trafficmansionAffiliate marketers live and die according to the amount of engagement they generate from their targeted audiences. If you have a page with an affiliate offer, you need to make sure the content on that page speaks volumes to people you’re trying to reach.
Regardless of how well or exciting a particular offer may be, audiences still need a bit of additional convincing before they grab their wallets, pull out their credits cards, and actually decide to buy a particular product or service.
For affiliates who operate in such a crowded and competitive industry as online dating, great copywriting skills are essential. For most people, dating websites offer the same types of deals. In their eyes, it makes no difference where they join and spend their money. Your job is to convince them otherwise and make them see that the brands you’re promoting are much better than the competition.
Copywriting is more than just a practice that uses words to list down benefits and attach catchy slogans to specific brands. It’s a legitimate sales tool because it builds credibility, increases engagement, and helps defined groups of people understand the value of specific offers and why they should take on what you’re proposing to them.
Mastering the skill of copywriting will help you craft better landing pages, ads, and angles over your competitors. This, of course, will eventually assist you in getting cheaper clicks on your creatives and better conversion rates.
The best thing about copy is that it’s cheap and easy—once you figure out which formulas and techniques to you use on specific audiences. Here are a couple of great copywriting tricks you could use to generate better engagement and long-term revenue from your affiliate marketing efforts:
1. Extreme Simplicity
In order to win clients with your copy, you’ll need to perfect your craft. Substance and style go hand-in-hand in this game. It’s not enough just to be an expert on a certain subject. You also need to know how to excite people about what you’re preaching and hook them onto your story. You can only do that if you figure out how to make complex narratives look simple with your copy.
Every time you write something, you need to make sure that your copy is:
- Grammatically and factually accurate
- Easy to read and understand
- Full of compelling conclusions
- Full of words that your targeted audiences actually use in their day-to-day lives
Even though these pointers seem basic to you, they are often quite difficult to apply in practice, especially if you don’t really have a rich background in copywriting.
The curse of knowledge is a real issue for most modern business. What seems easy and logical to you, doesn’t necessarily mean the same for your targeted audience. If you want to provoke action with your writing, you need to make sure that a six-year-old can understand your copy. You don’t want to be too clever for your own good. If you confuse your audience with your writing, they won’t be tempted to buy what you’re selling. People only reach for their credit card when they’re perfectly clear what they’re about to purchase.
In order to ensure that our copy is easy to digest and understand, we at Traffic Mansion use the HemingwayApp. This is a great tool for analyzing and editing text, especially the type of text that goes on landing pages. All you have to do is edit your text until the HemingwayApp stops displaying phrases and sentences in red and yellow.
2. The 80/20 Rule
You have probably heard about the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle. The idea and the name were coined by Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, who, back in the end of the 19th century, noticed that the Italian society was divided into two groups: the vital few and the trivial many. The “vital few” represented 20 percent of the people—the upper class, those with the most money and influence; while the “trivial many” counted everyone else. Pareto discovered that virtually all economic power of the country was subjected to this principle, meaning that the 80 percent of the wealth of Italy was controlled by the above-mentioned 20 percent.
Even though the initial idea was used to explain the absurdity and disbalance of power in Italy during the late 19th century, the principles of Pareto’s 80/20 rule can be taken and applied to almost any situation. In copywriting, for example, this particular rules suggests that 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your efforts.
In copywriting, the headline is everything. If you don’t start strong in your copy, you won’t be able to keep people interested in what you have to say. On today’s Internet, you only have a split-second to grab your reader’s’ attention, which is why you should spend a decent amount of time working on your openers.
Even though your headline seems like a small part of the copy, it’s often the most important one. Let’s face it, a lot of people won’t even acknowledge your pages and posts if the title doesn’t interest them. They will abandon your copy after two or three sentences if you don’t have a strong opening.
3. The 4U’s Formula
The 4U’s is a popular copywriting formula used by experts to grab the audience’s interest and boost engagement for their posts and pages. Originally developed by a serial entrepreneur by the name of Michael Masterson, this specific method was designed with headlines in mind. With a little tweaking, however; it can be used for blog posts and landing pages, as well. The 4U’s formula focuses on the following four elements:
- Usefulness
- Uniqueness
- Urgency
- Ultra-specificity
The goal is to ensure that your headlines and copy meet all the Us listed above. Copy built with the 4U’s methodology will help you convince more people to click on your headlines and read articles because the headline will tell them exactly what they’ll get from a particular post, and why it’s relevant for them.
4. The SHINE
The SHINE is another simple, yet effective copywriting formula for making content and headlines more attractive to the readers. SHINE is an acronym, and it stands for the following set of words:
- Specificity
- Helpfulness
- Immediacy
- Newsworthiness
- Entertainment value
Before you decide to publish any piece of content, it is highly advisable to rigorously analyze it and see if it meets of all the listed criteria. If you fail to check all of these factors from the list, you should take another swing at your piece and try to add the ingredient that’s missing.
5. PAS Formula
If you want to earn authority online and become a recognized figure in your niche, you need to establish yourself as an expert. The only way you can do that is if you figure out what problems your readers are facing and how to offer an effective solution for them.
Using the PAS copywriting formula is a great way to produce your type of content.
It looks like this:
- Problem: Prove that you really understand your current and desired readers pain points
- Agitation: Underline how difficult is to overcome such problems and why most people fail to do so on their own
- Solution: Show that there is a solution to their troubles and that you can actually help
In order to make this formula work, you need to make sure that you have actually recognized the problems your audience is looking to solve. You can do that by developing precise customer personas, running surveys, and conducting detailed keyword analysis. It’s imperative to actually look at what people are searching for online, instead of just guessing what’s bothering them.
The reason the PAS copywriting formula is so good is because you’re not technically selling to your audience. This is not an aggressive approach. What you’re doing basically is following your desired customers’ intent, and responding to their needs in a most effective way. It’s brilliant!
Over to You
Thank you for taking the time to read this article. We hope it helped you recognize how to effectively reach and engage your audience through creative writing. These are just some of the very best copywriting tricks we have experimented with during these last couple of years. What techniques do you use to make sure that your copy hit the mark? We would love to hear what works for you!
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