When it comes to copywriting, don’t write about yourself, your product, your service, your enterprise or your brand the whole time.
Replace the words ‘I’, ‘our’ and ‘we’ with ‘you’ and ‘your’.
Your copy will become more engaging for the reader.
The reader is primarily interested in themselves and how to solve their challenges.
“How you can solve this challenge,” is better than: “Our product solves this challenge.”
Use the word ‘You’ as much as possible.
It is difficult to overuse this powerful word.
A good test is to go through your copy and count the number of times that you have used the ‘you’ words.
Use ‘You’ and ‘Your’ four times as often as you use ‘I’, ‘Our’ or ‘We’.
When people read your copy, it will come across as more personal and engaging.
When I was a trainee copywriter, I used to print out the draft text and then circle ‘you’ and ‘your’ in blue and I, our and we in red.
The objective being to reach the magical 4:1 ratio.
When you read the copy, you may notice that the word you crops up many times.
The reader will not notice this; for some reason, however, they will keep on reading, just like you have.
Written by Nigel Temple, marketing and copywriting trainer.
