Top Online Copywriter Secrets

The Most Wanted Response

This one of the most fundamental concepts you must understand in order to be a successful writer of Internet copy. No matter what kind of copy you're writing, be it content, and email newsletter or an online sales letter, there is always one particular response that you most want the reader to take. There may be more than one response, but one of them is always most important - the rest are back-up responses.

Takes sales letters for example. What's the Most Wanted Response (MWR)? To get the sale, of course. You want the reader to punch in her credit card details and make the order.

A back-up response may be an option to sign up to an email newsletter, so if she doesn't buy today, she might buy when you email her next week.

Breaking up Your Copy

Make sure your paragraphs aren't too dense. Reading Internet copy is a lot harder on the eyes than reading a page in a book.

Help the reader out as much as possible by breaking up the writing into short paragraphs. In some cases, single-line paragraphs will be appropriate. It's better to have more breaks than you need, rather than not enough.

Writing Compelling Headlines

Again, due to the nature of reading from a computer screen, people tend to scan a web page before they read the whole thing. That's why it's important to have attention-catching headlines sprinkled throughout your copy. They should clearly indicate what the following paragraph should be about, so they provide structure for the copy. But they also need to be interesting enough to keep the reader reading.

Intelligent Linking

Don't forget that links are a part of your copy as well. Now, there are a couple of important points to mention when it comes to links. It's generally better to use specific words for your links, rather than something like "click here."

This is because the search engines pay a lot of attention to what a link actually says when they try to figure out what each web page is about and how important it is. Links should also be compelling enough to encourage the reader to actually click - remember that with many content pages, the MWR is to get the reader to click through and read another page.

SEO and Copywriting

Writing persuasive copy and the art of search engine optimization can't really be split apart these days - they are completely intertwined. That said, some types of web pages require a lot more attention to SEO than others.

For example, let's say you want to write a content page. How important is SEO in this scenario? It's a high priority, because one of the big jobs of content pages is to generate free traffic from the search engines.

Now, let's think about a sales letter. It's still good to have some optimization in a sales letter, but you don't want keywords getting in the way of your persuasive message.

Trying to cram in keywords where they don't fit can make the copy clunky - not such a big deal on a content page where you aren't "selling" anything, but awkward copy can be a deal breaker on a sales page.

Ideally, you should be driving traffic to the sales page from other sources, such as a content site or PPC ads, and therefore you don't have to worry so much about getting the sales page itself to rank well. This allows you a lot more freedom to write the persuasive copy that's required.