Tips on Website Copywriting – DSP 239

In another jam packed marketing episode, Derek and Graham get into the nitty gritty of how to write out all the content you need on your website.

They dive in and explain the importance of layout, how to keep things succinct, and some really great resources for copywriting, A/B testing, and general marketing knowledge.

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Neville Medhora’s Kopywriting Kourse

Google Experiments

Optimizely

Swipefile database (still called Swipefile)

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Alright, hello everybody. I am Graham.

Derek: And I am Derek, completely zenned out.

Graham: Yeah, got a little trance intro there. So Ashkahn’s not with us again today, he’s out working on conference things, so Derek Wyatt’s in the studio again, helping us out with an episode. The conference, just in case you don’t know, is right around the corner, coming up in mid August here, so be sure to grab tickets, and flights, and hotels, and all that good stuff you haven’t.

Derek: FloatConference.com.

Graham: Yup, just what you’d guess. Yeah, so it’s good-

Derek: ‘Cause we’re so creative at naming things.

Graham: Yeah, and I guess also just a shout out to Agents of Echo, who was on that intro. We actually had one of our bands related to our float center in here, it’s actually run by our shop manager, Marshall, so thanks Marshall for coming in and rockin’ out the music on that one. Might hear Agents of Echo popping up here and there on different intros from now on.

This question is around marketing, so Derek, just to give a little background is a marketer, he eats and breathes marketing, he runs the social media for Float On and does just a ton of behind the scene stuff with Float Tank Solutions.

Derek: I’m glad it’s not about construction ’cause I don’t know anything about that.

Graham: Alright, and the question is “how do you come up with the right words to place on your website?”

Derek: Well don’t pick the wrong words.

Graham: Yeah, all the best words, only the best words for the website.

Derek: The very best words.

Graham: How do you end up with all the best words on your website?

Derek: Yes. This is a big question, but we can break it down to which pages on a website and what should be said on each page, or we can break it down just one page, what do you think, what are you feelin’ like?

Graham: Well let’s just start with the home page. Let’s just assume that we’re talking about the homepage. You have to make a website for your Floats Center-

Derek: Should have your logo on it, it’s a word.

Graham: That’s not a word, but yeah, it should have your logo. Other than that, yeah, how the heck do people even know what to put there, should they put testimonials up above where they click the schedule, what should they say to click to schedule, what should be on there, and even if you know what you want is a ‘schedule’ button and links over to your social media, and little text about floating, how do you know which words to write for all of those?

Derek: Right, so this one of those crash course in copywriting episodes, which I don’t know if we have a full time to go into, we can give some book recommendations, or we can give some highlights. I think-

Graham: That would be the CCC?

Derek: Crash-

Graham: Course in Copywriting?

Derek: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Trademark, ding.

Graham: I don’t know if we want the trip, the CCC, sounds a little too much like the KKK, but-

Derek: Well there is a Kopywriting Kourse with a K.

Graham: Let’s just not. Let’s definitely not use the abbreviations if we go with that one.

Derek: So anywho, I think what we should talk about with the home page is definitely the elements that go on above the fold, so yeah, we do need to have a ‘booking’ button. The home page-

Graham: And what does ‘above the fold’ mean?

Derek: Gosh, you’re making me break it down. Yes, when you first visit a website, and let’s say everything you see there on the very top of the very first page or the very top of the pages above the fold. When you scroll down, whatever is the next, I guess height of the website is the next fold and it keeps going down. So above the fold is the very top of your website page.

Graham: It makes sense, it’s just taken from newspaper terminology like you fold the newspaper in half, everything that was just showing without you needing to unfold it is above the fold, the same basic concept for a website.

Derek: You’re good at this breaking things down, a lot better than I am.

Graham: No, you’re doing great.

Derek: You’re using the right words. So what we’re talking about is though it’s the most common page of your website visited. It’s usually found through a search, and even if people have been to your site, usually just bookmarked the homepage, so when they wanna go schedule their floats, they just go back to the homepage and click the big ‘schedule appointment’ or ‘book online’ button. How do you know which words to use? You can test. One of the easiest things for calls to action is actually describe the action you want them to take and not ‘click here’. ‘Click here’ is a terrible call to action because there’s no context to it, but a button that says ‘schedule online’ would assume that if I click that button, I’m now going to schedule online. So as specific as you can be with your words to the actual result and benefit they’re going to take is the first step.

