by 
Happy Monday you awesome person you,
I’ll keep this short and sweet as you’ve probably got a million and one things to do this week and are probably buzzing with ideas.
Here’s a really simple copywriting tip to keep your readers coming back to you and can be used easily in any blog post, article or guest post. It’s called:
Leaving a trail
Writing great content for your website, guest post articles, or newsletters is only part of what it takes to build an audience for your business.
You’ve got to leave a trail to the juicy stuff
Otherwise your customers might stumble on a fantastic article you wrote, but not know that there’s a ton of fantastic just waiting for them a little further down the path.
Just including a link to your home page is not a strong enough trail
Your articles are free tasters of what you offer as a paid service. Some people will eat up your free samples and never buy from you or hire you, and that’s cool.
But some will eat up the free samples, and want to know where to get more, and they might eventually buy from you or (even worship you and build you a small, but fancyshrine made from gingerbread)
The more encouragement your reader gets from you to find bigger and better samples, the more likely they are to be receptive to you when you have a promotion or a sale
So how do you leave good trails for your customers?
Guest post articles
- Stick around and interact with people in the comments. Don’t just pitch and run. If the audience is your target audience, keep sticking around and connecting with people
- Send your new audience to a specific welcome page to make them feel special and include details of all the cool things they can find on your site
- Use the bio section to put in a link to a related post. Let your new audience know that: “if you liked this, you might like…”
- Give them an exclusive discount for one of your products or services
Blog posts
- Suggest they sign up to your RSS feed and your Newsletter in every post, AND let them know why. Is there a bigger piece of free awaiting them if they sign up? What are they going to like about it?
- Get the related posts plugin if you’re on WordPress, or suggest other similar posts for them to read
- Create a series – let them know to expect to come back on a regular basis for more cool stuff.
Web copy
Make it obvious for them to find the juicy stuff like:
- Discounts
- Popular posts
- How you can help them
Next time you’re writing content for or about your business, ask yourself what the trail looks like, and does it lead the reader down a path that keeps showing them how amazing you are and how much you really deserve that shrine?
Do you have any other methods you use to leave a trail? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!
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Hi Amanda, thanks for stopping by!
Forums are a great place to get feedback for ideas and also put your site and service in front of new audiences that you can help.
Good luck with the newsletter, I’m sure you know a lot more than you give yourself credit! 🙂
Hi Amy,
This is a great post. Congratulations. I’m currently working up the courage to create a newsletter for my growing number of readers… but I need some inspiration and more courage that I can deliver decent content in the newsletter.
Another place you can leave trails is in niche-specific Nings and similar forums. I’ve spread the word about my site in these places successfully.
Thanks for your clear and crisp articles.
Hey Larry, great to see you here.
I didn’t know you were expected to jump into the comments of your own guest post so left it quite a while. I thought I was being rude but realise that readers appreciate you being around to thank them and further the debate.
The pop-up boxes are tricky because I’ve heard they get great opt ins but there is the annoyance factor.
Thanks for your comment. 🙂
Hi Amy:
Superb post — I wish I had written it 😉
I especially like the point about sticking around and interacting after writing a guest post.
To encourage visitors to sign up to receive my content via e-mail, I use a screen that appears after 1 minute. I’m not totally crazy about the method, because the potential for annoyance is high, but it does a great job of letting readers know that you want them.
Larry