Writing highly effective copy can make the difference between low and high sales of any given product, program or service. And you make your copy effective by doing careful research into your reader's psychology, using proven copywriting tactics and crafting an extremely compelling offer.

Here's how to properly use each of these necessary tactics.

1. Researching Your Reader's Psychology

What keeps your readers up at night? What would they give anything for?

What are their insecurities? What do they want—and why do they want it? What do they want that they don't want other people to know they want?

Article writing is part science and part art. As a solopreneur, it's important that you feel comfortable and confident writing content for your business. Content is too important to disregard or not take seriously.

The good news is that even if you aren't presently comfortable with your writing skills, there are simple things you can do to improve your article writing. Here are the three most helpful.

Create a Structure

Before you sit down to string sentences together, create a structure for your article. Think of it as a very informal outline. For example, the outline for this particular article might look like this.

• Intro re: why article writing is important and that it's easy to improve.
• Tip #1—create a structure

If you're producing any kind of content—newsletters, blog posts, social shares, graphics, podcasts, and/or videos—to market your coaching business, an editorial calendar can be your ultimate secret weapon.

Originally developed in the print publication industry, editorial calendars were implemented to provide busy editors and publishers an at-a-glance overview of each issue as it developed.

Since magazine issues required several months' of work by numerous team members, editors needed a document that gathered and recorded specific information about each piece of staff-produced content in each issue and the status of that content's development.

Content marketers and bloggers began borrowing the concept within the past decade or so. The benefits editorial calendars bring to the table more than justify the additional time and effort it takes to create one and keep it current.

One way to look at copywriting is as the art of creating motivation using the written word.

The written word carries profound power to persuade. But how do you use this powerful tool to create motivation? By mastering and implementing these five principles below.

1. Benefit-Driven Language

Most business owners focus a lot of attention on telling consumers why their company or product is the best. Yet at the end of the day, that's not what consumers care about. Consumers care about what you can do for them.

They don't care that you have the biggest company, but they do care that you'll always have their product in stock. They don't care that you've been in business longer than anyone else, but they do care about reliable service.

Did you know that you have fewer than 20 seconds to grab your reader's attention? Once you have it, you have to keep it, of course. However, once they've made a decision to continue reading, it's easier to hold their attention.

So the first few sentences matter. They may be the most important words you write. So how do you hook your readers? How do you grab their attention? Here are five tried-and-true ways.

Ask a Question

One of the easiest ways to capture attention is to get your reader immediately involved. You can do this by asking a question.

When people read a question, they want to answer it for themselves or guess at an answer. By doing this, they become invested in the answer.