If I had to pinpoint the one key thing that’s been responsible for 95% of the money I’ve made online in the past seven years, then without a doubt, it’d be words. Granted, selling freelance copywriting services has been my main gig for most of this time, so it’s really fairly literal. I write the words, and business owners pay me for it.
But it goes deeper than that too. These clients didn’t just randomly stumble across me and decide to take a risk… They found me via the words that I’d written for publications, the words I’d included in emails, and the words I’d weaved into pitches. The fact that they then pay me to do the same thing for them is almost just coincidental.
Whether you’re selling a physical or digital product, or you’re running a blog, or you’re pimping out your time as a service provider, knowing the right words to say and HOW to say them makes an absolutely massive difference to the income and the impact that you can make.
If my income streams all suddenly fell apart overnight, for whatever reason, and I needed to build everything back up from scratch? Copywriting is the most important skill I’d use to do that quickly.
You don’t need to be an expert writer though, or spend years and years studying, to write words that increase your bank balance. Here are five copywriting tips for freelancers, bloggers, and side-hustlers that you can implement right away.
1. KNOW WHO YOU’RE WRITING FOR – THEN NARROW IT DOWN AGAIN
Knowing your reader and what they want, and how they think, is a bit of advice that you’ll find in every piece of copywriting advice ever created. That’s almost a problem in its own right, because it’s really easy to just rush straight past it and consider it done. Even with copywriting clients that I’ve been working with for years, I never assume that we know everything there is to know about the audience. There’s always a bit of deeper digging to be done.
If you’re not digging deep, then it’s just too difficult to come up with content ideas, and it’s even more difficult to get started with writing.
Suppose you’re a blogger and you think that your ideal reader is a mum. There are millions – possibly even billions – who tick that box. But it’s not really the number that’s the issue. It’s the fact that those people, despite the fact that they all happen to have kids, are going to be wildly different. Try writing for mums in general, and you’ll struggle to ever write anything meaningful. But try writing for vegan mums who homeschool? You’ve just made life a lot easier in terms of saying something that they’re going to care about.
2. DITCH THE SURVEYS AND START DOING MORE SNEAKY RESEARCH
Once you know who you’re writing for – and you’ve got REALLY specific with it – then you need to do your research. That’s how you’re going to unearth what these people care about, what they’re struggling with, what’s keeping them awake at night, and all the juicy stuff that’s going to keep them coming back to YOU for you’ve got to say.
This is where loads of people will start recommending that you survey your audience. There’s huge amount of value to be taken from having real life conversations with your ideal readers, but chucking a few questions into Survey Monkey and then pestering people to answer them isn’t going to do you too many favours. It’s time consuming, it’s ridiculously hard to get meaningful answers that you can draw proper conclusions from, and there are easier and more effective ways to do things.
One of my favourite tactics? Join Facebook Groups where your readers are, and use the search bar to find conversations about your topic. You’re likely to find a bucketload of inspiration for the kind of things that are burning issues for your readers, that they’d be interested to find out more about.
Another benefit of doing it this way is that you get to see the exact wording and terminology that they’re using. Keep a little swipe file with what you discover, and you’re taking yourself one step closer to REALLY talking to your readers in a way that’s going to make them sit up and listen. It’s a bit like Facebook stalking, but with a legitimate purpose.
3. TACKLE POTENTIAL READER OBJECTIONS HEAD-ON
Whatever you’re trying to educate people on, your readers are going to have a ton of potential reasons in their minds why their circumstances are different, and why what you’re saying can’t work for them. We’re cynical creatures, and we make excuses about why things aren’t going to go according to plan.
Imagine, just for example, that you’re writing a blog post about how to lose weight. What potential objections are your readers going to have about why THEY can’t follow your advice and see results? It might be because they’ve already tried a million and one different ways. It might be because they don’t have time to get to the gym. It might be because they’re on a tight budget with their grocery shopping.
Instead of writing a post about weight loss methods, you could take it a little further and title your piece ‘5 Tips For Losing 10lbs Before Christmas – Even If You’ve Got No Time To Get To The Gym’. Now you’re talking their language, and they’ve got no reason to dismiss your advice before they’ve even read it. In fact, you’ve created even more curiosity.
When I’m working with a copywriting client, I always do some initial work on identifying the objections that their audience might have. Then, we weave objection-busting right through everything we do.
When you’re talking about your subject, what will your ideal readers say ‘YEAH, BUT IT’S DIFFERENT FOR ME BECAUSE…’ about? It’s usually easy to come up with at least five potential objections. And right there, you’ve got a load of raw material for sharpening up your existing content, and making everything you do from that point onwards more effective.
4. WRITE WITH YOUR END GOAL AT THE FRONT OF YOUR MIND
Practically every piece of writing that you create should have an ultimate end goal. That could be driving more traffic to your blog so you can monetise via ads, or encouraging email subscribers to visit your sales page, or getting a prospect to book in a call with you so you can talk about working together.
When it’s part of a wider business plan, writing for the sake of writing, or creating content because that’s what everyone says you should do, isn’t going to cut it. It’s going to waste your time, and ultimately leave you wondering why you’re not getting results.
So let’s say that you want more blog visitors, and you’re also growing a list of email subscribers. How can you write to those subscribers in a way that’s going to contribute towards hitting that goal, instead of just adding more stuff to your plate?
It might be tempting to just copy and paste your latest blog post into the email you’re sending. Ultimately though, that’s likely to result in LESS traffic to your site. Why would your readers bother visiting, when they’ve got your latest content in their inbox?
Instead, it’d make more sense to send a shorter email telling your readers to click through to your site to read the full post. That email content should create some curiosity, and be benefit driven. Ask yourself what’s going to make them eager to read what you’re saying, right now, and what’s in it for THEM.
Before writing anything, put the pen down. Step away from the laptop. What do you want to achieve here? And how can you reverse engineer that so you’re not just writing for the sake of it?
5. WRITE LIKE YOU SPEAK
So many people make copywriting harder than it has to be by telling themselves that it has to be done in a certain way… That it has to sound ‘professional’, or formal, or official. The result is that what you write ends up sounding more like an essay you’d write a school than a piece of content that’s going to engage people.
At the end of the day, all your copywriting really is, is a CONVERSATION with your readers. No one wants to be spoken AT, or bombarded with a load of jargon and lingo that they barely understand, and no one wants to spend their valuable time working through a dull and dry and rigid piece of content – even if there’s value in there that they need.
Your readers don’t just want to be informed. They want the process to be engaging and entertaining. That might sound like a challenge, but it’s something that you already do to one extent or another every single day. You know how to be conversational, because it’s what you do practically every time you speak. Once you just decide to let YOU shine through in your copy, you’re unshackled by all the ‘shoulds’ that usually just lead to boring content. Challenging Clare published a great post on her blog about her own grapples with this on her blogging journey.
The best way to make sure you’re doing this? After you’ve written your blog or your email or whatever it might be, read it out loud. Does it feel and sound like you? Is that how you’d actually talk? If not, go back to the drawing board and tweak it. You can also use this tactic the other way round – start speaking out loud about what you want to say, instead of being faced with a blank page, and use that to get started. You might feel a bit daft, but it works.
BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY…
If you want to improve your copywriting, the ultimate way to do that is to practice more.
Your blogs or your emails probably won’t be amazing when you’re starting out – mine definitely weren’t – but committing to a little bit of writing each day is the quickest way to get better.
Couple more actual writing with these tips here, and it’d be impossible to not notice a big difference to the quality of what you’re producing within just a couple of months.
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