How to Get a Trustworthy and Effective Client Testimonial for Your Business?
How To Get A Trustworthy And Effective Client Testimonial For Your Business? Testimonials are a vital part of your business and brand success and growth. Testimonials shape the perception of your brand and business by your prospects. Specific and well-written testimonials encourage your website visitors to take action and buy that product or service or hire you. You can speak about your products or services non-stop and try persuading your potential clients that you can provide the best solution to their problems as much as you want. But often it’s better to let your former clients speak instead, and share their results and experience working with you. Your potential clients want to see that you’re capable of doing the work, that you’re credible, and that you helped other people to achieve the results they want Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with you speaking about your products and services, promoting and selling. Because if you’re afraid to promote them, and don’t believe in them, nobody will know what you do and be able to buy from you. So it’s essential at the time to work on overcoming your fears and limiting beliefs that you have about selling if you want to improve your sales. Your potential clients don’t know you yet. And it takes some time for new people and potential clients to start trusting you. Are you the person who can provide the best solution to their problems and make their lives easier? They need a proof that your company or business is legit and that you can be trusted. There is nothing more inspiring than seeing other people getting the results you want. Let your former satisfied clients be your advocates and promote your services for you. So if you want to boost the credibility of your business and brand, make sure that you gather and share case studies, testimonials, and social proof from your former clients. It can be text, video, or audio, you can be as creative with the testimonials on your website as you wish. You want to ensure that your website doesn’t just describe the features of your services and how great you are, but that it includes positive reviews from your former clients. Reviews that describe how you, your brand and your services transformed your former client’ lives. It will make your business and brand more credible and desirable among your new potential clients. Testimonials is a powerful marketing tool A positive client testimonial is a powerful marketing technique that is used by both small businesses and big corporations. Well-written, specific testimonials placed all over your website can help to boost the overall trustworthiness and credibility of your brand and business. Testimonials can reassure and prove to your new potential client that you’re actually capable of bringing them the results they want because you helped to achieve the results they want for other people before. Don’t underestimate the importance of well-written and effective sales pages too. Both testimonials and an effective sale page should work together. Often a testimonial or a case study can be a breaking point and push your potential client to take action and book that call, buy the product you offer or hire you. In the past, I made a lot of my own decisions and took action on people’s websites based on their testimonials and case studies. There is something magical in seeing other people who used to struggle as you do now to get the results you want. It’s inspiring, it gives hope, and it makes you believe that it’s actually possible for you as well. If you just starting out, make gathering testimonials, case studies and working with clients your priority. There are no amount of paid ads that can do the same things for your business that great testimonials can. It’s a free marketing tool you can leverage to grow your business and get a new client. In addition to this working with clients will improve your skills, and confidence, and will help you to understand in what direction you would like your business to move. But does every single testimonial is effective and actually does something for your business? Not every positive testimonial if effective ”Alina is amazing!” ”I loved it!” ”The course or the service was great!” It’s the examples of the worst testimonials you can possibly get from your clients. Moreover, they will do very little for your business. Most likely your website users will ignore them, as they ignore stock photos of smiling people on your website. These kinds of testimonials are very vague, non-specific, and inauthentic. They give little or no information at all about your services or products and what they do. What elements create a powerful, and credible testimonial? Trustworthiness – always use the full name of your client, maybe include information like her website, and the location. Include a headshot if possible – it’s very important. People want to see real people. Specificity – the testimonial gives a specific reason why your product or service is good. What problem did exactly your service help to solve? Specific testimonial is more credible, they make your potential clients trust you more. Nobody cares about general copy, general services, and general faceless testimonials. Authenticity – you don’t want your testimonial to sound unnatural, and be written in a non-natural way. Make sure that your former client uses simple language that describes what exactly they liked about your services and what specific results it helped them to achieve. Don’t forget to mention any fears, and problems your client had before they started to work with you. Then you can explain how they were eliminated. You can also address here any objections that people had before they bought from you. Explain the benefits of your service or products – what impact your product or service made had on your clients? How was their life was transformed? This makes your product or service interesting for your future potential client. Add
