The Unspent Energy at the Bottom of the Page
Good copy is an engine—make sure you give it a direction to point its energy.
No matter what kind of copywriting you do—landing pages, emails, direct response, social media, editorial, etc—eventually, you’re going to reach the end of it. The copy, I mean. Not all of copywriting. Someday you may actually reach the end of “copywriting,” and if you do, please write to let us all know how it looks from that side.
Gotcha! Now you’re writing again.
“You can check out any time you like…”
In this article, however, I’m talking about the ending of the copy itself, and what so many new copywriters forget about it: putting it there in the first place.
There are plenty of podcasts, blog posts, and videos about high-conversion copy, but they don’t address the most important part of conversions: the actual conversion. They go on and on about how to create copy that converts, but spend little time talking about the actual converting copy, leading to uncountable reams of sales pages that go on and on (often descending into hell itself) before ending like a college essay thrown together at 3am: because it has to.
This is a massive waste of the energy you have just spent an entire landing page building up! If someone actually makes it to the bottom of your page, then they are, by definition, a person who is invested in your topic and has energy to spend on it.
Give them a way to spend it!
Set up your argument
Many people default to the Descending Copy Ladder to Hell when they write for reasons I already discussed here, and a big one is a lack of awareness about messaging frameworks. It sounds complicated, but it’s just the skeleton of your piece. If your skeleton is strong, then you’ll be easily able to hang the meat-copy up on it later.
Have you ever seen a body without a skeleton? It’s just a pile of meat on the floor. No one likes a pile of meat on the floor.