Your business means a lot to you and you’ve poured a lot of blood, sweat and probably even tears into making it a success. You believe in what you do and you think the world should, too. So, it’s only natural that you should be the one to write the copy that is going to market your business, right? Not right. Here are five ways writing your own copy is destroying your reputation.
1. Writing to impress rather than engage.
Business owners and plenty of marketers forget that the point of writing your own copy is not to impress your audience, but to engage them. If you are using a lot of four syllable words, technical or industry-specific jargon and generally writing copy that reads like a stuffy textbook, your audience is not going to break out their decoder tools to try to get the gist of what you are saying, they will look for a site with content that easily digestible so they can get their information quickly and easily. If you don’t write copy that people are comfortable with, your business may be branded as stuffy or unapproachable.
2. Just the facts, Jack!
This one is hard to tame when you’re writing for yourself- the separation of what you believe to be true from fact. You simply cannot present your opinions as facts because if you don’t have research or proof to back it up, your visitors will quickly label your business untrustworthy or biased. It doesn’t matter if you believe you have the absolutely best most incredible widget on the market, you have to have to be able to prove it.
3. Who are you writing your copy for, anyway?
Remember the work you did to determine your primary buyer persona? This is who you have to write for every time you touch your keyboard. Your copy is supposed to address their pain points and help them discover on their own (kind of), that your product or service is exactly what they need. Some of the most common mistakes here include writing in the first person (I am, I like, I anything), and not gearing your writing to the people most likely to become your customers. For example, if your primary buyer persona is a teen girl, even if you can link aging products to your products or services, that is not a piece of content that will bring you success. You risk becoming a business that doesn’t know its customers.
4. Going keyword crazy.
You know keywords are especially important and with the time you’ve spent researching them, by goodness you’re going to use them! If your keywords are being used like punctuation or people can easily pick out the phrase you’re hoping to get search engines to notice, you’re going to lose credibility with your audience. Keywords are paramount, but they have to be kept in their place so they sound completely natural.
5. Eye rely on spelling checker for pea sea.
Was that as painful for you as it was for us? Believe it or not, that sentence passed spell check without the slightest hint of a red squiggly line. Relying on spellcheck for your copy is a really big mistake made when writing your own copy. Spell check doesn’t pick up on syntax or most grammar errors, so even if your review comes up perfect, you could be in the weeds. Spelling and grammar errors can scream a lack of professionalism to a lot of readers.
Writing your own copy for your inbound marketing efforts is a difficult task. With these five reputation-killers in mind, you can avoid making mistakes that are driving your potential customers away from your site.