10 Tips for Writing an Effective Service/Sales Page
10 Tips For Writing An Effective Service/Sales Page Your service page is probably one of the most important pages on your website. It’s rarely a good idea to just have your services listed on your homepage unless you have a simple landing page. The main reason for that is when people search for solutions to their problems on the internet, they will almost never search for a particular person or company. They will directly search for a solution to their problems. And you want to make sure that they can actually find what solution you offer for their problems. Your website is a tool. The primary end goal of any website is to sell your products or services. Of course, it all starts with attracting your target audience building trust, and connection, which can lead to a potential sale. It takes time, trial and error to create a well-performing service page. Especially when it’s something you have never done before. Don’t believe when some experts and gurus out there promise you quick results and quick sales, just because you created a product or a service and put it on a landing page. Do you believe in what you have created? Does it something that your audience actually needs? Do you even know your audience? Is your website copy clear? Can your potential clients find easily answers to all their questions and objections they might have concerning your offer? If your service page doesn’t work and doesn’t convert the way you expected it to, are you ready to work to improve it, and don’t take your things that didn’t work personally? But instead, use this experience to grow and improve it? There are many things to take into account when you write your service page. But there is a structure you can use to create a great service page. One page per service You can have a lot of different services and sometimes they can be not connected, and created for different audiences. There are many experts that say that you need to have one primary service on your website, and use the same keywords to make your website searchable and known for this very specific service. So make sure when you choose the name of your service or course that it’s clear and can be found. When you have many different services that aren’t connected at all, it’s when having a separate page for every service you offer is the best solution. A person who is interested in your one-on-one coaching sessions might be not the person who is interested in your courses or group programs. It helps to get rid of confusion and speak exactly to your ideal client. It will allow you to have the whole page to speak in detail about your offer, and its benefits, address all the reservations, describe the process, answer the questions, and provide testimonials or case studies. One service per page is better from an SEO and promoting perspective as well. You can create a separate title and a description for every single page and its service. So when you promote your offer is so much easier to advertise. You send people to exactly the page they would like to see without any distractions and unnecessary information. It’s so much easier to make up your mind and take the decision when you don’t have 10 choices and distractions. Even if you have a separate page for every service you offer, you can still have a general work with me page. It’s the page where you can list all your services, and provide a brief description with a button if your website visitors would like to learn more about a particular service. Provide the most important information first Be very specific from the first sentences on your website page. You want to be clear, and specific and let your website visitors know what is it that you offer. Values people’s time. Your goal isn’t to make people stay on your sales page s long as possible, but to get rid of people who are not a good fit right away. When you create a copy from this place, it has more clarity and it’s easier to write. Later you can continue your copy by addressing the biggest objects, and pain points they might have, show them that you understand what they are dealing with and finish with a promise and benefits of your products or services Let your website visitors know that you understand them, that you empathize to them and that you can provide the best solution to their problems. Start with a great value proposition Your values proposition is a short statement that summarizes what your business offers and to whom. You can also add some information about what makes your offer, different and unique. It can be a short heading+subheading, heading+short paragraphs of text, headings+video or any other form. Choose the type of value proposition that suits best you and your business. I won’t go into details on how to write your value proposition in this blog post, but here is a simple formula you can use to help you: I help (audience/niche) to (achieve result/solve the problem) by (service/product). Creating a good value proposition demands you know your audience and your offer. Always finish your value proposition with a call to action (CTA). It’s mostly done for people who are familiar with your offer, or maybe they have already read the page and come back to it and would like to book a call or buy your course right always. Here are several examples of great value propositions to inspire you: You can see a clear heading, a promise that these email marketing software gives to their potential clients, a very brief text section for who this offer is, some visuals to give an idea of how your email will look, and CTA. In the Convert Kit case, they reassure their prospects with a free trial, make people
