What is Copywriting? The Definitive Guide

Why Is Copywriting Important?

In this age of video and podcasts, does copywriting still matter?

In a word: yes.

Before looking at the benefits of copywriting, let’s first comprehend the core duties of a copywriter.

What exactly does a copywriter do?

A copywriter is a professional writing occupation for advertising and marketing purposes. Brands that engage effective copywriters get better organic engagements and increased conversions. We shall cover more about this later.

Learning how to become a copywriter takes time and a little patience. Though it’s a core requirement for most businesses, copywriters with a deep understanding of how to carefully craft words that resonate with the target audience are hard to come by. This explains why this skill continues to be in high demand.

Here are some of the benefits that you can get from becoming good at copywriting:

• Get higher conversion rates on key pages
• Improve the structure and flow of articles
• Get more engagement on social media posts
• Have more people share your content
• Understand your customer’s needs and wants

In other words: copywriting can improve nearly every element of your marketing.

Different Types of Copywriting

There are many different types of copywriting, each with its own unique goals and challenges. Some of the most common types of copywriting include:

• Advertising copy: This type of copywriting is used to promote products or services to a wide audience. It can be found in a variety of media, such as YouTube, television, radio, print, and online.
• Sales copy: This type of copywriting is used to persuade people to buy a product or service. It is often used in direct mail, email marketing, and website landing pages.
• Public relations copy: This type of copywriting is used to promote a company or organization to the public. It can be found in press releases, media kits, and website biographies.
• Technical copywriting: This type of copywriting is used to explain complex products or services to a technical audience. It is often found in user manuals, training materials, and white papers.

How To Become a Copywriter

Fortunately, you don’t need any formal training or education to become a copywriter. Instead, you need to get good at the following skills:

Top Tips for Copywriting

To succeed in copywriting, possessing these skills helps you strategize, and give a narrative about your product/service to the target audience before giving a solution that infers the desired goal.

At a minimum, a good copywriter possesses these key skills:

• Customer research
• Sentence structure
• Web copywriting
• Grammar and spelling
• Persuasion
• Content structure
• Online advertising
• Storytelling

To be clear: becoming a good copywriter takes time. But it’s a marketing skill that you can use to get clients as a freelance copywriter or to improve your job prospects.

In fact, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 80.3% of employers want to hire people with strong writing skills.

And if you’re a small business owner (like me), you can use copywriting to improve your marketing and grow your business.

Amazon Reviews

As you’ve probably seen firsthand, people on Amazon don’t hold back:

Ouch…

And you can mine these honest reviews for a killer copy.

For example, check this Amazon review for a standing desk:

Well, if you also sell a standing desk, you just found some killer copy.

And I should point something out:

You can mine Amazon reviews… even if you don’t sell a physical product.

For example, I looked at reviews for a popular book about SEO on Amazon:

And found these golden nuggets:

This is a copy that I can use to describe my next online course or guide.

Customer Interviews

Interviews are like customer surveys on steroids.

That’s because you can dig deeper with followup questions.

For example, a while ago I hopped on Skype with three people that recently graduated from one of my programs:

(Fun Fact: I was visiting family in Rhode Island when I did this interview. Hence the awesome flower curtains. 🙂 )

And I asked pretty much the same questions that I ask in customer surveys:

• What’s your biggest challenge in SEO right now?
• Where does getting more search engine traffic rank in terms of importance in your business?
• Have you ever spent money on SEO training before? How did it go?

The big difference is that the interviews allowed me to ask follow-up questions.

These follow-ups helped me understand my customer’s challenges WAY better than a one-way survey response.

Here’s an example:

How do you go about choosing topics for blog content?

Well, if there’s a lot of shares on it on social media then you know people are interested in it.

We kind of try to add onto what a lot of people are already writing about and go from there.

Makes sense. Once you pick a topic, how do you know whether to go with an infographic, a guide or whatever?

It depends on the client’s business. Infographics worked really well for one client and they didn’t work so well for another. For example, one client sold pool supplies and infographics worked awesomely.

Can you give an example for an infographic you made for that client?

Product Hunt Discussions

You can use “Product Hunt Discussions” to learn how potential customers describe what you sell.

Why? 90% of the people that post a question on Product Hunt already Googled for a solution to their problem. And they came up empty.

