5 Easy Tips For More Engaging Copywriting (+ My FREE Formatting Cheatsheet)

Okay, be honest. Is your copy a little boring? If you're following proper punctuation and grammatical rules to a T like your high school lit essay is about to be graded by Professor Umbridge? If you don't know when to gif, when to meme, or when to bold, or if you are using even just one of these, then I am sorry to say but you need this video more than it needs you. So keep watching. Hey posse, what's up? It's Alex. We are getting a little saucy in today's video. A few weeks ago a launch Patter posted this in our Facebook group. Can I make a request for a fun and easy bonus? I would give my personal information and possibly my firstborn since I'm already on the mailing list for a formatting cheat sheet. As a person who is dusting off my writing practice from academia, I have no idea when to emoji or gif. Making something easily skimmable was not a skill required to pass the state assessment test, although I'm sure 8 out of 9 professors agree it should be. What do I bold? Why? What is a basic guideline for emoji use, assuming it's appropriate for the brand's voice? As a maniac who still uses proper punctuation in my text when my thumb hits the right button anyway, formatting is not intuitive for me. Help. I chuckled a bit when I read this because I thought, oh my God, that is actually so relatable. Because the truth is, a lot of freelance copywriters in the posse are transitioning from a more technical writing background or academia. And for those writers, unlearning everything about proper punctuation and grammar and syntax is really difficult. And and honestly, that's why I always say that not having a college English degree or any formal writing experience can actually be beneficial for copywriters. Because the truth is, technically perfect and grammatically flawless writing just isn't what the modern day Internet age consumer wants to read. And don't even get me started on like acronyms and funny memes. Right? The average everyday doom scrolling Internet browser wants to be entertained, educated, or inspired. Yes, even if you're writing for a more formal niche or brand voice, your audience is way more likely to respond to messaging that is clear, conversational, accessible, easy to understand, easy to skim, and the big one? It's engaging and if it's anything but, they will not read what you're putting out there for very long. So if your messaging is overly formal, long winded, or technical, I'm sorry But I gotta call the personality police. I said sorry like such a Canadian right there. I'm sorry. In this video, I'm gonna share five tips for making your copywriting more engaging, relatable, and easy to read, no matter your business, brand or niche. And because my launch patters ask for it, if you stick around to the end, I have a free cheat sheet with even more formatting tips, tricks and examples to help you make your copy glossy, saucy and posse approved. So if that sounds good to you, you know what to do. Give me a thumbs up and subscribe below for more tutorials to help you master your marketing and messaging. And whatever you do, do not forget to hit that bell icon to be notified when my next video goes live. All right, so let's dive in with tip number one. Write to a Friend. Okay, so you have likely heard me say this one before. Write in the way you speak. Or write like you're talking to a good friend. But okay, what does that really mean? Well, let's think of it this way. When you're chatting with a good friend about that one time you spilled your coffee on your laptop while you were working at your fave coffee shop, I almost guarantee you you didn't use the words decaffeinated, cold brew notebook computer, or neighborhood narrat. I had to Google what that even meant. To be honest, I didn't even really know. But when you're talking to a good friend, you are not worried about sounding smart or impressive. You are just telling a story. You are sharing information. You are having a regular conversation. And yes, that is how you need to write your copy too. Because here's the thing, and I have said this so many times before, the average person reads at a seventh grade level. Yes, the seventh grade level. So unless you're writing to a highly, highly educated audience that requires that level of formality, or you're being public in a scientific journal or you're writing a legal document, then you probably shouldn't be using industry jargon or fancy words because people are just going to get hung up when they read it. Simple copy is easier to read. And when your copy is easier to read, guess what? The more people will actually read it. And when more people read it, the more conversions you'll get. And overall, your messaging will just work better. So the simpler the better. Right now if you have trouble putting this concept into action, try this little exercise. The next time you sit down to write copy, close your eyes and and actually imagine that you are writing to a friend. Make it A real person who you are close to and talk to frequently. I was just talking with my friend Mark, and we were talking about how people tend to ask other business owners, like, what's your core business challenge? But when you run into these people, let's say at a networking event or you're talking on the phone, you would never ask someone, what is your core business challenge? You would say, so what are you struggling with right now? You know, what's something? What's a problem that you're trying to solve in your business right now? There's a way that you can word things that don't seem so formal and intense. All right, now let's move on to tip number two. Write first, edit later. Seriously. So this is a temptation that we all, all have. I am so guilty of this. You are writing an email, and let's say you write the first two or three sentences, and then you realize that, oh, I don't really love that word that I used, or I didn't like the way I said that. So then you go back and you change the word or you change the sentence, and you tweak this and you tweak that, and then you try to get back into flow and continue on with writing the rest of the email. Then stop doing that. You'll almost always change it again anyway, and go back and change and tweak and edit till you know your heart's desire. But when you do this, it interrupts your conversational flow. And then your copy gets kind of clunky because it's one train of thought that was stopped and then edited. And then you're trying to continue