We live in a day and age where we can do just about anything we want without having to hire someone. Blogs and digital publishing are examples of this. We can use these things to find customers and to keep food on the table. Using social media we can now manage our own advertising and reach consumers we never could before. We are empowered by technology and we don’t need anyone to help us, like a marketing or PR rep, right? Well maybe we do, and maybe we don’t. We might not have to hire a PR rep, but we do need to at least learn some of their skills.

As an indie author I appreciate the marketing aspect around publishing, and a lot of indie authors feel the same. Bloggers and experts have been brow beating new authors about things like cover art, editors, good blurbs and let’s not forget the importance of blogging, for a long time now. So now many of us have cover artist and editors in our phones contacts, but the blogging and blurb copy? We are authors, writing is our job, we got this right? …Wrong, we don’t have this, well most of us don’t. What we have is the ability to write stories that people love and maybe even stories that inspire, but blurb copy? What I’ve been learning over the last few months is that blurbs, bio’s, blogs and all that jazz are a different type of writing than what we already do, and if we don’t learn it, we are going to face an uphill battle.

Copywriting at its core is writing compelling content. It could be an article, a blurb or a thousand other things. We’ve been reading it for years in places like magazines, newspaper articles and on the back cover of books, to name a few. Sometimes this copy can be a hard sale but it doesn’t have to be. It does however have to move the reader. Learning how to write good copy is the base of an effective content marketing campaign (like your author blog). Here are 5 areas that you need to know how to write good copy for:

1) Blogging - Your blog is one of the most powerful tools you have to find new readers and to stay in front of the readers you already have. Are you writing blog posts that people care about? An even more important question to ask is, “are people even reading my posts?”. When you learn principles of copywriting you learn how to write headlines that people are more apt to click on. Don’t believe me? Take a gander at your RSS feed. Scan down the list of blog posts there and see what jumps out at you. If you look at the posts you’ll likely find the ones that jump out at you the most, are some of the bloggers you read the most. Why is that? They know how to write a good headline and a post that is interesting, informative, inspiring or moving in someway. You’ll also likely find a bunch of bloggers that are the opposite of this, that you are subscribed to, but that you don’t truly care about.

2) Social Networks – Twitter, Facebook, Google and any other social network that are out there are a glut of information and status updates for readers. They also have different personalities. Twitter for example only allows you 140 characters, that’s all the space you have to make people want to read whatever you’re posting, be it a blog post or a new book. On Facebook and Google you have more space to use and users generally expect a bit more than 140 characters. If you aren’t writing copy for these sites, your posts aren’t being seen by as many people as they could be.

3) Blurbs – I’m in a workshop about this topic right now and it’s important! After your cover, your book’s blurb has to make that reader want to click the buy button. You can have the greatest cover in history, and still drive away a consumer with a poor blurb. A lot of authors downright suck at writing blurbs. We tend to bore readers and tell them too much, or we try to be clever with our blurb and end up confusing readers. Either way, we lose a sale, and any potential sales we could have gotten from that reader or the people that they might have recommended our book too.

4) Bios – Your author bio is crucial, it connects readers with you. Does everyone read your bio? No, of course not, but a lot of people do. If you seem like a stick in the mud then readers probably won’t care about you. They want to feel confident that you are able to write a story they will enjoy, and a story that is worth their hard earned money.

5) Ads – “I don’t want to sound like a sales rep,” authors say right before they blast their network with a request for people buy their new book. Come on, we’ve all done it and some of us do it too much. Learning how to write good ad copy will help your ads to be more effective and less annoying to people (this doesn’t mean you should constantly be plugging your book).

“But I don’t have time to learn another skill!”, you say and I feel you. As Indie authors we have a lot of things we have to learn, and sometimes it can be overwhelming, but this doesn’t have to be. We don’t have to be copywriting masters from the word go. I know I’m not. I’m just starting to learn about this, and how to apply it in my blog and social network habits. Here is a link to a site I found (in a blog post by a writer who knows how to write good copy). The site is called copyblogger.com and they have a large amount of easy to digest resources. Another thing you can do to help learn how to write good copy is to study those who are already doing it. That blog that you always find yourself reading because they just have such good stuff, well look at what they are doing and apply it to your own life.

There is no doubt in my mind that if you are a writer or have any other web based business, you need to learn how to be a good copywriter, or you may find it hard to put food on the table. So now here is my call to action…What are all of your thoughts about copywriting? Are there any resources that you would recommend or is copywriting just a waste of time?