It’s time to go all English class on your marketing and listing text. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Proofread all copy

While you’ll want to make sure your product itself is free of spelling and grammatical errors, especially if it’s a book, so many overlook all the other text associated with selling something. Take a look at your emails, website, social media bios, listing text and any other written words around what you’re selling. Poor grammar or spelling not only turn potential buyers off, they can also prevent buyers from finding your items at all by mucking with your search engine placement or your item visibility on marketplaces. A typo or two in a blog post is very different than a mistake in a header or graphic. Here’s a case where you may want to ask a detail oriented friend to help you out because it can be so hard to spot mistakes in your own writing.

Text that’s free of errors gives the buyer confidence in you and what you’re selling and that makes them that much more likely to entrust you with the sale.

Punch up your messages

Speaking of writing as a marketing tool, beyond spelling and grammar issues, one of the simplest marketing tweaks you can do is to reevaluate the written word all over your site. Take a look at your form emails, your bio or about page, your FAQ, your listing text, anywhere there’s words on your site. Sometimes the text on our sites is something we just throw up there quickly when we’re trying to get our site live but take the time to make sure it’s not just clean… it’s good.

Is it as dynamic as it could be? Does it read well? Are there awkward phrases or extraneous sentences that you could edit out?

While the goal here is to look for free things to do to promote your stuff, if you’re not confident in your writing skills, this might be something worth hiring a freelance writer to help you will. After all, the effectiveness of every single marketing tip in this book would increase dramatically if you upgraded the writing that went along with it.