DEV Community: UntitledOne

5 Tips To Instantly Improve Your Copywriting Skills

UntitledOne — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 16:05:36 +0000

What is copywriting? Many people confuse copywriting with content writing. The simplest way to tell the difference is this: content writing sells ideas, copywriting sells products. Although these tips can help with both, in this article we focus on copywriting.

Copywriting is the act of writing persuasive text (copy) for the purpose of marketing, advertising, or promoting. The goal of copywriting is to motivate the reader to take action. That action could be to buy something, make a donation, sign up for an email list, call now, or simply click a link. Examples of copywriting can be found on websites, email promotions, advertisements, and commercials.

If you want to instantly improve your copywriting skills, follow these 5 simple tips.

1) Focus On Your Audience

This tip is first because it is the most important and should be the foundation for all of your future copywriting. After all, you are writing for your audience; it only makes sense that you focus on them. Write to one and talk as if the person is standing in front of you. You can achieve this by using first and second-person pronouns such as “me, we, you, and your.” This will make your copy feel more personable and friendly to the reader.

Don’t focus your wording on what you provide. Focus on how your customer is going to benefit. Consumers don’t care what you offer as much as the why and how. Why should they go with you over the competition? How is it going to improve their life?

In order to focus on your audience, you have to figure out who they are. This will entail good research and listening skills. If you are unable to reach out to your target audience directly, you can go online and check out what they’re saying across various social media platforms. Reddit threads are a great place to start. There are subreddits for almost every demographic and you can learn a lot through simply observing and taking notes. Figure out what platforms your audience is on and see what they’re saying.

2) Grab Their Attention

There is an unimaginable amount of marketing copy out there and you want yours to stand out. Grabbing the attention of your audience is essential for getting people to even consider whatever it is you’re trying to promote. A great way to do this is by using eye-catching titles or targeting specific words and phrases for your viewers.

Grabbing your audience’s attention is the first step in the AIDA method. If you haven’t heard of this method before, you’ve at least seen it used probably thousands of times and that’s because it tends to work. AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. In order to get your readers to eventually take action, you must first earn it by grabbing their attention.

3) Keep It Simple

When copywriting, you want to keep sentences and paragraphs short as often as possible. When people see a lengthy ad or email promotion, they tend to skim the copy rather than read every single word. Make it easy for your readers by keeping things simple from the start. When you go to proofread and edit your copy, focus on what you can take away rather than add.

Another way to keep it simple is to be clear and specific about what action you want your audience to take. Don’t make them think more than they have to. It’s been proven that when people are given too many options, they often won’t make a decision at all. Give your customers one clear call to action and they’ll be more likely to do it.

4) Create Value

How do you create value? The first step brings us back to tip number 1: Focus On Your Audience. If you don’t know what your potential customers value, how will you persuade them to take action? Find out what is important to your audience and give it to them. Value is often the driver of action.

“What the scarcity principle says is that people are more attracted to those options or opportunities that are rare, unique or dwindling in availability.” - Dr. Cialdini.

Once you know what your audience wants, you can generate even more value by creating scarcity. If your offer or promotion is only available for a limited time, or a limited number of people, it’s automatically perceived as being more valuable. This in turn will make your audience more likely to take action and feel good about doing so.

5) Build Trust

One of the best ways to write better copy is to be honest and consistent. Being consistent means keeping your word every time. Do what you say and say what you do. This builds trust. When people trust you, they’re more likely to do business with you.

A surefire way to lose trust is to use clickbait tactics. Yes, eye-catching titles are important but they’re useless if they’re lies. No one likes to click on an interesting link only to find nothing about it in the copy itself. People are tired of being sold false promises. If you can’t follow through with something, it shouldn’t be in the copy.

Believe it or not, your audience is smart. They can tell if you’re being genuine or not. Even if you are able to pull a fast one on a few people, it isn’t ethical. Everyone deserves respect, especially if you’re expecting them to give you some of their time, money, or attention. Build trust and you build value.

“Trust is the scarcest resource we’ve got left.” - Seth Godin.

Conclusion

These 5 tips are a great way to instantly improve your copywriting skills. Focus on your audience, grab their attention, keep it simple, create value, and build trust. Keep these customer-centered tips in mind and your copywriting is bound to be successful.

Setting Up a LAMP Server on a Vagrant Machine

UntitledOne — Sun, 28 Apr 2019 22:10:55 +0000

When I first started developing with PHP, I used XAMPP on a Windows machine. A few years later, I landed my first job and moved on to using a Mac. Using XAMPP on a Mac doesn't feel right, so I found Vagrant. Since then all new developers at my company are given a MacBook with a configured Vagrant machine, I always have to reference my notes when setting their machines up and so I thought I could share these notes to the world as a guide to setting up LAMP on a Vagrant machine.

In this guide, we will be using Mac OSX, Vagrant, Virtual Box, Ubuntu, and Sequel Pro. On our Vagrant machines, we'll be installing, Apache, PHP 7, MySQL & PDO. We'll also be configuring, a Virtual Host and an SSH connection.

Before writing this I was not aware of https://box.scotch.io/, this may fit your needs and make setup faster.

