🗞 What's New: Easy copywriting tips for founders

Knowing the basics of copywriting can save you time and money:

• Good copywriting will evoke emotions in your potential customers, helping you to close the deal. These tips can get you started!
• Business opportunities are exploding in the expanding pet telehealth space. Here's how to get your paws in on the action!
• Founder Fernando Pessagno grew his resume making tool to over 100,000 unique monthly visitors with little marketing. Below, he shares how he leveraged the media, SEO, and multilingual support to foster growth.

Want to share something with over 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

✍️ Copywriting Basics for Founders

by Reeshav

Copywriting is the process of creating effective text for marketing, advertising, or other purposes. It involves understanding the audience you're targeting, crafting engaging and persuasive content, and making sure that the message is delivered engagingly. Here's how founders can level up their copywriting!

Copy that

Copywriting can be important for businesses of all sizes. When it comes to marketing, effective copy can help you reach your target audience and convert more leads into customers. AdWords and other advertising platforms can be incredibly effective when used by businesses with talented copywriters on their teams. Here's the basic script:

We help (X) do (Y) by doing (Z).

This script is a great starting point, but it only scratches the surface of what you need to be doing for effective copy.

Before worrying about creating good copywriting, make sure that your content is actually valuable and solving a real problem for your audiences. Then, incorporate the knowledge of different human emotions to sell your product. You don’t need to be a psychology expert to do that. Just being cognizant of these behaviors can inspire you:

1. Desire: Buyers want what they want, and they want it now. This is probably the easiest emotion to tap into since your only job is to leverage what they already want. A perfect example is your favorite burger joint:

The feeling of hunger does the heavy lifting on this ad.

Here is another one focusing on the SaaS model. Again, if you know that you have the product your audience needs now, just nudge them with the desired triggers. This is the landing copy of an AI copywriter called WriterGenie that allows you to create your copy in minutes:

2. Fear: Humans are terrified of…well, everything. So, they need reassurance. They want to feel safe and in control. Make no mistake; modern buyers are extremely smart, and want to protect their financials. Don't hide valuable information under your call-to-action (CTA), like in this example:

Make it clear to potential customers that they won’t lose anything, like in the example here:

3. Belief: Buyers believe that they need a product to be successful, or they believe that they are not good enough without it. Let’s look at Hotjar's landing page:

This copy is based on your belief that you need to know about your user's behavior, and the company is providing a way for you to learn this. Simple and effective.

4. Social norms: Buyers conform to social norms when making a purchase. If ever in doubt, go with social proof. You need to showcase that people are successfully using your product:

Learn everything that you can about your user, and find out how you can provide them with something valuable. Then, choose an emotional trigger from above. This will be the basis of the copy you will create.

Your next campaign

Here are a few tips for effective copywriting for your next campaign:

1. Use keyword research to target your audience: Knowing which keywords to target is essential for effective copywriting.

2. Write clear, concise content: It’s important to keep your content concise and easy to read. This will help to draw in more readers and increase traffic to your website.

3. Use images and videos to create an engaging story: Relevant images and videos can be an effective way to add visual interest to your content and increase viewership.

4. Use social media to promote your content: Social media is a great way to promote your content and reach a wider audience.

Keep costs low

If you’re looking for a way to improve your copywriting skills without spending a fortune, consider using AI copywriters. AI can help you produce high-quality, search engine friendly content quickly, and at a fraction of the cost of hiring a human writer.

Here are four ways that AI can help you improve your copywriting:

1. Automated research: AI can help you identify the keywords and phrases that your target audience is likely to search for. This information can help you write content that is both relevant and useful to your readers.

2. Quick turnaround times: AI copywriters can produce content quickly with minimal editing. This saves you time and money, allowing you to focus on other tasks.

3. Greater accuracy and consistency: AI copywriters will make sure that your content is consistent across different platforms.

4. Greater flexibility: Some AI copywriters can adapt their content to meet the specific needs of your target audience. Custom models of AI copywriting are based on the understanding that each customer is unique. This understanding allows for content that is specifically tailored to the needs of each customer.