11 Ways to Improve Your Website Copy
11 ways to improve your website copy as a small business owner Nobody today can deny the importance of well-written and strategic website copy. Making a website became so much easier than it used to be. Although, there are still so many aspects to take into consideration if you would like to build a well-performing website for your business: basic design principles, visual brand identity that reflects you and your business, user experience, website copy, and tech knowledge to make it actually happen. Your website copy attracts, and keeps your target audience, leads them through your website and makes them take action. It’s not possible nowadays to create a beautiful design without a well-thought copy and strategy behind and hope that your potential client will choose you, just because you have nice graphics and layouts. The questions you might want to ask are: Can your website visitors actually find what they are looking for? Is the information clear? Do they know what they should do next once they finished reading your copy on every single page? Is the information on your website valuable for your target audience? When there is no clarity, when your website visitors cannot find the information they are looking for, and when you speak about yourself all the time, most likely your website visitors will leave and will never come back to your website. It’s not always easy to write a copy for your website, you need to be concise, and clear, and lay out all the information in a strategic way. Make your copy readable You may have the most amazing messaging, and valuable information on your website, but when it’s hard to read and perceive nobody will spend hours trying to understand what is written. Our brain is lazy, it doesn’t want to burn thousands of calories to figure things out. You want to actually make sure that people can see, recognize and read the content on your website. It’s a quite common mistake I see people make on their DIY websites. There are several main tips that can improve the readability of the content on your website. Make sure that your font size is neither too huge nor tiny. Use a font size large enough so that people could actually read it. Make sure that links look like links, and that people can actually see that it’s clickable Use small sections of text instead of a huge wall of text. Use high contrast between the text and the background. Choose simple background over a very busy textured one. Use short sentences Don’t put your text close to the edges, it forces the eyes of your users to move too much, cuts the text, and looks not nice. Use extra space between lines of text “F” Pattern design – web users scan computer screens in an “F” pattern. They read from left to right, and from the top to bottom. You can adapt your copy for easy eye scanning. Down below I insert the image from the biggest user experience research website when they tracked the eye movement of website users. Proofread before publishing your copy Misspelt words and weird white space between words ruin people’s first impressions. If you would like to be seen as a professional, act as one. Research shows that grammar mishaps can negatively impact your sales and conversions—so double-triple-check your work. Make sure to proofread even if you’re a native speaker. Sometimes when you work on something for a long time, your eyes stop seeing the mistakes. You want to have a fresh eye that can look at your text. But don’t worry, if you can’t afford to hire a proofreader or don’t have anybody who you can ask for help, there is much great software out there that can help you to check the spelling mistakes. I personally use Grammarly. It can seem like something unimportant, but believe me in these small things your potential client can see your professionalism. So don’t let your ego dictate your action, that you don’t need it, that you know everything, and just do. Put the important information first Put the most important information in the first two paragraphs. When people land on your website they want to know who you are and what you can do for them. And to be honest it’s very annoying when they can’t find it right away. You can use simple headings and subheadings that explain in simple words what you do, and who you’re. Very few people will read your whole copy. People scan information on the internet but do not read it. On the average web page visit, users read only 28% of the words. 79 per cent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 per cent read word-by-word. Your website visitors don’t have time and they hunt for relevant information or products. So make sure that they can understand the most important information on your website by just looking at it fast. Only after reading the most important information, your website visitors might want to read background information and find out more details. So even if your prospects read one sentence, they need to understand the big picture of what you would like to say. Keep it human We all want our website to be easily found on Google. But it takes time for Google to actually start ranking your website and put it in front of your target audience’s eyes. Taking into account SEO and making keyword research is important, but remember that you’re writing for humans, not for Google! And when people enjoy your website’s content and it gives a sign to Google that the content on your website is valuable so it improves your website’s ranking and more people can find it organically. There are several things that will help you to make your copy more human: Keep it conversational. Write as you talk, don’t use a complex academic vocabulary or language.
