Lessons in Copywriting and SEO
Hello, readers and fellow Praxians! My work at OpenEd is an interesting mix of technical and creative skills. One benefit of being part of a small team is that I get to do all sorts of things.
Copywriting
One thing I’ve done a lot of in the past week is write email templates for different types of outreach. Sounds boring, I know, but more goes into an email than you might expect.
Some of these templates were for contacting influencers and podcasts for the upcoming book tour. Matt Bowman, the founder of OpenEd, is publishing a book, and many of my current responsibilities revolve around marketing the tour.
Crafting emails:
Short and sweet: No extra fluff. People won’t read a long email, so get to the point.
Clear CTA: Include an obvious call to action that’s easy to follow with minimal friction.
Test for the best: Create multiple versions and send each to a small group. Whichever gets the highest response rate, send that one to the rest.
After getting feedback on my initial drafts, I learned some helpful lessons about the mindset behind writing effective emails:
Create an experience: For example, when booking a podcast, you’re creating an experience that begins the moment they open the email. If the email is boring, why would they want to book a conversation?
Keep it casual: Depending on the context, a casual tone helps you sound more human and not like a bot.
Hold the key: When pitching something, you want to sound like the gatekeeper to something awesome, not like you're begging them to believe you.
Meta Tag - Titles and Descriptions
The titles and descriptions you see in search results are called meta titles and meta descriptions.
Search engines can auto-generate these, or you can write and enter them manually. Each page of your website will have its own meta title and description.
Search engine: The search engine pulls content from the page to create a summary. But if your pages are too similar, it can confuse the engine and make navigation harder.
Writing them yourself: The benefit of writing your own meta tags is that you can include target keywords you want to rank for. If you’d like to learn more about SEO, check out a previous post here.