What copywriting tips have helped you the most? Share below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🥯 Delivery giants are pivoting from their primary business amid increased competition.

💨 Wind and solar energy hit a record 10% of global electricity in 2021.

💋 OnlyFans wants to go public through a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC).

🍎 Apple’s stock is having its best winning streak since 2003.

👀 It’s an unfortunate time to be a business starting with the letter "Z."

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🐶 New Opportunities in Pet Telehealth

from the Hustle Newsletter by Shân Osborn

The Signal: Interest in veterinary advice platform Pawp is exploding. Similarweb shows that the site gets 350K+ visits per month.

What's driving the growth: ~60% of vet appointments can be avoided just by talking to a veterinarian, professionals who are in increasingly short supply. They are also notorious for working long, high stress, inflexible hours, with after-hours advice being a common pet owner need.

As the world embraces remote work, a younger generation of vets will look for more control over their time. Telehealth for pets could be huge, especially if it assists in cutting down unnecessary in-clinic visits.

The big picture: Pawp has positioned itself uniquely in the market. Not only does its $24 per month subscription fee provide access to virtual vets 24/7, but also to a one-off, annually renewed $3K emergency fund; a key benefit, as anyone who's experienced a pet emergency will tell you.

This hybrid between advice and basic insurance creates a massive incentive to enroll, and to stay enrolled.

*Source: Pawp

As Pawp's paw-pularity continues to grow, there will be several opportunities for founders to continue expanding the telehealth vet space, such as:

1. Prescription (Rx) medication: Pawp only offers advice. US laws state that no Rx meds may be prescribed by vets telephonically, unless the pet has already been seen in person to establish a Veterinarian-Client-Patient-Relationship (VCPR). US VCPR rules also vary by state.

To help solve this, founders could focus on lead gen for vets to establish VCPRs with local pet owners. Once formed, vets could alternate between providing remote video consults and in-person appointments.

It's not just the vets who would win: 28% of cat owners and 22% of dog owners report stress on their animals being a major barrier to visiting the vet.

2. Value-adds: Differentiate yourself by providing add-on services, such as:

• A pet first-aid kit when signing up, so that virtual vets can guide you through basic wound care, ear cleaning, allergy support, etc.

*Source: Google Trends

• Access to animal behaviorists: ~75% of pet parents would like to change their pet's behavior in some way, and this dog training subreddit is exploding.
• Comprehensive coverage pet insurance firms could grab their share of the advice market by adding a telephonic "ask vets" option for premium members.

3. Beyond the US: Pawp's $3K emergency fund option is only available for US residents. You could design a global advice platform that provides emergency fund options specific to countries of residence. Further insights, from Similarweb:

• After the US, the majority of site visits to Pawp come from Canada, the UK, India, and the Philippines.
• ~75% of traffic is organic.
• Email is an underutilized channel (<1% of traffic).

4. Specialization: The range of animals that most vets see is very broad. Pawp's emergency fund is only available for cats and dogs. Specialized telehealth platforms could be a solid opportunity (the billion-dollar small animal niche is a great place to start)!

Would you enter the pet telehealth space? Let's chat!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

👥 Audience Defined

from The Steal Club newsletter by Alex Llull

audiEnce → Expands your network.

The value of the connections I’ve made with my audience is incalculable. I launched a podcast with someone I've never met in person. I've made friends from all around the world. You can't put a price on that.

Subscribe to The Steal Club for more.

💻 Fernando Pessagno Hit 100K Unique Monthly Visitors

by Fernando Pessagno

Hi! I'm Fernando Pessagno, founder of ResumeMaker.Online, a resume builder tool that helps non-tech users to easily design an effective resume.

ResumeMaker.Online recently reached a huge milestone: 1M free downloads. Almost at the same time, it also hit 100K unique visitors per month for the first time. I've achieved this growth without spending any considerable time on marketing.

Hopefully my story will spark ideas that could also be applicable to your businesses!