on with a different train of thought, and then that was stopped and edited, and you get what I'm trying to say here, right? You go on and on until the end of the email when you have to then go back and somehow make all of this clunky copy, like, flow and patch together to make it actually work. No, don't do that. Just sit down and just write. Now try this, and I promise you'll be surprised by the stream of genius that comes from your brain and into your fingertips. It can, you know, take a little bit of work at first to really get into that flow, but if you get in the habit of it, it'll become a lot easier. Yes, you will misspell words. You'll mess up. You'll duplicate words. You'll have to go back and read and edit later, of course. But the goal isn't to write a perfect email on the first draft the goal is to write bad copy and then fix it, right? So just let it flow through you and then fight the urge to correct and edit as you go. Don't worry about the formatting or the bolding or the punctuation or the use of GIFs or brackets or grammar or readability or anything else. Right? Now, just get it all out of your brain and onto paper. And no editing. Okay, now let's move on to tip number three. Read your copy out loud. So now that you've written your first draft of copy in a conversational way, now is when you go back and you clean it up. So to start, I recommend using spelling tools like Grammarly. That's the one that me and my team use. But there are a ton out there, so just pick the one that works best for you. But this is really important to keep in mind as helpful and necessary as these tools are, because I can miss a typo 18 times for sure. Make sure to always read your copy out loud, because when you read what you've written in your head, you do this weird thing where your brain reads it the way you intended it to sound when you wrote it. So you might have like a ridiculously long run on sentence that you don't catch, or a missing word that your brain literally just like fills in the gaps. And you could swear that word was there because your brain just fills it in. But when you read your copy out loud, word for word, you get to hear it from the perspective of your reader, right? Your mistakes become way more clear when you read something out loud. And if you get tripped up or you have to read a sentence twice, twice, or even three times to figure out what you're trying to say, then your reader will too, and that'll really break the flow. And that conversational copywriting vibe. Or like this one super embarrassing situation where I was writing an email and I used the first name merge field so much in the email that when I read it out loud after it had already been sent to my entire list, it sounded ridiculous, it was completely unintentional and the result of not following tip number two in this video and then not catching it. Because I never read the email out loud before I actually sent it. So it ended up sounding ridiculous. I went back, I kept editing and putting in first name merge fields and the whole thing was a total disaster. And I only caught it after pushing send. So do as I say, not as I do. So as you're going through this verbal editing phase, here are some things you might want to Watch out for. You definitely want to remove any redundancies, anything that you're saying 18 different ways, but it really means the same thing. Remove that. Keep it simple. These will become really clear. When you read your copy out loud, you'll be like, I said that already, just in a different way. Take it out. Right? Shorten wordy sentences and paragraphs. That's a big one. The rule of thumb that I like to follow is that no sentence should be longer than about 15 to 20 words and no paragraph or block of text should have more than one to two sentences in it. I really follow that pretty strictly when I'm writing copy. Remember, great copy is also a visual experience too. And long sentences and long paragraphs, even if they're expertly written with commas and dashes, right, can be really visually overwhelming to the eye. Now, a lot of people won't even begin to read your copy if it looks too wordy or if there's like a wall of text. So always break up your copy into bite sized chunks. And you can do that through using coherence markers to improve clarity and conversational cadence. So if you're like, alex, what the heck is a coherence marker? They're bridge words or transition words that connect two ideas or concepts together and they really keep people engaged with a more conversational flow and tone. And yes, they definitely aren't grammatically correct or have the nicest syntax from like a literary perspective, but they make your copy really clear and easy to understand. So Judith Kamalski investigates this in her study using coherence markers like, but so that's why you know, dot, dot, dot adds clarity and conversational cadence to the copy, and it just, it makes your copy easier to follow. Now I'll reference that study and share more, along with over a dozen more examples of coherence markers that you can use in your copy inside the free cheat sheet that I created for you. And I'll tell you how to get your hands on that in just a second. And yes, because I know you're wondering, I am a big fan of the dot, dot, dot. So ellipses help you transition from one thought to the next. It's also a visual open loop, right? It's a visual experience, a visual open loop that keeps your readers reading. But more importantly, it actually gives your reader a little bit of a break. It creates more of that conversational rhythm to the reading. It's like a little pause, right? And if you think about conversations between people, pausing is essential. I should probably do it more often. But think about it. No one wants to talk to that guy or gal at the party who just wants to talk and talk and talk and never lets anyone in or never lets anyone get a word in. You'll notice that even stand up comedians do this. They don't just talk and go from one joke to the next. They pause, they speak slowly, and then they give an audience the chance to process and catch up to what is being said. And then they often naturally transition into the next joke, right? So adding coherence markers and ellipses to your copy is how you can accomplish that same feeling in your writing. It can't make you funny like a comedian, but you know, you can try. Now, the next thing that's important is to get to the point, but not too fast, right? If you're reading your copy out loud and it's going on