Author: Lyndsay

Getting into Writing When you are busy in the daily grind, finding the discipline and motivation to write copy for your business is hard.  Copy is the written text that persuades a potential customer to take action, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a service, or simply engaging with a brand.   Habit influencers are everywhere at the moment, there are books aplenty on how to develop new positive habits, I must admit I have several of these books and I really buy into the idea that we can turn things around.  The thing I don’t agree with though is that it takes a set amount of time for a habit to stick, so if you just get past that hurdle you’re onto a winner.  I don’t believe all habits are created equal and some are much harder to stick to or achieve for various reasons.     One of the biggest challenges I’m finding at the moment is trying to undo 20 years of writing within a strict corporate identity that appears to be embedded into my core, which required everything I produced to be very standard, very consistent, and nothing too ‘out there’ and generally holding the corporate line (i.e. no personality injected into it).  We had to write everything in Verdana 11; no images or colours were required. My writing has been ‘un-fun’ for 20 years! My experience was in the non-commercial world so we didn’t need to include a unique selling point, any call-to-actions, or any features v’s benefits.   There is absolutely nothing wrong with this in context, however when you write copy for your own business, you need your messaging to contain your personality, you need it to show the way you do things, you need it to speak and meet the reader where they are at, and quite frankly, you need it to be highly engaging and make them want to take the next step you’ve created for them.   Here’s What I’ve Learned: The Checklist Try using this list to guide you through the writing process: Write a catchy headline or hook. Know who this is for, what they care about, and what they need? If you don’t know, research first. Know what the purpose of the piece is, is it for education, information or advice, entertainment or to bring them into a funnel. Set the language tone to fit the audience, keep it simple and avoid industry jargon that they might not understand. Use stories, narrative helps to capture the reader’s imagination. Decide on a feeling outcome, what would you like the piece to make them feel?  Motivated? Energised? Ready to take action? Connected to you? Engaged? Find a structure that works and use it as a template for future work. Make the layout easy to read, and make it scannable with headings, subheadings, images, and lists. Be concise, don’t write more than you need to just to fit a word count. Be influential, think about how you would convince a friend to try a new thing you love. Focus on the benefits over features if you are writing about a product or service. Use a call-to-action (CTA) with a reason for them to act now. If you don’t know what CTA to use, consider writing a list of them.  It’s a great way to think about the customer journey. CTA’s could be signing up to your email list, enquiring about a product or service, completing a quiz, making a purchase, or following you on social media. Get someone to read it through if you can, to check readability but also to check the structure works and the writing style is consistent. Keep a copy, get your content organised so you can repurpose it.  No piece of writing should ever be used once, you’ve put hard work into a piece so make it work for you! Reward yourself when it’s done, writing a good piece of content is not a 5-minute job and it can be difficult and painstaking. Setting rewards can definitely help the process. Tools Don’t be afraid to use tools and templates that help you along the way.  It’s not cheating, it’s efficiency! I’ve been using Grammarly for about 6 months now and I find this really helps me, it’s not as annoying as autocorrect and gives you spelling, grammar and structure tips that you can either accept or reject.  The free version seems perfectly fine for what I need, you just need to install it on your laptop or desktop and it will pop up automatically in whatever you’re using (including social media). There is also a huge amount of talk about AI generated content at the moment, and whilst I think most of us know that we shouldn’t be relying solely on the robots, there is a huge amount of time to be saved by using it as research, structure, ideas and to get something on the page. I always say you can’t edit or improve nothing, so there is definitely a place and a use for this. There are so many amazing copywriters in the online world who recognise that a 1-1 service is not the only way to work with entrepreneurs and business owners.. Seek out those who offer copy templates that you might be able to buy once and reuse again and again. These might be perfect for sales pages rather than blog posts where you just insert certain elements.  I will add links here at a later date. How to Make Your Writing Better Edit, edit and edit some more.  I know there is not always much time for editing if you’re up against it.  I do believe in the philosophy that done is better than perfect, having said that I also feel that improvements can be made everyday.  Even if you have to publish something right now, go back to it when you have 5 minutes and spend some time reading through it.  Having a break away will be