5 Types of Stories to Tell in Your Business
5 TYPES OF STORIES TO TELL IN YOUR BUSINESS I already mentioned the importance of using storytelling in your business. In this blog post, I wanted to speak about the different types of stories you can tell in your business. You can use different types of stories to inspire and create an emotional connection with your audience. You can use stories on different parts of the website, and on different pages, on your social media, on your blog. It’s a very powerful tool everybody should leverage in their business. Inspire people with your business mission Instead of a boring mission statement, you can tell a real story of how you found your business. Help your readers to see who you are. When you’re open, and vulnerable, and help your audience to find out more about you, they will connect more to you. It can be a perfect story to tell on your About page. You can speak about what inspired you to start a business, the obstacles you overcame, what exactly led you to where you’re now, lessons you learnt on your way and how did it change you as a person. Don’t be afraid to share your failures, nobody needs a perfect story. As we all know that it’s not possible to have a perfect life and a perfect business. It’s exactly your failures and difficulties that make you real and relatable. You can share things you genuinely care about, things that drive you every day and give you the power to keep going! Maybe without even knowing it, you will help or inspire somebody with your business mission. It’s so important to inspire your audience. It will lead to emotional connection as well as will drive action on your website. Share success stories or case studies of your clients Nothing motivates people more than seeing other people with the same problems get the result they want to achieve. It makes them curious, and impatient to get the same results. When you share success stories of real people and how they benefited from working with you, it creates a lot of trust among new people who arrive on your website or social media pages and they have no idea who you’re and what you do. A good success story should contain a photo of a real person, a description of problems this person had and what she wanted to achieve before she found you. The second part should be all about the benefits and specific results you helped this person to achieve. Use stories to educate You can use stories to educate, explain your point of view or explain complex notions in a simple way. Stories help to understand complex things as well as to keep attention better, than just dry facts. If you educate your audience well and share relevant information, they will be more loyal, they will trust you more and they will come to your website over and over again to get great information. It shouldn’t necessarily be real stories, it’s totally okay to use imaginary stories. You can use these stories in your blog, on your social media platforms, in education videos or in some other materials you use to attract your ideal client. Let people imagine working with you Don’t just describe the features of your services, and speak only about yourself all the time. As I mentioned before nobody wants to read it. People are searching for a solution to their problems, they want to know how they will benefit from working with you. Let them imagine what working with you will look like. Where they will be in 3 months after working with you? How they life will change? What benefits and solutions to their problem they will get if they choose to work with you? Numerous studies show that people’s desire to buy a product increase tremendously when they hold it in their hands. But if you’re a service business you can increase their desire by telling a story about your services. It will create desire and will make your offer irresistible. When you write these types of stories always keep your ideal client in mind. Try to imagine what they want, and what exactly will make them choose you over others. Share Your personal story In addition to your brand mission story, you can add your personal story. Speak more about you in relation to your business. Be human, share your struggles, values, things you believe in and things that are important to you. You shouldn’t try to please everybody, and to appeal to everybody when you tell your story. Try to be yourself, be true to yourself, and speak from your heart. When we open like this, we attract our ideal client who relates to us, and who has the same struggles or doubts. From my own experience, I can tell that it’s hard to do. It will feel uncomfortable, and you will want to hide, but don’t let these feelings prevent you from sharing your real story. When it’s getting uncomfortable, it means that you come out of your comfort zone and grow. Final thoughts Telling stories is natural for us as human beings. If you just starting out, it can sometimes feel that it’s not for you. But if you want to learn how to write good stories, you need to try and fail sometimes. Great stories will help to grow your business, captivate people’s attention, and connect to your audience.
