Investment newsletters may be steeped in analytics, fundamental and technical research, and powerful stock screens. But at the end of the day, they are discrete pieces of content which require people to subscribe to them and eventually, read them.
Here, we want to learn from effective copy writing rules even if they were written for other industries.
Why care about copywriting for investment newsletters?
Whether you’re sending out free newsletters with the hope of upselling your readers or emailing out a premium newsletter and hoping readers actually read it, according to Copyblogger’s Brian Clark, “What’s the primary purpose of your headline, your graphics, your fonts, and every other part of the content? The simple, surprising answer is…To get the first sentence read.”
From there, as investment newsletter writers, we want to convince our readers to read each and every sentence. That’s our job and how we need to think about our content and it’s every bit as important as our price target on a hot green tech stock.
Writing newsletters is essentially no different from writing other pieces of content. From the structure of our articles to our delivery of the final product, even when writing the subject lines in our newsletters, we should be thinking as professional copywriters.
At the end of the day, that’s what we are and what sells our investment newsletters.
This realization — that we’re professional copywriters — should influence everything we do.
- For instance, did you know that readers have a pretty strongly ingrained bias to read from left to right and therefore assume images/words that appear on the left of the page “appear as having more ‘agentic’ properties – in other words the left is associated with power, decisiveness and action”? It’s important to know this and it should influence the layout of your marketing emails and newsletters.
- You probably know that according to Dan Ariely, a leading behavioral economist, “People’s expectation about the value of what they’re consuming profoundly affects their experience.” This totally impacts pricing and positioning of all your products and touch points with customers and prospects.
- Did you know that writing for the web is different than writing offline? Your text should be scannable, titles really well-thought out, and enumerated lists written to encourage reading and interest in your content.
As the cost of publishing a newsletter and the technical knowledge needed to do so continues to go down, investment blogging is exploding. While publishing an investment newsletter is easy, writing and managing one isn’t.
There is a ton of information out and resources out there. Read up.
Like what you see? Subscribe to New Rules of Investing to learn more about the best investment sites on the Internet.
Additional resources to get started:
- Here is our free e-course on starting an investment newsletter
- Copyblogger’s Copywriting 101
- Problogger’s How to Write Great Blog Content
- DoshDosh’s Lesson on Writing
Photo from The Writer’s Workshop
