Simple Tips to Amp Up Your Copy

Well-written copy can inspire its readers to do pretty much anything. In order for your copy to have this same impact, there are a few key things to keep in mind as your drafting these motivating words:

1. Make your headlines action-oriented – The difference between: “New Website is Up” and “Be the First to See Our Newly Redesigned Website,” is huge in your reader’s eyes. You want to get them excited, regardless of what it is that you’re writing about. In order to get anyone else excited about what it is that you’re talking about, you, yourself, need to be as well. Even if you’re just writing up a quick announcement about a small change to something, write as if it’s the greatest thing in the world! You can always tone it down later if you go overboard.

2. Organize your content appropriately – This is especially important when drafting up newsletters: put the most important items in your newsletter at the very top, then work your way down. People get bored after a chunk of text or two, so make sure they’re seeing the good stuff, first! It’s also important to think about this idea from a business perspective, It may not be the most important thing to you, but what do you ultimately want to get across in your message?

3. Use better more effective words - You don’t need to be a walking thesaurus to know which words make people more interested in what you have to say than others. A fatal flaw in your copy can be the insertion of ordinary, subjective words that don’t really paint the picture you’re looking to tell. Here are a few quick examples:

  * Instead of “great,” use words such as: incredible, monumental, special, admired, renowned, notable, etc.
  * Instead of “fun,” use words such as: enjoyable, amusing, entertaining, carefree, etc.
  * Instead of “new,” use words such as: just announced, unveiled, novel, latest, current, advanced, modern, etc.

4. Cut the Fluff – If you ever want people to enjoy reading any of your copy, you need to make sure that every bit of it is powerful, and worth their time. People learn quickly, so if you stick in some filler copy in one area and people read it, they’ll start to think the rest of the your site isn’t worth reading as well. Your copy should be thought of as important as your design – cut out the unnecessary words taking up space and get to the root of what you’re trying say. Travelzoo has a great newsletter that is tremendously popular, yet only includes the absolute basics: Headline, price, and link:

5. Cut the Copy - As much as I love copy, it really is not always a necessary aspect of everything you do. Yes, maybe a sentence or two is required, but beyond that, it can be OK to say nothing else. The most effective and popular newsletters, are often the most simple. Here is an example of a newsletter that does a terrible job of this:

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Stats about this newsletter:

August 3rd edition word count – 4,077

July 29th edition word count – 5, 653

Guess what I do with this newsletter when I open it up? I don’t read a single sentence and it gets deleted. How am I supposed to know which of the 26 pages of text is actually important to me?

6. Forget SEO - Your first instinct might be that all of this text means search engines will love your website more and reward you with higher search result rankings. If you’ve checked out our post titled “SEO for the Average Joe,” the you should know the most naturally written websites tend to do best with search engines. Just write for your audience, and the search engines will do the rest.

So get writing already! And make sure you keep in mind that your copy should always try and encourage its reader to take some sort of action when they’ve finished consuming it, so make it good!

Questions to Discuss

1. Do you have any other tips to add to this list?

2. Where have you seen copy that really got you interested in doing something?