So, you’re ready to stop spending hours sitting at your desk writing (or beating yourself up for not writing) and hire a health and wellness copywriter? Honestly, it’s a great move. Hiring a professional wellness copywriter can help you polish up your messaging, increase revenue, increase traffic, increase conversions…and save you a ton of time.
But sometimes, hiring a copywriter can also feel overwhelming. Where do you start? With a website overhaul? A few emails? What does a *good* copywriter charge? And how do you know if they’re actually good?
If you’re even thinking about hiring a health and wellness copywriter, consider this your insider’s guide to make the process go as smooth as grass-fed butter spread over a gluten-free english muffin.
Copywriting Services
First up, let’s talk about what kind of services health and wellness copywriters provide.
Honestly, there are dozens of ways a health copywriter can help your business, but here are some of the most common:
Website copy — the words on your website that direct people to take action (like book your services or sign up for your email list)
Emails — welcome sequences, launch sequences, broadcast emails, post-purchase emails, cart abandonment emails, webinar show up sequences….the list goes on
Sales Pages — those long-ish pages that you use to sell a product or service. Sometimes these are a thousand or so words if your product or course is on the less expensive side. Other times they’re over 5K words long
Content — top of the funnel content like blogs and social media captions
Case Studies - fleshed out ‘success stories’ with strategic storytelling incorporated. Hiring a pro to write your case studies can be a very worthwhile investment
White Papers - white papers are massive and require a TON of research to be done properly. Hiring a pro is always the right call
Ads - Facebook and Instagram ads can be irresistible for your audience in the hands of a good copywriter
Website Copywriting Services
OK, let’s talk about website copy for a minute. Website copy is what the words on your website are called.
Ideally, when you’re hiring a health and wellness copywriter to create or makeover your website words, they’ll help you to refine your messaging.
Your messaging is the concise way you communicate to your prospects how you are going to help them.
But — website copywriting for health coaches, doctors, nutritionists, and naturopaths is different from other types of copywriting. You’ve got to be very careful about making claims in your copy. You need to make sure that what you say you can do is within the guidelines of the government (for example the FDA in the US, and Health Canada in Canada). Check out this blog post for more details on what you can and can’t say.
Websites for health and wellness providers have to demonstrate competence and clarity. And they have to speak to the outcomes your client is looking to achieve.
Your website shouldn’t really talk too much about WHAT you do. The focus of a great website for health and wellness professionals should speak more about how your prospect feels — before they engage with your services, and after.
Tips For Health And Wellness Website Copywriting
A health and wellness copywriter will help you to speak to your clients where they are currently in their journey. We call it “entering the conversation in your prospect’s mind.”
For example, if you’re a gut health specialist or a nutritionist, you may be tempted to make your home page headline say “get your gut health in order and own your kitchen!”
A good health copywriter will help you understand that your prospective clients aren’t *really* thinking “I wish I could get my gut health in order” or “I really want to own my kitchen!”
They’re thinking more along the lines of:
I wish my pants weren’t so tight
I wonder how I can incorporate healthy meals into my hectic schedule
I’m tired of feeling bloated
These are the kinds of pain points that a health and wellness copywriter can help you effectively turn into headlines and subheads for your website — ones that will drive clicks and conversions.
And a website copywriter should also:
Incorporate SEO research — so your website gets found by your ideal prospects
Provide you with compelling meta descriptions for each of your website pages
Be able to suggest keywords to target with future content to drive more traffic to your site
Have a thorough understanding of claims and how to avoid making them in your website copy
Email Copywriting Services
Another common way a health and wellness copywriter can help you to save a ton of time and generate a boatload of cash is with professionally crafted emails.
An email copywriter can help you draft a welcome sequence that makes new subscribers to your list feel welcome and harness the initial excitement they feel about you to make sales.
An email copywriter can also help your weekly or monthly newsletter get more engagement, generate traffic to your blog, and drive sales of your products and services.
Email copywriting for health and wellness providers has to follow the same claim-free format that your website does. Make the wrong claim in an email and you could wind up having to pay fines and/or lose your license. So make sure that your email copywriter is well-versed in claims, no matter what type of email they are writing for you.
Some general guidelines your copywriter should follow:
Stories sell! Let your email copywriter interview you and get some background info so they can weave stories about you or your brand into your emails.
Ideally, emails should be about getting the reader to do *one* thing. Don’t try to do too much in one email. Better to send more emails than confuse your subscriber by calling them to more than one action at a time.
If you’re launching a product or service, you will have to send several emails to your list. It sometimes takes an impending deadline and seven (or more!) times of interacting with your message before a client might purchase. Don’t freak out about sending too many emails to your list or your unsubscribe rate — those people were never going to buy from you anyway.
Health And Wellness Sales Pages
Sales pages are those long (1K to 5K+ word) pages you probably think no one reads before purchasing a product or course…but I promise you, they do get read and they do help to drive sales.
Here’s an example of “sales page” I created for my VIP Experience.
Technically, this isn’t what I’d classify as a sales page — but since sales pages are only typically active during a launch, I don’t want to create a potentially broken link here…so this example will have to do.
