Finding the Right Voice for Your Copywriting

How one web marketer improved his copywriting with one simple test that you can apply to your copywriting, too

Are you turning potential customers away with your writing? I wouldn't have thought I was. Writing has been central in every job I've had.

But I recently got "schooled" big time on my writing. And if I, with 30 years of experience writing for a living, can fall into a rookie mistake, you might want to check whether you're making the same one.

My daughter was home for a weekend recently. She has come to me a lot for advice on her business, so I figured a little turnabout was in order.

I had just finished my newsletter. It had a couple of new product reviews that I was pretty pleased with. But I thought, why not get her reaction to them? After all, she's exactly the kind of small business owner that reads my newsletter. So I asked her to
read them.

She finished.

Silence.

I could see her trying to figure out what to say. Finally she said, "I guess they're OK, but..."

"But what?" I asked.

"But that's not the way you usually write," she replied. "I don't know. Maybe it's supposed to be different when you write a newsletter, but I like the emails you write me a LOT better."

Caught in the biggest beginner mistake

BAM! I had gotten so overconfident of my writing that I had fallen into a real beginner mistake: writing formally.

You know the way you always used to write in school? Well, you don't want to write that way in ANY of your online business writing.

When you wrote for your teachers, your goal was to make the teacher think you're smart. So you wrote with big words, complex sentences, abstract thoughts. You wrote very formally.

When you write for your online visitors, the last thing you want to do is come across like you think you're smarter than they are. You want to win their trust, not alienate them.

The way you want to write for your audience

You want to write on their level -- warm, accessible, helpful. You want them to feel like you know their needs and genuinely want to help them. You want to write to them in the same way that, say, a father might write an email in response to a question from his daughter.

I've been applying that test to my writing ever since. Before I consider anything that I write done, I reread every paragraph, every sentence, every word with one question in mind: "Would I write this way in an email to Rachel?"

And whatever doesn't pass that test gets simplified, gets "informalized," until it sounds like the way I write to my kids. That reminder to keep it casual has helped me catch a lot of overly formal writing and improved my results.

Apply this test to your writing

And it's a test you can apply to your writing, too. After you've written something for your potential customers, think of someone you genuinely care about and reread everything you wrote. And as you reread it, ask yourself, "If I was writing an email to this person to explain this same thing, is this the way I would write it?"

I'm sure that you can improve your writing immensely with this little test. It certainly improved mine.

Helping you become the successful business owner you want to be.

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