Installation

As of writing this, VirtualBox's SSL does not seem to be configured correctly and is not accessible by the link below. Reddit Post about it, As a workaround, you can go to https://download.oracle.com/virtualbox/6.0.6/ click VirtualBox-6.0.6-130049-OSX.dmg it'll then bring you to a page that says "An unauthorized request." just remove the https:// from the URL and it should start to download.

First, we'll need to install VirtualBox

Next, we'll need to install Vagrant for MacOS.

In this guide, we'll be using ubuntu/xenial64 you can find other Vagrant Boxes from their catalog here.

Now lets create a directory that will contain our Vagrant configuration files and the machine. I like to keep mine on my Desktop.

cd ~/Desktop
mkdir our_vagrant_machine

Let's now set up a Vagrant Machine within this directory.

cd ~/Desktop/our_vagrant_machine
vagrant init ubuntu/xenial64

Once the machine is done setting up, we can turn it on and SSH inside of it.

vagrant up
vagrant ssh

vagrant up - This command creates and configures guest machines according to your Vagrantfile.
vagrant ssh - This will SSH into a running Vagrant machine and give you access to a shell.

Once you're inside we can begin installing the basics, Apache, MySQL, PHP and the PDO extension.

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install mysql-server # This will ask for a root password, I leave it blank. 
sudo apt-get install php
sudo apt-get install php7.0-mysql

LocalHost

Now that we've gotten Apache on there we can now configure a local server to connect with our Vagrant Machine.

The Vagrantfile describes the type of machine required for a project, and how to configure and provision these machines.

Inside your our_vagrant_machine/ directory, there is a file called Vagrantfile. Open this file in a text editor, inside there are two lines we'll be uncommenting out.

The first one is

config.vm.network "forwarded_port", guest: 80, host: 8080

and the second one is

config.vm.network "private_network", ip: "192.168.33.10"

Now let's restart our machine, go back to our terminal and exit the shell with exit then restart the machine, SSH back into it and restart Apache as well.

vagrant reload
vagrant ssh
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 start

In your browser, navigate to http://192.168.33.10/ and you should see Apache's welcome page.

This is fantastic we have our vagrant machine up and running!

Synced Folders

But we need something other than Apaches default welcome page to display. So how do we get our own files onto the Vagrant machine? Well in our Vagrantfile there is config line called config.vm.synced_folder. Excellent.

Let's create a new directory on the desktop called vagrant_site
In that folder lets just create a basic hello world with PHP

index.php

<?php echo "Yo world"; ?>

Lets go back to our Vagrantfile in our text editor and uncomment

config.vm.synced_folder "../data", "/vagrant_data"

We now need to change "../data" to our hello world folder and "/vagrant_data" to the path where our files will live within the Vagrant Machine.

config.vm.synced_folder "../vagrant_site/", "/var/www/html/"

Save the changes, vagrant reload the machine, refresh http://192.168.33.10/ and you should see "Yo world".

MySQL and Sequel Pro

Now let's configure our database connection with MySQL and setup Sequel Pro as a GUI to our database.

SSH into the machine if not already and start MySQL.

sudo mysql

Create a new user and grant all priveledges

    CREATE USER 'ubuntu';
    GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO ubuntu;`

Cool. Now quit MySQL, exit the shell and enter the command vagrant ssh-config. Here you can see your configuration info for SSH'ing which you can use to login into your database from Sequel Pro.

Open Sequel Pro, navigate to the SSH.
Name enter whatever you want
MySQL Host enter 127.0.0.1
username enter ubuntu
password blank
database blank
port blank

SSH Host enter 127.0.0.1
SSH User enter vagrant
SSH Key click the little key icon in the field, navigate to our_vagrant_machine/.vagrant/machines/default/virtualbox/ and select private_key.
SSH Port enter 2222

and now press Connect and we should now be logged into our database.

Virtual Host

In this part we'll be setting up a Virtual Host, so instead of navigating to http://192.168.33.10/ we can navigate to a URL of your choice. I personally like to use hello.world on my local machine.

To do this we must find our hosts file. I typically use my Finder, from Finder's menu press Go, Go to Folder, type in /etc/hosts, and press "Go".
Now that we have found it, let's open it in a text editor and add a new line at the bottom.

The vagrant machines private network IP + space + the URL of your choice.
192.168.33.10 hello.world

Save the Hosts file.

Now we need to make a conf file for our virtual host.

SSH into the Vagrant Machine once again, navigate to Apache's "sites-available" directory.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available/

Create the new conf file.

sudo vim hello.world.conf

and add the following to the new file.

<VirtualHost *:80>
  ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
  ServerName hello.world
  DocumentRoot /var/www/html/
</VirtualHost>

Save it. ( :wq! )

Run:

sudo a2ensite hello.world.conf
sudo service apache2 reload

and there you go!

A running Vagrant Machine with Ubuntu, Apache, PHP, MySQL, a Sequel Pro connection and a Virtual Host.

I hope this was helpful this is my first post ever, so any tips, constructive criticism and/or critiquing is much appreciated. Thanks.