I believe in hard work over smart work.
Why?
I don’t think you can get to smart work without the hard work. I think that the idea of working smart is just a form of procrastination. Especially with entrepreneurs or would-be entrepreneurs.
One area of smart work that I see in our area of business is Sales Copy.
Now, I love sales copy. I like to audit the copy of the Ghost Blog Writers website at least every six months or so. I collect information we get from inquiries. I see how people are using the site. I try to make improvements.
But the big thing is that when I launched the site my goal was to get it launched. I couldn’t gather feedback if nothing was up on the web.
Startup Sales Copy
This post is more for startups.
If you’re a startup you may not even need a website. I would recommend one. I would recommend getting into some kind of content strategy. You won’t see the immediate results that you might expect, but five years down the road it will really pay dividends.
And in the meantime you can get customers through face to face meetings, network connections, referrals, etc.
Anyway, sometimes startups will come to us and they won’t quite have their website ready. They’ll be working on perfecting their sales copy. They’ll ask for some advice and I’m happy to give my thoughts. I’ll even rework a few things here and there.
But sometimes the revision will go on and on and on. The sales copy never seems to reach a point where it’s ready to publish with the startup owner or the team.
The reality is that sales copy is never going to be perfect. Trying to get it perfect is just putting off the inevitable, which is working on getting clients.
A Few Sales Copy Tips
So the big takeaway is to write copy. Write the basics of the problem you solve, how you solve it and a little about your self and launch it. Then tweak as you learn more by interacting with each new customer.
But if you’re still struggling to get started with the sales copy here are a few tips.
1. Map Your Sales Process
This might be tricky if you haven’t had one customer, but it’s still possible to imagine. Think of how you would sell your service in person. Walk through, in your head, a person coming to you that’s interested. The questions they would ask. The answers you provide.
Write it all down and put that content on your website.
You’ll sell your service that way.
2. Use Headings
Design is important, but you don’t need to be perfect right away. But it is important to not have huge chunks of text. That scares a lot of people off. People like to scan before they dive in.
One simple way to break up blocks of text is to use headings. Just like you see in this blog post. I bet you scanned the headings quick all the way to the bottom before you went back and read the paragraphs.
3. Know The Final Call To Action
What do you want the final step to be on your website?
Do you want someone to get to the point of calling you or do you want them to make a purchase?
Figure out the last call to action on the site and work backwards from there. It’s surprisingly an easier way to get the content you need. Starting from the beginning can be confusing. Reverse engineering it seems to work better.