Is your web copy all fluff and no hooks? Fluff is lazy, unappealing and pointless copy that wastes valuable web space. Without effective sales copy hooking your visitors they won’t stick around to become customers.

Before you can write effective sales copy you have to eliminate fluff. The first step is recognising where fluff comes from and stopping it taking root. Let it run rampant and that’s a lot of shaving later on.

The agoraphobic fluff explosion

Most fluff stems from a kind of agoraphobia — the fear of open spaces people get when presented with a blank page and asked to write. That’s when fluff starts expanding to fill the available space until it has suffocated all life from the website and clogged every page.

Avoiding this agoraphobic fluff explosion means planning and structuring your copy before you start writing.

Pushing the web design envelope

When people think about a new website or revamping an old one a strange thing happens… they concentrate on graphics — images, logos and colours. Strange considering Google (the SEO kings), the w3c (the web design ‘regulators’), the most successful sites, marketers, salesmen… and visitors themselves all tell you it’s quality content that makes a successful website.

So lots of folks get a website designed and when it’s finished they put their content in! I don’t know how you can have an effective website without knowing what you’re going to say and how.

What I do know is it leads to fluff — just filling a design, not designing what to say. A website is a container for your content; and content should always dictate a container — chocolate teapots anyone? Chocolate is great, but not very effective at containing tea.

So beware of web designers pushing the envelope before you’ve written the message.

Figure out what your audience wants to hear and how best to communicate it. Develop a consistent tone of voice, create landing pages, sales funnels and calls-to-action, section your copy into pages optimised for selling, user interaction and SEO, work-out how sections best interrelate (links/site architecture), what needs emphasis… Then design the graphics to support it.

Keeping up appearances — the corporate fluff-factory

It’s time to kick the bouquet. In the TV show Keeping up Appearances, Mrs. Bucket called herself Mrs. Bouquet to sound posh. Funnily enough it didn’t work. And it won’t work with your web copy either.

Trying too hard to sound ‘professional’ leads to bland, indecipherable and meaningless corporate waffle. It’s cold, sterile, impersonal, patronising and pompous — in short, it creates the worst possible environment in which to sell. It’s a fluff-factory.

Shut down the factory and stop churning out mass-produced copy. Better results come from lovingly hand-crafted copy. Find your own voice and write in a natural style that talks to your audience, not at them.

Stand-out from the crowd — don’t use clichés like that one for starters…

Having the confidence to be different, to be an individual pays huge dividends. You’ll never stand-out from millions of other web pages by conforming to the standard drivel.

No matter how unique you think your offer is, you will have plenty of competition. The only thing that differentiates you from your competitors is you. Your voice is what most defines you and your brand. And, in today’s mass-produced and globally competitive marketplace, brands are about all that really differentiate products/services.

Too much web content out there is conformist, boring and little more than copy-paste-tweak fluff.

Be different. Create your own identity, actually talk to visitors — say something interesting in an interesting way – they’ll appreciate that and will be far more likely to become customers.

The hook

Eliminating fluff is only the first step in writing effective sales copy. Sales copy needs hooks. But sales copy that’s all hooks is still one-sided Velcro. To get results you need to create hooks and replace fluff with something else. We’ll get to this I promise.