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Congratulations! You’ve just built your first online course. Or finished your ebook. Or bought the domain name that will launch your career as a motivational speaker.
Now it’s time to go out and change the world. But how do you get customers and clients?
Many personal development and mental health professionals create awesome self-help products, believing customers will find them based on that awesomeness alone. The truth is success takes strategic marketing. And that’s where a personal development copywriter can help.
A personal development copywriter (or self-help copywriter) aligns your messaging with your value. Moreover, they give you a shortcut directly to customers. They strategize how to promote your offerings. And they apply the age-old techniques of persuasive writing to maximize the benefits of your promotional materials.
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Are you avoiding doing marketing? It’s only natural. After all, you want to help people improve their lives, not spend endless hours on your website or emails.
But, if you aren’t promoting your offer effectively, you’re missing out on a massive opportunity: research shows that millennials are driving personal development sales like no generation before.
Millennials — young people aged 25 to 40 years — care about being the best they can be, and their spending habits prove it. According to market research, millennials are willing to invest $300 per month into self-help and personal growth products. And their spending power will only increase over the coming decades.
Overall, the personal development industry will sprawl to $13.2 billion by 2022, according to Market Research. A self-help copywriter can put you in the middle of all that commerce. They can make you and your brand stand out by communicating your essence more clearly, putting you on the path to success.
The goal of copywriting is to motivate action. Action might mean buying a product. But it can also mean motivating people to improve their mental health, lose weight, or get organized. And it all starts with creating a relationship.
You’re probably an expert at connecting with your audience. You empathize with their problems. Without empathy and understanding, people won’t follow your lead or buy your product. They won’t achieve the results you wish for them, no matter how technically excellent your offering is.
The audience needs to feel like they know you, and most of all, they need to feel like you know them.
A personal development copywriter makes your empathy clear. They get to know your audience. They analyze your customer base before putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard). They start with the audience’s problems — not the product — and make an assessment of how to speak to those problems clearly in relatable language. Later, that research will make selling the product more effective.
During the course of your copywriting project, you may even want to create an avatar, or several avatars. An avatar is an imaginary embodiment of your perfect customer, and it helps you directly, specifically address your prospect rather than creating content for a vague audience.
Using an avatar — one with a name and even an associated picture — brings the copy alive and makes it more personal. Suddenly, you’re speaking to an actual person.
An avatar is a good way to consider your clients too. It’s an opportunity to envision who you’re helping and how they can receive your help on their terms.
For example, if you have a dating course to sell, your avatar might be male, in his mid-thirties and divorced. You’d even imagine the avatar’s stressors impacting his dating life, such as his physical health and financial concerns.
You may not need to develop a formal avatar. But using an avatar — which is a longstanding practice in copywriting — demonstrates how copy connects people. Just like personal development.
Working with a personal development copywriter may reveal great things about your product or service that you didn’t know. Or things you didn’t know about yourself.
A copywriter lends an outside eye to your situation. They’ll have special experience in finding every feature of your product and assessing the benefits of your offer to communicate elements you may have left out.
Sometimes, as service providers, we fail to see what’s great or unique about ourselves. We’re too close to our own subject matter. And many product developers and self-help professionals get caught up in the features of what they offer and lose track of what really matters to their clients: the benefits. All business owners are prone to this tendency.
A self-help copywriter can help you express the things you didn’t know were great about yourself!
They’ll list the features of your product (a 12-part dating course with 27 videos and 11 PDFs) and determine how the features yield benefits (more dates, a loving partner).
By pulling out more of your benefits, your copywriter will give you more sales material and make your message more clear and complete for your prospects.
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Now your product and message are clear. And your audience is clear too. Those elements create the foundation for brand building.
Your brand is the distinctive tone and personality that characterizes all of your marketing materials, products, and customer service interactions.
A coherent brand — one that applies uniformly across all your messaging — helps you stand out from all the other service providers and content producers online. It gives your customers a distinctive entity to interact with. It gives them you.
A brand should be consistent like a good friend. Nobody wants an erratic, inconsistent friend. Good friends are reliable and responsive.
Your copywriter can harmonize your branding across all your marketing materials. That way, your prospects feel your integrity and unique personality. This applies whether you’re an individual, such as an author or course creator; or an organization, such as a drug treatment center
A copywriter can make your website shine. But how? There are universal elements you’ll want to include, but those may vary depending on you and your needs.
Your website needs to communicate quickly and clearly. Research shows 55% of viewers spend less than 15 seconds visiting a website, so it’s critical to get your message out there quickly.
