Last updated on January 8th, 2026 at 01:19 pm
Our co-founder Russel Brunson says that copywriting is what made him rich. But why would a software entrepreneur insist on that?
Because you can have the best product in the world and it won’t matter if you can’t write copy that sells.
Here’s the truth:
Until you learn copywriting, you will always be outcompeted by others, even those with offers inferior to yours.
That’s why today we are going to discuss how to write website copy that converts.
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- Conduct Extensive Customer Research
- Create a Dream Customer Avatar
- Have One Clear Conversion Goal for Every Page
- Realize That No One Cares About You
- Focus on the Benefits of Your Product
- Have a Headline That Immediately Makes it Clear What Your Offer is All About
- Preemptively Address Potential Objections
- Provide as Much Social Proof As You Can
- Have Several Calls to Action on Every Page
- Want to Learn Copywriting FAST?
Conduct Extensive Customer Research
The most effective copywriters in the world are the ones that understand their target audience the best.
That’s why customer research is the foundation of all good copywriting. There’s just no way around it.
We often see people who assume that they understand their dream customers already, skip customer research, and jump straight into writing copy. Then they wonder why it doesn’t convert. Don’t make this mistake!
So how can you get started with customer research?
- Figure out where your dream customers hang out online and observe the conversations happening there.
This might mean joining Facebook groups, subscribing to subreddits, registering to online forums, etc. - Figure out what content your dream customers are consuming and start consuming it yourself.
This might mean reading books, reading blogs, subscribing to newsletters, watching YouTube videos, listening to podcasts, etc.
You want to get to the point where you understand your dream customers better than they understand themselves:
- What are their values?
- What are their beliefs?
- What do they want?
- What are they struggling with?
- What are they afraid of?
- How do they see themselves?
- How do they want to be seen by others?
Ultimately, you want to understand what really drives your dream customers, which may not always be obvious.
And pay attention not just to what your dream customers say, but also how they say it – what words, phrases, and metaphors do they use to express themselves?
Keep in mind that great copy not only addresses what’s important to potential customers but also speaks to them in their own language!
Create a Dream Customer Avatar
While clearly defining your target audience is a necessity, it can be difficult to write compelling copy if that definition is all that you have to go on.
After all, we humans have evolved to live in small tribes, so we aren’t that great at conceptualizing large groups of people. It’s just too abstract!
This is where customer avatars, also known as customer personas, come in. They are fictional characters that serve as representations of either your entire target audience or of a particular customer segment within it.
Say, if you are selling a weight loss plan for new moms who want to lose weight post-pregnancy, you can create a customer avatar called Jane that represents such a person.
Then, instead of writing your website copy with your target audience in mind, you can write it with Jane in mind instead.
You see, it’s much easier to write compelling copy when you are addressing a specific individual, even if that individual is fictional.
We recommend experimenting with this idea even if it seems crazy – copywriters swear by customer avatars for a reason!
Have One Clear Conversion Goal for Every Page
Copywriting is all about getting the potential customer to take action – whatever that means at that stage of your sales funnel.
When it comes to websites, the three most common conversion goals are:
- Subscribing to an email newsletter
- Signing up for a free trial
- Buying the product
You need to be crystal clear what is the conversion goal of a web page before you start writing copy for it.
Each page on your website should only have ONE conversion goal. This will allow you to have a clear call to action (more on that later).
You can have several calls to action for the same conversion goal, though.
Say, you can have several opt-in forms on the same page because they all serve the same conversion goal of getting the potential customer’s email address.
Keep in mind that the more options you give to someone, the more likely they are to experience analysis paralysis and do nothing due to what is known as the Paradox of Choice.
As salespeople like to say, “a confused mind always says no”.
So don’t ask the potential customer to follow you on social media AND give you their email address AND buy your product all on the same page.
Remember:
ONE conversion goal per page!
Realize That No One Cares About You
There’s an old copywriter joke that goes like this:
“What’s everyone’s favorite radio station?
WII FM!”
WII FM is an acronym that stands for What’s In It For Me.
This joke is supposed to serve as a reminder that people don’t care about you, they care about what you can do for THEM.
That’s why you need to think carefully about what actually matters to your dream customers.
Ask yourself:
- What do they want?
- How will your product help them achieve it?
You need to focus on the latter all throughout your website copy – even on pages that are ostensibly about you, such as your About page.
If you are talking about yourself, your company, or your product, you should do so with the goal of getting the potential customer to take the desired action, whatever that may be. Don’t talk about stuff that doesn’t serve that purpose.
Say, ClickFunnels is a SaaS company that primarily caters to small business owners.
We have a lot of cool tech stuff going on behind the scenes and we would love to geek out about it on our website. But guess what?
Our dream customers don’t care what programming language we used to build our app, what we think about this framework or that framework, or the crazy engineering feats that our developers have pulled off to make our software blazingly fast.
What they are interested in is making money online. That’s why on our homepage we talk about how our software can help them grow their businesses.
Stop talking about yourself because no one cares about you and start talking about how you can help your dream customers get what they want.
What’s in it for THEM?
Focus on the Benefits of Your Product
One of the most important copywriting principles that you need to understand is the distinction between features and benefits:
- A feature is a quality or a function of a product (e.g. “These shoes are waterproof”).
- A benefit is the value the potential customer will get from that product (e.g. “These shoes will keep your feet dry”).
People buy based on the benefits, then use the features to support their decision. That’s why you need to focus on the benefits all throughout your website copy.
