What’s the Difference Between Content Marketing and Copywriting?

For a traditional marketer, the answer to the above question is simple.

Content marketing is the creation of valuable content that has a marketing purpose. For example, my company creates an awesome special report, and we exchange it for your email address and your permission to educate you further about our stuff.

Copywriting is designed to get the reader to take a specific action. Sometimes that’s making a purchase, but it can also be confirming an email opt-in, calling for more information, or going into a store to check out the merchandise.

Content marketing is blogs, white papers, and viral video.

Copywriting is sales pages, infomercials, and direct mail.

Two different critters, right?

Well, not if you’re doing it right.

Content without copywriting is a waste of good content

There are some blogs out there with seriously good content, and few readers. (Maybe yours is one of them.)

If you’re writing great stuff that people would love to read, but you’re not finding the traffic you want, the problem probably lies in ineffective copywriting.

• Your headlines are boring and they don’t give people any reason to click through.
• Or your headlines might be too cute and clever, showing how smart you are without communicating any reader benefit. Either way, if you’re not putting much thought into your content headlines today, hop over to the Copyblogger tutorials on writing great headlines and fix that before you try anything else.
• You haven’t explicitly thought about how your content benefits readers. Just like a product has to have a benefit to the buyer, your content has to be inherently rewarding to readers, or they won’t come back. Here’s an article that talks about how to do that.
• Your content isn’t building any rapport or trust. You can always get social media attention by being a brat, a pest, or a train wreck, but attention doesn’t translate into subscribers or customers.
• You haven’t leveraged any social proof to show readers that your blog is a cool place to hang out. This is tricky when you don’t have lots of readers yet, but we have a few tips for you.
• You don’t have a clear, specific call to action that lets people know what you want them to do next. (That might be to subscribe to your blog, sign up for your email newsletter, or share your content on social sites like twitter and Facebook.)

Remember, copywriting is the art of convincing your reader to take a specific action. (And yes, it’s still copywriting if it takes place in a podcast or video … if you’re doing it well).

The thoughtful use of copywriting techniques on your blog will get readers to subscribe to your content, opt in for more from your email newsletter, and share your great stuff with other readers. That’s how you build a large, loyal audience.

Copywriting without content is a waste of good copy

So is copywriting everything? Will effective use of copywriting technique propel you automatically into the ranks of the world’s most popular blogs?

Sadly, no.

If you do a brilliant job packaging and marketing crap, all you do is efficiently get the word out about how bad your crap is. Not the result you’re looking for.

Smart marketers still need to keep these cornerstones of great content marketing in mind:

• Generosity is sexy. When your free content is so valuable that it makes you a little uncomfortable, you know you’ve got the mix right.
• Only ad men like advertising. If your content looks like an ad, it will be overlooked or thrown away. Make your “advertising” too valuable to throw away by wrapping it in wonderfully beneficial, readable content.
• Content marketing makes for great SEO, but don’t make the mistake of writing for the search engines. Always write for people first, then go back and make your content search-engine friendly so new readers can find you.
• And of course, always remember the first rule of Copyblogger.

Really good content is unsurpassed at building rapport, delivering a sales message without feeling “salesy,” and getting the potential customer to stick around.

That’s why the sharpest copywriting minds are trending more toward a “content net” approach. They combine strategic copywriting with great content to get the best of both worlds. Which is exactly what Copyblogger’s been teaching readers for the past five years.

How about you? How are you using content and copywriting on your site to build more traffic, and to convert that traffic into fans and customers?

Let us know in the comments.

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How to Get More Mobile Visitors Onto Your Email List

On Copyblogger recently we’ve talked about why it’s so important to make your website mobile-friendly.

And we’ve hammered on how critical it is to get people onto your email list.

But there’s a problem: it can be really hard for your mobile visitors to sign up for your newsletter.

Here’s why:

Most mobile-friendly themes (in WordPress or other content management systems) hide the sidebars. They show just the main content area. For example, in the mobile theme I used for one of my sites, there’s a built-in way to share posts with Twitter, but there’s no way for a visitor to see the signup box in my sidebar. No matter what they do, they just can’t get there.

Even if you’re not running a special mobile theme (for example you’re depending on the built-in mobile-friendly goodness of a framework like Genesis) your visitors are still just looking at your main content column.

Why? Because even though they see your full page when they initially arrive, the first thing they’re going to do is “double-tap” on the content column to blow it up to a readable size. That pushes those sidebars out of sight and out of mind.

Also remember that if someone is reading your site on a mobile device, you probably don’t have their full attention. So don’t expect them to take the initiative and hunt around for your signup box. They won’t.

How to fix the problem in two easy steps

The solution is simple. You need a call to action for your newsletter at the bottom of your content column.

Not in the sidebar. Not in the footer. You want it right there at the bottom of your text, so it’s the first thing people read after they finish your post.

Step one is to copy the code of your signup box and drop it onto its own page. Give it a sexy name like yourblog.com/subscribe. Add some content that lets people know why it’s a good idea to subscribe. And be sure to test that it works.

(Here’s an example if you need one.)

Step two is to get a call to action and a link to your new signup page onto the bottom of every single page you create. You can do this manually, by typing or pasting it into every post, or you can do it automatically by editing your theme.

I actually prefer doing it manually. (That’s also how they do it on Copyblogger.) I like to vary the call to action depending on the content of the post. And writing it reminds me to make sure that the rest of my content is mobile-friendly.

For example, if I’m showing a video hosted on my own site, I’ll provide a link to a copy on YouTube, so people on iPhones or iPads can see it. And if I’m using a Flash-based audio player, I’ll provide a link to download the MP3, which also allows it to play on mobile devices.

If you’re comfortable with code, you can insert the signup link into your regular theme with a hook or a widget so it shows at the bottom of the content column. Then it will show up automatically on every post, past and future.

But if you’re using a mobile theme, I don’t recommend modifying the code. That’s because your mobile theme is probably a plugin or a module, and any customizations you make will be overwritten when you update the plugin. For normal human beings, the chance that you’ll update your mobile theme without remembering to reinstall your customizations is pretty high, and unless you visit your site frequently on a mobile, you won’t notice the mistake for months.

Getting people onto your email list should be a major goal with every post you write. No matter what device someone uses to read your content, you can make it easy for them to get to your signup box.

It takes just a couple of minutes to copy your signup box onto a standalone page, and only seconds to add a link at the end of each blog post. Start doing it now, because mobile traffic is only going to increase … and you want to be sure you’re there to capture it.

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