How to write better in your business
Do you think everything you write sucks? Have you written a page on your website, a sales page, a blog post, or even a Instagram or Facebook post … and immediately been overcome with the urge to delete it? Congratulations, you’re just like every other human being I know. Stick with me if you want to know how to write better so you can grow your business faster and make more sales.
The hardest part about writing is that it’s an art form. Just like painting or music, beauty is in the eye of the beholder (or the ear of the hearer?). Some people will think that what you’ve created is the best thing since sliced bread, and others will hate it.
If you’re brave enough to put anything original out into the world, you have to be OK with someone hating it.
Have you ever been to a museum, looked at a famous piece of art, and wondered “Why the hell is this here? That looks like my 2 year old could have done a better job!”? (I’m looking at you, Jackson Pollock). That is the magic of art!
I’ve thought about this long and hard over the years, and I’m convinced that the beauty of art isn’t the art itself, but the courage of the artist to claim that it’s art in the first place.
The difference between famous art and art that never saw the light of day is the audacity of the creator to even show it to another human being and to declare its worth. Art doesn’t exist if it’s never shown to anyone else, because the essence of art is defined by it being experienced by someone else, good or bad.
No matter how beautiful or not any piece of art seems to be, someone will still hate it and say “how dare this be called art?!”.
Here’s one of my favourite quotes that sums up this phenomenon perfectly:
“You can be the ripest, juiciest peach in the world, and there’s still going to be somebody who hates peaches.”
So it really doesn’t matter what you write, there will be people who love it and people who hate it, and lots in between with no feelings whatsoever. You could write the most vanilla, say nothing, bland, “don’t hurt anyone feelings” social media post, and people will still hate it and unfollow you. And you could write the most powerful, inspiring, vulnerable, make people take action social media post, and people will still hate it and unfollow you.
Being an entrepreneur is an exercise every damn day in self esteem and self worth. You’re putting out something that you created, and people are going to vote on it with their likes or no likes (but are they even seeing it in the first place, sweet algorithm?), follows or unfollows, purchase or no purchase.
The only thing you can do is to put yourself out there bit by bit, and the pressure will either grind you to death and you’ll realize that being an entrepreneur isn’t for you, or it will create a beautiful diamond. How you’re able to handle the pressure is up to you.
This is why being an entrepreneur isn’t for everyone, and the quicker you can figure that out, the happier you’ll be, because you can move onto something else that will help you feel happy.
So there is no way for me to definitively say “this is how to write better”, but what I can do is to give you some pointers for writing clearer, with more confidence, and in a way that’s easier for people to digest.
For me, this comes down to the 3 C’s of writing: confidence, connection, and conversions.
How to write with more confidence
I hate to burst your bubble, but there are no secrets to writing with more confidence. No “3 steps” to all of a sudden getting over yourself and your self doubts and all the mean things you say about yourself in your head.
If you want to know how to write with more confidence, I suggest you find a good therapist and instead discuss why you feel like what you have to say doesn’t matter, why you expect criticism from the world (and are taking it to heart when you don’t even know the people handing it out), and where your self worth issues came from. I’m serious.
You’ll write with more confidence when you’re more confident in yourself.
For me, confidence comes from taking action and from my belief in myself (more to come on this later). Note that confidence and self belief aren’t the same thing, one is internal (self belief) and one is external (confidence).
However, let’s focus on the action part:
“You become a writer by writing.”
There are no secrets. You become more confident in your writing by writing more, practicing, honing your skills, and feeling out what works and what doesn’t. In other words: failing faster.
And if you’re wondering why you didn’t feel you even had self worth issues until you started your business, that’s totally normal. I didn’t think I had self worth issues, either (and boy, was I wrong)! It’s only because I wasn’t required to show more of myself and my thoughts to the world before being an entrepreneur.
