3 Tips For Writing Content That Sells

 



The more people use the Internet, the more companies are willing to invest into different kinds of online tools that are supposed to help them sell their products and services. One of the most popular things the companies do today to boost sales is they actively post specific content on their own websites, different online platforms and forums, social media networks, etc. Many business efforts in this context boil down to writing a powerful selling text. In other words, companies are looking for people who are experienced in sales writing and how know very well how to sell your product with the help of a written text. The question is how do you do that? How can you write a selling text that could increase sales rates? In this article, we are going to address this question in detail. We have developed this process for effective sales writing as we find it the most effective method of delivering a content that can grow sales, be it a blog article, product description or social network account posts.

The Process

  1. Before you ever sit to write any kind of text for sales purposes, you have to define your target audience first. In other words, you have to know whom are you writing this text for. For instance, if you were to explain the offensive football tactics to a doctor who is not interested in football at all you would have used different words than when you would be explaining the same thing to a football player. So before writing anything you have to know the audience. It will help you make your text more appealing to those who are going to read it. Since this is a purpose of any selling text that is how you achieve your goal

  2. This second step you have to make doesn’t involve any writing too. At this point, you just have to know the product, service or company you are going to write about. But that is not for the purpose of listing all of the specifications, details, and features of the products or services in your selling text. No one likes to read articles with general descriptions and specifications. Instead, people want to know how it can help them make their life easier. So it should be more about benefits rather than some kind of specifications. Before you do that you have to understand what those benefits are (improved productivity, problem resolution, etc.). For example, if you are going to write about cell phone batteries you can say that they last weeks, not just a few days. That would be a huge benefit people are going to be interested in.

  3. Now you have to choose the tone of voice (yes, texts have the voice). Depending on who the readers are you want to sound engaging for them. That can also help you stand out as most of the selling text are written in a boring fashion. If appropriate, inject a dash humor and your personality into it. Try to use language your readers use every day. In other words, imagine you are trying to communicate the same thing to a person in a real conversation: what kind of words are you going to use? That is a kind of language you would want to use if you are to create a powerful selling text.

  4. Now that you know what to write and with what tone you should communicate the message you need to come up with an easily scannable format that your readers could follow. Whenever people open a website article, they usually read about 20%. However, there are several tools you can use in order to make the readers go through all of your text. First, use headings and subheadings. This helps to see a clear structure and divides your text into the blocks of information, which are easier to read. Secondly, you may want to use a bulleted list format when describing key benefits of your product or service. This should also improve overall readability.

  5. When people are looking for an interesting read or are simply trying to find out more about a specific product or service they usually close the pages on which all they can see is a solid text (or blocks of text). If your text is not visually engaging in any way it is very likely that people won't even start reading it. In today's world of technology people expect a photo or video illustration to help see things not just read about them. What is even better is to develop an interactive infographic in order to illustrate the benefits of the product or service. It is both helpful and engaging, which is exactly what you need.

  6. At this point, you just have to implement all of the ideas mentioned above to create a powerful piece of sales writing. But even after you have your text written and checked several times for mistakes you are not done yet. You still have to optimize your content for search engines. It does not mean that all you have to be thinking about is just keywords and phrases. Let it flow naturally from your article.

Customer-Oriented Texts

Whenever you have to write a text that is to generate sales you need to keep in mind prospective customers who may be first to buy the product you are describing. We have always been in the place when we read stuff online about something before we actually make the decision to buy it. If the only thing you are asking yourself is how to sell your product through writing selling texts you will likely end up nowhere. It is all about what a prospective customer needs. This ultimately is the answer to the question how to sell your product.

No matter what your business sells, your content should try and achieve the following goals: Position your brand as a thought leader; Develop relationships and loyalty; Create authentic value; 3. Align Your Content to Your Business Goals. A number of speakers at Content Marketing World highlighted the importance of measuring your content efforts. Media update’s Aisling McCarthy shares six tips to writing copy that actually leads to sales. If you’ve ever written content before — whether it was for a blog, press release, article, marketing material or something else — you’ll know that it isn’t easy. Starting off the list of writing tips for non-writers with the quote to boost your morale and eliminating the negatives that were blocking you from writing your content piece. The first tip in the list is the same. Here, the example is one paragraph long. What if the example was a paper of 2-3 pages? This is one side. Lack of a topic sentence also causes the writer to drift away from the topic. He loses control over the writing. He may write 3 sentences about one controlling idea and 1 for the other which causes an imbalance within the writing. Creating the right content for your business might seem tricky at first. The good news is that you can easily achieve a great result with a little effort. Writing content that converts into sales can be made easy if you follow certain tips. Even if you are a beginner in writing, most of these are easy to follow and can help your business a lot.

