Value Added Copywriting

I know a preacher that can burn any pulpit down within an hour. His sermons cause the greatest stirs and responses in his audience and he really can keep his congregation awake. But there is one tiny problem. Ask many of his listeners what they think about his sermons and they’ll quickly respond with only words of acclamation. Follow that questions with a request for what the sermon was about and you’re met with only blank stares.

They knew that the sermon was “great” but cannot recall what they learned. 

This reminds me of the popular selling tenant referred to as ‘selling the sizzle and not the stake’. In other words, build enthusiasm and curiosity about your product without giving away too much. Let them hear it, smell it, imagine it but never taste it until they buy.

I find however that when you’re selling high ticket items, because you are asking for a higher level of commitment from the prospect, you have to give something in order to get something back. So you have to give some ‘steak’ along with the ‘sizzle’. This is what is commonly referred to as ‘value added copywriting’.

I use some of this myself at my website http://www.webcopy-writing.com to sell my copywriting services. Right there in the sales letter itself are some tips and ideas on how to sell to prospects online. So the reader gains some value from reading the letter even before he or she uses my services. 

But this “free information” also serves a few other purposes:

1. It helps to establish goodwill with the potential client. My willingness to share this information shows that I’m not stingy and helps to develop a relationship with the reader. So even if the prospect doesn’t use my service he walks away with something.
2. It helps to establish my credibility. This is an opportunity for me to show that I know what I’m about and have the qualifications to help the reader’s business.
3. It serves as a teaser. It’s obvious that I’m not saying everything that I know and that there is a ‘lot more where that came from’. In other words, if I’m willing to give away this information I must have a lot more ‘secrets’ up my sleeve. 
4. It lowers the sales resistance of the reader because I’m in the giving rather than the taking mode. There is really no argument against someone who is giving you something for free.
5. It provides a natural incentive for the prospect to read your entire sales letter. Any device that encourages readership will also improve sales especially with longer sales copy.

It will be therefore helpful if you can provide your prospects with useful information in your sales literature. This may be in the form of a free report, an email course or case studies. Once this information is useful and not seen as an overt sales piece, then this should lead to an easy conversion of a new customer.

This technique of value added copywriting works very well in service-type industries. There are many services where the professional can ‘reveal’ a lot without fear of losing his value to the customer. This often occurs because even though someone may know how to perform a task, the job may be sufficiently difficult or unpleasant that it may be better left to the professionals.

A quick example comes to my mind. I know how to do simple maintenance work on my vehicle but I’ll prefer to pay to have this done. I’ll happily read all the available literature from my mechanic about how a mechanical repair should be done. The fact that my mechanic made this literature available to me gives me confidence in his performance of a great job.

So, in the same way, a lawyer may want to provide information on how to fill easy legal forms, while a plumber may provide information on performing simple repairs around the home. When a prospect read this helpful information and they need further ‘expert’ attention they would easily think of that lawyer or plumber. 

Because the public today is bombarded with so many advertisers’ messages the usual sales talk is having less impact. With the advent of online advertising where it is easier and cheaper to get your message before thousands of eyes your sales message must have a lot more bite than its bark; a lot more steak where only sizzle use to be.

After listening to your sizzling message, your market congregation will need to recall more than the enthusiasm of your delivery. They must be able to recall enough value to want the whole shebang from you.

Why Should I Bother With Optimised Online Copywriting?

It's no good having a creative, individual website with brilliant, informative copy if customers can't find you on the internet. On the other hand, it's also detrimental if you have a website that can be easily found (has a high ranking) but people become bored and alienated reading it.

Producing effective online copywriting is a creative process blending art and science in a balanced technique combining many different elements. This integration of disciplines is required to satisfy both the technical and the aesthetic objectives of a website.

Optimised online copywriting should ensure that your website is:

•    highly readable to your viewers

•    highly visible to the search engines, and thereby

•    commercially successful for you.

Many people and businesses don't have the time to actually write web copy themselves. A professional freelance copywriter can furnish you with keyword-rich, highly original web content to enhance and improve the quality of your website, with the aim of transforming more of your visitors into customers.

Rarely will you get a second chance to engage your customer's attention, so your first shot must be formatted for maximum sales potential, catching the eye of the search engine robots as well. But not too much… If your copy goes overboard in favour of the search engines it can earn a penalty from Google that will negatively effect your rankings. Your website must always have the reader as priority. This makes more business sense anyway.

Search engines provide a way for potential customers to find you on the internet. People type a keyphrase or keyword into a search engine, such as Google, Yahoo or MSN (or one of the many other popular engines) and this returns a page of listings - web page suggestions for that particular phrase or word. Obviously, you want your website to feature highly in this list. 

Optimised online copywriting specifically targets the words and phrases people are using when searching for a product on the internet (Search Engine Marketing (SEM), keyword research). You want to make sure your website stays at the top of the listings so people go to your website before others. With targeted copy in place, search engines are more likely to index your web site on page one, than if it does not include keyword-rich copy. This is an ever more important issue when dealing with Google, the leading search-engine today.

To rank highly in the search engines the words on your web pages should never be an afterthought, but should be included right at the beginning in the original design of your website. Content development is the most valuable asset web developers can utilise in the bid for productive, successful search engine optimisation and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Hiring a professional copywriter is a wise investment in your business future. Even if you don’t want to optimise your site you should make sure that the words on your site are reasonable, enticing, spelled correctly and artfully arranged to engage attention. Just because you can type letters or write some emails doesn't mean you can write the copy for your website. The writing on your homepage is often the way people determine whether the website is a scam or the genuine article, good quality or a shabby affair. Your website’s credibility takes a nose-dive if the spelling is wrong, the grammar incorrect, or it just reads like bad, clumsy English. People will be disinclined to trust your content.

Within the search engines new technologies and algorithms are being developed all the time to make search methodologies smarter, more astute. It's never a coincidence when someone types in a search phrase and your website is indexed highly on the page. Keyword rich online copywriting is a significant and critical component in gaining high rankings on the search engines.

Recently, Google has been pioneering a new trend of intelligent search engines which are not attracted by mere repetition of words throughout the text, but which look for meaning, attempting to make grammatical sense of the information, trying to understand what the web page is actually saying. This is forcing webmasters to improve the content on their web pages or suffer the consequences. The old saying has never been more relevant: "content is king."