The most important thing to understand about writing website content is: you are making a sale.
When I was getting started in my professional sales career, my father-in-law, who has been a professional salesman in one capacity or another for over 30 years, taught me the most valuable lesson I’ve ever had on selling. By applying his simple advice, it doesn’t matter what the product is, I can sell it. What proved true for the real world, is just as true for the Internet. If you can apply this basic understanding of the dynamics of selling, you can write web content that will generate leads and produce sales.
The Fundamentals Of A Sale
When you are making a sale, my father-in-law told me, there are four things you need to do:
- Establish Need – Convince the person that they need the service or product
- Establish Competency – Show them that you know what you are talking about
- Establish Trust – Make them believe that you are on their side
- Establish Urgency – Convince them that they need to do this now, not later
Now, there are as many “sales techniques” out there as there are stars in the sky, but every time I look closely at any of them, all I see is a repackaging of these four elements. My first job in sales was front-line, in-home, direct sales for a Fortune 500 company. New salesmen were flown to the corporate headquarters and put through a week of courses on how to sell the product. The course was an endless rehearsal of the sales script and how to handle objections to the sale. As I sat through the course, I realized that this highly refined sales process was a precise application of exactly the process my father-in-law had told me.
When I got back home, armed with a flip-book, sample case, and the knowledge of this process, I sold my way to the top of the regional salespeople for that company in my first year, beating out other salesmen and women who had been in the business for decades. In other words, this system works!
How To Write For The Web Using This Technique
So how does this all look on a webpage? Well, SEO best practices include the division of content into sections using headings. So, breaking the content of a page written about a particular service or product into sections reflecting this four-step sales process we get the following:
- Section #1 – Establishing Need (1 – 2 paragraphs): Talk about the service and when people need it.
Example: People who need more room in their home, but can’t afford to or don’t want to move, need to remodel their basements. - Section #2 – Establishing Competency (1 – 2 paragraphs): Talk about the company’s certifications, licenses, years in service and value proposition.
Example: People who need to remodel their basements should hire Company X because they’ve been in the business for X number of decades, they have licenses from agencies A, B, and C, and, above all, they give customers the best value for their money in Northern Virginia. - Section #3 – Establishing Trust (2 – 4 paragraphs/Can have more than one heading): Provide information about the service, especially common mistakes that could cost them money or common practices of less trustworthy providers.
Example: When people get bids for remodeling their basements, they should be wary of bids that are too low because X or they should consider X before they begin or they should be prepared for problems arising from X. - Section #4 – Establishing Urgency (1 – 2 paragraphs): The person who reads to the bottom of the page is interested. They’re never more prepared to say “yes” to hearing more than right now, so they need to know that someone is there, waiting for their call, ready to continue satisfying their curiosity. This section should tell them why they need to stop reading, pick up the phone and call this company… NOW! i.e. a call to action.
Example: “Don’t spend another day cramped in your home when there’s hundreds of square feet that you could turn into a playroom for your family or a man cave to entertain your friends. Call now for a free estimate.”
And that’s it. If you can master this process, (and learn proper grammar) you will succeed in writing web content that will get people picking up the phone or swiping their credit cards for orders.
It ends up looking something like this
So, here’s a paragraph that goes through the whole process in a couple of lines:
Learning how to write effective web-site copy this way takes a lot experience and training. Most small business owners lack the time needed to do so, which is why many of them choose to trust their on-line copy to the professionals at Big Blue Bear. Our staff of professional writers are all college graduates with professional degrees and experience in writing marketing copy for both on-line and traditional marketing campaigns. We produce well-written marketing content that is optimized both in its keyword density, its link profile, and through the new HTML5 convention microformatting. The combination will boost your search engine rankings, improve your on-line conversions and, most importantly produce phone calls and sales. If going back to school to relearn how to write is more effort than you’re interested in putting into your website, or if you think you’d prefer to entrust this work to professionals, give Big Blue Bear a call today. Start realizing the full potential of the on-line marketplace for your business.
Ok, so I did a little shameless self-promotion there, but you still get the idea. If you break down that paragraph into the four sections, it looks like this:
Establishing Need: “Learning how to write effective web-site copy this way takes a lot experience and training. Most small business owners lack the time needed to do so,…”
Establishing Competency: “…which is why many of them choose to trust their on-line copy to the professionals at Big Blue Bear. Our staff of professional writers are all college graduates with professional degrees and experience in writing marketing copy for both on-line and traditional marketing campaigns. We produce well-written marketing content that is optimized both in its keyword density, its link profile, and through the new HTML5 convention microformatting.”
Establishing Trust: “The combination will boost your search engine rankings, improve your on-line conversions and, most importantly produce phone calls and sales.”
Establishing Urgency: “If going back to school to relearn how to write is more effort than you’re interested in putting into your website, or if you think you’d prefer to entrust this work to professionals, give Big Blue Bear a call today. Start realizing the full potential of the on-line marketplace for your business.”
See how that works now? Good. Go forth, and write good copy… or if you’d prefer, give me a call and you can pay me and my team to do it for you.
