You’ve done it! You’ve started your business, your new website is built, and now all that’s left to do is fill it with words and hit the ‘publish’ button. But you can’t do it. You’re stuck, staring at a bunch of blank pages, not sure what to say. Or worse, you’ve written something, but it doesn’t quite flow the way you want it to, and the tone is like reading one of your old secondary school essays. What do you do now?
Simple. You hire a copywriter.
For a lot of business owners it’s a bit of an alien concept – hiring someone else to write your words for you. But your website is the face of your business, and you need it to build trust, maintain a consistent tone of voice and be compelling enough to actually sell your products. And you might be able to do that yourself, but honestly, most business owners can’t. They’re too busy focussing on the bits they’re really good at, at leaving the content to fall by the wayside. That’s why you hire a copywriter to help you out.
But just in case you’re thinking of going the DIY route, here are a few questions to ask yourself first.
Do You Have Any Experience in Creative Writing?
You might think that writing is writing is writing – but that’s just not true. For example, we’ve all written long emails and business documents, and while they’re important, they hardly capture your attention, do they? Writing marketing content is all about getting creative with language and enticing your prospects in, compelling them to contact you and start their buying journey. You don’t want to bore them with bland copy or technical jargon. You want carefully crafted content that has that special creative touch – which requires at least some experience in creative writing.
Do You Have Time to Write, Edit And Proofread All Of Your Copy?
This is often the big one. Even if you are able to write copy well, odds are you won’t have the time to actually do it. Business owners are notoriously busy people, and often far too invested in the business to be impartial. This means you spend far too much time pouring over every word and punctuation mark trying to make it sound sexy, when often you don’t need to. And because it’s your baby, the content will never be ‘done’. And if you never finish the first draft, how will you ever write a second or third draft, edit it down and proofread it to make sure there are no silly mistakes? Copywriting is time-consuming, and if you have dozens of other things to do to keep your business running, you’ll probably never have the time to give it the attention it needs.
Can You Make Your Topic Sound Interesting?
Some fields are so exciting and unique that they just leap off the page at you. And others (like paper shredding, HR or law, for example) can be pretty dull at times. Even the people in those professions acknowledge that it’s difficult to make their work sound interesting to an outsider! Copywriters have experience in writing content for absolutely everything you can think of, and making it sound good enough to spend money on too. So if you’ve been stressing about making those 18 different colours of door handle sound exciting to your customers, a copywriter is about to become your new best friend.
Do You Really Know What SEO Means?
I might be able to build a shed if I really put my mind to it – but odds are I won’t do a very good job of it. SEO is exactly the same. You might be able to hazard a guess at the keywords you want to rank for, but unless you’re a professional you probably don’t know where to find trends, how to implement them and how often to use your keywords in the text. So your DIY SEO efforts will be a bit like my shed – lopsided and with a fair few big holes in. A copywriter can do all of this SEO legwork for you and implement it in your content for you, so you don’t have to worry about building your own shed.
If you answered ‘yes’ to all of these questions, then fantastic! You probably don’t need to hire a copywriter, and you’ll have some great content for your business. But if you said ‘no’, then it’s time to find yourself a good copywriter to kick-start your content! Every copywriter is different, so it’s important you find one that fits your business and your values, so shop around a bit, and soon you’ll be wondering why you didn’t hire one sooner!
And hey, if you like the feel of this blog and have some questions about what a copywriter actually does, why not drop me a line, and I’ll be happy to help!