Your website is the front line of your content marketing strategy, so don’t cut corners with the copy.

Visitors tend to leave websites within ten to 20 seconds and only read about 20 percent of the content on each page. Your copy therefore has to be something special to grab their attention, inspire action and drive up your website conversion rate .

But it’s not brain surgery – just tweaking and slimming your existing copy can make all the difference. Indeed, changing the description of a shipping charge on a DVD trial offer from ‘a $5 fee’ to ‘a small $5 fee’ increased conversions by 20 percent in one study.

Warm ups

First, the obvious ones:

Cut your copy. No one has time to read paragraph after paragraph across dozens of pages, no matter how well crafted they are. Cut it down and make sure all the text on your website is pithy and relevant. Highrise, the customer relationship management software from 37signals, saw a 22.72 percent decrease in conversions after increasing the amount of copy on their…

Read more | badlanguage.net

Photo credit | Operation Board Game by Adi Dahiya on Flickr