How embarrassing is it when you look back through a document you just shared with your coworkers and notice multiple careless mistakes?
Pretty dang embarrassing. We’ve been there too.
In this week’s blog, we’ll be talking about the most common copywriting mistakes and how you can make sure they don’t happen again.
Mistake #1:
You’re using the wrong contractions.
If you don’t know when to use they’re/there/their and you’re/your, you might have a bit of a problem. But we get it, sometimes it’s a little confusing, and sometimes you simply don’t realize you’ve committed a homophone sin.
You have two choices here; either learn the differences and train your brain to recognize when it’s in the wrong, or use Grammarly to catch your mistakes!
There’s no shame in asking for a little help every now and then, y’all.
Mistake #2:
(This one is a big one.) SEO!
If you can at least keep up with the simple things (like keywords and alt tags), you’ll be fine.
Pro tip: Keep your sentences short, straight, and to the point. Cut out all the unnecessary wording and fillers and try to maintain a nice variation of sentence and paragraph length.
Mistake #3:
Bad headlines.
We can’t stress this one enough!
If your headlines are trash, your audience is going to assume everything else is too. Do yourself a favor and carefully craft some epic headlines!
If you struggle with this (or aren’t even sure what a good headline is), enter your headline into Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer and take a look at what you can do to improve it.
Mistake #4:
Consistency.
Please (we’re begging you) don’t go back and forth on your writing style, tone, visuals, etc. Choose what you know best and stick with it. It may even help to create a style guide so that any future creators can keep their content consistent with the brand.
Mistake #5:
Too many commas!
We’ve all fallen victim to this before. Here’s a quick rule of thumb: If you find yourself using more than two commas (or even commas in every sentence), try shortening your sentences to less than 20 words. This can also help with the flow of your work.
Here’s a dirty little secret they don’t want you to know: Even the professionals sometimes fall victim to the simplest mistakes. No one’s brain works perfectly 100% of the time– So don’t feel so ashamed when your brain mistakes were for where!
If you still can’t keep up, tools like Grammarly are there to help!
Grammarly is a free writing assistant that is currently helping more than 7 million users improve their writing each day (yes, you heard that right). Go try it out for yourself!
We’re here to help you improve too! Check out Blog Writing Basics to Better Your Business or Let’s Talk About SEO to get started on your journey to becoming a better copywriter!
And just because we’re feeling so generous this week, we’re going to be sharing a few more tips and resources in our monthly newsletter (which comes out tomorrow, y’all)! Be sure to sign up if you haven’t already!
And of course, if all else fails, feel free to reach out to us on our contact page for help!
