We all love to read well written copy.
Reading well written copy is like drinking a super large mug of your favourite coffee on a cold morning. You drink happily, eager for the next gorgeous sip. You savour every minute of the experience.
On the other hand, bad copy is like bad coffee: it tastes like crap and you don’t ever go back to the café you bought it from.
Instead of happily checking out what else the café sells while you wait for your tasty brew each time you call in, you never enter the café again.
As it’s always best to focus on the shining lights out there, first up I’d like to give an example of what I consider to be absolutely premium quality copy.
The example comes from a blog post by Marie Forleo called How to Grow a Business When You’re Short on Time.
This blog post is absolutely exploding with value. Marie’s posts are always written with the reader clearly in mind, and not only does this post flow beautifully, it’s well structured and bursting at the seams with helpful information. The post incorporates the below equally useful Marie TV Live Call-In Show video episode, but the post oozes quality and readability even without the video. After summarising the key content in the video, Marie goes on to list 7 super helpful tips on how to work smarter not harder.
At the very end of the post, the reader is given the option of signing up to Marie’s email list with some free and easy to digest audio training. After receiving so much value in the form of super helpful information, I think a lot of people would be keen to sign up to her email list. Even if they chose not to do this, they sure as hell would be clicking through Marie’s website to check out the other awesome services she offers.
And now for the flip side, and what I consider to be absolutely terrible copy.
Firstly I’d like to state that in my view the most terrible kind of copy is copy that drains the reader with lots of words that say nothing at all. We can all forgive an occasional spelling mistake or grammatical error if we are at least being offered something helpful, however having our precious time wasted with utter shit is much harder to forgive.
It’s truly awful to plough through lots of big words and poorly structured long sentences, only to discover that what you’ve just spent several miserable minutes dragging yourself through is a complete waste of time.
As an example, the copy below was on the about us page of a real business’ website. I’ve only changed some names and words. And no, the name of the business wasn’t Fluffy, but as the text is so fluffy, I thought this name was appropriate:
No one wants to read this garbage.
The copy is absolutely meaningless, and even worse, it actively repels customers. Reading meaningless crap padded with the same buzzwords clogging up so many other business websites is a waste of our precious time on this earth.
Instead, the business could have invested in paying a good copywriter just once to present the business and its products or services well for all the world to see.
When you consider that your business website is on show for all the world to see 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and 365 days a year, ensuring your website attracts customers rather than repels them is absolutely critical. Websites provide such an awesome opportunity for every business, and good quality copy (from quality local copywriters) and images (from quality local photographers) are an absolutely essential part of them.