Why Writing A Website Feels So Hard..And what To do About It

The biggest mistake you can make when trying to write your website is thinking you can just grab a latte, open your laptop… and the inspiration will magically appear.

News flash: That doesn’t even work for the world’s best copywriters.

And hasn’t worked for you so far, right? If you carry on doing it this way, you’ll still be in overwhelm-paralysis in 3 weeks, maybe even 3 months. Wasting time by getting your biz out there. Wasting money by not bringing in new clients. Driving yourself crazy in the process.

Getting started on your website feels so hard because there are 3 things you need to nail before you can start to write. In this webinar you’re going to find out what they are and how to get them ticked off the list. So you’ll feel confident, clear and FINALLY feel ready to write.

It’s time to stop staring at the blank computer screen and clicking on youtube How-tos thinking inspiration will strike and start taking the action that’ll get your website live.

Over the years of writing websites for my clients, I realised there’s always three things I needed to do before I started writing in order to make the whole thing easier and the end result better.

Introducing my unique B.A.M method.

By the end of this course you’re going to be ready to write your website.

You’ll feel confident that you CAN do it. And most importantly you’ll know exactly how to get going, without spending the next few weeks in overwhelm-paralysis or procrastination-mode (I see you falling down the youtube how-to black hole instead of actually getting started)

Brand can be a scary word and I’ve seen lots of clients get hung up on brand pillars and promises and visions.

We’re not going to get hung up on all that right now.

Really at this point you just need to have an idea of your brand voice. And don’t worry about having it completely defined now - it will evolve as you become more confident in your writing.

Wondering, should my brand voice sound like me?

For 1:1 service providers I will always say just write like you speak.

It’ll make the whole process a lot easier if you can be authentic and genuine in your words - and it’s obvious to your reader if you're trying to be someone you're not.

Wondering why you sound great when talking to clients, but then come across pretty boring when you write? 

The problem is that you are trying to stick to the grammar rules you learnt in English class,

Writing to market your business is completely different to the academic writing you learnt at school or university.

I see this manifesting in 2 ways:

1. Business owners think because they were great at writing essays, they should automatically be able to write in marketing and then get really frustrated when it comes out all dry and boring

1. They have created an identity that they ‘can’t write’ because they were no good at writing at school - they just don’t have the word-gene.

Both can put a real stopper on writing your website and create overwhelm-paralysis.

So I’m giving you permission today to write how you speak. Start sentences with ‘and’ and ‘because’.

After you have written anything, read it outloud - are there any words that you just wouldn’t say? Take them out.

This is how you build a real connection and stand out. Just like when you meet someone in person, your personality will attract certain people, same with your words.

Want to learn how to write killer website copy? Check out my course: https://courses.23wisewords.com/courses/voice-of-customer-free

The other part of your brand that it’s important to think about before you start writing are your brand messages.

Once your website is written you can use it as a great pool of brand messages that you can use all over your business.

To get started - you may already have some of these, if you have written social media bios, emails you’ve sent to potential clients or business descriptions for linkedIn or Facebook, or directories for example.

If you have these I want you to collect them all up before you start writing your website.

I often find that the limited character limits in bios will mean you have some real gold in these and often when I am developing brand messages for clients, the first thing I do is go to all the places they are present online and collect these descriptions up.

Many of these make great About page and homepage intros.

I always find that if you can nail what stand up and stand out for before you write your website, it really helps as a reference point for the rest of your website.

You can write headlines around it, and your stand-out-statement is perfect on your About page - which I know is always the hardest to write.

Once you have this, lots of your words will fall into place. So how do you do it?

The ‘I believe’ exercise is my favourite! I get all my clients to do this, I do this for my own business every year and I teach my students in the Website Words Workshop to do it too when we go through the About page module.

• Write ‘I believe’ down the side of paper or google doc and fill in the rest of the statement with things you believe to be true about your industry, offer, clients, business - even the world

• Look for any messages that really stand out to you or reoccuring themes

• Combine a few great 'I believe' statements together, to create the ultimte stand-out-statement

Want to learn how to write killer website copy? Check out my course: https://courses.23wisewords.com/courses/voice-of-customer-free

Now I know earlier on I said there’s more to writing your website than just knowing what your ideal client eats for breakfast.

And we’ll get to that next. But first of all there are the top 5 things that you need to know that’ll really help you write various parts of your website.

