticed, and those that do are rarely successful in marketing. For copywriters in particular, boring your audience can be the kiss of death for your business. Writing needs to be compelling, persuasive, and above all interesting. If you can’t catch a reader’s interest, your copywriting has failed at its main objective.
Good headlines are hard to write, but you cannot survive without them. It’s a little brutal, but it’s just that simple. Without a good headline, your reader won’t want to keep reading your article, your web copy, or your blog post. That means that without the headline, nothing you write will ever be read, and your copywriting will never compel a new customer to buy a product, visit a web page, or even be interested in what you have to say.
Getting your reader to pay attention to and enjoy your copywriting is a good start, but if you’ve failed to make a sale by the time they’ve finished reading, you still haven’t done your job. Good copywriting begins with compelling prose and enticing reasons to keep reading, but it should always end with a call to action.
This is surprisingly difficult for many writers, since the question “What is your call to action?” is ultimately synonymous with “What do you want the reader to do?”
In the last post we spoke about an exercise you could do jazz up your writing with some action words.
“Is” cheats the reader of the chance to create an image that will stick with them throughout the day. “There is a dog.” Most people would walk right by that statement without ever stopping to think about what kind of dog, what it looks like, or what it’s up to.
Try this exercise to jazz up your writing with some action verbs. Go through your copy and pick out every instance you’ve used the word “is” or some variation (will be, was, were, etc). Now rework the sentence so that you can use a more compelling verb in the place of each of those “to be” verbs.
Remember learning about the upside down triangle, or inverted triangle, in high school? Well, it turns out that it also comes in handy as a copywriting technique for your business. When developing your copy, keep the upside down triangle in mind. It helps you grab your audience’s attention right away so you don’t lose them before getting to the point. Make sure to answer the questions, who what, when, where and why.
The triangle’s base contains the most important information
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