Seven guidelines for good copywriting

What is good copywriting? This is the question everyone would like to know the answer to. There’s probably no one right answer either. What is good copywriting for one audience or medium won’t necessarily work well for another.

Are there any “must haves” that are pretty universal?

I think there are. Here’s a list of my “must have” qualities for qualifying as good copywriting. See what you think and feel free to post your list or additions you think are important.

  1. The style must appeal to its target audience
  2. It should be clear what product or service is on offer
  3. Benefits and unique selling propositions should be emphasized
  4. It should answer the implied question “Why this product and not another?”
  5. It should help the reader understand why they need the product or service
  6. It should be interesting and engaging so that the reader wants to know more
  7. And it should contain a call to action

What do you think?

Munaiba Khan is a professional copywriter with more than 20 years experience. As a qualified web developer she has an appreciation of the needs of web users and has focused her copywriting business, The Copywriter Online, on web content and seo copywriting. Munaiba is a guest Blogger and also blogs on Copy This!

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Build your Joomla site locally and faster… Extended.

Matt wrote an excellent post on time-saving tools for designing and developing your Joomla!. He’s right, you can save substantial time by installing a local server environment. As well, these tools provide a great platform for learning. Since he’s the Mac pro, I thought it would be of use to include some handy Windows tools… JSAS is a light-weight, reliable, and quick way to install all your necessary servers, databases, and Joomla! files. This downloads in seconds and is up and running in no time on your local machine. What many people don’t realize is that you can actually use JSAS to develop/design several other open source apps such as WordPress or Drupal. (more…)

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MarkItUp – A lightweight, powerful and flexible editor engine

Whilst doing my usual rounds on the web this morning, I stumbled across a real gem. This particular gem is a simple (yet incredibly powerful) Markup Editor. You may be thinking that this is another WYSIWYG Editor (What You See Is What You Get), but it is a bit different. With a true WYSIWYG Editor it is exactly that – what your seeing is how your content will look. You don’t actually see the markup (code) that constructs the html output. In the case of a Markup Editor, when you select one of the easily recognizable buttons for H1, H2, H3, Image, Link, etc – it actually outputs the code. You will recognize this behavior from many Forums, which often use BBCode.

A brief history.. (more…)

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