There are more questions you need can answer that really help when writing your website , and I share the questionnaire I have honed and perfected over the years in module 1 of my Website Words Workshop.

5 things you need to know about your audience before you write your website

1. What keeps them up at night / occupies their shower thoughts? Great for Homepage intro ??

2. What's the outcome of the outcome you provide? Great for headlines ??

3. Why might they say 'no' this isn't for me? Great as an 'objection-busting' section on your Homepage ??

4. What are the smaller wins they'll get from working with you? Great for copy near your buttons ??

5. What books might they read to help solve their main problem/frustration? Great for reflecting their words all across your website ??

Want to learn how to write killer website copy? Check out my course: https://courses.23wisewords.com/courses/voice-of-customer-free

This really is the BEST thing you can learn to help you write your website or anything for your business.

I talk about this all the time. The best copywriters in the world do ‘voice of customer’ research before they write anything.

It makes the writing part quicker, easier and makes sure it converts this really is the secret sauce to great website copy - this is gold.

I love it so much that I dedicate the whole 1st module to this in my Website Words Workshop. I have actually developed a methodology for doing this research called my ‘Clever TRIC’ method.

Honestly we could (and I do) do a whole masterclass just on this research. But today I’m going to share my favourite quick-win method.

I’m going to teach you a really quick little exercise you can do to find out what’s going on in your ideal client’s head and use this to start drafting your copy.

This is why it’s good to know which books your ideal client might read to help them solve the problem you solve for them. If you don’t know that’s fine, there’s always google.

Amazon reviews for 'voice of customer research;:

1. Identify how-to/ self-help books in your niche

2. Search the books on Amazon and click on 5* reviews

3. Copy and paste interesting words and phrases into a google doc

Want to learn how to write killer website copy? Check out my course: https://courses.23wisewords.com/courses/voice-of-customer-free

We’ve learnt a lot so far and I’m aware that I want you to leave with a lot of value, but not a headache!

So this section is a little bit easier to digest, because it’ll be very similar for all of you.

The 4 pages you need on your website:

Homepage

About

How I work

Contact

From working over the years with coaches and service providers I have found these are the main 4 pages you’ll need.

And these are the four pages that I teach you how to write, with step-by-step templates for each page in my Website Words Workshop.

Of course you can add more, such as a blog and or delving further into your services, or sales pages for courses or offers.

But these are the ‘let’s get started’ basics

Please don’t ignore the contact page - put a testimonial there. Give it a good headline - this is the place where someone is about to contact you - give it some love!

Now you you know which pages you're going to write, it's it to pull everything you learnt here together.

As a first step open your google docs (I recommend as editing and version control is so easy) and create a new doc for each of these pages.

now start to add in: 

? The brand messages from your ‘I believe’ exercise

? Answers to the 5 questions about your audience

? The words and phrases you discovered while doing your Amazon review research

For now this is meant to be messy! Just roughly copy and paste. If you’re not sure if a message should go on one page or another, just put it one both. It doesn’t matter.

The main thing here is you are starting the first draft process - so when you come to write you are not starting with any blank pages.

Knowing the journey most people will take really helps, because you can support them through your website on this journey - great for SEO.

This is how a usual visitor will travel. You can make sure you have a button on your homepage that links to your About page. And a button from your About page t you ‘How I work’ page.

Gives people a really good user experience on your site.

The other thing you need to decide before you write, is ultimately what do you want people to do from your website and how do they get there?

What’s your main CTA?

For most of you it’ll probably be ‘book a discovery call’. Make sure you know how they’ll go about booking that call. Will the button open an email to you or link directly to a booking system like Calendly?

Make this process as smooth and easy as possible.

When you know what the goal is of each page and where the reader might want/need to go next, BEFORE you start writing, it makes leading the reader in that direction much easier.

Want to learn how to write killer website copy? Check out my course: https://courses.23wisewords.com/courses/voice-of-customer-free

Hopefully you can see now how hard it’d be to just start writing without doing this stuff first. And why you might have been struggling before.

If you take one thing away, I want you to know that you CAN write your website. It doesn't have to feel overwhelming...

......it just helps to have support and guidance from someone who has done it a zillion times before (like me!)

If you enjoyed this course, please leave me a review - it'll help other people find it and let's me know that you want more like this!

Want to learn how to write killer website copy? Check out my course - get started for free! https://courses.23wisewords.com/courses/voice-of-customer-free