Chances are that you’ve done hard things or jobs in your life. You’ve worked a corporate job that had hard to achieve goals and caused you stress, but I bet if you didn’t achieve those goals, you didn’t blame yourself nearly as much as you do in your own business. You didn’t inherently think you were a bad person because you didn’t sell X dollars in sales revenue or gotten X rating on feedback questionnaires.
You probably looked at your results in a bigger context, plus other factors likely existed, like the economy and company culture, that were completely out of your control.
Yes, you might have failed at your goal, and yes, you might have had a bad day or week at work, but you didn’t forever go forward remembering that goal as the biggest failure of your life.
So why do we do that when it’s our own business? Why does writing a blog post or a social media caption bear the weight of the world? Because you’re sharing a piece of you, not selling a product that someone else made.
This emotional attachment is normal in the beginning, and it’s definitely a common feeling, but that doesn’t mean that it’s entirely healthy in the long run.
It takes time to develop a healthy detachment from your work, to not attach your entire self worth to the results of your business, and it’s a skill that you can learn, just like you learned how to publish your first Instagram Reel or do your own bookkeeping.
Your work, your writing, will seem precious in the beginning, just like you feel like you’re going to break a newborn when you have your first baby. But the more time you spend gaining experience, the more you write, the less precious you’ll be about your writing.
Just like the first diaper change is all baby talk and cooing … and your 1,000th diaper change at 3 am is all about business and getting it done, with a side of cooing.
If you’re still having confidence issues after writing 55+ blog posts, 285 email newsletters, and 750+ Instagram posts, like I have, I highly suggest seeing a therapist. If you haven’t written that much yet, get to it. The words aren’t going to write themselves.
How to write for more connection
The second thing that will help you write better is to write for more connection.
What is writing except storytelling in written form? And storytelling is literally baked into every human’s DNA.
It’s how we passed on important knowledge, like what poisonous plants to stay away from and where the four-legged beasts migrate throughout the year so we could find our next meal.
One of the ways to know what’s working with your writing is to get good feedback, and for that you have to be willing to connect with your readers.
When I say “willing to connect” with your readers, notice that I didn’t include anything about strategy or conversions or data. All you need to connect is a willingness to do so, but also a vulnerability to show something deeper than the surface level.
Connection is a two-way street, and you’ll get back as much energy as you’re putting out there.
Now, I don’t want you to share super vulnerable things that could put yourself, your family, or anyone else at risk. We’re not being “authentic” because it’s trendy, and we’re not sharing anything that will cause yourself or your family mental health issues. What I mean is I want you to share the things that you identify as your truth.
When you believe something is true, you believe in it strongly, and when people sense that (and they can), they react. Sometimes positively and sometimes negatively, but they will react.
It’s that reaction that will initiate a response from someone, and if one person is taking the time to comment or reply to an email, know that 10 other people are probably feeling the same thing and just didn’t have the time.
For me, connection = vulnerability. Just like I’ve embraced my writing and put it out there as “art”, you have to be willing to embrace vulnerability and put it out there, too.
These connection posts, which I usually write on social media, aren’t for teaching in the step-by-step style. These aren’t likely to be carousel posts or Reels. These are written from the heart, for my heart, to connect with other people’s hearts.
For me, these usually get a medium amount of saves, a few shares to Stories, but generate many more times the comments than my other posts.
Here are a few examples (you can click through to read the captions):
These are the posts that I really don’t care what the engagement is or if they get me more followers. I write them because I needed to write them, to process the feelings, and to get them out of my head. And it’s that need to share my own thoughts that inevitably connects with others.
Fair warning, these are the posts that when you write or publish them, you immediately want to delete them. You’ll sometimes feel like you’re going to throw up. They feel too powerful and raw and bold, like “who am I to post this?”. That’s precisely why you should post them (unless you’re spreading disinformation, that’s not cool).
Dare to take up space.
Dare to share your real thoughts, not the ones that have been scrubbed of anything even remotely triggering to everyone else.
Dare to post something when you’re in the heat of the moment, when you’re transmuting your emotions into something more useful.
That’s when you’ll connect with your followers and readers.
