‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’ is a saying which can be comforting on the one hand but can lead to blatant neglect on the other. Take this example. On Friday our printer simply stopped performing its one basic job and refused to print anything. We weren’t asking it to do anything fancy, we just wanted to print some invoices off but it was having none of it. After much searching I found the original printer box and dug out a collection of manuals in every language from Russian to Chinese, except there were no instructions in English. The original box had been left untouched since we bought the printer a few months back so a manual in English had never been included. Not popping an English manual in with a printer which is going to be sold in England is rather a massive oversight and something which created a lot of hassle for us.

Small niggles like this happen all the time. Another example occurred last week when I enquired about the closing time of a particular shop. The customer service person informed me over the phone that the shop was open until 8pm that day. I got down there just after six to see the staff cashing up after their 6pm finish. I bet in five minutes you can think of a handful of similar examples of companies just not getting the small stuff right.

It can be tricky to keep on top of everything when you run a business. Although website copywriting comes first at Pure Ink Creative we still need to keep up to date with the paperwork as well as keep in touch with existing and future clients and take care of a thousand other jobs that running a business creates. It’s tough but whether you run a business by yourself or have a team of hundreds or more working with you, you should ask yourself if you’re getting the small stuff right as failure to take care of what may appear to be the finer details can actually lose you customers in the future.

This weekend it was the Reading Festival. In the mid nineties I attended my first festival at Reading and fourteen years later I’ve spent the Bank Holiday weekend gardening, drinking tea and tidying the house and the thought of having to spend four nights in a wet tent in a field of stinky people would be quite terrifying.

So in fourteen years I’ve changed quite a bit and this got me thinking about how much companies’ target audience must change. Restaurants have worked around this by providing different menus to different audiences i.e. kids’ menus, regular menus and pensioners’ specials. Take McDonalds as an example, when you’re young you opt for the Happy Meals then it’s onto burgers and as you get older and a little more health conscious you move onto salads or give up fast food altogether. So at McDonalds, plus many other restaurants and retailers, there’s something for everyone.

As the saying goes, ‘you can’t please all of the people all of the time,’ and that’s true but what you can do is try to understand what your customers want. At Pure Ink Creative whilst we don’t have a ‘one size fits all’ approach we do offer a flexible service which can be tailored to any company as this is what we’ve found our potential customers want from our service. For start-up businesses we can create new website content and maybe a couple of blog posts to get the clients’ website and blog up and running. For established businesses we can create regular articles, rewrite copy and take full control over their blog so they don’t have to worry about it. Businesses (just like people) develop and their needs change so what’s right for a new business doesn’t work for a business which has been trading for years. Through website copywriting you can clearly convey what you offer and why this service and product is right for them.

Hitting everyone with the same information simply doesn’t work so think about who you want to connect with and offer them the appropriate service or product.

We’ve finally unpacked and are now installed in our new office in Hillsborough. We want to get to know the local area better and meet other businesses in the process so if you also work in Hillsborough give us a call on 0114 2211937! Coffee and cake on us!

Pure Ink Creative are relocating and from 1st August our new address will be…

7 Cannock Street
Hillsborough
Sheffield
S6 2AZ

Please update your records so you can keep in touch!

Running out of ideas for articles? Don’t know how to start your next blog post? Check out the top twenty article and blog post ideas below for some website copywriting inspiration. Just fill in the blanks!

1) How to Create Better [blank] for Less Money

2) 5 Ways to Save Time Doing [blank]

3) The 5 Best Ways to Handle [blank]

4) Top 3 Benefits of [blank]

5) Top 5 Reasons to [blank]

6) The Worst Ever [blank] and How to Avoid Them

7) 5 Tips for Finding the Best [blank] for You

8 ) How to Fix a [blank]

9) Top 3 Uses for a [blank]

10) Basic [blank] Skills You Need to Know

11) All You Need to Know About [blank]

12) Why [blank] is Better Than [blank]

13) How to Manage [blank] for Better Results

14) How to be Better at [blank] Than Your Friends

15) Why You Need [blank] in Your Life

16) How to Have a Worry Free [blank]

17) Top 5 Ways to Get Rid of [blank]

18) 5 [blank] to Help You [blank]

19) Easy Ways to Improve Your [blank]

20) The Best Ways to Get [blank] Fast

Mix these up and use them as you like to kick start your blogging and article writing.
If you have enough ideas for your website copywriting but no time to write them down then contact our website copywriters on 0114 2580393 or email us at talktous@pureinkcreative.com.

