When you were a child, did you ever want to become a superhero with powers that helped you conquer the word? Whether you wished for flying powers or the ability to cast spider webs at the flick of a wrist, we can all use a superhero in our lives now in then—and sometimes that superhero is in the form of a copywriter.
Connecting with customers in 2017 is tough. Really tough. Attention spans are shorter than ever, clickbait is running rampant, and fake news is one of the newest obstacles to impact the world of content marketing today.
It sounds like we need a superhero after all.
Even though clickbait and fake news are a few evil villains in the eyes of your customers, this doesn’t mean that you need to accept defeat. You can still win the attention of your audience by installing some serious copywriting skills in your business blog, but it will take some dedication and a splash of superhero copywriting talent to make it work.
What is a Copywriter?
Oh, those commercial jingles that you simply can’t get out of your head. That awesome tagline from your favorite brand that makes you smile every single time. And don’t forget about the countless blogs that you read that inspire you to grow your business year after year.
Those are your copywriters, hard at work.
But what is a copywriter by terms of definition? A marketing and advertising copywriter specializes in writing content that helps sell something. Whether it’s a wristwatch or a new luxury car, companies hire copywriters to help build buzz and sell the pants off of whatever item they’re marketing.
This is type the of copywriter companies hire to write actionable and engaging blogs. They’re highly creative yet strategic with their craft.
However, keep in mind that there are different styles of copywriting for all kinds of fields. There are technical copywriters, healthcare copywriters, and you guessed it—web content and blogging copywriters.
What is a Copywriter Superhero?
Now that you know what a copywriter does, what is a copywriter superhero? A copywriter superhero is both a writer and a strategist. They thoroughly research the blog audience in order to deliver the best content and build a connection with the audience.
This is where the difference lies between an everyday copywriter and a superhero copywriter. The best copywriters won’t just plunge into your blog without looking twice. They will research the audience, best keywords, and hot and trending content with tools such as Buzzsumo.
Once they have gathered enough information to write their masterpiece, only then will they move forward with making your blog something that stands out.
It’s a combination of using powerful, influential written words with extraordinary research skills.
How do You Begin to Build Customer Connections Like a Pro Copywriter?
As I mentioned earlier, there is a lot of noise on the Internet today. This is why it is crucial for any bog strategy to include high quality content that delivers actionable advice for readers. Your blog strategy must also offer content where your audience learns something and can apply it to whatever problem they are trying to solve in the moment.
The takeaway here is that you need to do your research and find questions asked by real people.
This is one of the keys to building trust through your content, thus establishing a connection that keeps your customers coming back for more.
Developing Your Researching Superpowers
The good news is that with some hard work (and a bit of luck), you too can begin the process of gaining trust with your readers. The first step is to learn how to research what your audience wants so you can be sure that you hit the right note with every blog post you publish.
Key Research Methods for Copywriting: Creating Killer Topics That Customers Want to Read
Let’s say that you’re a pet supply company that wants to increase your sales of dog collars. The last thing that you want to do is publish a blog post that lists your dog collars with prices and call it a day. You want to create content that sounds good, but it also needs to make sense to your audience and benefit them in some way.
This will help you identify what your readers actually want out of a blog post. There are numerous sources online that can help you, and these are some of the best ones to use in my book:
Real Q&A: Customer Research with Quora
Quora is a free Q&A community, much like Yahoo! Answers but a little more polished. You can use the search bar to find questions or simply type in the keyword that you have in mind.
Upon typing “dog collar” into the search bar, dozens of questions pop up that are asked by real life people—people who could potentially become your customer.
These are four great examples that you can take as a base for a new blog post about dog collars. They are all legitimate questions where you can provide in-depth answers right on your company blog, which offers numerous benefits: increased traffic to your website, in-depth content that transforms your blog into a credible resource, and positioning yourself as an authority with your readers.
If you choose to answer any of the aforementioned questions from Quora on your blog, be sure to add additional value. You don’t want to rehash any of the answers already provided without adding your own input.
If Quora doesn’t get the job done for you, not all hope is lost. You can find some customer questions and feedback from the following sources:
• Your social media accounts
• Competitor social media accounts
• Face-to-face interactions with customers
• Online industry forums
• Blog comments (your own and competitor blogs)
Investigating Trending Social Media Topics with Buzzsumo
Every great superhero needs to do some detective work to make sure their mission is on point. Now that you have a grasp on how to use real people as a source of content writing inspiration, social media can also offer more clues.
Buzzsumo is a great tool for unveiling the top performing content on social media in your industry. You can either use the free version with numbered daily search queries with limited results, or you can upgrade to an account that starts at $99 per month. It shows social shares for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest.
When you search by a particular keyword on Buzzsumo (in this case, “dog collars), you’ll find a list of the top trending content within a specified timeframe of your choice. These are three of the best-performing articles in 2016 in terms of social media shares:
The idea isn’t to directly swipe these topic titles. You’ll want to tweak them and add new value for your customers.
Think of how you can add your own unique angle here—perhaps you can consider a longer article than the original with in-depth research. If you have any photography skills, you can also add some high-quality photos for extra engagement.
You’ll also want to take a close look at each post and determine what it is that made people want to share this content. If you don’t have a unique edge to offer with your new content, your strategy will quickly go downhill.
Blog Topic Guidelines that Help Build Trust
Keep in mind that there are certain blog topic ideas that work better than others when it comes to building trust. Positioning yourself as an authority in the field is one of the most effective and fastest ways to help build customer connections.