And yes, while comments on social media posts and replies to emails shouldn’t control your self worth, they do signal to you that you’ve caused an emotional reaction in your readers, and that creates connection.
How to write for more conversions
You’ll know if your writing is better because it will create connections (i.e. comments, feedback, and replies) with your followers and fans, but to me, the ultimate sign that your writing is better? You’ll create more conversions.
Conversions are where you’ve gotten someone to take an action, whether it’s to sign up to your email list, apply to a program, or the ultimate conversion of buying your paid offering.
That makes me sound like a money digging capitalist, but the truth is that people will give their likes on social media posts away without thinking much about it, they’ll take time out of their busy day to comment if you’ve really hit the nail on the emotional head, but they’ll only give you their email or open their wallets if you’ve clearly communicated that you have a solution for their problem and the value that it holds for them.
You could have the best product or program in the world, but if you suck at communicating the value, you won’t sell much.
For your writing to convert people to opt-ins or sales, it needs to:
Be Easy to ‘digest’
Have one call to action
Overcome their objections
Let’s go over each of these in more detail:
Easy to digest
When I mean writing is ‘easy to digest’, I mean it’s easy to read. And for that, I mean design and paragraph structure.
This isn’t a high school English paper. Most of the time you’re writing in digital forms (on a website or social media post) and people aren’t expecting a solid wall of words when they’re reading online, unless they’re reading a news article (which you’re probably not writing if you’re reading this blog post right now).
I recommend splitting your writing up into smaller paragraphs, no more than 5 or 6 lines long.
When you do this, you’re giving the eye a “break” and tricking the reader’s mind into thinking they’re not reading as much. Remember, they’re reading your social media post or website because they’re between other tasks or they’re trying to solve a problem. If they wanted to read entire pages of information with no break between thoughts, they’d buy a book.
So even if you’re writing an 8,000 word blog post (some of mine have been that long!), which, by the way, is 1/10 the length of an average non-fiction novel that your potential customers will probably tell you they don’t have time to read, you’re tricking their mind into thinking it’s not as long because there’s more white space between smaller paragraphs.
Bet you wouldn’t have thought you’ve already read 2,200+ words in this blog post so far. Tricked you.
You can also give their mind a break from feeling like your content is too long by splitting the information up with headers (like I’ve done with this blog post) or into different sections.
Here is an example of a few sections from a super long, 26 section sales page. These sections give the mind a moment to pause, and to help them feel like they’re making progress down the page.
There’s actually quite a bit of copy (writing) on the page that you can see, but it doesn’t feel like you’re reading a novel because of these sections.
You do this in Squarespace (my preferred website building platform) by inserting different sections with different coloured background banners.
Have one call to action
There’s a lot of noise out there and everyone’s to-do list is too long. If you want someone to do something, blatantly ask them.
Click here to XYZ. Scroll down. Swipe right. Share to your stories. Sign up. Follow me for more information. Buy now.
All of these are examples of calls-to-action, and don’t be afraid to use them.
A note on this is to have only one call-to-action per social media post, blog post, or email. If you ask them to do too many things, people will get confused or overwhelmed, which drastically reduces their chances of taking the action.
Don’t send an email with links to a blog post, a separate sales page, and a call out to follow you on social media. One email = one action. One social media post = one action.
Pick the most important one, focus on it, and feel free to repeat the one call-to-action in different areas of the email or social media post (i.e one in the middle and one closer to the end, or even as a P.S. at the bottom).
Overcome their objections
As soon as you inspire someone to take action, the objection gremlins will pipe up in their minds. They’ll start coming up with all sorts of excuses as to why they can’t take action.
Whether it’s something as easy as opting into an email, or something harder like investing thousands of dollars into coaching, their mind will always come up with a reason not to do it.
You don’t have time, this is too expensive, you’re too stressed out, you’re too lazy, you don’t stick with anything.
The same 5 excuses can be applied to anything, and they all come down to one fear that the brain does anything and everything to avoid: I’ve never done this before, this is new and scary.
