How to Easily Plan Copy For an Entire Website the Best Way

How to Easily Plan Copy For an Entire Website the Best Way Besides a stellar design, your web copy is the single most important step you can take to properly market your services. Why? Because your website functions like a billboard, sales rep, portfolio, and product page all in one. And your website is a step that big requires a serious plan. Ready to see how it’s done? We’ll walk you through all the criteria needed to plan your beautiful, smart, well-functioning website copy. How to Easily Plan Copy For an Entire Website the Best WayDownload Your Free Website Content Template As a bonus, when youre ready to write content for each page on your site, use this free template. Step 1: Develop Your Voice Voice is how you say something. It’s the difference between your brother saying, â€Å"Hey, nerd!† and hugging you, and the school bully yelling, â€Å"Hey nerd!† with a baseball bat in his hand from across the courtyard. It’s also one way people will remember you. Look at the â€Å"about us† page from Missguided,  a UK-based clothing company. They go beyond â€Å"casual† right into â€Å"colloquial† and it works well. Why? Because it fits their brand and guidelines. Think about how weird it would be if a dental company used a tone like that. Right? Now that’s why you need to make sure your voice, tone, and brand guidelines all match. Let’s look at some ways to make sure your tone, voice, and guidelines all match. Your tone is made up of your voice, your style, and those writing â€Å"quirks† that make your writing sound like you. It has to do with the pacing of your writing, the way you pull paragraphs together, and the types of words you choose to use. You could spend years and years developing your voice, but for now, we think these tips will help you get started. Your tone is made up of your voice, your style, and those writing â€Å"quirks† that make your...Identify Tone To develop your voice, you first have to identify your tone. Figure out which of these you most identify with: Casual (think about the Share a Coke  video) Traditional (think about how â€Å"Yale University† talks) Quirky (think about how Dollar Shave Club  talks) Outrageous (we’re talking about companies like Squatty Potty) Once you have your tone, you should consult two very important pieces of information: Your brand guidelines Your company values Make sure that your tone matches your brand guidelines and your company values. If you value providing honest services, you probably don’t want to run a website that’s full of jokes, lies, or silly phrases that trick your customers into purchasing products for more than they’re worth. If you value providing fast turnover times, you probably don’t want to use a quirky voice. Your best bet is to make sure your brand guidelines, company values, and tone are all aligned. Then you can get to the fun stuff. Your best bet is to make sure your brand guidelines, company values, and tone are all aligned.Step 2: Identify Your Audience Now that you know how to talk, you have to figure out what to say. You can do this by discovering your audience and doing investigative work to figure out what type of information they like. Recommended Reading: How To Create A Marketing Strategy That Will Skyrocket Your Results By 9,360% Use Social Media and Third-Party Platforms to Uncover the Truth Moz is a platform that most users use to check their on-page SEO scores, find optimal keywords, and the Fresh Web Explorer to find keyword mentions across the World Wide Web. But guess what? There’s another way to use Moz, and that’s for learning more about your audience. Moz’s Link Explorer  is a great way to see who is linking to your site and where most of your links come from. To access your linking domains, log in at www.moz.com Find â€Å"Moz Pro† from the main nav Under â€Å"Research Tools† click on â€Å"Link Explorer† From there, click on â€Å"Linking Domains† Once you’re there, click on â€Å"root domains† Type in your website Discover all the websites that are linking to your domain. Where are most of your linking domains coming from? Social platforms – if most of your linking domains are social platforms, use that information to uncover the platforms people use, the way people talk to each other on those platforms, and the type of information usually shared. If, for example, your biggest linking domain is YouTube and most of your viewers comment and share videos, you can assume most of your audience members will benefit from more video content. Use that information to move to the next steps. Article websites – if most of your linking domains are from long-form articles, you might be able to infer that your audience loves detailed information. Use that to develop a plan later on. *Google – if most of your linking domains are from Google, you can assume that your audience is finding you organically. You may want to focus your efforts on your SEO skills. Google Analytics  is a platform that will give you a detailed look into your audience and what they do. To get started, go to https://analytics.google.com/  and log in. Under â€Å"Reports,† click on â€Å"Audience† Click on â€Å"Demographics† to learn about your audience’s demographics With Google Analytics, you can learn about your audience’s language, country, city, browser, service provider, screen resolutions, and, of course, you can explore your bounce rate, page sessions, and pageviews. But you can also dig deeper and look at things like Lifetime Value, Cohort Analysis, Audience Behavior and Audience Interest. But what we think you should always do is come up with a general chart of your audience based on their demographics and interests. This will help you start to see how you can connect with them in a way that they will respond best to.