Graham: Yeah in nerdy English, that’s the imperative, is what you’re using-

Derek: Yes.

Graham: Things like ‘book a float’, it’s an embedded command that’s in there. It’s both the action that you click here to book a float, but also it’s subtly instructing them that is what you want them to do.

Derek: So sticking with just the homepage of your site, you have to explain what floating is. On Float On’s site, we don’t get too deep to what floating is on the homepage, we actually link to deeper parts of the website, and that’s strategically because we want people not to scroll as much, we want them to take an action when they hit the homepage. So we give ’em a host of actions whether it’s sign up for email updates, read testimonials, learn about our programs, or just contact information is another good piece of information to have on your homepage ’cause sometimes people just go to the website to find the phone number, they don’t wanna have to dig for it, so those kind of things are good words to have at least on the homepage.

Graham: Yeah, and I guess as far as you were saying, as far as actual content, it’s really not too much that you actually need, and at every step of the way I guess it’s just important to ask yourself what you want the customer to be doing and to make that the easiest thing for them to do.

Derek: Right. If you’re really good at your imperative call to actions, then you can just place those on your website to link deeper into your website, it’s also good for SEO to get them to dig around more on your website, and take ’em to the page that’s going to tell them all about floating or all about your float tanks, or all about your team. These other pages, what’s said on them, you can also be very strategic.

Graham: Yeah, I guess one of the biggest mistakes that I see people making on websites is a bunch of text and stuff upfront with no obvious call to action, or no obvious button to click to schedule a float. So if you start finding yourself talking about your personal story and all the benefits of floating, and you realize that people have had to scroll down for two pages before they even realize where a ‘book now’ button is, you made a big mistake. Keep things, especially when they first enter, concise.

You may have heard that adults these days have the attention span of seagulls or some other related scientific studies come out, and it’s very true, especially when they’re just going to a website, they got curious about floating, they clicked some link, and somehow ended up on your homepage, make it really clear what action you want them to take, and have fewer words rather than more words. As far as what words to put on your website, again, testing will reveal exact ones, but whatever you do, don’t put too many, at least on the homepage.

Derek: Right, and then that is a strategy called short form copy, or keeping the form that you’re communicating very short. Now, if you were to let’s say go the opposite route of what Graham was just saying, do get into long story about you, about your passion for floating about what floating could do for people, different ways to use calls to actions.

For example, you can have a hyperlink or a link within the text of your paragraph that guides ’em to an action you want them to take, like when you come and discover our tanks, and you link our tanks, that word, to your ‘our tanks’ section so that they can learn about your tanks, that’s other ways you can get people where some people are resistant to clicking on buttons right away ’cause it seems like you’re trying to get me to buy right away, you can also use different methods. So whatever your words are, having calls to action within your body is also useful too. I guess we should answer how do we choose the right words?

Graham: Yeah, well again, it’s yeah, that’s a lot of the content you need to even know to put on there. You make your best guesses, and for that basic crash courses in copywriting are good, like copywriting, what is it called, Kopywriting Kourse by-

Derek: Yeah, so this guy’s name is Neville Medhora, he’s not the best copywriter out there, but he’s probably one of the best students of copywriting, and much like Graham, can very distill it down into just as few words as possible to get you to understand copywriting at its most elementary form. So with that, I think the books online, it’s called This Book Will Teach You To Write Better, and it’s $3 on Kindle, and $5 if you want it shipped to you. It’s 50 pages, and it’s a little crude, but it tells you some of the things like a headline, what’s a headline for, is to get people to read the next line, and it goes into some classic copywriting lessons. Again, it’s almost like the Cliff notes of copywriting, it’s a book that’s fun to flip through.