When entrepreneurs try to follow the advice we shared in the previous section, they often don’t realize that saying “look at this cool feature” is still them talking about themselves even if that feature is indeed relevant to what the potential customer wants.
Instead, they should say “look at this cool feature” and then tie it to the benefit it provides “and this is how it will make your life better”.
Here’s how we do it on our homepage:
As you can see we don’t just list a bunch of features and leave it at that, we also explain the benefits that they provide.
So make sure that on every page you:
- Lead with the benefits
- Tie each feature you mention to the corresponding benefit
- Mention the benefits in the call to action wherever possible
By the way, this doesn’t just apply to your products, it also applies to your free offers!
Have a Headline That Immediately Makes it Clear What Your Offer is All About
There’s a famous quote attributed to one of the best copywriters that ever lived, David Ogilvy:
“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Ogilvy was a 20th-century man – he was born in 1911 and died in 1999. He never got to see all the digital madness we are living with right now.
But it’s probably safe to say that due to seemingly ever-decreasing attention spans headlines are even more important now than they were back then.
In fact, when a potential customer lands on your homepage, you only have a second or two to grab their attention with your headline.
That’s why you need to make sure that it clearly conveys what your offer is all about. Otherwise, the potential customer will simply leave. Once again, a confused mind always says no.
You can also experiment with super-headlines (text above the headline) and sub-headlines (text below the headline).
Say, the headline on our homepage is simply “Meet ClickFunnels”, but we use its size + positioning to catch the potential customer’s attention.
When they land on our homepage, their eyes will automatically be drawn to the headline, but then they will inevitably read the super-headline that defines the problem and the sub-headline that explains how ClickFunnels provides the solution.
This is an advanced approach to website headlines, though, so we don’t necessarily recommend it to beginner copywriters.
If you have never written any headlines before, we suggest sticking to a headline that clearly conveys the #1 benefit of your offer. How will it make the potential customer’s life better?
Once you figure that out, you can start experimenting with super-headlines and subheadlines that provide additional information.
Just make sure to A/B test everything!
Preemptively Address Potential Objections
Whenever a potential customer hears about your offer, their mind immediately starts coming up with objections.
Say, our target audience is primarily small business owners. Over the years, we have learned that they tend to worry that:
- There’s some contract with sneaky fine print
- They won’t be able to cancel if our software isn’t the right fit for them
- The software will be too complicated for them
- It won’t work for their particular business
If you look at the screenshot of our homepage again, you’ll see that we address those objections immediately.
We tell the potential customer that:
- There’s no contract
- They can cancel anytime
- Using our software doesn’t require any tech skills
- Our software works for every type of business
Note how we placed “No contracts. Cancel anytime” right below the call-to-action button so that it would be impossible to miss.
You need to figure out what are the most common objections that your dream customers have when it comes to your offer and then find a way to address them on your homepage just like we did.
Provide as Much Social Proof As You Can
Social proof is a psychology principle that says that when people don’t know what to do, they look around to see what others do.
In copywriting, this means that when potential customers aren’t sure whether they should trust you, they start looking for indications that other people trust you.
Because let’s be real:
Everyone knows that you are biased when it comes to your own products and services. Of course you say that they are amazing. You have a financial incentive to do so!
That’s why what you say about your product has much less value than what OTHER PEOPLE say about your product.
This means that you need to invest in gathering social proof:
- Endorsements from well-known people
- Customer testimonials
- Customer reviews
Take a look at these three testimonials that we feature on our homepage:
Right below that there’s a Trustpilot badge with our rating of 4.7 stars based on 1,835 customer reviews.
We also feature six video testimonials by our customers:
There’s also more subtle social proof that can nevertheless be useful such as relevant credentials, achievements, and numbers, as all that also indicates the approval of other people.
Finally, you want to go out there, get coverage in the media, and then display “As Seen On” media badges on your website.
We have observed that entrepreneurs tend to underestimate the power of social proof. Don’t make this mistake!
Gather as much of it as possible and then display it on your website!
Have Several Calls to Action on Every Page
You should have a clear call to action + a call-to-action button on every page of your website. In fact, you should have several of them!
Again, as we have already mentioned, each page needs to have ONE conversion goal, but it’s okay to have several calls to action as long as they all serve the same goal.
For example, the conversion goal of our homepage is to get the potential customer to sign up for our 14-day free trial.
We have no less than 13 call-to-action buttons on it but they all lead to our free trial sign up page.
Entrepreneurs often have just one call-to-action button per page but we believe that to be a mistake unless the page is super short.
As a rule of thumb, you should have at least three call-to-action buttons on every page, though we do recommend experimenting with adding more.
The reasoning behind this is that you want to remove friction:
If someone scrolls mid-way through your page, having to scroll back up to find the call-to-action button adds unnecessary friction that might sabotage the conversion.
Wouldn’t it make much more sense to place call-to-action buttons all throughout the page so that no matter where the potential customer is at, there would always be one available nearby?
You can use A/B testing to figure out what the optimal number of call-to-action buttons is for each page.
Want to Learn Copywriting FAST?
When it comes to making money online, copywriting is the most important skill that you need to learn.
But you probably don’t have the time to invest years in mastering it. You have a business to run and you need to make money RIGHT NOW.
That’s why our friend Jim Edwards wrote a book called “Copywriting Secrets” in which he distilled the most important principles of copywriting.
You can read it in a few days, learn what you need to know and start implementing it in your business.
Do it right and you’ll see IMMEDIATE results! 💰
