(What follows is the outline I wrote for myself in advance of recording the video. This is just an outline. Not a regular post or article.)
This isn’t one of my Q&A videos.
Nobody asked me this question.
So I’ll ask it myself.
“What do I think is the most powerful way to get conversational with a website’s audience?”
In my course, Conversational Copywriting, I talk about a few different ways to get your clients started.
But if I had to choose one, and only one way… it would be this…
Invite your readers to ask you questions.
Do that and a few very powerful things happen.
- Answer those questions and you have automatically started a series of conversations. Include a comment function on those Q&A pages, and that conversation can spread to include more and more people.
- A study of the questions asked gives you incredible insights into what truly interests your audience. (It’s probably not what you think.) You can now adjust your inbound marketing efforts accordingly.
- Those questions, and the answers you and your team write, will teach you how to write in a conversational manner. You can now take that approach and tone of voice, and apply it across other platforms, like your blog and social media.
Am I making this up and I go along?
Absolutely not.
Inbound marketing expert Marcus Sheridan has written an entire book on this topic. It’s called They Ask You Answer.
For myself, generating conversations with an audience is the secret to the success of my own website about coffee, CoffeeDetective.com.
Coffee Detective is a side project of mine. Four or five thousand people come to the site each day. That’s enough traffic for me to treat the site as my private test bed for all things related to web content.
The site truly took off only when I created a page which invited visitors to ask me questions about making coffee at home. I added that invitation page about 6 years ago now.
Today over half of my visitors come to the site to find answers to the hundreds of questions I have now answered.
That emphasis on Q&A has informed what I write about, how I write it, and how I choose to interact on various platforms, including social media.
Invite your readers to submit questions, answer them well, and learn from the process.
In that spirit… if you have a question about conversational copywriting, please ask it in the comments section below.
NOTE: I have an entire course devoted to the craft of Conversational Copywriting.
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