How To Write Effective Online Ads

Do you run ads on Google, Facebook, or Instagram? Conventional wisdom tells us that Pay Per Click advertising (PPC) returns $2 for every $1 spent. This doesn’t take into account optimising your ads through compelling, catchy, and competitive copy.

If you’re dabbling in PPC advertising and struggling to come up with three headlines with 25 characters or fewer (the Google Ads limit!) - here is a short guide on how to write effective online ads.

Know Your Audience

Seems a little obvious, but just like in your content strategy, you need to know who your audience is and speak to them. If you are targeting 18-25 year olds, you don’t want to come off as cringe by adding out-of-context slang into your headlines and descriptions when they can become out of date very quickly. This will take some research on your part to determine the tone and style that works best for your core audience. Remember to keep consistent by using and updating a style guide.

Demonstrate Tangible Value

This can prove challenging for the writer, as you only have about 25-30 characters for headlines and 90 characters for straplines or descriptions (in Google Ads, at any rate.) But demonstration of value isn’t an uphill battle - you are only competing for attention among direct competitors for that search term. You can stand out by:

• Having a more competitive price. (Cheaper)

• Being more convenient. (Faster)

• Selling products of higher quality. (Better)

With these three elements in mind, you can “pick two” - something that’s cheap and fast is rarely better than something that’s premium and done with time and attention. (It also strains the credibility of your ad if you claim you can do all three, too.)

Drilling down to pain points and showing how your product or service can solve them can prove useful; but think of this formula when you are writing ads and in some cases…they may even write themselves!

Focus on The End Result

Ads are like the end of a story. “Once upon a time, there was a young man in search of a beanie. He typed ‘beanies’ into Google…” at which point your ad comes in. “He clicked on the ad that said ‘Quality beanies 50% off!’ and was satisfied when he got his beanie in the mail a couple of days later.”

Online ads should not be hypothetical, abstract, or mysterious. They need to focus on what the customer will get. In the beanie example, that young man was interested in getting the cheapest price. Since you can write a minimum of three ads, you can focus on quality (“100% Australian Wool!”) or convenience (Free Two Day Shipping.)

You can use these short “callouts” as Ad Extensions: short feature descriptions underneath your ad when it’s displayed alongside search engine results.

Calls To Action

All advertising is a call to action. Buy now, click here, sign up, schedule your appointment, Spend $50 and get free shipping, download for free, find out more.

You can enhance your calls to action by inducing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt in subtle yet effective ways such as appeals to scarcity (Buy now - last 20 remain), fear of missing out (Sale ends on Monday - check out before it’s too late!) or loss aversion (Was $500, now $299 for a limited time only). In fact, you can add countdown timers to your Google Ads to really hammer the point home. Don’t feel squeamish about using FUD - practically every online ad is built on these foundations.

Keep On Testing

There’s no such thing as the “perfect ad” - if so, we’d all agree to run it and make millions of dollars. Google Ads allows you to run multiple variations of the same ad to see which one is the most effective. Write as many ads as you can think of, let them run for a week or two and see what gets the most clicks and conversions. That means keeping the best two or three. Remember to refresh your ads every few months - and keep some ads on standby for holidays, special events such as Click Frenzy or Cyber Monday, or End of Financial Year/Calendar Year sales.

Following these simple guidelines, you too can write killer ads that sell more!

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Want to get your own Google or Meta ads written by an award-winning copywriter? Contact me to get started!

How To Use The Five-Step Writing Process For Your Content

I have to admit - I was never a fan of “the writing process.” I’d hammer out everything I wanted to say into a document and get a bit upset it wasn’t great the first time.

This wasn’t a novel feeling in the canon of human emotion, but a shared one among writers. Writing is a process - and there is Zen in the art of writing, as the great author Ray Bradbury once wrote.

I quickly realised that process, with one letter changed is progress, and began structuring my writing around a five-step writing process.

What are the five steps of the writing process?

According to me, they are:

1. Brainstorming

2. Research

3. Drafting

4. Revision

5. Proofing

Yours may look a little different - and that’s fine. But they should follow a logical order from generating an idea, researching it, writing the piece, and revising it.

