How household businesses can make more sales online—
without stretching,
twisting, halving or otherwise messing with the truth
People running small businesses to feed their families—people, perhaps, like you—often struggle to find trustworthy marketing advice. Throw a rock into any group of marketing experts, and you’ll likely hit a self-proclaimed guru whose chief skill involves slaughtering truth on the altar of mammon.
You don’t want your website to break the ninth commandment (bearing false witness). But…you still need the expertise.
If you’re like most small business owners, you didn’t hire a copywriter to write your web content. Maybe you’re starting to realize that was a mistake. To illustrate, consider this scenario:
Imagine you had to give a sales presentation using only words from your website…
I’ll give you a minute to open a new tab and have a crack at figuring how that conversation would sound.
Don’t feel bad. It’s normal. The verbiage on most business sites couldn’t sell someone in real life. Which is why most websites don’t make the kind of ROI their owners would like.
The problem is simply this: the ability to craft copy that actually sells has been trained out of us from the moment we could string sentences together. It was trained out of me, and it was trained out of you. It was also trained out of web designers. The only difference is I’ve spent a good time retraining.
The way we’re taught to write—at school, at university, and ironically especially in the workplace—produces weak, lifeless, and ineffective copy. It fails to engage, it fails to convince, and so it fails to sell.
The good news is, if you can close sales in real life, you can do it online. You just need the right help to figure out the right words—and put them into the right thought-sequence.
Which means the chances are good that your website could generate far more sales with the right adjustments. To that end, I offer the following services:
- Value Analysis & Messaging Strategy. This is how I start any copywriting project. I have developed VAMS over many years to ensure that I can quickly understand, identify, and articulate the 20% of your value that gets you 80% of your results. The VAMS workshop takes about an hour, and I then produce a VAMS guide from it for your review before proceeding with messaging development.
- Content architecture. This covers anything that involves planning out how content should get into your prospect’s head. For a website, it will usually start with a SCOUR audit (Site Conversion Objectives & User Response), typically of your homepage. From there I’ll create wireframes to guide your design team in adjusting the page’s layout (I don’t create design treatments as it is not an economical use of my time).
- Copywriting. This covers creating entirely new content, or treatments for copy that you think should be performing better. Either way, we can load your pages or campaigns with higher-caliber words, and aim them more accurately. My expertise is especially in web and email copy.
- Email campaigns A major component in most online businesses is the so-called “funnel,” which is really much better characterized as a quest. In addition to creating email copy on a more ad-hoc basis, I have special expertise in mapping out and writing such email quests.
- Web design. My original bread-and-butter. I only create from scratch because trying to adjust other people’s code is not economical—nor, typically, sensible in the long term. If you’re looking for a highly-optimized, hand-crafted bespoke website, inquire within. I build using modern JavaScript frameworks like AstroJS to create simple and very fast websites. If you want WordPress, look elsewhere. WordPress developers are a dime a dozen, and they are welcome to it.