If you want to convince your prospects your offer is exactly what they need, generalities won’t work.

Every word plays a crucial role.

You should calculate the space to the inch to say everything you need to say in as little space as possible.

People are in a hurry and only read what entails a promise.

In this copy mini-class, we’ll learn how to be specific and concise to sell more.

I’ll give you a hint, stories are very useful. But they can’t be too long!

So let’s get to the point!

Decide what’s the main message you want to convey

We talked about the Rule of One in this post.

Whether you’re writing a product page or a post for social media, you need to clarify in your mind what’s the main message you want the reader to take away.

And only one.

For example, with this mini class I want to share the keys to being specific and concise when writing for the web.

And here Michal Eisikowitz, an NYC copywriter wants readers to buy her guide to pricing.

Check her sales page, it’s super well-written. It’s a copy class in itself.

When you have your main message clear in your mind, writing becomes easier and more convincing.

How to write for the web with examples. #copywriting #contentwriting #blogging
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Share statistics and research

Most people who land on your website don’t know you at all.

At some point they’ll ask themselves, “Why should I trust what this person says?”

By adding information about relevant statistics or studies we increase readers’ trust.

“Oh, ok. She’s not the only one who says this. There are studies to back it up”.

Articulate Marketing offers inbound marketing and website design services to tech companies.

Their home page includes several statistics that help to sound more convincing.

You should always get to the point, so when quoting studies or statistics, just state the most important conclusion that supports your sales arguments, without beating around the bush or adding chaff.

Describe situations that are real and familiar to your prospects

The best way for the reader to retain the main message you want to convey is by describing situations they can relate to.

Use storytelling techniques to maintain readers’ interest.

If humour is your thing, use it.

If you are more serious, that’s fine.

Not everyone wants a laugh when it comes to business.

Let’s take a look at some examples.

Lemon.io is a platform that brings together developers and start-ups.

I love the copy and design of their website, it’s super effective and fun.

Be sure to stop by and take a look.

In just two paragraphs Lemon copywriters make their prospects feel understood through a specific message.

They describe how start-ups feel about hiring developers, the pain points as well as the objections.

“How do I know the developer will do a good job?”

Because Lemon puts them through 4 levels of judgement and out of 1000 applicants they only keep 300.

By adding figures the message becomes more precise and tangible because it’s super specific.

How to write for the web with examples. #copywriting #contentwriting #blogging
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Let’s look at another example.

Pip&Nut is a British peanut butter brand.

Pip is its creator and here she tells how the idea came about:

Pip, (or better said, the copywriter she hired), describes how she came to this idea.

But she also doesn’t miss the opportunity to tell us about the benefits of peanut butter and present it as a healthy product.

Here again, the message is specific and relatable.

No eureka moments.

No entrepreneurial miracles.

A girl who makes peanut butter at home and decides to turn her hobby into a business.

Every word should have a mission

When editing your copy ask yourself how you can make it more concise.

Cut where you can: where you see that the message doesn’t lose its meaning and persuasion power.

Do this:

Remove those sentences you think don’t add any value and reread the copy.

Has it lost its force?

Is the message unclear?

If so, add them back, but if the answer to these questions is a No, you’ve then succeeded in shortening the copy without losing any of its strength and clarity.

Then go over the long sentences.

Could you say the same thing with fewer words?

Give it a try.

Your copy should include all the necessary arguments to convince your prospects to buy in the shortest possible way.

Let’s look at some examples.

“The other day, when I met my neighbour in the lift, he said something that made me very happy.  He said that the neighbourhood association fee was going to be cut down because instead of hiring a managing company the neighbour in 4B had offered to take care of the administration himself for half of what the management company charges us.”

I will now highlight in bold the most important ideas in this paragraph.

“The other day, when I met my neighbour in the lift, he said something that made me very happy.  He said that the neighbourhood association fee was going to be cut down because instead of hiring a managing company the neighbour in 4B had offered to take care of the administration himself for half of what the management company charges us.”