So jot down the words people use to describe their problem…

…and create landing pages optimized around those terms:

With that, it’s time for chapter 3…

The “AIDA” Formula

AIDA is a powerful copywriting formula that works for:

• Sales pages
• Squeeze pages
• Blog post intros
• Email newsletters
• Video scripts
• And more

Here’s a visual of how it looks:

As you can see, AIDA stands for:

Attention.

Interest.

Desire.

Action.

Here’s a real life example of how I used the AIDA formula in this guide to landing pages:

First, I grab attention with the first line:

Then, I drum up interest with a bold promise:

And I tap into the #1 desire anyone landing on this page has (higher Google rankings):

I cap things off with a call to action that pushes the reader to scroll down:

Strong CTAs

A strong call-to-action is the difference between a page that converts… and one that falls flat.

Seriously.

Here’s why your CTA is so important:

Your prospect is busy. VERY busy.

Which means they don’t have time to figure out what they’re supposed to do next.

So tell them exactly what to do.

For example, check out this landing page from Social Triggers.

This page uses a strong and clear CTA.

Not: “Sign up”. Not: “Register”.

It’s literally:

“Enter your name and email, and click “Download Free Ebook”.”

The Bottom Line

Use strong and clear CTAs whenever you want your prospect to do something. As you just saw, your CTAs don’t have to be fancy. Just tell them what to do.

How to Solve The “Social Proof Paradox”

You need social proof to sell. But you need sales to get social proof.

I call this “The Social Proof Paradox”. And it’s a real challenge.

Fortunately, there’s an easy way to sidestep this problem:

Feature your strongest form of social proof.

For example, let’s say you launched a software product that has a free and paid version. But only a handful of people upgraded to a paid plan so far.

Well, you can show off how many people signed up for your free trial:

Or maybe you only have 20 total customers. But 3 of them got AMAZING results. Feature these 3 results on your homepage:

For example, when I launched my YouTube SEO course First Page Videos, we only had around 10 beta users. Not a ton of social proof.

But 4 of our beta students absolutely crushed.

(Including one student that quickly racked up 200k+ views with his first video.)

So we decided to feature those 4 people on the sales page:

Sense of Urgency

How do you get customers to buy NOW?

Urgency.

Here are some easy ways to create a sense of urgency in your copy:

• “Limited time offer”
• “Quantities limited”
• “Only 47 left”
• “Sale ends on August 31st”
• “Doors close on Thursday”
• “Don’t miss out”

(Needless to say, these statements should be backed up with real limitations. Otherwise, you’ll lose people’s trust.)

For example, this email from one of my product launches has a clear deadline (down to the minute!) that creates a super high sense of urgency:

Use a Number

Numbers FORCE you to write insanely specific headlines.

For example, look at what happens when you take this bland headline…

…and add a number to it:

It’s MUCH more compelling… and specific.

Which is probably why an industry study from Moz found that number headlines got 327% more clicks than question headlines:

In fact, that’s exactly why I use numbers in most of my blog post titles:

Use FOMO

FOMO can make your headlines 10x more powerful.

That said:

FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) doesn’t work for every situation.

But if you can use FOMO you should use FOMO.

That’s because FOMO triggers a strong emotion in your prospects…

…an emotion that makes them want to hear what you have to say.

For example, this Facebook ad headline from HubSpot includes the phrase “Limited Time Savings”:

Use Mini-Stories

Stories are a great way to hook people… and keep them reading.

The problem is:

Your lead should be short and sweet. This means you don’t have a lot of room to tell an epic story.

Enter: Mini-stories.

As the name suggests, mini-stories condense a story into 4-5 lines.

For example, I kick off the sales page of my flagship course with a super short story:

8 Lines or Less

Whether it’s a blog post, video script, sales page or email newsletter, you want your lead to be SUPER short.

(8 lines max.)

Remember:

The goal of your lead is to grab someone’s attention so they keep reading.

And once you’ve done that, it’s time to transition into the meat of your page.

For example, I keep my blog post introductions to around 6 lines:

That way, I hook the reader with a strong lead… then jump right into the content itself.

Short Sentences

Short sentences=better copy.

And there’s research to back this up…

The American Press Institute gave research subjects two different articles to read.

Article #1 had an average sentence length of 54 words.

Article #2 had an average sentence length of 12 words.

What happened?

People that read Article #2 had 711% better comprehension than Article #1.

Bottom line?

Use short sentences. They’re easy to read AND understand.

