Selling Your Products Online – It Starts with Words
April 24th, 2008
If you want to sell any sort of product online – from Votivo candles to bicycles to books — you must start with words. Ultimately, your words are what will sell a product. Your description of a product’s price, benefits, and advantages will convince customers to buy or not buy from you. You may hire a web design company to design a beautiful web site for you, but that company will still require quality copywriting in order to ensure that your products sell well. Your web design firm may hire a copywriter, or you may hire a copywriter yourself. However, you may also want to design your own copy.
Whether you hire copywriter or not, it pays to learn how to create effective copy. That way, if you need to update your web site on the fly, or you need to discuss suggestions as you work with your copywriter or web design firm, you will have input to share.
There are several copywriter’s tricks that you can use when selling products online:
1) Always make it about the customer. Whatever you are selling — be it Trapp candles or cosmetics — you need to describe the product in a way that appeals to the customer. Rather than describing what you think about the product, or just describing what the package says, make sure that the customer can imagine themselves using the product. Describe how the product will make the customer’s life better, easier, or fuller.
2) Be descriptive. Adjectives, such as “nice”, “great”, or “wonderful”, will generally not do the trick – they are too vague. However, you do need to use colorful words when describing a product or service. For example, if you are selling perfumes, you want to describe their enticing smells by listing and describing each of the fragrances and notes in a particular perfume. If you are selling a shirt, make sure that you describe the luxurious fabrics as well as a quality of the design and sewing.
3) Reduce the number of words. Once you have written some copy about a particular product, you must take out all the words that you can. A shorter, snappier ad is always more effective.
4) Have a hook. You need to have something startling or interesting to share about your product. This makes an effective headline or start to an ad, so that customers want to read more. For example, you might use a provocative quote, a contradiction, or a statistic to start your ad. You might also use a statement that makes the reader wonder. For example, writing “You do not want to read this ad – it might be too scary for you” will make readers want to keep reading – human nature compels us to look into things that seem to be forbidden or scary.
5) Make yourself stand out from the competition. If you are selling a car cleaning product and all the competitors are writing in their ads “Our product cleans your car best” that is not what you want to say, too. Saying the same thing makes your ad forgettable. Instead, say something different or even the opposite of what everyone is saying in their ads: “Our product will not clean your car…it will obliterate the dirt you did not even know was in your car.”
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