It’s not all hard work at Pure Ink Creative and last night we treated ourselves to a night out in Leeds for some well deserved bevvies and live music at Verve. Had to run for the last train home but it was worth it! 

We’re obviously lacking in photography skills as this was the best picture of the whole evening!

We are now two!

It was Pure Ink Creative’s second birthday this week which we celebrated in style with a few drinks out with our friends. There we are enjoying a cocktail – Sarah E on the left and Sarah T on the right.

Writing Great Headlines

Headlines are what your website visitors will read first so it’s vital that they make an impact. Headlines are also important for search engine optimisation purposes as including your main keyword in your headline can make your article, blog post or webpage easier to find by the search engines. Although it’s tempting to be clever with your headlines, leave the puns to the journalists at The Sun and instead be super clear in your headline about what the website copywriting on the page is about. Top things to remember are…

• Include a keyword
• Go for ‘top tips’ or ‘how to’ guides
• Don’t be obscure – include what the website copywriting on the page is about
• Write the headline last so you know you’ve captured the content in one line

If you need some inspiration check out the 100 Greatest Headlines Ever Written or for more information on any aspect of website copywriting give us a call!

It’s the start of a new week and there’s lots of website copywriting to complete at Pure Ink Creative. We’ve got some really great contracts in at the moment and we’re writing about everything from curtains and designer handbags to lavish properties in Italy and super cool pet products.

Each project requires a different approach and tone of voice which is where professional website copywriting really comes into its own. The tone of voice that the copy assumes has to be spot on in order for the message to appeal to the target audience and be effective. So what’s the key to achieving a successful tone of voice in your website copywriting? Below are some key questions that you need to ask yourself before putting your hands near your laptop…

-          What is my company brand?

-          What makes me different to my competitors?

-          Who am I trying to sell to?

-          What are the characteristics of a potential customer?

Asking yourself these questions will help your brand become clear which will result in a definite tone of voice for your website copywriting so you can ensure that you are doing everything you can within your website content to attract your target customers.

What Are Benefits?

Benefits are one of the most important elements of website copywriting as without them your website content will not say much of interest to your visitors. It’s easy to confuse features with benefits as they are pretty similar but the key is that features describe what something is or does and the benefits describe the positive effect that these features will have. One way of thinking about it is what the result of using a certain product or service would be.

For example, the main feature of website copywriting is that you will have content written for your website. The two main benefits are…

- It saves you time so you can spend time working on the parts of the business you enjoy or spend your evenings doing what you want instead of being chained to your computer.

- It can increase visitors and sales which means your business will be more profitable so that holiday you’ve been saving up for will be all the more affordable.

You can do this exercise for any product or service. Car companies are particularly good at selling the benefits of their vehicles. The main feature of a Jaguar for example is to get you from A to B but if this is what people wanted then they’d buy a much cheaper car. People buy a Jaguar because of the benefits which include the luxurious comfort of the interior, the sleek aerodynamic curves of the bodywork but most importantly how a person will look when driving this car and the jealous looks they’ll receive from their friends.

To find the benefits of your product or service, firstly create a list of the features, for example, how fast it is, what size it is, how much it can hold, how easy it is to use etc. When you have this list, then ask yourself ‘so what?’ about each feature then you can come up with the benefits. You offer a fruit box delivery service – so what? – Well, it means that people can have fresh fruit delivered to their home and avoid the stress of a trip to the supermarket and receive all the health benefits of eating their 5-a-day.

Once you know what the benefits of your product or service are then your website copywriting will get a whole lot easier as you’ll be viewing what you offer from the perspective of the people buying it.

Look out for Part 3 coming soon! If you need any help in the mean time just contact our website copywriters.