How to Attract and Keep More Visitors with Website Copy
How to attract and keep more visitors with your website copy Your website is an online representation of you and your business 24/7. It’s like your online visit card. Every business reaches a point when it needs to have a website. Nowadays it’s so much easier to create a website even if you’re not a professional web developer or a web designer. I absolutely believe that it’s possible to create it by yourself, even if there is a learning curve. You just need to decide for yourself if you’re willing to dedicate time and effort in learning all possible tech staff, design basics, website strategy, copywriting, or if you prefer to focus more on your work and have somebody that will do it for you. It took me some time to start seeing the strategy and carefully written web copy on some really good websites. Websites are so much more than just beautiful designs. Good web design is important and it helps to attract more people, but it’s a well-written copy that keeps visitors’ attention on your website. You should never neglect it and focus exclusively on design. It’s exactly a compelling web copy that makes your prospects stop, fall in love with your work, and take action on your website. It dictates how visitors see you, what they know about you, and most importantly how they feel about you, your brand and your business. A website is a tool. It should be built and used for a specific reason, it should have an objective. You should know exactly what is the objective or objectives of your website. It will help to lead your design and web copy in the right direction. BE VERY SPECIFIC WHO YOU SPEAK TO A well-written web copy helps you to start building relationships with your visitors. It allows you to serve your audience with valuable content and answer their questions. It allows you to build trust, establish authority and create long term relationships with your prospects. And if you want to create real relationships and provide value there are several questions you need to answer before you start creating an actual copy. Who are you speaking to? Who is your ideal customer? Who do you want to serve? It will help you to choose the right tone and voice of your writing. You won’t be creating generic content for everybody, speaking to everybody. Speaking to everybody seems like a good strategy in the beginning. But speaking to everybody means speaking to nobody. And people from this specific group of people you’re speaking to will spend so much more time reading your website, blog, and content in general. They will be learning with you, they will start feeling like you understand them and speak directly to them. It’s exactly when you start building a long term relationship it will help you to start generating long term revenue for your business. What are the benefits of your business, and why people should care It can be very easy to turn your website into an ode to your ego where you speak about yourself all the time. But let’s be honest, nobody wants to read that. It’s like when you have a conversation with somebody and she doesn’t let you even say a word. I have doubts that you will find a conversation like this interesting and exciting. Most likely you won’t want to engage in conversation with this person ever again. The same is true about the websites. In your website copy, you should directly address your visitor, use more ”you” instead of “I”. Define clearly what are the benefits of working with you. What problems do you solve? How can you help to make your prospects’ lives easier? Explain why people should care? What are your whys? Don’t just describe the features of your business, and speak about you. People don’t care. They want to know what is there for them and why they should care. How can you make their lives easier? Be crystal clear on what you offer It’s vital to define what you offer. What do you want your business to be about? What value do you want to provide with your work? This one can be a hard task to accomplish, especially when you’re not quite sure what you want your business to be about. When you don’t know yourself. When you don’t know what you enjoy doing. If there is no clarity in your mind, it’s the time when you should dig deeper into yourself and find out these things. Use simple language to describe benefits, maybe some features of your offer. Be very specific, and clear. Make sure that it’s easy to find and that visitors can access your offer from any page of your website. Create a smooth user experience Nowadays good usability is a must if you want your website to survive. If people can’t find what they search for, they leave. If it’s not clear what people can do on the website, if it’s not clear what you offer, they leave. If people are lost on the website, they leave. If the information is hard to understand, and don’t answer their questions, they leave. To help you to improve the usability of your website you can ask yourself several main questions: What do you want your visitors to do when they land on your website? What is the objective of every single page? Is it easy to use? For example, do your buttons look like buttons and look always the same? Does your search bar look like a search bar and whether it’s situated in a place where people expect it to be? Will it be easy to use your website again when visitors decide to return to your website? Or they will be obliged to spend some time to understand how to use it? Can they find all the necessary information easily? For example, if you have an e-commerce website and people can’t find
