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Do you know how to optimize your copy so that it converts and bring your business the results you want? Ask these 51 questions to improve your first drafts.

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Digest...

Desire is made up of two key elements: individual incentive and social norms.

Individual incentives

At a basic level, humans are motivated to take action either to gain pleasure or avoid pain.

In the context of your marketing campaigns, desire is created when people can see how your product or service can help them to either gain pleasure or alleviate pain.

Social norms

All that isn’t to say that humans will simply seek out whatever creates pleasure or alleviates pain with no thought to the consequences. We are inherently social beings and are driven to act in a way we believe will be considered normal.

>> When including hero shots of your product or service on your landing page, use professionally-shot photography to increase individual incentive.

>> When including pictures or screenshots of your product or service on your landing page, show them in the context of how they will help the user either create pleasure or avoid pain.

>> If you have a number of noteworthy customers who use your product or service, feature them prominently on your landing pages.

>> Whenever you can, collect testimonials from your customers to feature on your landing pages. To increase their relevance and efficiency, have them support the benefits you’ve listed on your landing page.

>> If you have an impressive number of people who have signed up for your product, then feature that number prominently on your landing pages.

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Digest...

1) Attribution Error

Humans have an innate tendency to explain the behavior of others in terms of their personality. It’s how we’re wired to think about things. The problem is this: We often ignore context and circumstances, attributing everything to a person or organization’s personality.

2) Confirmation Bias

Another quirk of the human brain is our tendency to explore information that agrees with our preconceptions and existing beliefs. In other words, we want to justify what we already believe, and we are more likely to dismiss information that challenges those beliefs.

3) Self-Serving Bias

This is a tendency to ignore information that challenges our ego. A good example is just how difficult it is to take criticism, even constructive criticism, and use it to your benefit. The self-serving bias has been tested in a wide variety of settings. Laboratory experiments typically involve feeding participants randomized, bogus feedback on a task and then evaluating their response to the feedback. The results almost always indicate that people will attribute positive feedback to their own performance, and negative feedback to faults in the evaluation process.

4) Belief Bias

This might sound like just another name for confirmation bias, but it’s actually a very different phenomenon. Belief bias is our tendency to reject conclusions just because they sound extreme or outrageous, even if the logic and evidence behind the argument are completely sound.

5) The Framing Effect (aka Loss Aversion)

The framing effect is our tendency to take risks when an outcome is presented as a loss, but avoid those same risks when an outcome is presented as a gain -- even when the objective outcome is actually the same.

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Digest...

Objective #1. Arrest attention

You can arrest their attention with a striking visual (although, with image blocking technology in many email readers, this can be reduced to a big blank space with a little red X) or a compelling headline.

Objective #2. Build a connection

Now you must build a connection with that prospect. You can start by bridging the gap between the headline or visual that caught their attention, and something that is meaningful to their lives.

Objective #3. Build the problem

The analog for email copywriting is building the problem. What pain points does the customer have? What is that situation of the world before your product, service or nonprofit comes into their lives?

Objective #4. Build interest

You must build interest in solving that problem, and show how it can be solved by your company.

Objective #5. Build suspense

You need to keep them on the hook to get them to the landing page since, after all, the conversion is not going to happen in the email. You just need to get the click to ultimately convert them on the landing page. That’s where the actual sale should happen.

Objective #6. Transfer momentum

Make sure wherever you send them to resolve the conflict created in your email copy – likely a landing page – continues the dialogue initiated by your email. You want a natural flow from one channel to the next, not a disjunctive change in the conversation.

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Digest...

Below are six proven techniques that you can easily apply to your website to make it more persuasive.

1. Leverage Scarcity to Persuade A Visitor To Buy Now

People want what they can’t have. Likewise, when something is in short supply, prospective buyers inherently feel a sense of urgency to act before availability runs out. This is the scarcity principle, and it works whether it is supply driven (e.g., there is a limited quantity available to sell) or deadline driven (as when there is a time limit set on the availability or the price of an item). People have a natural aversion to loss–they’d rather act too hastily, knowing full well that they haven’t given the matter proper consideration, than risk missing out.

2. Use A Decoy To Steer Visitors Toward A Certain Product

Also known as the asymmetric dominance effect, the decoy effect uses an alternate (less desirable) choice as a benchmark against which to compare the real product or service you wish to sell.

3. Use Anchoring To Help Visitors Justify Their Selection

People have a tendency to rely too heavily on the first piece of information presented when making decisions. This becomes the “anchor” against which subsequent products will be compared. Sound illogical? It may be, but you can use this anchoring bias to help visitors justify their purchase selection.

4. Make Visitors Feel Indebted To You

Marketers can use this impulse to spur site visitors to action. By giving your site visitors something of value, with no expectation of anything in return, you can begin to harness the power of reciprocity.

Offer exclusive information, free samples, or even a free in-home trial — anything that has real value and is obviously and exclusively for the benefit of the recipient. That last point is especially important — nobody wants to feel that they are being manipulated or receiving a gift with “strings attached.”