Don’t blame your brain, it’s just trying to protect you! But it’s not always acting in your best interest.
Overcoming someone’s objections can be important in anything you write, such as blog posts or social media captions, but they’re especially important on sales pages.
If someone doesn’t face their fears and overcome their objections on a blog post, no biggie, they might not opt into your freebie at the end.
If someone doesn’t face their fears and overcome their objections on a social media caption, no biggie, they might not click to your website or like your post.
But if someone doesn’t face their fears and overcome their objections on a sales page? You don’t make any sales, don’t make an income, and don’t have a successful business. And then you have to go back to feeling like a failure and/or to that shitty corporate job that you hated, like a dog coming back home with their tail between their legs after running away.
How do you overcome objections?
Define the objections. For your ideal client’s problem that you’re solving, what are the objections that come up in their mind? If you can’t define these clearly and in their words (i.e. they should be nodding their heads up and down while reading your content because they’ve thought or said exactly the same thing), you’re going to have a hard time gaining their trust and helping them get over themselves already and solve this damn problem.
Be descriptive. Make the objections and fears real to them: what’s really going to happen to them if what they’re afraid of comes true?
For example, in the paragraph above on what happens if you don’t help someone overcome their objections on a sales page, I said “You don’t make any sales, don’t make an income, and don’t have a successful business.”. I could have ended that paragraph there, but I went on to describe what you feel and what happens after you don’t make enough money to remind you of how painful it’s going to be. I reminded you that “you have to go back to feeling like a failure and/or to that shitty corporate job that you hated”.Make it about them (i.e the reader). Copy that converts is really good at talking about the person reading it and their situations, problems, and future possibilities. As much as the solution is about you and your expertise, people are busy and need to know there’s something in it for them. Honestly, people just really love thinking and talking about themselves, it’s human nature!
So although you might be describing a situation that you went through and how you overcame it (and how you can help THEM overcome it, too), avoid using too much “I” language, and turn it around and say “you” instead. They’ll be able to put themselves into the word picture that you’re painting them much easier, and start to feel the emotions much stronger than if they’re thinking about someone else.
For example, on my about page, I could have written a paragraph like:
”After being in business for 10 years I was completely burned out. Something had to change, so I started putting time and energy into sustainable marketing systems, like my website, blog, and emails, that could work for me 24/7 when I couldn’t.”
But that’s all about me. I mean, that is the reason why I do what I do now, but that’s a really personal story to me.
However, here’s how it’s written on my about page:
”I believe that you’re a human first, entrepreneur second. There’s certainly a time and place for hustle and grind (especially in the beginning), but you’re not a machine! You can’t keep working 12 or 14 hours a day for years on end, with your adrenals going haywire and anxiety out of control. This isn’t working anymore.
But you can’t make more hours in the day, and you can’t ask your body to keep going when you’re completely burned out … but you still want, wait, you need to grow your business. Something has to change, and that something is systems. You need systems to do the work for you, to grow your business when you can’t 24/7.”
Those were literally things I said to myself, while in a burned out, hyperventilating heap on the bathroom floor, and obviously a very personal experience, but by using the word “you” instead of “I” so much, it turns it into a story that the reader can connect with much easier.
When you’re able to move someone through their objections to where their fear isn’t running the show, they can make a decision based on what is best for their future self, not just what feels safer in the moment.
So there you have it, my “you can’t really teach someone how to write better but you kind of can”, soul meets strategy lesson.
Learning how to write for and communicate more effectively in your business, in the form of your website, blog posts, sales pages, or social media posts, is a skills that has so much return on investment.
If you learn how to write better, you’ll have people replying to emails saying “you wrote exactly what I was thinking” or “damn, I don’t even need your program but that email almost made me buy it anyways!”. Not only do those compliments give you a much needed dopamine boost, but they let you know that you’re on the right track.
And when you’re on the messy journey of being an entrepreneur and business owner, you’ll take every breadcrumb of praise you can!