Let’s see how we can shorten it without the message losing its force or meaning.

“The neighbour association fee is going to be cut down because a neighbour will take care of the admin for half of what the management company charges us”.

55 words reduced to 28 and the important message is the same.

Try this exercise.

When editing, think about how to remove the chaff from the main ideas.

With practice, you’ll see it faster.

I hope I’ve helped you learn to write in a more specific and concise way.

See you around!

How to write for the web with examples. #copywriting #contentwriting #blogging
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It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, there’s a special chemistry between you and the author.

You feel you have a lot in common.

The author lets you into the lives of her characters – or her own life – and when you finish the book you feel a kind of emptiness because you miss them.

You feel that the book was written for you, that some of the characters’ struggles have resonated with your own feelings.

Writing is a way of transferring enthusiasm, both in novels but also when we write copy.

Whether it’s an article for your blog or the copy for your website, your words should evoke feelings, they have to grab the reader tightly so she will continue reading.

If you want to learn how to write really well and make people want to read everything you write, you need to breathe life into your words.

You have to make time stand still and make the reader forget that she is in a hurry.

Contrary to what many people think, people still like to read.

Why do you think then there’s so much content on the internet and millions of books are still being published?

The truth is that people only read what interests them.

Here I’m going to show you some of the techniques great writers use to make their writing interesting and keep the reader engaged.

Vivid language

I feel really sorry when I read blogs from people who have taken the time to write them – including statistics, quoting sources, using correct language – but they turn out to be soporific.

Even for those that are the target audience who are supposed to understand the technical words.

People don’t read them because they are drab, they don’t excite, and most importantly, they don’t get the reader involved.

To get people interested in your article you need to bring your words to life.

And how do you do that?

By describing real situations that serve as examples so the reader can picture the scene and easily get involved.

Here’s an example.

Years ago I decided to polish my creative writing skills by signing up for an online writing school based in Madrid.

I tried to follow the classes and read all the material they sent us before doing the exercises.

I quit after 2 months.

The texts they sent me bored me to tears.

They were flat, bland, and lacking in vivid language. I couldn’t engage with them even if I tried hard.

So I decided, as I’ve done so many times in my life, to learn to write better on my own by reading the best books on writing I could find.

One of them was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

This book teaches you how to write by mixing the technical part with the author’s life experience.

It’s full of vivid moments that make you smile and get excited.

For example, the bird scene that stuck with me and gave the book its title.

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was 10 at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he’d had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was sitting at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

This scene stuck with me and it comes to my mind every time I get overwhelmed with some task. I think of the birds and I say to myself, come on Elena, bird by bird.

With this scene, Lamott manages to put us in the right mood and so we perfectly get the message she wants to convey.

We can almost feel her brother’s anguish since we have lived through similar moments in childhood.

To grab your audience’s attention, you should share concrete moments, so they’ll feel engaged and forget they’ve got an endless list of things to do.

This technique can also be useful when you write your company’s About section.

The Word Man is a British copywriter.

This guy is a storytelling wizard and tells you his story in a fun and original way that makes you want to read till the end, like going down on a slide.

This is how he starts:

“Adding extra to ordinary since 1988

Most six-year-olds in September 1988 were still playing with their own snot. Not me. I’d just put together a ten-game unbeaten Scrabble run against my dad, who’d only taught me how to play that very month. And the more we played, the more my vocabulary grew. ‘Bazookas’ across two triple word scores was my personal zenith. By junior school I was unstoppable. It wasn’t long before I was correcting teachers’ blackboard spelling and being the annoying kid who’d pull you up if you wrote their instead of there.”

Anyone could have said, “I’ve always been good at spelling since I was a kid,” but The Word Man tells an engaging story that makes you smile and forget that you’ve got some spaghetti cooking in the kitchen that’s about to get soggy.

Be crystal clear

In order for the people who have landed on your website to get hooked on your words, your writing needs to be transparent.

