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A picture can tell a thousand words, but only words can convince prospective buyers to take action.

What’s your product? What does it do? Who is it for?

What it will do for the buyer? What are the great benefits this product will deliver?

Who I am? Are the people behind this product trustworthy? Do they know what they’re talking about? Do they understand the buyer’s current problem that this product is supposed to solve?

What the buyer needs to do next. A persuasive Call to Action.

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Copywriting addresses two audiences: users & search engines.

First, the buyer that’s looking for your product and second, SEO or Search Engine Optimization.

Web search engines, such as Google and Bing, use computer algorithms to evaluate websites for relevance.

They use this evaluation data to rank results when a topic or product is searched through search engines.

This process affects the ‘visibility’ of a website. The higher the ranking assigned to a website, the easier it is for people to find it in the results that Google or Bing return when a search is made.

A website is more ‘visible’ when it is ranked highly by search engines.

Therefore, it is vitally important that your website ranks as highly as possible to enable potential buyers to find your products as easily as possible. This process is called Search Engine Optimization.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, search engines were unsophisticated in their ranking criteria.

Web copywriters could simply cram the site with ‘keywords’ such as for a bakery; cake, pastry, bread, fresh baked, piping hot, bagel, yeast, rye bread, sourdough, flatbread, etc.

Now, it’s not so easy.

The Search Engine ranks websites by competence, expertise, interaction, readability, how current is its information, do other websites cite it as a reference, how often is new content added, how naturally is the copy written, trust, uniqueness, load speed, visitor traffic, anchor text distribution, engagement metrics, quality of Tweeted links, Facebook shares, mentions of brand or domain in the news media or press, and many other criteria.

This makes it tough to fool the Search Engines. The only way to have a highly ranked website is to have a GREAT, regularly-updated website that is viewed and cited by many people.

That’s where One Yellow Tree comes in. We can make sure your website ranks as highly as possible. We can track its effectiveness and continuously work to move it further up the rankings as time goes on.

SEO is an ongoing process that needs short term strategies and a long-term plan.

Copywriting produces interesting content.

By including interesting stories, informative blogs, customer testimonials, FAQs, tips and tricks, links to relevant resources, customer feedback and comments, great product information and details on the Who, What, When, Why, Where and How of your products.

It’s the culmination of interesting and constantly updated content that wins the SEO race.

You can count on One Yellow Tree to build your website into an SEO powerhouse that is also interesting for people to visit.

One Yellow Tree can take your vision, no matter how vaguely articulated and transform it into ROI (Return on Investment) GOLD.

Copywriting is the number one variable of a website design that is often overlooked or hastily thrown together.

Well written copy can make all the difference in search engine ranking and help establish or reaffirm your brand’s voice.

Simply put, copywriting is when you write words to sell something. In the business, we just refer to it as writing “copy” though.

When you read a billboard, the words on it are “copy”.

When you see an infomercial, the sales spiel before asking you for your credit card is “copy”. In fact, the whole infomercial is “copy”.

Any time you’re writing with the intention of those words turning someone into a customer, you’re copywriting.

Benefits Focused

You’re a salesman selling jackets. You tell the customer “this one is made out of Goretex”.

Pop quiz: is that:

  1. a feature? OR

  2. a benefit?

Think about it for a moment. Don’t read any further until you’ve reflected upon the question.

Do you know the difference between features and benefits?

The answer is: (a) – a feature. The jacket is made of Gore Tex, but that doesn’t really describe “what’s in it for me” to the customer – that’s what benefits describe!

If you were going to sell a Gore Tex jacket, you’d want to take the benefits of the jacket, not the features. So you might say that the Gore Tex jacket is:

Copywriting is benefits focused, NOT features focused. Features are nice for techies, but for the everyday consumer, they want to know how it will affect their life.

They don’t need to know that the jacket is made of Gore Tex, they need to know that it will make their sunday-evening hike easier because of how light it is.

AIDA – The Principles of Selling

Invented in 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis, the AIDA concept represents how to sell to someone, and any good copywriting follows the principle in some fashion or another.

It stands for:

A – Attention

I – Interest

D – Desire

A – Action

The last step of course is the one you really want – they buy from you (ACTION)!

The process starts by getting your ever-distracted customer’s attention. This doesn’t mean they care about your product yet, it just means that they noticed it. This often comes as a result of placing your ad in front of the right people (perhaps a full-page ad in Gore Tex magazine is the right place to sell those jackets!).

Attention is a result of advertising in some way. Occasionally an advertiser will use a very shocking ad to get people to notice (take this Old Spice ad for example). In most cases you need only design a headline or ad that really speaks to your ideal customer to get their attention.

Once you have their attention, you need to create interest in what you’re selling. This means that they want to know more, and it’s accomplished by positioning your product as the solution to your customer’s problem. If you can’t solve a real problem that a decent amount of people have, then you probably won’t be able to make many sales.

Before you can close the sale though, you need to turn that faint interest into a real emotion of desire: the act of leading your customer to think “I WANT THAT”.

Copywriting puts these fundamental concepts in place to lead your customer into buying something. It is benefits focused, clear, and it understands your target customer very well.

Take Nike’s slogan: Just Do It. This is the result of understanding their target market very well – athletes. They’re people who spend less time “thinking about doing”, but instead just “do”.

Not only is Nike able to relate their brand to athletes through this phrase, but it’s also conveniently subliminal (you know you want to buy our Nike shoes, Just Do It!).

Any time you have written sales material, it will benefit far more if a copywriter writes it (or at least reworks it).

The idea of copywriting can take place in a 5,000 word sales letter, or it can be as simple as the 3 word slogan “Just Do It”.

It’s a vast subject that encapsulates the idea of selling in words. When you read words that are meant to sell, you’re reading copy.