and on and on, then you definitely, definitely need to cut out most of what you've written. If you're bored reading your own copy, your readers are definitely bored reading your copy, right? So conversational copywriting doesn't have to be this long winded, never ending copy. I mean, even a really good story will eventually kind of fizzle out if it never ends, right? So I read something the other day that said humans today have a shorter attention span than squirrels and goldfish. Now I have some thoughts on that. But hey, I read it on the Internet, so it must be true. Our attention span is even shorter when we're using our, our iPhones, which, by the way, the majority of people are actually reading your copy on their iPhones. And this is one of the hardest things about writing copy. You want to make sure you're giving enough information without adding anything unnecessary. I always like to ask myself with every sentence, does this feel like it's necessary? Does it add anything? Or am I just saying the same thing over again? Right. We all love those asides and explanations and backstories because we feel like they're so relevant to the story. But are they really right? Do you need that sentence to make your point? Be honest and edit. Get rid of it if you don't. Now on the flip side of this, you don't want to be like super cut and dry and just jump to every single point staccato with a period at the end of the sentence. And you're just getting it done right? Because that's not very engaging. Great copy still needs to utilize those elements of storytelling to pull your reader into what you have to tell them and pique their interest and Keep them engaged. Right? So you really want to pull attention forward. And that is a bit of a delicate balance here between not too much and not enough. And it can take a lot of tweaking and testing. But honestly, this is one of those softer copywriting skills that you really just learn with experience. Okay, so once you've made this first round of edits, you read your copy out loud, and it flows well, and it's pulling attention forward. You can now move on to the next round of editing. This is tip number four, Optimize for mobile. So, yes, I mentioned this earlier, but according to a study done by Campaign Monitor, 81% of people are reading emails on their cell phones or mobile devices. That is wild to me, 81%. Especially when most of us marketers and business owners are on laptops every day. And like it says in this article here, if your copy isn't optimized for mobile, then guess what? It is going straight into the trash. Or they're just not reading your website, or they're closing the page and they're not engaging. So what does that actually mean, right? Like, optimize for mobile. We hear it a lot, but what does it mean? How is your copy supposed to look on mobile for it to be optimized? So it might look really awesome on that Google Doc that you typed it on, on your desktop, right, where all of your sentences and paragraphs look good and they're easy to skim, and there's, you know, no more than a couple of sentences per paragraph, but then you pop it onto your phone and it turns into, like, a wall of text, right, where the entire screen, you know, top to bottom, is just text. So as the last step in your editing process, you should always, always, always pull your copy up on your phone to see how it looks. I actually have the Google Docs app, so I can see how every single thing looks on my phone. And then once you do that, you can break up your sentences in paragraphs to make it, you know, less visually overwhelming to the eye and optimize it for mobile. And now that you've done the hardest part right, you've gotten it all out, you've made it simple. It is time to get to the fun part, which is tip number five, add your copy gloss. I'm talking bolding brackets, italics, gifs, emojis, memes, and more. This is the stuff that can elevate a piece of copy from good to wow. I loved reading that. And maybe even get, like, a chuckle or an emotional response from someone, right? This is what adds personality, fun and conversational best friend flair to your copy. Yes, of course, the way you write and the words you select and the stories you tell should really accomplish that too. But your copy gloss is that final formatting touch, the cherry on top that distinguishes you and helps you stand out to your reader. And this is the stuff that is really baked into your brand voice, right? But how do you know when to use different formatting and graphical elements, right? How much do you use, where do you use it and why? Well, you will get a ton of formatting tips, tricks and examples inside my free Copy Posse Gloss Guide, which you'll get your hands on in just a moment. But here's the general rule of thumb when it comes to all sorts of formatting and graphical elements. These things should be used to make a statement, which means you should use them sparingly. Want to convey a feeling or stir an emotion that words just can't describe? Adding the perfect GIF or an emoji can do the trick. But adding GIFs all the time to every email just for the sake of it because it's your brand voice, really takes away from the impact of your message. Now bolding is something that all copy should be utilizing, right? It helps draw the eye of the reader to important concepts and takeaways. And if most people are skimming your copy, which newsflash they absolutely are, you want to make sure that you're using bolding strategic and yes, just like gifs and emojis sparingly. So the key here is to bold small bits here and there to draw the reader in and keep them reading. So when I'm writing copy and then going back and editing and adding my copy gloss, I like to bold key benefits and calls to actions. You know, the things I really do not want my readers to miss. Now all of this and more is laid out for you inside my free Copy Posse Gloss Guide and you can get your hands on that in the description box below. And I've also included more free resources and related videos on the topic that you might like below that I will see you next week with a brand new video. Until then, I'm Alex. Ciao for now. All right guys, if you enjoyed that video, make sure to check out the next one from me right here and you can click right here to get a free gift. Unpopular Opinion the copywriting formulas you learn don't mean jack until you master the art of formatting. If you want a peek behind the scenes of what my sales pages look like before pushing published, keep watching.