The reader shouldn’t have to spend any energy trying to figure out what you’re trying to say; all their energy should be focused on reading on to find out more.

One way to write clearly is to ask yourself if you would repeat the same sentence in a conversation.

Imagine you are at a dinner party and the person sitting next to you asks you what you do.

And you reply, “I use Cognitive Sophrology techniques with my clients.

Do you think they understood anything?

I don’t think so.

But if you say, “I help people who are going through a difficult time to turn their negative thoughts around and make the best of it,” they’ll have a better idea of what you do, and you won’t sound like a walking encyclopaedia.

Write as you speak.

Imagine a real person who has landed on your website and wants to know more about how you can help them solve a problem.

Anticipate the questions that will pop into their head at the points where they might be in doubt because you are talking about something more technical.

The same applies to your blog posts.

To make sure they are clear, ask yourself before you sit down to write, “What do I want this article to achieve?”

“I want the reader to have a better idea of how to write in a more engaging way.”

Being clear about your goal will help you with the structure and also with getting the message across.

Rhythm

Rhythm is one of the most important factors in writing.

A text is like a melody, with its ups and downs, its faster and slower moments.

By changing the rhythm, you break the monotony of the text and make reading a pleasure, like listening to a great song.

An example of a text with excellent rhythm, which is also one of the most famous opening lines in the world of literature, is this:

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”.

Yes, it’s Lolita by Nabokov.

Note the combination of short sentences with some longer ones.

Also note the questions that he answers himself, a method also used by the Spanish writer Fernando Aramburu in his great novel Patria.

Rhythm is the colophon of your text. It will transform your post from just another post into one that is worth stopping and reading until the very last word.

Recommended Reading How to write in a clear and engaging way

If you have set out the goal of writing a blog to attract organic traffic and establish yourself as an authority in your field, you need to write in a clear and engaging way to keep the reader’s attention.

It’s super important that visits who land on your article stay. And they’ll stay if they find your article helpful and entertaining.

You also need to show Google that you publish quality content, that’s why people spend time reading it, so Google makes a good move sending more traffic to your blog.

Today, there are millions of blogs (about 600 million, to be precise) and the day has only 24 hours, so Internet users are increasingly choosing what’s worth reading.

If your article has attracted the reader’s attention with the headline, don’t make him leave right after reading the first paragraph because your explanations are too vague or too complicated.

Help him focus on reading by going straight to the point and maintaining his interest.

Easy to say, huh?

But how do you write in a clear and engaging way?

How do you make the reader stay and, moreover, go and read more articles?

If you stay (wink, wink) we’ll see how.

Here we go.

Tell little and big stories

I’m referring to the technique of zooming in and out. Henneke Duistermaat explains it really well in this post.

This technique refers to combining data and conclusions you have reached by studying the topic you are writing about, with little stories about you or other people that serve as examples to illustrate those points.

Imagine one of those movies that start with the camera flying over a neighbourhood of houses with a front yard. This shot places the spectator in a specific place and time.

For example, from the type of houses and cars parked at the entrance, we guess the setting is in the US sometime around the 50s and since it’s sunny and there aren’t any lush forests we think it’s probably LA or any other southern city.

That camera which flies over the neighbourhood of houses with front yards descends over a single house and gets in a room through the window where we see a teenager getting ready to leave.

We see a grimace of annoyance on her face as she looks to herself in the mirror. She doesn’t like her reflection, sighs heatedly and heads to the closet to change her clothes for the umpteenth time.

This is the zooming in and out technique.

When you are explaining a topic you zoom out by talking about concepts or data and zoom in when you give a concrete example.
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And speaking of examples, let’s see one.

Susan David in her book Emotional Agility talks about how controlling our thoughts can help us live the life we really want. Basically, emotional agility refers to the skill of moving on to something else and not being tormented by negative thoughts.

In one part of the book she tells us (I’m not writing her exact words, by the way):

“We can’t read the instructions when we’re locked inside the jar. Mindfulness helps us to be more emotionally agile by making us observe the person who is thinking the thoughts”.