5. Offer Things You Don’t Expect To Sell

On the surface, it may seem odd to try to sell a product or service on your website that you don’t really expect anyone to buy. Yet, according to a compliance technique called door-in-the face, this strategy will actually help you sell lower priced options.

6. Throw Out A Lifeline With The Hurt & Rescue Principle

In this method, the marketer allows the prospect to see that they have a problem, and then offers a way to fix it. One excellent way to do this is through online quizzes. This technique can be especially effective in the B2B environment. Use your web copy to point out to visitors how much money they are losing, time they are wasting, or stress they are experiencing, and then offer them a solution. Hurt and rescue sounds negative, but it’s really nothing more than emotion-based selling.

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Digest...

PAS stands for “Problem-Agitate-Solve” and is not only incredibly simple, but also extremely effective.

The formula breaks down as follows:

• Problem: Identify a problem

• Agitate: Agitate that problem

• Solve: Find and present the solution

PAS is applicable to any business/service/product that helps solve a problem. Since businesses exist to offer solutions to problems, chances are PAS will work for what you’re selling.

Agitate:  Now that you have uncovered their problem, it’s time to agitate this problem and make it seem even scarier than the reader originally thought. Do this by making the problem more emotional. However, don’t strike with your words too hard.

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Excerpt...

The Hemingway Editor might make you a better writer.

When the Hemingway Editor first debuted, it took the Internet by storm. The site hit the Web months ago, and now it’s available as a $5 desktop app with new perks: offline use, markdown support, and the ability to save and open your work.

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Digest...

In a recent TIME article, What You Think You Know About the Web Is Wrong, Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile (@arctictony) upends the “above the fold” gospel by noting, 66% of attention on a normal media page is spent below the fold. That leaderboard at the top of the page? People scroll right past that and spend their time where the content not the cruft is.

The conclusion one can draw is that the coveted top-of-page leaderboard isn’t so desirable after all. First, users may tune it out due to experience-based banner blindness. They have learned that the long rectangle at the top of the page is usually irrelevant to what they visited the page for.

Second, the top placement will get exposed to everyone who visits the page, but those impressions will include plenty of disengaged visitors who are about to hit the back button, click away, or close the window. Even those visitors who will ultimately engage with the content may not be “hooked” yet.

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Basic/ Condensed...

-- >  Slaughter gobbledygook. Simply state why your product is good and why your reader should care.

-- >  Instead of using mumbo-jumbo, tell readers exactly what’s new and how they’ll benefit from it.

-- >  Whether on a product page or a landing page, facts increase credibility, but benefits sell.

-- >  Enhance your credibility. Use specific details to explain the quality of your service or product.

-- >  Use simple instead of difficult words. Avoid jargon. And tighten your text.

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Basic/ Digest...

In a recent study performed by the CEB, which examined the impact of personal emotions on B2B purchases, it was found that 71% of buyers who see a personal value in a B2B purchase will end up buying the product or service. In fact, personal value had two times the impact on the buyer than business impact did. In short, the survey found that without question personal value, perhaps better read emotional value overwhelmingly outweighed logic and reason in driving purchase decisions.

The data in this study shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody, but what it should do is come as an important reminder to people that the reasons that people buy are usually attached much closer to their emotional center than their rational thinking. And while buyers will often push hard for specifications, data sheets and statistics in order to help them justify a buying decision, more often than not these requests are really their way of telling you that they are not yet seeing the personal value in the product being sold to them.

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Basic/ Digest...

• You have about five seconds to catch your reader’s attention. If you can’t present a compelling reason for why they should stay in about five seconds, they’re going to leave.
• A recent study by Outbrain illustrates how headline length can be linked to user engagement. The highest CTRs were witnessed for articles that had moderate headline lengths (16-18 words).
• As Bnonn Tennant found out, copy that goes far below the fold often out-converts those that try to keep selling points above the fold.
• According to the F-Shaped pattern study, most people read Web content in a very specific way. First, they read the headline. Then they read the first sentence on the page. Then they jump down and either scan paragraphs or subheads.
• When a user lands on your blog for the first time, their brain is asking, Is there something here for me? Is there a reward? Or should I leave?
• The study found that users form an aesthetic judgment about your website between 17 and 50 milliseconds. That’s about 1/10th the speed of your eye blinking.
• The more complex/cluttered a webpage is, the less likely users are to stick around.
• People have a certain expectation of what a blog should look like. If your blog varies widely from the convention, you’ll break rapport with your readers.
• In another study titled “Determinants of Web Page Viewing Behavior,” researchers found that complex website designs tended to increase “unexpected paths.” In other words, on simple blogs, people tended to follow a predictable eye pattern. They look at the headline, the first sentence, scan the page and then decide if they want to read. On complex blogs, this pattern can be unpredictable.
• The primary reason why less visually complex websites are perceived as more beautiful is because we don’t require our eyes and brain to work as hard to decode, process and store the data.
• On larger fonts, people had smaller and more frequent fixations. That means they were taking in fewer words per “visual gulp.”
• No or low margin text was read faster, but had lower comprehension. Putting a good amount of white space around your text gets people to read a little slower, but makes them understand the material a lot more.

