Here are 6 mistakes to avoid when copywriting, drawing from my experience as a professional copywriter for over 20 years.

You are going to do it badly at first. That's a rite of passage. But with practice, it gets easier. So get comfortable testing what you write until you can write it well.

However, by avoiding these 6 mistakes, you are instantly going to improve your copywriting.

Yes, I get it it! I know it's so tempting to say that everyone needs your product or service. That's probably true. But market your product and service to everyone in the same campaign and I promise you, you will be talking to no one. No one will be listening. Why? You aren't addressing their unique needs and concerns. You can't go broad and be effective.

You need to niche down to one target segment. This scares a lot of business owners when I tell them this. They immediately respond by saying we will be ignoring or putting off all the rest of their customers. But I promise you, by targeting and speaking only to one target audience at a time, you will convert at a higher rate because they will hear you, get you and want to buy from you - because you are talking to them.

Avoid big words and industry jargon that may alienate your reader. Your reader just wants a solution and doesn't want to sift through a bunch of pompous words to try and find what they are looking for. Tell it to them straight. Avoid the big words and the "clever" play on words. Write for upper primary school level readership. As long as you can keep it simple, your message will be clear to everyone.

Think of it this way - if you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough and then neither will your reader. People don't buy what they don't understand.

You've probably heard this before, maybe a lot of times. But I'm betting you're still not really doing it. This one is so hard to do for a lot of business owners because they want people to know how great their product is and that's when all the features come out. But they miss telling the reader why these features are so great - what it's going to do for them. I've said before, your readers don't care about you and your product until they understand what it can do for them. If you aren't selling the benefits, the "why they need what you've got", then you aren't selling anything.

Don't make your reader do all the work. Don't make them have to read between the lines as to why your product or service is so great for them. Tell them! If you don't give them reasons to buy, they won't. Using the word "because" after you've described the feature will make all the difference.

When writing, be aware of the size of screen your reader will likely be consuming your content on. Will it look good on mobile? Is it too text heavy? Are sentences too long, paragraphs too long? On mobile view, your content cascades down in a single column, so you need to break up your content into a lot of sub headers and short paragraphs. Otherwise the page will look overwhelming and won't get read. So think mobile first.

This is something I've seen time and again. Engaged by design agencies, I've been given a pre-designed layout with dummy text added in and been told, "Your copy must fit here" or on one occasion, "Write some shit here"! I get it. But sometimes the design isn't done in a way that makes the copy flow in the way the reader should consume it. Every sentence's job is to get the reader to read the next sentence, from start to finish. So always start with the message, the copy. Say what you need to say and then give it to a designer to add the design elements that will make it pop even more. Don't do it the other way round.

Again, it's amazing the amount of times I see copy on a page and no call to action. If you don't tell your reader what to do, they simply won't do it - even if you think it's the most obvious next step. You have to say - Fill in this form below, or Click on this button to find out more or Sign up here. Just having the button or sign up form on the page isn't enough. Your conversion rates will go up if you explicitly tell them to take the action.