Brainstorming Before Writing

Ideas are a dime a dozen. You can come up with about fifteen hare-brained schemes before lunchtime, all of them awful. (I do it all the time.) However you will need a vague idea about what you’re writing about before you set down and do it. Joel Saltzman in his excellent If You Can Talk You Can Write, wrote that you should write down almost everything that comes into your brain before you get to the next phase of writing - he calls this the crap, crap, crap, crap, GOLD method.

Chances are you’ve been in rooms where this has coalesced spontaneously. Once you’ve mined the gold from the crap, you can refine your idea by researching it. (This really is a lot like mining gold, isn’t it?)

Research and Writing

The very first and very mandatory subject I took for my Masters degree was called Research and Writing. This was the gateway to doing any sort of writing, be it for journalism, communications, or even fiction. Roy Peter Clark in his brilliant Help! For Writers book says that writer’s block is a furphy - it’s more that you don’t have enough information on hand to write anything meaningful.

Drafting Your Piece of Writing

Drafting is basically the act of getting words on to a page. In my process, if I’m writing a blog or a skyscraper piece of content, is to break up my piece into topic headings. This was auto-magically done for me thanks to this piece being called How To Use The Five-Step Writing Process For Your Content. However, in most non-fiction writing, the drafting process can be made easier by using the essay method or “painting the house” method:

• Introducing your topic - why are we here? What am I going to talk about? Let’s say, why M&Ms are the superior movie snack.

• The sub-topics or arguments - group these into discrete categories which will form paragraphs. In our essay, we could group these up into M&Ms are cheap; they’re tasty; they’re quiet; they don’t melt when you’re holding on to them.

• Concluding your topic - what did we learn? Summarise what you talked about. This is why M&Ms are the best choice for sitting down and pigging out at the movies.

They don’t have to be perfect at this point - this is where revision comes in.

Revising Your Writing

Writing is an act of creative destruction. You will write a lot, but you will cut a lot. When clients ask me if “X is necessary” - the mere suggestion should be an invitation to cut it. Cut, cut, cut. Murder your darlings.

Conversely, this is where the L’esprit de l’escalier rears its head - the “staircase wit” where you think of a perfect retort or reply just as you’ve left the room. (The jerk store called, yada yada yada.)

Lucky for us, you can return to your piece and add the perfect argument (in your eyes) after the fact. Oh yes - you can smuggle M&Ms past the ushers! On closer reflection M&Ms aren’t that quiet after all - best cut that entirely.

Use this time to sculpt your piece into its strongest - not perfect - form.

Proofreading Your Writing

With your contents locked in and your sentences as good as they’re going to get, this is where you proofread. Not edit - we’ve already done the editing. Proofing is NOT the same as editing. All you’re doing here is checking for grammatical or spelling mistakes.

Print your piece out and read it backwards to “refresh” it in your mind - it’s likely you’ve glossed over some clangers after staring at it for hours on end. If possible, get a third party to weigh in (provided their spelling and grammar skills are equal or better than yours.)

What’s Next?

After you’ve completed the five step writing process - you’re on to the next piece! If that makes you weep with despair, you can always get a professional to help you out! I write copy and content for all purposes (except academic - do your own homework!) using a tried and true five-step writing process. Contact me below!

Five Copywriter Habits That Will Improve Your Writing

Depending on the time of day, you’ve probably written hundreds of words already. Yes, it’s true.

Think about all the emails, reports, shopping lists, purchase orders, and notes to colleagues you’ve put out into the world today - all those words add up pretty quickly!

Modern business thrives on written communication. The power of the written word is so immense, it forms the entire basis of our society - think about our Constitution, laws, ordinances.

Though we may not be using words to trade sheep stations (or perhaps we are?) you can use these five copywriter habits to improve your own writing - and be more well understood and effective at work.

Writing For An Audience of One

The great American novelist and writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. once said:

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

In most cases, emails are one to one communication. In business, we may be writing reports to many stakeholders. Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett says that he writes his annual reports as if he was writing directly to his sisters. This will inform your style - as Buffett directed his copywriters: “safe, bland, and reassuring.”

Writing with one person in mind will keep your style consistent. You’ll feel less worried about how you say things and more focused on getting your message out there.

