Today I want to talk to you about your website copy.
So many of my clients and people I speak to struggle with this. It can be hard to know what to say and how to say it.
Are you giving off the right impression, and making your ideal client feel like they're in the right place?
Recently, I shared a blog post to help you define your ideal client. And in last week's post we looked at your brand personality where you chose 3 adjectives to describe yourself and how you want to come across.
Let's go back to these three words and use them as a starting point to craft your brand's tone of voice.
Are you energetic, youthful, friendly, calming, sincere, authentic or athletic? There are literally hundreds of words you can choose from...
Take your 3 words and keep them in mind when you are writing any content for your business: flyers, social media posts, blogs, website copy and even emails. Infuse these characteristics into your tone of voice to make sure it aligns with your brand personality.
Listen carefully to your ideal clients. Take note of the words and phrases they use... In general but especially around how they describe their pain points.
Often they don't use the industry terminology for things, so really pay attention to how they express their problems and frustrations.
When you use the words that they use, their ears prick up. They start to pay attention. It creates connection with them, because they begin to feel like you really get them. And this builds trust, which is what branding is all about!
Here are some guidelines to help you:
Talk in the first-person if you're a one-woman show! I know this might sound obvious but unless you really have other people working for you then don't try to pretend you're bigger than you really are. More often than not, people can tell if you're doing this, and it erodes trust. So use I and me instead of we and us where applicable
Write like you speak! Pretend you're emailing your best friend. Forget about High School English class and crafting perfect sentences. People skim-read these days and if your content is text-heavy, they are going to click away
Make sure your copy flows nicely. Read it out aloud to yourself. Use an apostrophe to shorten words and phrases where you can
Break up text into short paragraphs. Format the text with bold text every so often, quotes, images, and generally break it up so the skim readers can still get the gist of it
Keep your copy as simple as possible, don't use big fancy words a 10 year old would need to google
Be very clear and specific. Get straight to the point
All your content and copy needs to remain customer-focussed, even your About Me page! They are always wondering what's in it for them, so only tell them your life story if it's relevant to them
Be very conscious of how you're writing your text so when you're writing a lot about yourself, try not to speak about yourself too much and rather switch the focus from me, me, me to you, you, you. Literally go through your copy and everywhere you have the words I and me, see if you can change the sentence around to talk about them in relation to yourself
Keep your text block width so that there are about 12 and 14 words across. And then the paragraph shouldn't be too long, just a few five or six lines and then have a break and then another three or four lines... just break it up into smaller chunks
Use a minimum font size 16 for body copy on your website, and make sure it's easy to read
Don't use fancy fonts for your body copy! If you've got a lot of information rather add a Frequently Asked Questions page to your site so people can easily find the info they're looking for rather than needing to read through reams of text
Write in an active voice as opposed to passive a passive voice
Share your brand’s story, this creates connection
If you enjoyed these tips and found them useful, you will LOVE my Ultimate Website Checklist 😊
This is the very checklist I use with each of my clients to ensure their websites contain all of the elements needed to make an impact and to help them stand out in their industry.
To grab The Ultimate Website Guide. Pop your email address in and the checklist will be in your inbox ASAP. Once you've downloaded it, print it out and keep it close! You're going to want to refer back to it every time you make changes to your site.
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