Can Copy And Content Commingle?

Last year, a bunch of copy­writ­ers who also blog — like yours truly — shot the breeze on the Nuts and Blog­bolts talk radio show.

It was an inter­est­ing and at times spir­ited discussion.

After some talk about con­tent and copy (or should I say, writ­ing con­tent ver­sus writ­ing copy), the show’s host, Mike San­sone, asked each pan­elist if we would indi­vid­u­ally respond on our blogs to this question:

“Writ­ing for the vis­i­tor is more impor­tant than writ­ing for the search engines. Can both be met with­out sac­ri­fic­ing quality?”

Ryan Healy posted his answer on the sub­ject. Good answer. I agree with him, because he makes some great points. But I also dis­agree as I think there are ways around it.

So I guess my answer is both “yes” and “no.” Here’s why.

First off, I’m not a search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) expert by any stretch. How­ever, I do know enough about SEO to know that it’s pri­mar­ily based on three major factors:

Code, links, and content.

Let’s take a look at each one…

1. Code has to do with ensur­ing the con­tent is pre­sented in a way that makes it more appeal­ing to the search engines. Said in a dif­fer­ent way, the code is opti­mized so that the search engines can find your con­tent and read it more easily.

Why is this impor­tant? Because, in real­ity, your code not only helps search engines to find, crawl, and prop­erly index your con­tent, but also helps them present that con­tent, when searched for, in a way that appeals to their users. Human beings.

2. Links are links within your con­tent, as well as links to your con­tent — the lat­ter being more impor­tant, of course. When peo­ple link to you, they are indi­rectly telling the search engines your con­tent is of value, and there­fore of inter­est to their users.

Unde­ni­ably, this requires some writ­ing skills, such as know­ing how to write con­tent that cre­ates inter­est (i.e., what you write), and write it in a way that makes it inter­est­ing, too (i.e., how you write it). Which, by the way, is still copy­writ­ing. Isn’t it?

3. Con­tent, which is third in this list but by no means the least, is the one on which the ques­tion behind this post really hinges. I think a bet­ter ques­tion to ask is, “Can you write con­tent and copy at the same time?” Yes. But there are three ways of doing this.

Ways of doing it that doesn’t force one to sac­ri­fice the qual­ity of the other.

First, under­stand the dif­fer­ence between con­tent and copy. To me, con­tent informs. Copy invites. Con­tent edu­cates read­ers. Copy elic­its a response from them.

But can you be both infor­ma­tive and response-​​driven, too? Absolutely.

I do believe that you can write con­tent that’s appeal­ing to both the search engines and its users. At the same time. (And really, it’s all about the audi­ence, isn’t it?) To ensure it’s cap­tur­ing read­ers’ atten­tion and inform­ing them, while also gen­er­at­ing a response.

Per­son­ally, I don’t spend time on key­word opti­miza­tion, key­word den­sity, or things of that nature. I sim­ply try to cre­ate good con­tent. I look at it this way: I try to give what my users want, and by the same token I will nat­u­rally give what the search engines want.

So the objec­tive is to focus on your audi­ence. Find out what they want and bring value to them. Because that is why your web­site exists in the first place, whether it’s to edu­cate or to sell. (It’s also what makes copy truly com­pelling in the first place, too.)

In terms of what kind of con­tent to write, you can post a lot of it so that you nat­u­rally mul­ti­ply your key­word den­sity. You can focus on a par­tic­u­lar niche so that you can zoom in your tar­get audi­ence. And you can also write con­tent that’s buzz­wor­thy, too.

Do either one of these, and you will nat­u­rally attract a lot of organic traf­fic as a nat­ural byprod­uct, with­out much extra effort. That’s been my sole, core strat­egy for as long time.

But what about blend­ing copy? Well, if you want to max­i­mize your con­tent and make it response-​​driven at the same time, I believe there are three ways to accom­plish this:

1. Guid­ing
2. Fun­nel­ing
3. “Newsi­fy­ing”

1. Guiding

The con­tent guides peo­ple into tak­ing action, whether it’s directly or indirectly.

You can cer­tainly turn your con­tent into copy to a degree. You use the con­tent itself to elicit a cer­tain response from your audi­ence, or add copy to exist­ing con­tent to accom­plish this. (The con­verse is what I call “newsi­fy­ing,” and I will come back to it later on.)

Press releases, prod­uct reviews, and even arti­cles can be both edu­ca­tional and pro­mo­tional. But guid­ing can also be as sim­ple as adding links or forms within the con­tent, and even adding words or phrases that lead peo­ple to take a cer­tain action.

There­fore, the copy may or may not be part of the con­tent proper. If it is, you can mas­sage your con­tent so it leads the reader. Even if it’s just a few key phrases or pieces of tran­si­tion copy, like “keep read­ing for…” “later on I will…” “next you should…” and so on.

But it can be sep­a­rate and dis­tinct from the con­tent, and can either blend within the con­tent, or be placed in side­notes, in pul­lquotes, in John­son boxes, or in sidebars.

How­ever, in the case of a strictly long-​​copy saleslet­ter, I agree your aim is to elicit a response and not sati­ate the engines. If you were to opti­mize your copy for the search engines, its qual­ity may suf­fer at some point. So the trick is to find the proper balance.

