I listen to a lot of podcasts. Mostly they are startup related. Among them, Startups For The Rest of Us is one of my favorites.
I always had a skeptical view about copywriting and thought of it having less impact on web materials as compared to copywriting on other materials such as physical brochure. This episode made total sense to me.
I’m not saying words on landing page have no meaning at all, but given that most people do not read a lot of text you cannot expect people to pick up every word you’ve put on your landing page. I think it’s more effective to focus on design and that design should be self explanatory.
Also, copywriting is language dependent. Same copywriting can be interpreted differently depending on reader’s language preference. On the other hand, design is universal language. As discussed in above podcast, Call-to-Action in yellow color always yields the best conversion rate regardless of language or copywriting. Why? It’s because color scheme which is part of design is universal.
Again, I’m not saying spending time on copywriting is totally worthless effort. It is still important factor in some other area. However, my recommendation is not to spend too much time on it. Instead, run your contest at 99designs and try to find good designer who can improve conversion rate at your landing page.