Consider offering blog content that focuses on:
• Teaching your customers how to do something
• Educating your customers on a product or service (without being salsey)
• Guidebooks
• Bonus download content such as a checklist
Copywriter Superhero in Training: Back to Basics
So you have some ideas in mind for your next blog post, and your research shows that the content will benefit your customers. However, there is another piece of the puzzle that you’ll need before a connection can be made: stellar copywriting skills.
Here is the truth: some people have more natural copywriting talent than others. However, you can still sharpen your skills to help promote your business while ultimately generating leads and scoring sales.
The first step is to go back to the fundamentals of copywriting. While this may sound as if you’re taking a step backward, it’s important to help your copywriting skills flourish.
7 Superhero Secrets to Help You Write Blogs Like a Pro
When you’re ready to showcase your top-notch copywriting skills, here are 7 superhero secrets to help you get started:
• Do not write passively. Passive writing makes it sound as if you’re unsure of yourself. When you’re blogging to establish yourself as an authority figure in your field, this is certainly the last impression that you want to make. Passive sentences are created by combining the phrase “to be” and the past participle of the main verb. Write with an active voice in your blogs—and most importantly of all, write with confidence.
• Use your personality as a selling proposition. No one wants to read through a bland blog post, especially if your industry is dry enough on its own. Inject some of your personality into your writing style, as it will help you develop a distinctive voice for your brand.
• Take the time to develop the perfect headline. The scary truth is that 80% of your readers never make it past the headline of a blog post. This can be extremely disappointing when you spent hours planning, writing, and editing your next masterpiece, only to have it lost in a sea of ordinary headlines. When it comes to writing the perfect blog title, it truly needs to be extraordinary in order to grab attention and inspire people to read further.
• Make a strong introduction. If it’s not bad enough that only 2 out of 10 customers click through to read your blog post, the average attention span isn’t in your favor either. The average human attention span is roughly 8 seconds, which doesn’t give you a whole lot of time to draw customers into your blog post. One smart copywriting trick is to start your introduction off with a question. This instantly helps you to build a connection with the reader and get them interested in the remainder of the blog post.
• Focus on solutions, not sales. When your blog post is all about me, me, me, you’ll lose readers quicker than the click in a mouse. While the goal of nearly every blog post is to create some type of conversion, you’ll get nowhere fast by trying to push your product on your readers. The right approach is to focus on your product or service’s solutions and benefits. How do they make your customers’ lives easier?
• Tell your customers to take action. Once your readers reach the end of the blog post, many won’t do anything other than click the X on their screen and go about their day. Always include a call-to-action in your blog post and guide your customers on what they should do next.
• Don’t ruin great content by over-focusing on SEO. While blog posts are a great benefit to boost search engine rankings, beware of bogging down your blog post by over optimizing. Use your keywords naturally and always write for humans first.
Top Tools to Make You a Better Blog Writer Today
Although writing a blog post the right way can feel like an intimidating task, the good news is that there are tools available to help streamline the process. These are some of the best tools available to help make you a better copywriter for your business blog:
- HubSpot blog topic generator. This is a great tool when you’re a beginner business blogger and you need some help crafting compelling headlines. HubSpot offers a downloadable blog topic generator where you can input a few keywords for new suggestions. This can help spark your creativity and get your next blog post moving in the right direction.
- CoSchedule headline analyzer. Once you pick a solid blog topic, another useful tool is CoSchedule’s headline analyzer. This analyzer grades your headline and gives input in terms of emotional connection, power words, character count, and more. Of course you’ll need to take your grade with a grain of salt, but it can give you some good feedback on how you can make your blog topics even better than before.
- CoSchedule Scheduling Calendar. CoSchedue’s primary purpose is to help organize your workflow so you can create a streamlined schedule—whether it’s for blogging, social media management, and more. CoSchedule can help you stay on track with your business blog and you can even invite writers to your calendar and assign tasks. This works very well if you have a small marketing team to manage, or if you simply need a quick solution to keep your ducks in a row.
- Microsoft Excel. Yep—good old fashioned Excel can be a powerful tool to help you organize your blog. You can use an Excel spreadsheet to store future blog topics along with keywords and publishing dates. You can also source images from stock photo websites and store the links for future use.
- Copyscape. The best blog posts are well-researched and offer plenty of data and hard facts to back up your claims. However, you want to be very careful about referencing your material word-for-word, or even copying entire sections of other blog posts. We all learned at a very young age that plagiarism is a big no-no, and it’s certainly something you don’t want to play around with when it comes to copywriting. If you’re concerned about your blog’s material—or maybe you even want to find out if someone copied your work—turn to Copyscape. Simply paste your link into the box and Copyscape will find if there is any duplicate content from your post around the web. This tool can also be used to verify that your blog posts are original and authentic if you decide to hire a professional blog copywriter.
- Thesaurus.com. If you’re going to make a serious attempt at making your blog as professional as possible, you’ll need to expand your vocabulary. Thesaurus.com is an excellent (and free) source to expand your horizons and offer new word ideas for when you’re feeling burned out.
- Read-able. A free tool called Read-able helps you test the reading level of your work. This is helpful for those who want to simplify their blog posts with a reading level range of 7th to 9th grade—which is the level of the average American adult.
Save the Day with Superhero Copywriting Powers
As you can see, there is a lot to learn when you’re trying to grow your blog writing skills to superhero status. However, it’s important that you remain diligent and keep flexing those writing muscles day after day. After a lot of practice and hard work, you too can writer powerful blog posts that even your own villains can’t resist.
If you need a copywriting superhero on your team, get in touch with Busy Blogs Plus for blog content that moves mountains.
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