website Archives - Writing for the web - online copywriting and content writing.

What would happen if you improved on everything you did by a factor of 10?

March 27, 2016June 9, 2017 by Nick Usborne

a ten times iimprovement Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you’re a freelance writer, focusing on Business-to-Business clients, and want to create a free report to offer your website visitors when they sign up for your newsletter.

We’ll call your report, “The 7 Secrets to Converting Prospects into Clients”.

You create a short outline. You do some research. Maybe you download a few reports from your competitors’ websites to see how they did it.

You then write the report. Let’s say it’s 14 pages long. You get a cover designed. You’re good to go.

That’s the “factor of 1” version.

Now let’s look at what a “factor of 10” version might look like.

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The topic for your own money-making website is right there in your head.

May 23, 2013May 23, 2013 by Nick Usborne

As you may know, outside of my regular work I also have a hobby website about coffee. It’s called CoffeeDetective.com.

This is a site I started 7 years ago, and I’m still adding to it and improving it today. How come? Because I’m a huge coffee lover and enjoy writing about it and helping people brew a better cup of gourmet coffee at home.

Another reason to enjoy writing my site is that it has become a second source of income for me and my family. Best of all, it’s pretty much passive income, through ads and affiliate partnerships. I don’t have to sell or ship anything. I just have to keep writing and adding great content to the site, which I enjoy doing.

Anyway, a few years after starting the site I decided to share what I had learned with other people by writing a program which explains, step by step, how to write your own money-making website.

Over a thousand people have now taken the program, and hundreds of new websites have been published. And some of those sites are now coming close to or even exceeding the income I make from my coffee site.

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Web writers: For every great performance, you need to rehearse.

September 20, 2012September 19, 2012 by Nick Usborne

When you watch a live performance of your favorite play in a theater, you are looking at a performance that has been preceded by weeks or months of rehearsals.

And those rehearsals take place without costumes, without scenery and without the pressure of an audience watching.

The rehearsals allow the actors to get things right, outside of the public eye. There are fewer constraints. There are no downsides to making mistakes, missing lines, and so on. No pressure.

OK. Now let’s consider how we go about writing interior pages on websites.

As an example, let’s assume we are working on the rewrite of an insurance company website. The company offers home insurance, auto insurance, commercial insurance and farm insurance. Each of these areas has an interior page of its own.

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It’s not about the details, it’s about the overall customer experience.

August 2, 2012July 31, 2012 by Nick Usborne

After you have read a hundred articles by various people about how in the world of ecommerce it’s all about the details, step back and ignore them for a few minutes.

Yes, the details can make a difference.

But they won’t do you a lick of good unless you get the big picture right first. In fact, all the details should point in the same direction – towards optimizing the customer experience.

Whatever your online business, you won’t be remembered for moving that image from the right side of the page to the left side. You won’t be remembered for the size or font of your headlines either.

But what every visitor and customer will remember is the quality of the experience they had at your site, whether they have made a purchase yet or not.

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