As the say­ing goes, you can’t be all things to all people.

But this is where the next two options come into play.

2. Funneling

This is the process of using con­tent to gen­er­ate organic traf­fic, such as on land­ing pages, and siphon­ing that traf­fic to a copy-​​focused, response-​​driven page, site, or saleslet­ter. It can be part of the same web­site, or it can be on another site altogether.

These content-​​only pages are bea­cons or baits that attract peo­ple who are inter­ested in the con­tent first and fore­most, and are then led to take action else­where. Unlike “guid­ing,” this step involves two sep­a­rate processes that are dis­tinct from one and other.

Now, these may be con­cur­rent or not. For exam­ple, you can fun­nel traf­fic to another page, or through a multi-​​step process where one only occurs after the first has been com­pleted. Such as with optin pages, or what is often referred to as “reversed optin.”

For exam­ple, we see this in part with prod­uct launches that deliver con­tent before­hand to increase expo­sure, cre­ate inter­est, and build lists of eager sub­scribers who are later noti­fied when the prod­uct is launched and the sales copy published.

But whether it’s con­cur­rent or con­sec­u­tive, when you really think about it you are still direct­ing your vis­i­tors, are you not? So the con­tent acts like copy, to some degree. It’s still call­ing for some kind of action, even if it’s to get peo­ple to read more.

3. Newsifying

This third step is where the two blend.

The term “newsi­fy­ing” means turn­ing copy into some kind of news­wor­thy piece — such as copy that tells a good story, reads more like an arti­cle or edi­to­r­ial, or edu­cates the reader whether they take action or not. It’s a saleslet­ter in dis­guise, in other words.

Rather than adding copy to your con­tent (as in “guid­ing,” above), in here you are doing the oppo­site. That is, you are adding con­tent to your copy, or con­vert­ing your copy into an infor­ma­tive, valu­able, news­wor­thy piece in and of itself.

Even though the pur­pose is to elicit a response (a sale, in most cases), by mak­ing your copy read like an edu­ca­tional piece you also make it more palat­able to both users and search engines — and per­haps even more so, since you’re not overtly promotional.

In other words, it appears as a softer sell, where the con­tent doesn’t appear as an out­right pro­mo­tional or sales piece. But it’s not nec­es­sar­ily a “soft-​​sell” in all cases, too. You can newsify your copy and still be strong, hard-​​hitting, and benefit-​​rich.

For exam­ple, in my white paper, The Death of The Saleslet­ter, I talk about the increas­ing pop­u­lar­ity in copy that’s news­wor­thy, intrigu­ing, and infor­ma­tive, rather than copy that’s overtly hypey, aggres­sive, and mim­ic­k­ing every other saleslet­ter out there.

Tests show that saleslet­ters pro­vid­ing valu­able con­tent in them­selves are get­ting bet­ter results than saleslet­ters that appear salesy, over the top, and patron­iz­ing. These look less like saleslet­ters and more like arti­cles or edi­to­ri­als (think “advertorials”).

Here’s a forin­stance: you sell an infor­ma­tion prod­uct on how to reduce stress. Rather than a sale­s­piece that extols the virtues of stress reduc­tion and the ben­e­fits of own­ing your prod­uct, you can write a free report on 16 tips for reliev­ing migraines with­out drugs.

While the report talks about how to relieve headaches nat­u­rally, it con­nects with the effects of stress and how reduc­ing it can help. Later, you intro­duce your product.

Peo­ple will not only under­stand the real prob­lem behind most headaches and become bet­ter edu­cated on all the other effects caused by stress, but also under­stand the ben­e­fits of reduc­ing it, and there­fore the ben­e­fits of own­ing your prod­uct and ulti­mately buy it.

(Of course, I’ve just pulled this exam­ple out of thin air for illus­tra­tion pur­poses only. I am not a doc­tor, nor do I play one on TV. But hope­fully, you get the picture.)

Any­way, this is just one exam­ple. There are so many dif­fer­ent ways of doing this. In the above sce­nario, you write con­tent that log­i­cally fits with your prod­uct or market.

But you can also pull one topic from the many cov­ered in your prod­uct, offer con­tent that teases your audi­ence to want to know more, or pro­vide con­tent that’s sep­a­rate from your prod­uct but proves it, sup­ports it, or empha­sizes any of its key benefits.

(These arti­cles are mini-​​salesletters in dis­guise, in other words.)

Nev­er­the­less, the answer to the ini­tial ques­tion is to use one of the above three steps. But in the end, keep in mind that we don’t — and shouldn’t — write for the search engines. Not really. Even when we do or think we do, we are still writ­ing for the vis­i­tor.

Search engines exist pri­mar­ily to help peo­ple find infor­ma­tion. So the sac­ri­fice, in many cases, is caused not by writ­ing more for one or the other, but when we stray from either one by fail­ing to focus on our audi­ence and instead focus too much on ourselves.

Because I believe the more you focus on what peo­ple want and give it to them, the eas­ier it will be to get both the search engines and your vis­i­tors to do what you want.

After all, it’s all copy.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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