As an online retailer you have many advantages.

You can offer your products 24/7 without the staffing cost, you do not pay for bricks and mortar overhead, your audience can be global, and you can know more about your purchasers than any bricks and mortar retailer can possibly discover. That is wonderful and you probably know a lot about how to exploit those benefits already.

On the downside, you do not have a flesh and blood buyer standing in front of you, so you can not get an immediate feeling for them, for example by looking at how they are dressed or how much eye contact they are willing to make. You also can't change your message based on the responses you receive in your personal interaction. This means:

1. You have to know your target market very well, because you are removed from the personal interaction.

2. You need to make your communication count, because you have limited ways and time to communicate information and inspire action.

Point one has a great deal to do with how you are gathering and analysing data. Point two, the focus of Part I of this series, is about how you communicate information and persuade people to buy your products.

Websites communicate with colour choices, fonts, graphics, video and text. Many business owners feel much more confident choosing colours and photos than they do writing content to persuade, so let's look at that issue in more depth. We will look at how to focus your writing on your customer.

Appeal to your target audience

Before you can master persuasive copywriting, you need to master point one, know your audience; your writing needs to identify with that audience. For example, if your audience is teenagers, you need to use flashier, more edgy language that is absolutely current. If your audience is business people, you need to write succinctly, avoid loose language habits, and use industry specific words where it makes sense.

Remember 'What is in it for me?'

One of the major downfalls of people writing about their products or services is that they know too much about the subject, and they want to convey all that good, helpful information to their reader.

Unfortunately, more often than not, the reader, at least initially, does not want all of that information. They want to know how your product is going to help them.

That means that, instead of writing a laundry list of your products features, you need to write about how those features benefit the purchaser.

That is easy to figure out if you are selling the energy drink with the highest caffeine content. Your energy drink user is looking for an energy boost, obviously. If that is your claim, use this benefit as a headline to draw attention to the superior way you will solve the user's problem, such as:

• The energy kick that keeps on kicking., or more to the point;
• XYZ delivers the most powerful energy rush in the marketplace and we have got the caffeine content to prove it.

Or, if caffeine is a negative read, just leave that part out of the phrasing.

It is possible to make this benefit more targeted as well. What if you know that your product attracts a lot of younger women because it has fewer calories than other, more sugar laden brands? You could say:

• All the energy without the calories or
• Get the most energy and leave the calories behind or
• XYZ delivers the most powerful energy rush in the marketplace without the extra calories

Demonstrating benefit may be harder if you are selling a commodity such as office supplies. You are not likely to talk about the notion that your paper clips are stronger or your glue is stickier.

Again, you need to know your audience and the benefit your products are providing. If your audience comprises businesses, your benefits may have to do with price or service.

For example, maybe you offer the customer the opportunity to create a standard office supply list with the stationery sizes and brands they prefer. When they arrive on your site, their preferences pop up and they can just choose the quantity of presentation folders, because your site already knows that they want glossy white folders with two pockets and a business card holder.

• Just tell us once and we remember your office favorites or
• Faster supply purchasing starts here

The primary message is, be sure that your copy leads with the benefits to the purchaser.

A Tip about Headlines

One interesting way to find out more about which word or headlines people in your target user group respond to is to go to the website Digg.com. Digg is an information sharing site where people submit material from the Web that they think is worthy of sharing, and other people vote on the value of the content.

Try searching the Digg site for the keywords related to your product, then review the subject lines of the material found. This exercise will give you a sense of what kind of headlines attract the people interested in your products.

• You can simply lay out the facts, e.g., create a chart of the most popular energy drinks and report the caffeine content (and possibly the calorie content or whatever else makes your brand superior).
• You may want to explain why caffeine is a better stimulant than the sugar, herbs or enzymes that other manufacturers use in their drinks.
• If you worry that readers may think you have too much caffeine in your drink, you might want to quote the Food Standard's Authority's or FDA's recommendations for safe levels of caffeine for consumption in a single dose.