Takeaway: write to please one person, not many. Because you can’t please everyone.

All Writing Is a Story

Every piece of writing in business - in the world to date - has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Though I might cringe at the term “storytellers” in business, I do so because everyone is a storyteller.

In business, this narrative form may look like:

• The current problem

• What needs to be done about it

• What the resolved situation will look like

Make sure all your communications have a definite beginning, middle, and an end. Just like in high school, you need to introduce the topic of conversation to the reader. Don’t assume your reader knows everything there is to know - communication is the act of scooping out your brain into the brains of an unsuspecting and naive passer-by.

Takeaway: Structure your writing as stories with definite beginnings, middles, and endings.

Concise and Clear Language

You’ve likely read emails or reports that had you reaching for the dictionary at one point - I have, and I’m supposed to know “all the words.” Truth be told, I don’t. (The horror!) The point of good communication is clarity and concision. That means saying what you mean and making it as simple as possible to understand.

Doesn’t matter if your audience has three degrees in engineering or didn’t even finish high school - your writing should be equally accessible to both people. Would you rather be known as pretentious for trying to show off your brainiac vocabulary, or a business genius for explaining a difficult concept like you’re talking to a five year old? (That’s the old trick of “Explain Like I’m Five.”) Substitute long, difficult words for simpler alternatives. Utilize? Just say “use.”

Takeaway: Making your writing simple means it is easier to understand.

Editing Yourself

Everybody has time for editing. Doesn’t matter if it took you thirty seconds to compose, you can spend another thirty seconds proofing and editing. Editing is the art of cutting redundant words from your writing to achieve that concision and clarity. A sentence shouldn’t have extra words in it, much like a clock shouldn’t have extra hands on the dial. If you’re unsure on how to edit yourself, you can use Hemingway Editor or buy a book on editing, such as the aptly titled Edit Yourself.

Takeaway: Editing yourself is as crucial to the writing process as composition.

Using Verbs

Verbs power writing. Verbs, or “doing” words are the momentum your writing rides along. In business, almost everything is verbs. Buying, selling, ordering, drafting, syngergizing - some don’t seem like words at all, but they are at the very least passing themselves off as verbs. If your writing is trying to persuade or will something into being, verbs will get you there. Using too many nouns and adjectives bog the reader down - they will start wondering when you will get to the point very quickly. If you can write verbs into every sentence, you’re off to a flying start.

Takeaway: Verbs are the engine of writing, so the more verbs, the more horsepower your writing has.

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Need help from a professional Melbourne copywriter who can supercharge your business writing? Click below to contact me!

The Best SEO Copywriting Tips

Not everyone is a writer. That said, no one is born a writer – let alone an SEO copywriter. I know when I first had a pen in my hand, search engines, let alone the World Wide Web, was a pipe dream.

Even so, the art and science of copywriting has evolved over time – and now we have SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation copywriting.

Google Search Console.

What is SEO Copywriting?

SEO copywriting is straightforward – it’s writing copy, or text, for your website or webpages and optimising it as much as possible for search engines. That means picking relevant keywords without “stuffing” them and getting penalised, adding the right metadata, headlines, internal links, and title tags.

SEO copywriting is finding a balance between what algorithms like and what people actually find useful.

To be successful at SEO copywriting, you need to research keywords and the competition.

Keyword research

Content writing for the sake of it doesn’t help anyone. Google, DuckDuckGo, Bing, etc. categorise websites by relevance. If you search for copywriting, the webpage should explain copywriting in detail to help fulfill your query. You can see what your website already ranks for by using Google Search Console. This takes a few minutes to set up. After a few weeks, you’ll see what incoming search terms your site or pages rank for.

Analyse the competition

Not all keywords are created equal. Some keywords are highly competitive. An industry insider once told me that “lawyers” or “compensation lawyers” as a long-tail keyword would cost upwards of $100AUD per click on Google Ads! Use SEMRush or SearchAtlas to see what content ranks and how to leverage that to your advantage.

What are other people searching for?

Another way to look at keywords and searches is to use Google Trends and see the volume of searches for long-tail queries such as “how do I write better?” or “who can write a blog post for me?” and go about answering those questions as best as possible – better than your competition.

