How To Write Better Website Copy

There’s a great sales consultant named Jack Daly (get his book!) and he makes this wonderful point about how most companies can’t answer with crystal clear clarity, why should I do business with your company? He travels all over the country doing sales training and he’ll get an entire sales team in the room, and he’ll get out those giant post-it notes and he’ll say, “Give me all the reasons why I should do business with your company.” He’ll go ahead and he’ll just pencil them all in, but he does this all over the country hundreds of times a year.

He’s already got the answers written down, so when the sales team is all done saying things like, “We care,” “Better value,” “Good product,” all the generic things that, by the way, are like the salt and pepper at a restaurant–you don’t go to a restaurant for salt and pepper, you just assume it’s going to be there. But most of us feel like the reasons why customers should do business with us is just the salt and pepper.

Anyway, eventually after he gets all these answers, Jack will lift up the post-it note or the paper and he’s already got all the answers written down. He jokes around that he feels like David Copperfield. He already had this all figured out, but it’s because everywhere he goes, everybody says the exact same thing.

I want to challenge you to not only have crystal clarity about why I should do business with you, but I actually want you to write your website copy around that. If I take your website and I print out all the pages, and I take your next competitor and I print out all their pages, and I Sharpie out all the mentions of your name, and I give it to someone you know, are they going to know which copy was your website or is it all going to sound generic? Do you have real differentiation? Are you talking about yourself in a way that your customers can’t or won’t actually claim to be the way they do business?

For example, here at Juicy Results, we have a guaranteed SEO program. We talk about our SEO in a very unique way. We wrote the book The Bootstrapper’s Guide to SEO, which is tongue twister sometimes. That’s a great claim to fame that we have about our SEO program. These are things that only we can say, and if you read our webpages and you Sharpied out all the references to Juicy Results, you would still know that it was talking about us.

Our competitors can’t or won’t claim the same things, so I challenge you, if you’re working on a website redesign, take a look at your website today and read it and say, if I took out all the references to my name, would I still know it was us and would it still be compelling? Would I still want to do business with your company?