Joanna Wiebe

Back in March, I spotted this email subject line among dozens in my inbox: “Free Beer!” I quickly opened the email, which was from Matt Harris of SendWithUs.com, to find this: With a catch! Hey Joanna, Brad and I are knee deep in some important sales documents, and would love your opinion. If you’re free […]

This week, Lance and I are at Microconf (#microconf) with 170+ micropreneurs and generally awesome peeps. If you don’t know about Microconf, you should totally check it out here. We’ve still got another day to go, and we’ve already learned: How to validate your startup idea (Josh Kauffman, author of The Personal MBA and The […]

LAST UPDATED ON MAY 11, 2020 Long-form sales pages are ugly. At least, that’s their reputation. Even though long-form sales pages consistently outperform shorter pages – for a broad range of brands, products, services and events – most marketers don’t want to consider long-form because, well, it’s ugly. But it doesn’t have to be. And […]

At Copy Hackers, we recommend most startups use their unique selling proposition – or value proposition – as their home page headline. That’s because, when you’re a new business, visitors to your site need to be told what’s unique or different about you that they’d really like. Why? Because they don’t know you yet. Because […]

How to Write Great Body Copy List features, benefits, claims and facts in an engaging way Answer “So what?” – give your user a reason they should care Provide proof – the bigger the claim, the more proof you’ll need For my unwebinar with Unbounce, we solicited Qs in advance. And I was pretty surprised […]

Today Joanna is presenting at one of Unbounce’s popular “unwebinars”. Her topic? “Copywriting That Converts”, of course. If you’re unable to attend, there’ll be a recording made available afterward. In advance of the session, the folks at Unbounce gave all registrants the opportunity to ask Joanna a specific question about her topic… and 460 people […]

While working on an email campaign with a client recently, one of the peeps on the phone said this startling thing: “We saw in several split-tests that short subject lines work better than long ones for us, so that’s why we’re using short.” My jaw dropped. Because, for as long as I’ve been in dis […]

There’s a rule in creative writing that you should always show rather than tell. So you wouldn’t write: “The tall man felt bad when he saw the blonde woman crying on a bench. She reminded him of his mother, who’d abandoned him as a child because she wanted to pursue acting.” That’s telling. That’s bad […]

My first startup was a realtor rating site called What Customers Say. On the home page for What Customers Say, we had to speak to two groups: 1) realtors and 2) home buyers and sellers. Naturally, the value + benefits associated with using the rating site were very different for realtors than for home buyers […]

None of your competitors are converting 100% of their traffic. And none of the sites or the businesses you look up to are converting 100% of their traffic. Not even one-fifth of that. Nobody is doing it 100% right. So if you go out and copy what the other guys are doing with their websites… […]

NOTE: Case study with test results included below. When I was doing my MA thesis on persuading users in ecommerce environments, I focused on converting in online “catalogs” (by which I mean any page that lists your products, services, packages or plans). As is required for any thesis, you have to read everything anyone has […]

5 Types of Tone in Writing: Updated June 8, 2023 Your message is what you’re trying to communicate. Your tone of voice is how you communicate it. Tone takes a statement and either breathes life into it… or sucks the life out of it. It goes without saying, I think, that the tone you should […]

It’s easy to hate email marketing. It’s easy to look at your inbox, scroll through 100s of messages from companies that are probably just trying to sell you stuff, and add to your list of startup ideas “Banish Email Marketing from the World’s Inboxes”. But, as I’m sure you know, just because you don’t like […]

Here’s a lie that feels like the truth: “A mother is a person who, on seeing only 4 pieces of pie for 5 people, promptly declares, ‘I never did care much for pie.’” That’s a lie that turns moms into martyrs, which is not what moms are supposed to be. It’s one of many lies […]

This week, the front page of Hacker News was filled to the brim with stories* about how much cold, hard cash startups have been earning: Nathan Barry’s $26,679 in 24 hours: Stats from my latest book launch Patrick McKenzie’s Bingo Card Creator (and other stuff) Year in Review 2012 Brennan Dunn’s Why I Gave Up […]

We all wish we could spend $50,000 to hire an awesome design agency for every new idea we have. But for early stage startups – especially bootstrappers – that isn’t always a sound investment. True, a high quality, custom-built brand and website is going to make all the difference someday – and it’s great that […]

Here’s what we’ve all allowed ourselves to believe: selling is tacky. If you have brains and a great product or service, you really shouldn’t have to ask people to buy your stuff, should you? Great products sell themselves! And, hell, you didn’t go to college just to end up hocking your wares like some sad-sack […]

Eliminating Friction Words From Your Button Copy Button copy is the site of conversion and deserves attention The words you choose for your buttons matter High friction words suggest the user has to give up something Low friction words make work feel less like work In my Mixergy course, I spoke briefly about something called […]

As we move into the holiday season (and as I realize, with that opening, that this post is not going to be shared after Dec 25), everyone’s going to be talking about how to squeeze more sales out of shoppers. I’m not going to talk about that… …I wrote about it last year, though, so […]

If you watched the vice presidential debate last week, you may remember our dearly beloved Moderator Martha grilling the candidates when they didn’t directly answer her questions. She tacked this important, revealing phrase onto the end of almost every primary question she asked: “Be specific.” Why’d she say that? Because when people have a question, […]