Active Voice

Look at these two lines:

As you can see, the active voice sounds MUCH better.

How do you know if you’re using the passive or active voice? You can read this thorough guide from The University of Wisconsin.

You can also check the active vs. passive voice with a tool like Hemingway:

Write For Skimmers

Here’s a good rule to follow for ALL of the content marketing that you do:

People online don’t read. They skim.

That’s why you want to format your copy for skimmers.

Here’s how:

First, use lots of subheadings.

These break up your content into little chunks.

For example, some time ago I published this post about how to do an SEO audit.

This post is 3,759 words.

And to make those 3,759 words easy to digest, I split them up into distinct sections.

In fact, I used 43 total subheaders in that post.

Second, use “takeaway lines”.

These sum up the biggest takeaway of each section of your post.

For example, in this post I listed out my 15 favorite link building tools.

And for every tool on my list, I covered key features, pricing and more.

So I added a little “Bottom Line” section after each tool:

That way, skimmers could get the gist… without reading every single word.

Landing Pages

Here’s how to create high-converting service pages, newsletter signup pages and more.

Let’s break each element down.

Headline = Clear Benefit

Your headline should let the reader know what they’ll get from your product, service, newsletter, or free trial.

For example:

Social Proof

Include social proof above the fold. This can be logos from places you’ve been featured, the number of customers or a handful of big-name clients.

Here’s an example:

Body = PAS

The meat of your landing page should follow the “Problem, Agitate, Solve” formula. Start with your prospect’s #1 problem, highlight how annoying that problem is, then tease a solution.

Transition

The transition from your prospect’s problem to a specific offer.

Here’s a cool example of this transition action:

CTA

Let your reader know exactly what to do next, whether it’s scheduling a demo, buying something, or signing up.

Sales Letters

Here’s how to structure long-form sales letters for online courses, supplements, paid newsletters, and more.

Headline = Bold Promise

Grab your reader’s attention with a bold headline. Your headline should cite one insanely specific benefit that they’ll get from your product.

Here’s an example:

Powerful Lead

Start your sales letter off with a story, statistic or relatable situation.

This is a great example:

“D” and “A” From AIDA

Your headline and lead checked off the “Attention and “Interest” in the AIDA Formula. The middle of your sales letter should create the desire for your product… and push them to take action.

Bullets

Use bulleted lists of benefits throughout your sales page.

Here’s an example of super compelling bullets:

Testimonials

Use lots of testimonials from people that your prospect can easily relate to.

This is a great example of a non-spammy testimonial:

Risk Reversal

“Cancel anytime”. “60-day guarantee”. “No questions asked”. “Try now. Decide later”. Pack your sales letter with risk reversals. They make signing up a no-brainer.

Lots of Call-To-Actions

Your sales letter should have CTAs up and down the page.

Sellin’ Ain’t Tellin’

I once asked a successful salesman his #1 sales tip.

His answer:

Sellin’ ain’t tellin’

In other words:

Don’t talk about your product.

Instead, SHOW people what it can do.

For example, this landing page talks about why their digital currency is “Made For You”.

But I still have no idea how it actually works.

On the other hand, the Coinbase homepage shows you exactly how it works:

How to Get Out of “The Friend Zone”

We’ve all been in “The Friend Zone” before.

(Or at least I have… 😀 )

The Friend Zone is when you like someone. And they like you back… as a friend.

As it turns out, the same thing happens with potential customers and clients.

They like what you’re selling… but not enough to buy.

What’s the solution?

Squash objections.

Objections like:

• “It’s too expensive”
• “Not a good time”
• “Will this work for me?”
• “I’m not ready to switch from Product X”

You see, most people pretend that these objections don’t exist.

Instead, you want to bring these objections up… and squash each and every one of them.

Here’s a great example:

Reduce Price Objections

Here’s how this works:

A few years ago researchers at the University of Pittsburgh looked at how the wording of a mandatory fee affected conversions.

One group saw an overnight delivery fee described as:

“$5 fee”

And another saw the same fee described as:

“A small $5 fee”

Amazingly, the conversion rate of the “A small $5 fee” group was 20% higher than the group that read about the “$5 fee”.

In other words:

Adding the term “a small” made a HUGE dent in conversions.

How can you use this research in your own copy?

Well, let’s say you have a fee or charge that you want to minimize.

Use terms that make them seem small and insignificant.

And you might just notice conversions boost.