Graham: If you don’t have time to run your own tests for right now on your things, when I say testing, what I mean is A/B testing optimization. You can do that with Google Experiments, you can do it with Optimizely, you can do it with a host of other softwares and you’re just comparing two versions of your website, or even two versions of an email-

Derek: You can do simple non-technical related tests. So you can have a button at the top of your page that says, ‘book now,’ and a button at the bottom of your page that says ‘schedule appointment.’ Now the top of the page is probably gonna get more clicks ’cause it’s the top of the page, but if you find when people scroll all the way to the bottom, they’re actually clicking more on ‘schedule appointment,’ maybe ‘schedule appointments’ is the wording that actually gets them to convert, try it on the top button now and see if that increases it. You can do a little quick A/B testing hacks that way too.

Graham: It’s cool, and I do recommend using A/B testing software just because it’ll actually run it like in an actual experiment, but there are ways without doing that, that you can get results too on exactly what wording to use. Again, you make your best judgment based on best practices. I do recommend just looking up eight best practice A/B tests out there, so again, if you don’t have time to run your own A/B tests, guess what? There’s a ton of other websites that have already run a ton of experiments and there’s some results that they’ve found best words for actually getting someone to click the equivalent of a ‘buy now’ button, or ‘add to cart.’ Best texts for calls to actions from an ‘about us’ page, different structures like that, how many photos should you be using, what colors should you be using, there are tons of best practices that you can grab from other tests that people have run on their own websites, and maybe won’t translate 100%, but that’ll also give you that base line where you get your best guess in place, and then start running experiments from there, and seeing what works.

Another just quick and dirty one that you can do is running experiments with ads, so if you don’t get enough traffic going to your website, run some Google ads, or run some Facebook ads with different headlines, and just see which of those headlines get more clicks, and guess what? Whichever one does is also probably going to be the best headline to use on your website, not just for that ad.

Derek: Right. I think when it all comes down to it, copywriting is one of those skills that is going to be useful and transcends more than just your website. I think when we refer people that you probably should learn a little bit of marketing basics, probably should also learn a little bit of copywriting basics ’cause that will help you with your Facebook posts. Just getting to use the right words anywhere is more important than using the right words just on your website. I think that’s one thing. How do you get the right words on your website? Well let’s figure out the right words first.

There’s also other websites that call back to what Graham was saying about the eight best practices articles and whatnot, I believe it’s Whitefile.com, I think it used to be called Swipefile.io, these marketers literally collect the best homepages, the best ‘about’ pages, and you can see how they’re laid out, some of the text that’s laid out on it to see what makes it the best of whatever page you’re trying to create, and you can again model that towards floating. Obviously you won’t be able to ripoff word for word, but you will be able to say, “Okay, in this few of words, they were able to cover these key topics. They didn’t have to go back through the intricate details of their first five years in the business, they covered the more important things like the benefits to the customers and stuff like that.”

Graham: Yeah, yeah. Benefits, not features is really good. If you don’t know about the idea of benefits, not features, then go read up on some copywriting until you encounter that one ’cause that’s copywriting 101.

Derek: Go back to Neville Medhora’s book, and one of the first lessons in it is it’s not about you, it’s about them. If you ever get your hands on the course, he does this little guitar video singalong of ‘It’s not about you, it’s about them.’ He just keeps repeating that over and over again to drill in your head that if you’re saying something’ about your float center, and it’s braggadocious, and it’s not really anything more than, ‘Hey look, what we are, look what we did,’ it’s probably not the right words. The right words are ‘how does this actually make the customer wanna come in, how does it solve their back problem, how does it solve just their perception of floating’. It’s more about stating things that are going to benefit them than it is just to benefit your own online ego.

Graham: Yeah, we could spend many, many episodes going down precise tactics and breaking them down, so just suffice to know it’s a big broad world of copywriting out there, definitely educate yourself and play around from there. Just try things out, see what’s going on. To me, the most dangerous thing you can do is not know any best practices, just throw up whatever you want, and then not test anything.

Derek: Exactly.

Graham: Then just keep that same version up for years because what you really doing there? You’re just blindfolding yourself and tossing a dart at a dart board and you don’t even care where the dart landed and you just assume that it’s fine, and you’re still in the game. So read up on best practices, experiment mercilessly, and send us your questions as well, unless you have anything else to add for the episode there, Derek.

Derek: Definitely send us your copywriting questions that are more drilled down and we’ll drill down an answer.

Graham: Awesome, and you can do that at FloatTankSolutions.com/podcast.

Derek: See ya everybody.

Graham: Bye everyone.

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