5 Reasons Why Your Web Copy is as Important as Your Web Design.
5 reasons why your web copy is as important as your web design Usually, when we think about a website, we imagine beautiful pictures, graphics, and design elements. And of course, a website should be aesthetically pleasing and create a smooth user experience, but what about the web copy? Is it clear from the first sign to your new visitors what you do? What do you offer? How they can benefit from working with you? Many web designers care only about the visual side of the website and don’t care much about the copy. Of course, if you have a budget, you can always hire a professional copywriter. But not every small business owner can do that, especially when you just starting out. When I was building my first website, I didn’t care about the copy much and I didn’t realize its importance of it. I thought that I can just put whatever text, write the description of what I do, and people will start booking calls with me. But people don’t interest in you, or in what do most of the time, they want to know right away what’s there for them and how you can help them solve their problems. It’s always better to have a simple website with a great and clear web copy than a website with a sophisticated design and a poor copy. Down below I uncover 5 reasons why your website copy is as much important as your design. A GOOD COPY MAKES YOUR WEBSITE VISITORS TAKE ACTIONS It’s important to have a visually beautiful website, to create a great first impression on your new visitors. But it’s not the aesthetically pleasing graphic element or nice colour combination that will make people take action if they’re interested in your offer. Does your website have an objective? What do you want to achieve with it? Do you want people to book a call with you? Buy your book? Buy your course? Subscribe to your newsletter? If you think about your main website goal and create everything around it, your website will be way more intentional. When you decide what your main goal is, you can start deciding the main goals for every of your website pages. Every single page you create should have at least several calls to action (CTA). A good copy will lead your visitors to this CTA, and make them take action if they are interested. Finish every single page with a CTA. It will prevent people from just browsing your website and never taking any action. New visitors can arrive on any of your website pages. Is it clear from any page you have what you do? What is your offer? How your visitors will benefit from your work? Clear copy helps to ATTRACT your ideal clients Don’t be afraid to be very specific and put right in the beginning what you do. Does your website offer what people are looking for? Is it easy to find all the necessary information on your website? People don’t read the information on the web, they scan it. They’re busy and don’t have time, if there are too many distractions and if they cannot find the information they are looking for, they leave. In addition to this, if you’re very clear right from the beginning about who you are and what you do, it will help to get rid of people who are not interested in what you have to offer right away. You won’t waste your time or their time. And interested visitors will stay to read more. Can you imagine how much easier it will be to write the copy for your website if you don’t try to appeal and please everybody? You will know exactly what do you want to say, what tone to use, and how to face the objectives of your potential clients every single time. It’s not very easy to do and narrow your niche and speak to a specific group of people. Maybe in the beginning it will seem like you losing clients if you’re not pleasing everybody. But believe me, sometimes less is so much more. 100 interested people are so much more valuable than 10000 people who don’t really care what you do. It’s just a mind shift you will have to do. A GOOD COPY HELPS WITH SEO A good copy helps with the Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of your website. Well-written headlines, subheadlines, and paragraphs help search engines to understand your website. The more valuable, high-quality, and clear copy you have on your website, the more likely it is that search engines will rank your website in organic search results. A well-written copy helps to build trust A well-written copy can show you as an expert in your field. Don’t be afraid to be specific, it will show that you know exactly what you are talking about. And people who stayed to read your blog or learn more about your services want to know the specificity. When you find your authentic voice, speak it, and don’t afraid to share your experience and vulnerability, people really appreciate it and connect more with you. We as human beings have often the same struggles in life and we want to know how other people are dealing with them so that we could speak about it and use their experiences to help us. Don’t be afraid to be generous, share free information, provide value and help people. It creates connection and shows you as an expert. People will feel like they know you and they will trust you more, and they will be more willing to buy from you. We’re all tired of cold sales and of people who’re trying to sell to us things we don’t need. So don’t be afraid to show up, speak your authentic voice, provide value, and connect another human being like yourself. A pervasive web copy SALES A pervasive copy doesn’t mean a pushy copy or a copy that tries