Writing Formulas

This section is about the small pieces of wording that turn up on every local business website whatever the trade, meaning the headlines, the buttons, the guarantees, the contact forms, the price sections, and the messages you send when you finally get around to asking a happy customer for a review.

These are the parts most people write last and think about least, which is a genuine shame, because they are very often the exact parts that decide whether somebody picks up the phone or quietly closes the tab, and the difference is larger than it looks.

A button that says Submit performs quite differently from one that says Get my price, a guarantee that vaguely promises complete satisfaction is skimmed over and ignored while one that names a specific thing you will actually do is believed and remembered, and a headline that opens with your company name is skipped almost every time.

None of this needs natural talent or a background in marketing, because it is much closer to a set of patterns that reliably work, and the strange thing about those patterns is that once somebody has pointed them out to you, you cannot stop seeing them everywhere. Every guide in this section is built to be used rather than admired, so you will find lists of ready-made wording, fill-in-the-blank templates, message scripts you can send today, and plain explanations of why one version tends to beat another, and you are welcome to take whatever fits, change the details, and put it straight onto your page.