One lesson I learned the hard way about writing copy is… you MUST know your market. And I’m still getting better at joining the “conversation in their mind.”
Lately I’ve been testing different techniques for researching what’s going on inside the ideal customer’s head. And I’ll share a couple with you even though I planned on giving myself an unfair advantage with these techniques.
If you’re selling anything online right now, you should try both of these to better know your prospect…
1. Yahoo! Answers. Google Answers recently was shut down because they got wiped out by Yahoo! Answers. What Yahoo! Answers offers is an inside look at what your market wants to know, what they’re thinking about, and how they’re thinking about it.
What product or service are you writing for? Type in some keywords for it at Yahoo! Answers and see what questions people are asking in your market. The “questions” may completely change the way you write your copy. http://answers.yahoo.com
2. The Way Back Machine. I haven’t been as successful with this one, but if you find a competitor who split-tests their copy, you’ll be able to reverse engineer their test results.
The Way Back Machine (WBM) is an online archive of what websites looked like at any given point in time. Every now and then, the WBM takes a snapshot of a page and stores it in it’s archive.
So if the WBM has taken several snapshots of a competitor’s page that is slowly being tweaked, pay attention to new elements that stick around. A failed Split Test will show a new element in one snapshot that disappears in a later snapshot. With a successful Split Test, the element won’t disappear.
This could be especially helpful if your competitor is testing headlines with different appeals. If you find out people respond to “home business” ads better when the headline addresses more money to pay bills… rather than more money to go on vacation… that’s great information!
You’ll have to play with this… And it can be work to find a competitor who is taking the time to Split Test, but it could be gold if you do. http://www.archive.org