How well you write a page of content determines how successful it is at improving your bottom line. You’ve got a couple of seconds at most to capture those eyeballs and keep the reader on your page, drawing them further in. Fail to do so and you’ve lost that random visitor for ever – and that lead – and that potential sale – the losses keep adding up.
To help you avoid creating pages that just take up space, I’ve noted down 20 tips to writing content that sells.

1. Write For Your Target Audience

Engineer the tone, voice, structure and content of your article towards the expectations, sensibilities, sensitivity and receptiveness of your audience.

2. Work On The Title Till It’s Perfect

It’s your content’s title that readers first see in their search results, in tweets, in forums. Make the best of this opportunity and work that title till it’s catchy, attention grabbing and perfect.

3. Grab Attention With Your Opening

The first sentence and the very first paragraph should be nothing short of awesome. If you give a boring intro, thinking that the body is what’s important, think again.

4. Choose Topics Your Audience Is Interested In

Use a tool such as Technorati or Google Analytics to know which keywords people use to get to your site. You’ll know what topics your audience likes and what they dislike. Make sure the topics are interesting and informative.

5. Organize Information

Google is trained to look for what people like or dislike. So make sure to organize your article in such a way that it reads well on the whole. If you are discussing points or opinions, provide a conclusion without fail.

6. Use A Storyboard

To make your content that much more effective, create a storyboard out of your strategy. Start with your toned-down sales pitch, step it up with product benefits, provide solutions, answer questions they’re bound to ask, make the main points clear and bold.

7. Engage The Reader

Your writing style should engage the reader – ask questions in your post and follow them with solutions. With each paragraph, get the reader thinking, pondering, and reacting. You are not selling through your content but if you engage your reader, your content will sell.

8. Don’t Leave Out The Emotion

Customers base their purchase decisions on many factors. Emotion is an important one of them. Make sure you listen to your customers’ feedback and questions and provide suitable solutions. Use stories to get them to feel good about you and your products.

9. Include A Call To Action

At the end of the article, don’t forget to tell the reader exactly what you want him or her to do.

10. Soothe And Calm The Reader

Readers tend to have their guard up when they visit a new site, ready for the hard sell. Go the extra mile to provide assurance; use words to soothe, calm and assure the reader and avoid aggressive sales language.

11. Use Bullets And Numbers

Bullets and numbers are great to break up the eye’s focus, add interest to the article, and squeeze in more information without making it overly long.

12. Bold Section Headers

Readers need to know they’ve completed reading a point and have moved on to another. Bold those headers and allow for a line space before following up with para text.

13. Left-Justify Text

Centered text is fine for poems but not for much else and justified text can end up all spaced out, which looks downright silly. Left justified text is easy to scan, allows space between words and is respectful.

14. Raise The Bar And Keep It High

View your content as a silent salesman, an employee of your company. Set the bar high for this employee and keep it high. Do checks now then and so that the quality sustains itself over time.

15. Clean Your Copy

Spelling mistakes tend to offend the sensibilities of a sensitive reader. If your copy has errors in it, your readers won’t pass it around. After all, they don’t want to be seen sponsoring incorrect stuff.

16. Keep Paragraphs Short

Restrict each paragraph to not more than 2 to 3 sentences. Explore one idea in each paragraph and write a suitable sub-header for it.

17. Add Some Visual Interest

Reader statistics indicate that articles with images in them have a 70% more chance of being read. Look for images based on your keywords. Tell your story through strategic imagery and you’ll win.

18. Take Carel With Acronyms

Abbreviations, trade terms, business acronyms – if you plan to use them, expand them first and then provide the term. Don’t presume your reader is familiar with the terms that go with your industry.

19. Use The Right Font Settings

Your article’s text should be easy to read. Big enough for good visibility even on default browser settings, and prominent enough not to strain the eye. Use fonts that are common on both Windows, Mac, and Linux systems.

20. Provide Relief To The Eye

Prevent reader eye strain by incorporating more white space in your content. Break up paragraphs and use a liberal spacing between sentences. No long blocks of text – that’s the quickest way to lose them.
 
Follow these tips and you’ll soon be writing great content that increases conversions and swells your profits, instead of sending visitors away before they’ve even had chance to discover how wonderful you are!
 
Conversion optimization company Invesp was founded in 2006 and specializes in providing landing page and website optimization services.

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