There's no quick or easy way to write copy for your website. In fact, you should do several things before you even begin to put pen to paper-or fingers to keyboard. And most of it involves a lot of legwork. First, you need a master plan that takes into account what you what to achieve, who your potential customers are, why they'll want to buy your product or service, and what information they'll need to make a purchasing decision. You can't just make this stuff up on a whim. You've got to get stuck into some serious research. To help you out, here's a brief laundry list of things to do before you get started.
Know your objectives. This may seem obvious but many people who want to sell online have no idea what they want to achieve. In fact, it's surprising how many people put up a website just because they think they need one. What's
purpose of your site? Do you want to sell products or services? Generate leads? Promote your brand? Build a datebase? Place your product catalog online to complement or do away with your print version?
What information will your visitors need? Put yourself in their shoes. If you're selling a product, what will your customers need to know about it in order to make a purchase? What kind of things influence their purchases? Is it a major purchase they'll need time to think about? Or is it a small, low or medium cost item they won't need to put a lot of thought into before they buy? You really need to know all this before you begin to think about writing anything. Because if you don't, you'll end up writing wrong words, in wrong style, for wrong people.
Choose your words carefully. Having completed all these tasks, it's time to make sure words you plan to use on your site include words and phrases your potential customers will use when they type a query into a search engines search function. "That's easy," you say. "If people want to buy a camera, they'll type word "camera" into Google." Well, yes and no. They may indeed type word "camera" but they could also type in lots of variations depending on what exactly it is they're looking for.
The only way to truly identify these words and phrases is to spend a serious amount of time doing some keyword research. Just in case you're not convinced, here's an example of how research helped one business target exact words their potential customers were using.
What a difference a word makes. AutoWorld Santa Cruz, (www.autoworldsantacruz.com) a small, family-owned car rental company in Santa Cruz, California, was in trouble. Several international car rental companies - Hertz and Enterprise - had moved into town and diluted their customer base.
AutoWorld knew that dollar for dollar they couldn't hope to compete with these global giants-print advertising, television commercials, pay-per-click etc. The only thing they could do was try and target potential customers who used Web to search for goods and services, and who, perhaps, preferred to deal with a smaller, family-owned business.