Journalistic rigour and creative flair

You don’t need to be a journalist first to be a copywriter – but it helps. Articles online need to be timely, relevant, and factual. Disinformation and misinformation is rampant; so don’t add to it by being lazy in your research. Think and write like a journalist: if possible, try to cross-verify claims by finding two independent sources for your content (e.g. two primary sources, not secondary sources that may reference one another). Above all, be creative! Just don’t open the forbidden door: plagiarism. Plagiarism is not only IP theft but a known SEO penalty. If you’re unsure, use a plagiarism checker.

What is Google passage ranking?

Google’s algorithm is smart enough to rank certain parts of pages for relevant content – so everything in your page needs to be informative and relevant. Separating subjects into sections by using headings and paragraphs can go a long way in helping rankings. For more information on Google Passage ranking and how it works, click here.

Off-Page SEO

Many modern Content Management Systems such as WordPress, SquareSpace (which is what I use!), or Kajabi offer off-page SEO tools such as creating custom headlines, snippets or excerpts, title tags, metadata, and social images. Use these to your advantage. Don’t pack your off-page metadata with keywords and hope for the best: use strategic keywords so your content ranks better!

What’s next

Does the thought of filling up a blank screen fill you with dread? Contact me and get Melbourne’s best SEO copywriting and content done for you! Click here to contact me.

Advanced Books on Writing

For seasoned writers who rely upon clear and concise prose to get their point across, here are some more advanced texts on improving one’s writing craft.

To the Point: A Dictionary of Concise Writing by Robert Hartwell Fiske

When writing, simplify. If you can’t, read this book.

Edit Yourself: A manual for everyone who works with words by Bruce Ross-Larson

A comprehensive style manual including suggested edits and alternatives. I use this manual for my own editing.

Help! For Writers by Roy Peter Clark

210 tips, exercises and lessons for writers. If you’re stuck on a plateau and want a comprehensive program that’ll light a firecracker under your fingers, this is the book to get.

Language in Thought and Action, by S. I. Hayakawa

This book’s for thinking about words and how they create meaning rather than word choices, structure and what have you. Also handy for discovering your own biases and the biases of others. Essential for anyone who writes non-fiction or wants to get involved in the media. Also recommended: Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman.

I Always Look Up the Word ‘Egregious’, by Maxwell Nurnberg

A vocabulary builder for people that don’t need one. A good start to expand your vocabulary and in time, your entire palette of meaning.

The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth

aka, “How to turn the perfect English phrase.” A rundown of the elements of rhetoric and other embellishments that turn your copy into poetry, sweet poetry.

Hemingway App

A free app aiding concise and clear writing. It’s not perfect, but goes a long way helping you tighten copy.

The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, by Steven Pinker

A new approach to style in the modern era. Cognitive scientist and linguist Pinker dissects language structure and form, different and differences between styles, and how to think more clearly and accurately about writing. Best read after you’ve absorbed the more “prescriptive” texts such as Elements of Style, etc.

Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch by Constance Hale

Verbs power writing, and this book features a boatload of exercises to rev your verb-writing engines. You’ll scratch your head after reading, wondering why your laurels ever rested on lazy adverbs!

Elementary Books on Writing

The first in my series of resources for writing clear and concise copy

If you've contemplated improving your writing by clearing it up and trimming the fat - you should do it. Clear and concise communication improves chances of saying what you mean and meaning what you say. Here are some of the elementary books on writing that I use and recommend.

The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White

If your writing resembles a frothing sumo wrestler, get this book and swallow down its advice every day like a regimen of vitamins. The most fundamental of fundamentals to good, clear copy are in this book.

Good Grammar, by Graham King

Does what it says on the spine.

If You Can Talk, You Can Write, by Joel Saltzman

One of the clearest, sharpest and most helpful books on writing there is. Packed full of fun vignettes, exercises and eye-openers. You’ll read it in a day and return to it constantly.

Choose the Right Word, by S. I. Hayakawa

A thesaurus of sorts, this book explains the precise shades of meaning for any word you’re struggling to come up with. Also recommended: Roget’s Thesaurus.

A Dictionary, by whomever

Get one that’s at least as big as your head. Refer to it often.