Your copywriter should start with a distinctive headline at the top of the page that simply states your offer or value proposition. The headline must also communicate how your product or service benefits clients.
Unless you’re a well-known brand, such as Nike, you need to be more descriptive with your headline and less flashy. “Just Do It” works for Nike because everyone knows the brand.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is most important on your homepage. Google will interpret what your site is — and determine how high to rank you in the results pages — based on the words that you use across your site and particularly your homepage. A good copywriter will improve your ranking.
Don’t forget a call to action! Every page of your site should tell viewers what they should do next. A call to action (CTA) is an explicit instruction such as “Buy Now.” But often, your CTAs will direct users deeper into your site, encouraging them to visit your other pages.
Here’s where you can get more personal. Some people overlook their About page and only state the facts: location, products, executive biographies, etc. But the About page is another chance to connect on your terms.
It may seem strange, but your About page shouldn’t be about you. It should be about your readers, or at least it should start out that way.
When people first visit your site, they don’t care about you — yet. It’s the hard truth. They want to know what they can get from interacting with your brand or buying your product. So start there. Start the About page with a description of who you help and how you help them — not your office location.
Maybe. Blogging can be an excellent way to offer your gifts to the world. Moreover, writing a blog will help prospects get to know you. It establishes you as a top-of-mind resource when they need your product or service.
A blog isn’t about sales (though a good blog can help you sell). A blog is about trust and nurturing relationships. Some personal development professionals object to giving away their content for free on a blog, but doing so yields returns; users keep coming back — often to buy your product.
A self-help copywriter can create posts for your blog. They can spice up your content to make it more engaging and bring an objective eye to how you’re interacting with prospects through your content.
It may seem strange to have a copywriter ghostwrite your content. However, big self-help providers employ outside writers for good reason: they’re experts at communicating clearly.
You can feed your writer the information they need to write the blog and they can back up your knowledge with more research. When you work with them to adjust the draft, you’ll always get a stronger final product than you would working alone.
As the saying goes, “content is king” online. A blog helps you rank for SEO and climb to the top of the pile.
Not everyone needs a landing page. But if you do, your personal development copywriter will be invaluable in building one.
A landing page is transactional. It offers something of value in exchange for the user’s contact information or payment. If you have a lead magnet (read more about lead magnets below), you can give it away in exchange for your prospect’s email. That lets you stay in touch or follow up.
When it comes time to actually sell your product — rather than just provide free value — the effectiveness of your landing page is critical. The copy needs to be especially persuasive when you’re seeking a sale.
It should grab your prospects and keep them reading, leading them in and developing their interest. Finally, it needs to prove why they can’t live without your product and why they need to buy it — right there in the moment!
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Lead magnets, or freebies, are the content pieces websites offer in exchange for your contact info. They’re the free checklists, ebooks and audio recordings that provide free value (and a way for the content producer to stay in touch and make a buck down the road).
But do you need a lead magnet? That depends on how you structure your marketing and how much you have to invest.
If you have a high-ticket item to sell — such as courses or high-priced in-person services — you’ll need to start a lasting relationship with your client. That means adding them to your email list and contacting them frequently with valuable content (as well as the occasional promotion).
Some self-help products lend themselves to written content (PDF guides, checklists). Other personal development concepts are better relayed with video or audio (on-demand webinars, audio downloads). More sophisticated self-help professionals may develop a short online course.
No matter the type of lead magnet you choose, make sure that it promises a well-defined outcome. But don’t give away the whole solution. Give your clients a taste of the results they want, or help them clearly see their problem. That leads them to the next step: purchasing your product.
Okay, so they downloaded your free lead magnet and you have their email. Now make sure to follow up right away and say ‘hi’!
An autoresponder sends a sequence of emails in the days after your first contact. It tells them about you. And it provides them with subsequent value and resources for personal development. These might be links back to your blog posts or helpful tips right there in the email itself.
Your copywriter can hone your emails to work well. After all, you want clients to take action and that’s what good copy does — it leads prospects to take action. These simple emails are actually powerful sales tools.
There are many tricks, tips and best practices for autoresponders. Make sure to ask your copywriter what’s best for you.
Lots of stuff. A copywriter can help with your social media, pay-per-click ads, articles, one sheets, brochures, and more. Just ask. Sometimes, the most effective marketing tools are right under your nose, waiting to be discovered.
Ready to get started with a personal development copywriter? Contact us today for a free consultation and quote.
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