Writing for Sales

I got a lot out of my system in my last post, but there were still a few things I wanted to expand on. The first may seem to be a departure from my title, but bear with me - I'll tie it together by the time we reach the end, and it's pertinent.

That is, it goes straight to the heart of what writing IS. We don't think about that often, but since I've had the experience of selling writing textbooks, I've known for a long time that the writing process is the same as the thinking process. In both, we collect and assimilate information, analyze what we've learned, and construct understanding of the topic or issue in the process. With that new understanding, we can then connect to other knowledge we already have and draw logical conclusions and make reasonable predictions. Writing, at its most basic, is simply going through that same process and putting it down on the page. To be a good writer, you have to first be a good thinker - in addition to knowing spelling and rules for punctuation and grammar.

There are a lot of good thinkers out there, but not all of them are really good writers. Why not? I don't know, but I think a love of written language has to come into play to boost someone from being a competent writer - technically proficient, able to convey meaning, but not very exciting - to being really good. People who read a lot because they love to read are, in my experience, the only ones who attain the level of "very good," and I think it's just the result of exposure - when you've seen how it's done thousands upon thousands of times, it sinks in and you can pick it up and use it.

These are the people who are able to write material that others want to read. Reading their work is a pleasure rather than a chore. The added bonus of working with this type of writer is that the breadth of their knowledge is likely to be quite wide, thanks to all the reading they do. Needless to say, there are a lot fewer of these types of people than there are merely competent writers. To get an idea of how many fewer, go through your mind and count how many of the people you know who read 20 books or more a year. Not that many.

But among this much smaller pool of people who are really good writers, the number who can write for sales is smaller yet. I haven't been able to figure out even a guess as to why this is - as a genre, writing for sales is pretty formulaic; you want to make it centered around the reader and how the product or service will benefit him, point out important features of the product or service that set it apart from the competition, and provide a call to action for the reader to take a next step, whether that's a purchase or a request for a quote or more information. Sounds pretty straightforward, right?

And yet, it's not.

Sales writing is a weird amalgam of formula and creativity. A writer can cover all of the points outlined above and produce a piece of perfectly good sales copy that no one ever reads. That's because people don't like to feel they're being sold something ... anything. They like to buy, but they want to feel like they made the decision to do it on their own with no pressure. So they'll often ignore a straight sales pitch. The only way to get over that hump is with some kind of hook to grab their attention - and to then pivot to benefits right away to keep them reading. Some writers can't come up with those hooks and others have a hard time staying inside the formula - they get TOO creative and lose the thread of what they have to accomplish in the copy.

Writing good sales copy for the internet presents its own unique set of issues. Usually, the best sales copy is tight - it gets the point across in as few words as possible. That's the opposite of what's required for SEO, where you score higher for higher word counts, and of course if a search engine doesn't find the page and give it a good ranking, no one will ever see the brilliant sales copy on the site. There are ways to satisfy SEO and still have snappy, effective copy, but in my experience, it's at least twice as hard to write good sales copy for the web than it is for print. I have to do a lot more mulling for web sales copy, not only to come up with the hook, but also to figure out how to lay out the information so it's easy to scan and the benefits & features stand out - AND to satisfy SEO best practices for use of keywords, headers, and sub-headers. It's a lot to juggle, and the people who can do it well? There are even fewer of them than there are people who can write good sales copy in general.

Recently, a client shared with me a few pages of copy they got through a content mill, one of the better ones. This was copy that was intended to go on the homepage for their new digital marketing consulting firm. It was technically fine, reasonably well-written, and boring as hell. It had clearly been written with a heavy emphasis on SEO, which wasn't all that surprising since SEO content is the vast majority of what copy mills produce. The distance between the writer and the client was evident in what was produced - the writer clearly either didn't understand that the content needed to sell the company and its services, or didn't know how to write to do that; without the firewall of the content mill standing between client and writer, that could perhaps have been resolved. I suspect that part of the problem may have been the absurd turn-around times the content mills impose on their contract writers; whoever wrote the piece was probably given the typical 24 hours to turn it around.

That's crazy. As I said earlier, when I'm writing sales copy for the web, I do a lot more mulling. I typically won't start writing the copy until I've had at least a day and a half to just let the brief and my research marinate. This is another thing clients sometimes don't understand. Yes, I charge a rate higher than most (though not all) of the content mills - but by the time I sit down to write your sales copy, you've already been living rent-free in my head for at least several days! I bill for my research and writing time, but my THINKING time? You're getting most of that for free.

Remember, this was supposed to be copy to sell a digital marketing company's services. How much confidence would you, as a customer, have in that company's ability to market your business if you went to their website and saw boring copy that had been written more for the benefit of robots than customers? Because it was a marketing company, and a good one, they knew that copy wasn't going to fly, which is how I ended up on the project.

The moral of this story is: if you feel you simply must get your SEO copy from a copy mill due to the sometimes - but not always! - lower price, fine. There are some that do a fairly decent job on SEO content, though as I've noted, you can do much better for the same price with an independent freelancer. But whatever you do, DON'T go to them for sales copy. They aren't set up to do it, and even if they do have a writer capable of doing it and willing to do it for $15 or less an hour (which is about the most writers are paid by content mills, after taxes), the firewall between you and the writer and the turn-around time the writer is given by the copy mill means you aren't going to get good, effective sales copy for your website. At best, you're wasting your money on copy that won't do what you need it to do so....just, don't.

If ever there was content worth paying for to get it right, it's the sales copy on your website. There's no point in working on your site's SEO, doing social media updates, or working on getting online reviews if visitors to your site aren't engaged by the copy. You can spend thousands of dollars boosting SEO rank, seeking reviews and paying for regular social media updates, and you'll get zero return on it if the sales copy on your site or landing page is boring. You need sales copy that's going to grab the reader if you're going to have the slightest chance of converting them into a lead or customer, or all of your other online marketing efforts will be for nothing.

The bad news is, you aren't going to find someone who can write your sales copy by going to a content mill or freelancer bidding site, and you aren't going to get it for less than $100 for a 500 word SEO-friendly page. The good news is, there ARE writers out there who are really good sales copy writers. You'll pay more for their services, but the return you'll get will pay it back many times over.

So, is it worth spending a few hundred dollars more for effective sales copy for your website if it makes all your other online marketing efforts more likely to bear fruit? You bet it is.

If you're ready to see what good sales copy can do for your online marketing efforts, I can help. Give me a call; I'll be happy to work with you to turn your website into a lead- and sales-generating machine.