~ For Copywriting Clients ~
Five Proven Principles that will Help You
Sell More Effectively

Principle#5: Good copywriting will speak personally to your audience.

Good copywriting will use conversational language - and even break grammatical rules - to connect with your audience.

This may make you raise an eyebrow.

Given that copywriting is a subset of business writing, it's natural for you to expect the same formal, impersonal language that you routinely see in other subsets of business writing, such as report-writing or proposal-writing.

However, consider this: copywriting's main objective is to sell. And selling is about meeting your readers' needs, business or personal.

Look back to some of the better salespersons you've talked to. Maybe that salesperson who sold you the family computer you're really happy with. Did you stand there while the other person stared into empty space like a robot, rattling off information in a stiff, obviously rehearsed way? No - rather, you'd be involved in an animated, informal conversation with a fellow human being.

Good copywriting, then, is about engaging your readers the same way, in essence becoming their friend. It will incorporate the buzzwords, acronyms and informal colloquialisms that your readers use on a daily basis. It'll break grammatical rules in order to reach your audience. Often it'll talk to your readers, directly, as if it's having an one-to-one conversation.

In the final analysis, good copywriting is all about getting into your readers' own world: the way they speak, think, communicate - and reaching them where they live.

And it'll use plain language, too - rather than confounded sentences and paragraphs that make your readers work harder than necessary. Even the government's getting into the act, by the way. See http://www.plainlanguage.gov/howto/wordsuggestions

Pick up the copy and read it out aloud. If you can't read it with a high degree of comfortableness - if it doesn't speak the way your audience speaks in daily life - it's not good copy.

There you have it. Five principles of good copywriting that will help sell your product more effectively. Just remember that copywriting is "selling in print" - and allow your
copywriters to help you connect better with your target
audience.