You can never successfully increase sales if all you are thinking about is just numbers and figures that you expect to grow. The whole sales process is all about people buying stuff. And if you don't care about your buyers they can feel it and will unlikely ever make any purchase at your company.

Concluding Remarks

Finally, if you think you cannot develop a strong text to motivate prospective clients buy things you can order writing services. There are many companies today offering custom writing services to help businesses with this kind of endeavor. Usually all you have to do is to provide specific details as to what you need and pay for the piece of writing in advance. However, you should be careful since many of writing agencies online never go beyond their promises. They usually take your money providing a poor content. Sometimes you can get your money back in these cases but it may take too much time...

In Process Writing, we have emphasized the fact that it is very hard for the teacher to concentrate on both the grammar and the organization errors on a student paper and still not discourage the student with those red marks all over the paper. Instead, we have suggested that the students should be able to comment on and edit their own paper to a certain extent. The advantages of such an approach would be raising awareness of the student and reducing the workload of the teacher.

The exercises we have here are organized in such a way that the students will concentrate on only one thing (e.g. organization, grammar, vocabulary choice, etc.) at a time. For each type of mistake, we first repeat the information presented in detail in Paragraph Development and The Essay, and then provide a writing exercise about it. For each type, the student first sees the original writing. Then, he corrects the writing by typing in the text box provided, and then sees the teacher-corrected version. The teacher-corrected version is only a suggestion. There may be many ways to correct a mistake. The examples given here are all original beginner level papers.

Here are the contents:

1. ORGANIZATION OF THE PARAGRAPH

Exercise 4

Exercise 1

Exercise 5

Exercise 2

2. VOCABULARY CHOICE

Exercise 3

1.ORGANIZATION OF THE PARAGRAPH

A. Unity: It means that all the sentences refer to the main idea, or the topic of the paragraph.

Exercise 1: The original student paper:

I live in a flat with my family. We have two bedrooms and a living room. We have a garden and we have some flowers there. In weekdays I arrive home at five o'clock and I have lunch. Then I do my homework and go to bed. I had a computer but now it doesn't work. I have a brother and a sister and I think I am very lucky to live with them. Sometimes our relatives visit us. Our flat becomes very crowded sometimes but I like it.

In a unified paragraph, we expect all the sentences to be about the main idea of the paragraph. The main idea in this paragraph is 'the description of your house'. If we examine the paragraph, we see that some sentences do not describe the house, such as:

In weekdays I arrive home at five o'clock and I have lunch.

Then I do my homework and go to bed.

I had a computer but now it doesn't work.

3 Tips For Writing Content That Sells

Now, rewrite the main idea of the example paragraph so that it covers all the sentences the student has written.

You can compare your answer with the answer we suggest:

B. Coherence: It means that the sentences should be organized in a logical manner and should follow a definite plan of development.

Exercise 2:

The original student paper:

I live in a house in Izmit. It isn't old or modern. It's a normal Turkish house. We can say it is near the sea. It takes about 10 minutes to go to the sea side on foot. We have one bedroom, one living room. We also have two other rooms, too. We use them as a dining room. Naturally, we have a kitchen, a bathroom, and a toilet. I live with my parents. And our house has a little garden; my parents spend their time there to grow vegetables and fruit.

First, let's see the order of the ideas:

1. Where the house is

2. Type of the house

3. The location

4. The rooms in the house

5. The fact that he lives with his parents

6. The garden

3 Tips For Writing Content That Sells Directly

The paragraph is well organized until he says he lives with his parents. It looks like this idea interrupted his description of the house. It should be put somewhere else in the paragraph. In the box below, rewrite the paragraph in the correct order of ideas (you can copy (ctrl+c) and paste (ctrl+v) if you like.)

Now, compare your answer with the answers we suggest:

C. Faulty Start:

Here are some ways to bore your readers to death (!) when starting a paragraph/an essay:

You can start with:

1. a nonsense sentence:

e.g. I want to talk about X.

2. a cliché:

e.g.X plays a great role in our lives.

X is a very important issue in today's world.

Exercise 3: Here is an example:

I want to talk about friendship. Friends can change your life. So, you must know who is a real friend. Firstly, your friend must understand you and of course, you must understand her, too. I think, another important point in a friendship is confidence. You mustn't tell lies to each other. In addition, you must say everything about yourself. I think these are important for a friendship. If you have a friend like this, you don't break up with her because a real friend is not found easily.