This statement brings us closer to their meaning by telling us about a specific person:

“Okay, I’m having the thought that I’m a loser. As it happens to many people at some point. That’s my wounded child talking. I have a lot of thoughts every day. I can notice them and accept them all, the bad ones and the good ones, but I reserve myself the right to act only on those who are going to help me live the life I want to live”.

With the zooming in and out technique you establish your authority in your field since you explain important concepts that show you know what you are talking about. You are also able to explain these concepts in a simple way by telling a specific story.

Sharing personal experiences brings you closer to the reader who sees you as the person of flesh and blood you are.
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You also help them to apply what you teach to their lives since they can relate to your story.

Let’s look at other ways of writing in a clear way to keep the reader’s attention.

The power of appealing to the senses

There is nothing that brings the reader closer than feeling she can taste, see, hear, smell or touch your words.

Sometimes adding metaphors and slowing down to explain a feeling can help a reader feel that same sensation and become more engaged.

Describe how something made you or the character you want to talk about feel:

“When my client saw that her website had been hacked, she told me that she felt as if someone had broken into her house. You open the door and find the whole house upside down, you hardly recognize it. It’s your territory, the centre of your business, and someone has snuck in to make it theirs. It was a horrible feeling of helplessness”.

With this little story, you help the reader imagine the situation and even feel it in their own skin, in the case he’s never experienced before.

If the reader has already been through this same situation, he will trust you more since you perfectly know how it feels.

Diana Athill gives us precious life lessons in her memoir Somewhere Towards the End:

“A broken heart recovers much faster from a blast than from progressive strangulation.”

A delightful metaphor that makes us feel, remember and agree with her.

Let us continue to see more ways to write in a clear and entertaining way.

Short sentences

We are all very busy and want to get the information we need quickly.

If we see that the article where we have landed has long sentences with commas and smart words that embellish but say nothing, we will lose the will to continue reading.

You have to make the words flow, make them alive. People want action.

You achieve action by building short sentences where the main characters are the subject and the verb.

Forget about the passive voice where the subject is unclear. Passivity is the opposite of action and the number one enemy of zesty writing.

When you edit your text, look at your sentences’ structure. How many verbs and adverbs are there?

Have I added too many adjectives, and can I remove some parts to make the message crisp and straightforward?

Let’s look at an example:

Our new mums’ group will help you fight loneliness and insecurity related to your baby’s first months and will provide you with the right environment to clear up your doubts more quickly so that you feel more secure and can live this special moment with joy.

Words highlighted in bold are the important ones:

Our new mums’ group will help you fight loneliness and insecurity related to your baby’s first months and will provide you with the right environment to clear your doubts more quickly so that you feel more secure and can live this special moment with joy.

Clear and concise version:

Our new mums’ group will help you fight loneliness and insecurity. We help each other by clearing up doubts so that you can live this special moment with joy.

Remember:

Who does what? The most important thing is the subject and the action verb. Don’t get lost in pompous adjectives and adverbs.

These are some of the main action verbs:

• Progress
• Improve
• Reach
• Grab
• Dazzle
• Create
• Support
• Grow
• Savour
• Imagine
• Galvanize
• Flourish
• Talk
• Win…

Write the way you speak

Do you remember the books you were assigned to read at school?

Well, don’t write like that.

I know, you still hear Margaret’s voice, your English teacher, instructing you to write long sentences with a lot of description and to use smart words.

Forget about Margaret. She wasn’t in marketing and sales.

We are not here to win the Booker Prize but to communicate in a clear and simple way the message we want to be engraved in the reader’s mind.

Be careful not to neglect the spelling and avoid swearing.

Just because you have to write in a conversational way doesn’t mean you can swear or write like in a teenager’s WhatsApp.

Always read aloud when you are editing your text.

It will help you to break long sentences and identify repetitions.

You know, practice is what will take you from writing more or less well to nailing it.

See you around!