This week’s post is written by Heather Anne Carson of Onboardly, where startups flock for PR help. Hint of the genius that follows: Heather doesn’t think promoting your startup should rest entirely on pitching TechCrunch. Learn loads and share a tweet o’ thanks… For most startups – especially those who are bootstrapped or not yet […]

TMI = Too Much Information Time and again, we see long copy outperform short copy in split tests… But long copy usually means long pages – not lengthy page elements. So we shouldn’t have been surprised when we ran two headline tests – detailed in our brand-new ebook The Great Value Proposition Test – and […]

After nearly 2 months of prep and execution time, Joanna and I just wrapped-up the final A/B test for our brand new ebook, The Copyhackers Great Value Proposition Test, where we ran headline-only tests on a wide range of websites – 11 in total. And what a fun, worthwhile experiment it was! The adventurous souls […]

You’ve wondered how to inject a little personality into your copy… And we’ve talked about writing with tone before (right here). Now you can learn from one of the masters of voice and tone, Kate Kiefer Lee of MailChimp fame. Cuz I sat her down and picked her brain for 25 minutes! The result is […]

By Joanna Wiebe Subscribe for free weekly tips here and get notified when my course opens PPC ads need ’em. Blog posts need ’em. Email subject lines need ’em. Landing page headlines need ’em. Qu’est-ce que c’est? ATTENTION GRABBERS! Uber-prominent messages that grab your prospects’ attention! If you want people to notice your message and […]

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 […]

In this post, Joanna and I want to know what YOU think about 5 SEO agency sites – by giving you a chance to rate how strongly they make a case over their competition… Part of outperforming your competition involves telling your site visitors exactly why they should choose you over any other available options. […]

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: This post is grounded in what you’ve shared with us in the persistent poll on Copyhackers.com. Based on 273 responses to our question about the types of copy that challenge you most, 61% of you told us that THIS topic is top of mind for you. (Oh, and in case there’s any confusion about […]

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 […]