"The Power of Your Ego in Writing Online Copy!" by Joe Vitale
I obey one main rule when writing copy for the online world: Get out of my ego and into my reader's ego. It's a basic marketing truth that shouldn't be violated anywhere. Yet it's violated every day online.
Let me explain.
One day I received the following email:
Dear Mr. Vitale,
Your name was mentioned on a site that I came upon while I was looking for informational material to market on the Internet. Can you PLEASE, give me some feedback on this. The site is WWW.Internetpowertools.com/d.cgi?ebookprofits-pw10031
Thank you for you time.
I took a quick peak at his site. If you did, too, you saw that his site is a sales letter. There is nothing in that headline to appeal to your ego in a way that is acceptable online.
Off-line that sort of hard-sell headline might work. On-line it won't. Why? Because it is too sales oriented. It looks and reads too much like an ad. If you think of your reader's ego, you wouldn't post something so heavy handed online. Instead, you would give them information they want. Information they can use.
Think of it this way: Write your website copy as if you are writing a how-to booklet or a news release. Give facts. Give details. Give specifics. I might rather write this fellow's website as a special report on the rise of e books in the new millennium. I might even give pointers on how to write your own e-books. In short, get out of your ego and into your visitor's ego. Appeal to their interests and they will eventually show interest in yours.
Let's look at another example.
Hello Mr. Fire,
I am not a copy writer but I am trying to write a copy that sells my information product. Can you please check out my website and tell me whats wrong with the copy I have now. www.inetstart.com
Thank you for your time.
Did you take a look at his site? Same problem as the one before it. It's written by a person trying to make a sale. That means the copywriter was writing to his own ego, not to mine or yours. Again, to transform this or any other website, think of what your READER wants to see, not what you want to sell. Think about it. Don't you care more about what interests you, than what interests me?
I might rewrite this fellow's website by writing a news release or a special report on "The Top 10 New Ways to Make Money Online." I'd research the top ways, too, list them, explain them, and make what he wants to sell just one of the new ways to make money online. It's the traditional way to sell anything with a news release: Simply plug your product or service within a story of genuine news.
Are there any examples of websites using this basic copywriting principle? Of course. But they aren't easy to find. Obvious examples are www.ebay.com and www.amazon.com. Both focus on YOU. When you look at ebay or amazon, for example, you don't detect an ego behind the sites. Instead, you can easily look around for what interests YOU. Again, get out of your ego and into your reader's ego.
I just took a moment from writing this article to browse some random sites. I went to www.etour.com and let it bring websites to me based on what I told it I was interested in. It's a marvelous tool. Sites I saw were one on new music releases. No ego here. This had a search engine for me to type in my favorite artist or style of music. Another site was on how to give CPR. Never know when it may be needed. Yet another site taught me how things operated. Type in anything, like engine or website, and an article at the site revealed how an engine, or website, works. Again, all useful information. No ego. No selling.
Which leads to the question: How does anyone make any money online when they have to create ego-less websites that focus on the visitor and do little or no selling?
The answer is this: It's called Hidden Selling. It's what all good publicity people or "cause public relations" people do. They engage you in something you want to know about and sell you after the fact. It's the soft sell. It's what Hallmark Cards does when they fund a movie. You don't tune in to watch their commercials. You tune in to watch the movie they sponsored. As you do, you are also fed the commercials. Good websites do the same. They offer you want you want, and sell you quietly, by focusing on serving you, not selling you.
(Note: See my article online at http://www.mrfire.com/0033.html for more examples and explanation of how this "Hidden Selling" concept works.)
This whole topic may need more space than what I have here to fully explain. The bottomline for me is this: You'll create better copy on your websites if you focus on your visitor's ego, not yours. Think of serving them, not selling them, and ironically, you will end up selling them.
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