If you take a look at this page, it’s trying to sell you on booking my VIP Experience (a done in a week copy project of your choosing — website, emails, or sales page).
You can see it walks you through the process of understanding your struggles, and it shows you how a health and wellness copywriter can help you solve your problems.
It tells you a little bit about me and why you can trust me. It shows you social proof (testimonials from some clients I’ve worked with). It helps overcome sales objections and explains clearly how my process works.
This is a page that people are usually visiting after they’ve interacted with me in some way already, so it’s meant for a warm audience. A cold audience would likely need more convincing to boop that ‘contact me’ button…which is why sometimes you’ll see sales pages that are loooong. Usually, the colder your traffic and the more expensive your product is, the longer your sales page will need to be.
And — as will all things related to health and wellness copywriting, it has to be claim-compliant.
SEO Copywriting Services
Another way a health and wellness copywriter can help you up your online game? SEO-infused content.
This blog you’re reading right now?
It’s an example of SEO copywriting.
Now, there are some people that say content isn’t copy…but there’s a distinction here. I say content without strategy is just content. Content backed by a solid strategy should be handled by a qualified SEO copywriter.
There are lots of health and wellness copywriters who don’t truly understand content strategy. And there is a lot of content that’s written just for the sake of having *something* to say…
But when blog content is strategically crafted with SEO research and a copywriter’s persuasive bent, it can be very, very lucrative.
Blogs live on the internet forever.
They can serve as long-term lead generators for your website until the end of time. They aren’t subject to the whims of social media algorithms. And if you write them properly, your ideal clients will arrive at your website, looking for solutions that you provide!
If you’ve targeted the right keywords and followed SEO best practices, you can capture traffic passively and then direct readers to take action.
Actions like:
Buy your supplements
Enroll in your course
Sign up for your email list
Monetizing your blog isn’t just about throwing up a bunch of ads. When you’ve created an effective strategy, your blog can generate revenue for you while you sleep.
Health And Wellness Content Ideas
People often wonder how in the heck copywriters can constantly come up with health and wellness content ideas.
I’ll let you in on a secret.
We don’t.
We use data to drive our content ideas.
We look at what people are already searching for.
This makes everyone’s job easier and the outcome is so much more satisfying.
If you already know that people are interested in what you’re writing about, it’s guaranteed that you’ll start ranking for that keyword you’re targeting.
A great way to do this is to look at a keyword research tool like Ubersuggest — by SEO wizard Neil Patel.
You can also Google a term and let Google do the work for you…it will show you what else people are searching for.
Other great resources are websites like BuzzSumo and Keywords Everywhere.
If you’re launching a product or course, it’s a good idea to have your content leading up to your launch seed the need for the thing you’re launching.
Check out my blog post on nailing your pre-launch runway here.
How Much Do Copywriters Charge?
How much do good copywriters charge? There’s no one simple answer for this.
There are copywriters who are less experienced and charge less.
There are copywriters who only work with large corporations that have massive deep pockets and unlimited marketing dollars to spend. They charge more.
And there are copywriters that run the gamut in between.
I have friends that charge $10K and up for website copy. I know health and wellness copywriters that charge $20K for a single sales page.
I charge $2,550 for four pages of web copy, 10 emails, or 1 short-form sales page. I find this pricing is affordable for the smaller businesses that I prefer to work with. It’s just my personal preference.
Check out my VIP Experience here to get your copy in just one week.
Finding a health and wellness copywriter that you like that ~gets you~ and understands your mission is key.
And make sure that they understand the importance of claim-free copy as well. I know I keep harping on that, but it really is crucial.
And if you want to see if they’re any good?
Be sure to look for testimonials on their website or social platforms.
And don’t be afraid to ask for samples. Any good copywriter will be happy to provide them…sometimes, especially with sales pages and emails, we don’t like to post them on our websites because they get ripped off easily. It’s sad but true. There are a lot of copycats on the internet.
How Can A Health And Wellness Copywriter Change Your Business?
Here’s the thing.
A great copywriter can help you refine your message and make sure that your website words, sales pages, emails, and blogs speak to your ideal client.
But we can’t make magic happen.
You’ve got to have an audience and a solid, proven offer for a copywriter to work their magic for you.
If you’re just starting out, I actually think investing in a copywriter for your website can be a great investment…it can help you bypass that awkward first website stage…
But, don’t go spending tens of thousands of dollars on a launch copywriter if you haven’t tried beta testing your course launch yet.
And don’t think that a perfect sales page can generate thousands of conversions if you haven’t built up an audience that already knows, likes, and trusts you…
I only say that because a lot of times we hear these gurus pushing the “one funnel away” myth and “sales page conversion hacks” where one small tweak to your check out page copy is guaranteed to make you a bajillionaire while you sleep. I just like to counter some of that icky online marketing BS when I can.
Not trying to discourage you, just want to keep it real.
Those overnight successes you see were usually years in the making.
So keep going, keep showing up, keep selling, keep testing, and if the timing feels right — hire a professional health and wellness copywriter to help you save time and increase revenue.