The background

In the past three-and-a-half years since I launched ResumeMaker.Online, I moved to three different countries and worked at three different full-time jobs. Adapting to new cultures and settling down meant that there were always too many things going on to set proper routines around a side project. Plus, I didn’t want to neglect my main source of income or my relationships.

This made it clear that the marketing strategy needed to be one that wouldn’t require constant action on my part. Instead, it should focus on bringing practical, long-lasting, continued results.

The plan

Here is what worked for me:

1. SEO: Almost 65% of my traffic comes from organic search. I had a head start by being selected number one product of the day and week on Product Hunt. This built a good reputation, and snowballed into countless backlinks, tweets, and shares from day one.

I was a total beginner then, and not part of the indie hackers scene at all. I posted it just for fun, with zero real expectations. Now knowing how much of an impact it can have, I would have taken more time to prepare for the launch. This would have left less room for luck to play a major role.

From there on, it was relatively easy to follow the successful launch. I wrote a UX case study, did multiple interviews, and got featured on several SaaS-related websites (including Indie Hackers!), although it was always a struggle to get noticed outside the tech, design, and indie hacking bubble.

My target audience is non-technical users, and the goal was to get press coverage in other major channels. I wrote a cold email with a media kit attached, and sent it to hundreds of journalists. The outcome? Pretty low success. So, I decided to change the angle of the story. Instead of making it about the product, I made it about my personal journey.

During that time, Argentina (my home country) was suffering harsh economic effects of the pandemic, and it was under one of the most strict set of restrictions in the world. The story about an Argentinian that fled the country, landed a job overseas, and was helping others do the same was much more interesting to a mainstream audience than just talking about a website.

And, it worked! I managed to get an interview with Clarín, one of the most popular news sites in South America. As an added bonus, lots of other news websites echoed the story, resulting in more backlinks, without me having to lift a finger.

Getting high quality backlinks was only one part. The other was making sure that the website met Google SEO requirements. At one point, ResumeMaker.Online was on the first page of Google for keywords like “resume maker” in almost every country, thanks to the number of backlinks. Then, the December 2020 Google Core Update tanked the rankings hard.

I was in shock, thinking that the site was never going to recover. In a way, I’m glad it happened. It was a much-needed wakeup call to take ResumeMaker.Online to the next level, and tick all the boxes in Google Search Console.

I worked nonstop to fix all of the problems that Google listed, and revamped the mobile experience from scratch. Currently, ResumeMaker.Online ranks better than ever, and the improved performance (perfect score in Google Insights) has had an impact on rankings, overall user experience, and sales.

2. Multilingual support: Data shows that, despite the majority of search traffic being in English, up to 10% of users land on non-English pages. So, I introduced support for six more languages: Spanish, German, Portuguese, Swedish, French, and Italian.

3. Watermark link: At first, I was concerned that monetizing the product would get in the way of growth. I decided to offer the service for free, but I added a watermark link at the bottom of the page. By nature, a resume is shared with multiple people, and I wanted to leverage that. Currently, almost 2% of my traffic comes from users clicking the watermark. Great payoff for a feature that took me less than 10 minutes to add!

4. Share to download: When I introduced the paid version (without the watermark), the free download remained available, but this time, locked behind a share-to-unlock feature. Now, users need to share a link on one of the available social media channels in order to unlock the download link.

Currently, more than 25K free resumes are downloaded monthly. Even though many users do probably delete their post immediately after sharing, around 10% of the traffic comes from social media every month. This is a huge increase compared to previous performance.

5. Shareable discount link: After payment, users can spread the word by sharing a discount link with friends and family. The traffic from this source is below 1%. Naturally, it is low compared to the result of other efforts, but almost 70% of paid users copy the link, and the conversion rate is almost double.

I plan to launch a remote jobs newsletter some time this year, so I added a newsletter subscription form. It currently sits at 30K subscribers, averaging 800+ new subs per week. When the time is right to start working on this, the subscribers are already there!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Reeshav, Priyanka Vazirani, Shân Osborn, Alex Llull, and Fernando Pessagno for contributing posts. —Channing