photo credit: TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³
Adwords, copywriting, SEO, headers, <title>, keywords….Online business is a lot about words and how you can make them dance at your will. Stealing an awesome phrase from an awesome movie, we all need to be “warrior poets” when it comes to our verbiage online. Luckily this takes more effort than skill.
In our current quest to test how viable a product idea is without wasting money or time, the most thought intensive piece of the puzzle so far has easily been the words. The title of the product, the copy of the sales page, and the advertising wordage to be specific.
I trailed out a week of Adwords for my undeveloped guide. I did it mostly to finally do it. As previously mentioned, I finally escaped my mind and have been keen to produce lately, even if just for experience. I kept a particularly small budget ($25) and used some keywords I had been analyzing (keywords) for weeks. My goal was simply to gain data on who clicked through to buy, and who left me their e-mail address. I knew I’d be revising before making a real decision but I needed to pull this trigger.
Results
- $25 Spent
- 387 hits
- 24 buy now clicks
- 4 e-mail sign-ups
- Keyword for Adwords : “how to backup itunes”
- Playing off the popularity (number of searches) of iTunes
The results were interesting, mildly positive, but what intrigued me more was after reading a rather lengthy (245pg) e-book on copy writing, I clearly saw how much my words needed to improve. Our words, our language as a whole, is everything when communicating with people. It’s clear any entrepreneur, lifestyle designer, or whatever you want to call yourself could always use a refresher on effective communication. The right words are like magic. I wasn’t present to this.
So I took the next steps in realizing this mock page needed one of two things to go through a real trial. I needed to hire a copywriter, or take a crack at real copywriting myself. You can imagine I chose the latter (to keep costs down, I was confident and well I’m cheap), but I didn’t even see this until after reading a book on copywriting. It’s clear that language is something that easily passes us by as a vital tool.
It’s a shame on the one hand because it adds time and effort to the feasibility testing of an idea, but it’s also a tool you’ll need and use continually as you go forward with developing ideas for income. The e-book I read was Make Your Words Sell and it’s free to download (scroll to the bottom). I’ll be summarizing my takeaways of the book in a future post and below I’ll explain the first steps in really writing to sell, and what created nearly the entire content of my re-write.
I wouldn’t mind outsourcing this type of work by the way, but locally with someone I could call regularly. It might seem impossible to ever let someone else write the message for your idea. I can understand that, but think of all the successful products out there, now ask if their creators also wrote there sales message? Do you think the guy(s) who build the Playstation also write’s its ads? or that Tim Ferriss doesn’t consult with other people or do rounds of testing before releasing written content? Don’t be afraid to do the same, remember relationships are fuel not just for you, but your ideas as well.
What to do now. Well, to build or not to build and in order to figure that out I need real feedback with some real copy this time.
Word Magic, Copy Writing Basics
- If you’ve never sold a product or written to sell, read something on it. It’ll help. Again, here’s the resource I used. Make Your Words Sell
- Use awesome headers, but avoid the word awesome.
- Express benefits, not features. People don’t care about features.
- Come up with 30 benefits by SWATing them. Take a feature and then ask, “so what?” to get another benefit. Come up with benefit after benefit until you have a huge list. Your sales page will develop from this. <- This was my biggest take away from MYWS.
If you’re interested in more details, let me know in the comments and I’ll really expand everything I took away from the book in one of my typically overly detailed posts.
Real Life
- First version copy before reading anything. (View)
- Second version when I was half way through Make Your Words Sell. (notice header changes, a lot still needed) (View)
- Here’s some feedback I received on the second version of copy from a real copywriter who I met through this blog. (View)
Next steps are to perfect the copy, revise the Adwords used, and up the budget to $100.
What do you think? Know any good copy writing resources? Leave a comment.