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All that extra stuff may be just wasted words—and there is research to prove it. Last week I was reading a blog post on the Business 2 Community site titled “How to Sell Complexity Beyond the Customer’s Capacity to Understand“.  It is a great post and it mentioned a research study that showed that (quoting from the article) “our limited short-term working memory that’s capable of remembering only 3-4 items of new information at a time.”

So what happens if we throw a lot more at them?  Well, they either only remember 3 or 4 of them or, even worse, the information overload causes them to forget most, if not all of it. So, there is scientific proof that too much detail will do more harm than good.

Let’s face it, most technology products today are so robust and complex that it is impossible to narrow things down to only 3 to 5 things.  But you have to.   Find ways to group things into a higher level story—-add the details as your drill down, progressively providing more and more information.  While not easy, this is not impossible.

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Learn how to supercharge your content marketing efforts with storytelling.

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So. You think you’ve got yourself a good blog post. You chose your writing style. You knocked out the first draft. You allowed it to sit for an hour or a day. Now it’s time to edit that bad dog — ruthlessly.

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Basic/ Condensed...

[The author] found some really useful data about crafting the perfect blog post or copy, and hopefully you’ll find it useful too.

1. Create a “curiosity gap”: the headline needs to be tantalizing enough to get a reader to click through, but mustn’t give away the whole story.

2. Use numbers: Our brains can understand it more easily: The Takipi research found that while numbers work well in headlines, digits in particular are more shareable.

3. Choose the right words: These are the 27 most retweetable and sharable ones (click through for the full list of 27)

4. Make it scarce: The team from Takipi analyzed a bunch of tech blogs to see which posts were shared more on social media than others, and what they had in common. One of the things they found was that using negative, dark, and aggressive words in titles lead to more shares.

5. Don’t expect announcements to be popular (and turn them into a story instead): One of the most interesting things I found in my research was about what doesn’t work. It turns out that announcements generally get shared the least.

6. Know exactly who reads your posts and tailor your words to them: This could mean avoiding jargon or slang, keeping your word choices simple and your sentences short, or avoiding swearing.

8. Use more verbs and less nouns: Social media scientist Dan Zarrella analyzed 200,000 tweets that included links and found that those that included adverbs and verbs had higher click-through rates than those using more nouns and adjectives.

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Five ideas and resources to help you write more unique, interesting and epic content that will allow you to break through the clutter and get noticed

Intermediate/ Digest...

Try choosing one of the ideas below:

-- >  Challenge popular opinion

-- >  Incorporate themes

-- >  Be edgy

-- >  Capitalize on seasonal and reoccurring events

-- >  Don’t be afraid of a little newsjacking

-- >  Google Hot Search: Check this list at least a couple times a week to see what topics are trending right now. If anything strikes you as something you could write about – and relate back to your industry – you’ll want to get it done as quickly as possible to capitalize on its current popularity.

-- >  Alltop.com: Alltop is an aggregated site that lists the hottest stories on a variety of popular blogs and sites. Often just reading others’ blog posts can spur an idea for a related topic of your own, so check out this site if you need a little inspiration.

-- >  Little Bird: Little Bird alerts you to the hottest emerging news in your industry, allowing you to write a blog post on those topics before anyone else. You have to “request access” before trying it out, but once approved, you can get a free trial to see if it will work for you.

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Basic/ Digest...

Logos marketing: the power of data

Using logic (data and facts) to persuade your audience is particularly important in the digital marketing space because of the virtual nature of the interface. It’s crucial, on the web, to give consumers ways to measure and evaluate your product and brand.

Ethos marketing: Optimizing identity

Where do I even start? Good credibility and character are of paramount importance to being persuasive in digital marketing. Authorship, for one. As most of you know, CTRs are higher for search results with authorship images.

Pathos marketing: Manufacturing love

Pathos marketing, the appeal to emotions, has a special significance in digital marketing.  What your brands must do is capture their consumers’ love. It’s a particular kind of “love”, and in the context of marketing; he means is creating “'loyalty beyond reason.” It’s a powerful thing.

Kairos marketing: The right site

We’re at kairos, which Aristotle refers to as the element of timing. The digital marketers who were the first to apply the spirit of the times (kairos marketing) to their site, adopting clean slate brands, have received big payoffs. The takeaway here is to keep your eyes and ears open to changing consumer desires and associations; apply them to your logos, ethos, and pathos digital marketing strategies. That's the essence of kairos marketing.

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► NEW: iNeoMarketing makes content marketing easy with the new Q8 Content. Q8 fills your content pipeline daily with relevant articles that your audience wants to read. Learn more and sign up for the beta program: http://www.Q8content.com.

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