How do we understand that 'I want to talk about friendship.' is a nonsense sentence? If we leave the nonsense sentence out, the content and meaning of the paragraph does not change. Click 'SEE' to check it yourself.

D. Lack of Topic Sentence: Topic sentence is the main idea, your attitude, your evaluation of something.

Having no topic sentence is bad both for the writer and the reader. First, the reader has to read the entire paragraph to get to the point. Here, the example is one paragraph long. What if the example was a paper of 2-3 pages? This is one side. Lack of a topic sentence also causes the writer to drift away from the topic. He loses control over the writing. He may write 3 sentences about one controlling idea and 1 for the other which causes an imbalance within the writing.

Exercise 4: Try to write only a topic sentence for this paragraph.

I hate lie. I always try not to tell lies and I want that from my friends, too. I think it is the most important behavior. I can believe everything my friends say. In addition, a good friend must say his ideas to me firstly. I mean, he shouldn't talk about me with other people. Especially about the bad thing, he doesn't have to talk because it might be wrong. Secondly, a good friend must help me. He must do his best. He should ask help from me too. If we solve problems together, our friendship will be better and it will become stronger. Thirdly, the talking time is important. I can talk with my friends for a long time, and during that time I must be happy. That's why we should like the same things. In conclusion, trust is the basics of a friendship.

Write your topic sentence in the box.

See the one we have provided:

E. Development of the ideas: It means that every idea discussed in the paragraph should be adequately explained and supported through evidence and examples.

We generally believe that people would easily understand us when we write. Unfortunately, our use of language may not be perfect and our ideas may be different. If we want our ideas to be understood, we need to explain them and give specific examples of each. Listing our ideas is never enough. See the example below:

Exercise 5:

First of all, a friend mustn't tell lie. He must always tell me the truth and he must be honest because if there is honesty between two friends, their relationship will last until death. In addition to honesty, helping or being near a friend on a bad day is very important. Another point to consider is that he must criticize me if I make a mistake.

If we list the ideas, here is what we get:

A friend must:

3 Tips For Writing Content That Sells

·not tell a lie

  • be there for him on a bad day
  • criticize when necessary

The list and the paragraph are the same length because the ideas in the paragraph are also listed without explanation. This means, the ideas are not developed. It also lacks a topic sentence. Let’s write the paragraph again creating a topic sentence and some explanation of the ideas provided.

See our suggestion:

2.VOCABULARY CHOICE:

Many reasons play a role in our vocabulary mistakes. There are some English words and expressions that are confused throughout the world where English is used. There even are dictionaries of common language errors. For example, effect/affect, advise/advice. There are sites dedicated to these common errors and related exercises amongst the links we have provided. Here, we would especially like to work on language errors caused mainly by Turkish interference (akaTurklish).

3 Tips For Writing Content That Sells Items

Exercise 6: Let's read the original student paragraph below and then discuss the issue:

Friends play a great role in our lives. They effect our lives negatifly or positifly. We should choose them very carefully. First, we can look at his behaviors. If it is OK, no problem but if it is not, we can't become a 'Kanka'. After that, we can look at his activities. It is very important to do something together. We must beware of people who has bad habits such as smoking, bad speaking, etc. Some people don't think so but I think finally we should look at his phsicalaparians because if you have diffirentphsicalaparianse than him, you can't be relaxable. For example if you are taller than him, this generally does unrelaxable to him. As a consequently, it is very important to choose a friend according to your especialities.

First of all, 'negatif' and 'positif' are written in Turkish (or almost in Turkish 'pozitif'). We, Turkish learners of English, generally make this mistake both in writing and in speaking (consider 'psychology, sociology'). We may have similar words in both languages; however, we must pay attention to their spellings and pronunciations.

Secondly, 'Kanka' is a Turkish word. It is correct to highlight it either by using double quotations or writing in italics, but does this explain what 'Kanka' means? Do all of us (including foreign instructors reading this writing) need to know this word which is used mostly by teenagers? It is common practice to use foreign words or expressions. If we use them, we need to make ourselves clear by explaining their meanings.

Thirdly, we see many misspelled words. We can deduce what they are but do we have to? Unless we write words correctly, we cannot expect others to understand us. This attitude 'This is how I write / talk. If they want to understand me, they should get used to my style' would not help anyone, and should not be.

Now, let's get rid of the 'Turklish' in the sample paragraph and write it again, without changing the meaning much.

3 Tips For Writing Content That Sells A House

Now, you can compare your version with the paragraph we have written. Remember, ours is only a suggestion. It is quite normal to have a different paragraph.

3 Tips For Writing Content That Sells At A

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Prepared by Oya Ozagac, March 2, 2005.