As a business owner, carefully-crafting your web content can take some serious effort. In between running your business and putting out fires, you get to come up with the reasons why do what you do and how you do it. You get to explain how your products are services are useful to potential customers and why they should pay for them.

Easy enough, right? Not really.

But it’s not impossible.

Though professional web content and copywriting should be left to the professionals, with a little thought and some polished human-speak, you too can pull it off!

Let’s look at 7 of top tips on how to improve your commercial content build your business by speaking the language of your customers:

For Websites:

• Be Human: Listen to your customers. Relate to their needs and concerns and show them you have the tools to solve them. Make your language easy to digest and easy to follow, and don’t hide what you’re offering or what you’re going to cost.
• Be Specific: Show your customers the VALUE of working with you. Eliminate the fluff and show them the precise ways you can help them through your written content. Don’t say you’re “exceptional” list the reasons why.
• Use Small Paragraphs & Writing Devices: Blocks of text give people headaches. Use devices like bullets, one-to-two sentence paragraphs, and lists to break up the “work” and help them see the benefits as they skim.

For Emails:

• Hit a Homerun with Your Headline: Your headline leads users to do one of two things: read the rest of your email or send it to the trash. Too long, the email loses its power of persuasion. Too vague, no one knows what they’re in for, and they don’t trust it. Into the bin. Use 10 words or less in your email and make a promise you can deliver on as soon as they click “open.”

For Blogs:

• Be Casual: According to the AP Style Guide and Chicago MLA formats, there are certain things you can and can’t do when writing. Blogs walk a different path. Experiment. Be informative but casual. Try out ways of writing that feel natural to you and your audience. They’ll appreciate it.
• Make It Bite Sized: The attention span of the average Internet reader is approximately 6 seconds. Like websites, you have to use various writing devices and very short snippets of text to deliver your point and entice your user. The difference is blogs can use that casual language we all love.

For Social Media

• Speak the Same Language: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook – each one of these massive social platforms uses their own language when conveying their content. Be sure you speak that language clearly and concisely. Use emojis, abbreviations, memes, and even acronyms to stay on message and tone.

Whatever industry you’re in, knowing how to communicate, and well, can only help you to delight your customers, alleviate their concerns, and build a stable relationship. And that can – and often does – translate in repeat profitable business for YEARS to come.