Why copywriting clients aren’t calling (and what you can do about it)

You have a nice looking website outlining your copywriting services. You’ve got your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles setup and you’re curating great content from influencers. Your copywriting blog is helping to boost your search engine ranking ….

So where are all those copywriting clients?

If you’ve asked yourself this question, you could be committing the single biggest mistake businesses make online.I was shopping recently. The store I went to didn’t have what I was looking for so I drove on. Before I committed to driving across town I thought I’d call the next store and see if they actually had what I wanted. I whipped out my phone and went online.

The website wasn’t optimised for mobiles so it was hard to navigate, but that’s another blog post. I looked for their phone number on the homepage but I couldn’t see it. I looked for a contact us page and eventually found it in the page footer, in grey font on a white background.

That was just too bloody hard so I moved onto the next potential business to give me money to.

Getting access to you should not be hard

If you are making potential clients jump through hoops before they contact you, they won’t. You might think that by making your clients click on more website pages, you have more chances to market yourself.

But all you’re doing is pushing them to your (easy to contact) competitors.

But never fear.

The fix is easy

1. Put your primary contact details on your website homepage and make them noticeable.

I recommend you choose your email address and your phone number. Even if you don’t like spending time on the phone, your copywriting clients might prefer it. And it’s all about them I’m afraid.

2. Make your other contact details easy to find.

That’s usually a menu item called Contact (or similar). The key is to make it easy to find and click – whether they’re on a desktop or a mobile.

3. Make your social media icons nice and visible, and clickable.

This is usually about sharing your content but you can also make social media icons on some pages a way for people to get in touch with you. What ever you choose, displayed your social connectivity helps you seem more approachable. And that’s a good thing.

4. If you have a contact form, include other ways to contact you as well.

Short contact forms are good but many people assume their responses go into a black hole, never to be seen again. You can overcome any reluctance to fill one out by listing other ways to get in touch. Like your phone number and email address for starters.

Pro tip: make your email address a graphic or spell it out like, belinda [at] copywritematters [dot] com [dot] au. This will slow down the spambots always crawling the net to find email addresses to spam.

Oh, and if you have a physical (postal) address, put that down too as it can help to make you seem more ‘real’.

5. Make sure every social media platform has your contact details so people know how to contact you regardless of where they are.

As soon as potential clients (or anyone for that matter) has to work too hard to find you, they won’t. So where ever you have a presence, make sure your contact details are there too.

See? Easy peasy.

By following these five steps you will make it easy for potential copywriting clients to transition from being interested browsers to booked clients.

Now this isn’t the end of the story by any means. To keep your sales pipeline full you need to court your target market by giving them a reason to stick around and get to know you. Being generous with your expertise, on your blog and social media, is great for that.

But if they can’t figure out how to get in contact with you, they won’t. It’s really that simple.

How does your online presence stack up? Does your website make it easy? What about your social media? Can your customers find your phone number where ever they are?

Let me know!

The Copy Detective