How to figure out what to write on your website
By: Digital Nspire
Tags: Copywriting, Writersblock, Digitalnspire, Copywriting Tips, Copywriting Services

1. Time to doodle (no joke)

First off, grab a pen and paper.

Draw boxes one next to each other, as many as webpages your site will have. My imaginary website is going to have 3 pages.

Make them big because you’re going to write in them in a second. Like this:

Inside the box, at the top, write the name of the page it represents: home, about, services, products, portfolio, contact, etc. Do it for each box:

Boxes for the different pages in my website: Home, About, and Contact.

2. Not your shoes

It’s time to put yourself in the shoes of your visitor. Oftentimes it’s not so easy to achieve when you’re designing and creating the copy of the website yourself.

This is because you focus so much on simply ‘doing’ that it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. It happened to me too, and it’s completely normal 🙃

So how do you avoid this? Simple. Ask yourself the following question:

What does the user expect to find on each page?

The answer to this question depends on the standards of your industry or niche market.

For example:

If you are a SaaS company , your customers might expect a certain pre-determined distribution of information throughout the website, such as features, pricing, and integrations. More on SaaS website design here.

, your customers might expect a certain pre-determined distribution of information throughout the website, such as features, pricing, and integrations. More on SaaS website design here. If you are building the website of a small-to-medium size consulting firm/marketing agency/law firm, your users will expect a presentation, some success stories, an introduction to the team, contact details, and maybe some freebies or resources.

Take a look at the distribution of information on the websites of well-established companies in your industry and decide what you like and not of these websites.

Note: I’m not telling you to copy a competitor’s website. Besides being a bad idea in itself, you should try to present yourself as a distinct and unique company.

Now that you have a clearer picture, take the time to figure out what each webpage is going to do for you.

Note down the concepts or ideas that you would like to include inside each box, under the page name. Use bullet points–it will help you to be more concise and you don’t have much space either way.

3. Write and refine

Now we’re getting closer! :)

If you’ve followed me thus far, you already have the basic message for each webpage, but you’re not done yet! Only architects and graphic designers can afford text-less websites (joke).

Now open a new Google Docs or Word document and write, in your own words, one paragraph that reflects what you want to tell your visitors for each webpage.

Don’t forget to follow the bullet-pointed script that you previously noted down on your paper sheet.

An example from my client. The initial paragraph for my client’s homepage was:

GreenSparrow helps gardening aficionados find the most suitable flowers and plants for each season based on the location of the garden.

Now, let’s make it better! You know your product better than anyone else, and it’s your mission to explain it to your potential customers, and in a way that’s appropriate for your audience.

Let’s take my client’s example. I expanded the paragraph above to:

Need some help deciding on what to plant in your garden? Design, manage and visualize your home garden with GreenSparrow! Home gardening doesn’t have to be a complicated activity. Different types of plants have different needs, and that is why you should take into account certain factors when deciding on what to grow. Some of these factors are latitude and daily hours of sunlight, climate, the characteristics of the soil in your garden, or the quality of the air in your town. GreenSparrow takes all the relevant conditions into account and makes suggestions for you. Now you can visualize how your home garde will look like! Customize the layout of your plants with an easy-to-use Augmented Reality feature. And much more… Download the app today and save the work for your garden.

How did I do that? Here’s my secret!

There is a common structure that works when presenting the value proposition of a product (or service). That structure has 4 parts:

What is it? ~ Don’t go technical, describe briefly what your product does. Why do you need it? ~ What is the problem that your product solves? What does it do for you?~ Here you should write about the benefits (not the features!) How does it do it? ~ This is probably the easiest and most fun part to write. You should elaborate more or less on the features depending on if there will be a separate webpage for them.

This is an easy-to-follow structure, but if you find another one that works for you, all the better!

Just make sure that a couple of friends and or relatives -whom you trust for literary assessment purposes- take a look at the final version of your text before publishing it on your website.

And you’re done!