Stacy Aguilar is a brand and website designer — and she knows her way around a website.
She’s designed for everyone from small, personal mom brands to ad specialists doing 8 figures in annual revenue, and her work has a massive impact on the businesses she supports…
…she just didn’t know how to talk about it on her own website, which meant explaining her approach and booking clients continued to be harder than it needed to be.
Enter: Cook Your Copy.
Stacy knew she was the best person to write her website copy (and wanted to get better at messaging), but she wasn’t sure how to relate everything back to her audience — or how to do it without relying solely on ChatGPT.
She was designing and serving her clients at a high level, but ChatGPT’s generic approach and inability to help her dig deeper and understand her clients were leaving her with surface-level content that people forgot instead of engaging with.
Here’s how we worked together to dig into Stacy’s messaging, identify how she truly serves her clients differently (no more splashing “differentiators” on your website just to sound good!), and turn it all into website copy that’s gotten her more time-on-page and positive feedback than ever before.
“Standing out” to your ideal clients isn’t about putting on a performance — it’s about relating your clients’ values and wants back to your own perspective and experience.
One of my biggest pet peeves in messaging is generic questions. Things like “What can you do to show your ideal clients you’re different?” just aren’t helpful (also, if you already knew those things, you wouldn’t have needed to download that free marketing workbook in the first place).
I’m not gonna lie to you: there is a messaging workbook inside Cook Your Copy, but the questions you explore on your own before bringing them to me for collaboration are focused more on who you are as a person and how your audience already sees and respects you.
Through this approach to defining differentiators, Stacy realized that she’s already a go-to for things like organization, workflows, and work-life balance.
“I get a lot of questions about managing my schedule, planning meals, and how I do it. For example, I mentioned at the start of the year that I spent some time organizing my Notion dashboard, and I’ve now had four different coffee chats about it — that’s not even something I do.”
After she brain-dumped some initial ideas (guided by her workbook to help, of course), we started thinking about how to actually position Stacy’s expertise on her website.
One of the things Stacy was most worried about was finding a “throughline,” or a way to make all of her various interests and perspectives relevant to each other.
We used Stacy’s unlimited Slack support to explore her messaging together, finding the perfect angle for her website copy to convert more clients by sharing her perspectives.
Ask any business owner who has ever tried to write their website, and they’ll tell you: writing your About page is one of the hardest things you’ll have to do.
It’s not your resume, so you can’t just list credentials, but it’s also not your diary, so you can’t just list your story. Everything you put has to be relevant to your role as the guide in your client’s journey.
For Stacy, we did a little bit of exploration about how much she wanted her brand and client base to be centered on motherhood and working parenthood, vs. allowing motherhood to be part of her story without feeling like the full focus.
We also wanted to make sure her brand spoke to a wide variety of potential clients. She really does have more of a vibe than a niche and works with massive, scaling agencies in addition to smaller solopreneur setups.
For her About page (and messaging as a whole), we decided to center her copy on the concept of “having it all” — reassuring her readers that brand and website design can not only help you have it “all” on your business, but that it’s okay to want to have it all.
Why Stacy chose Cook Your Copy instead of a website copy template:
“With templates, you don’t know what’s working. You just fill it out and think, ‘I guess this feels good?’ There’s no one to reflect with, no one to ask questions and help you refine. I’d write something I thought was fine — not wonderful, just fine — and you’d come back with, ‘This is okay, but I want you to hit this differently. Feel this emotion.’ I remember saying something felt a certain way, and you said, ‘That’s great, but people can’t feel things through a website — they need to see things.’ That kind of feedback is what you don’t get from a template.”
Click here to read Stacy’s whole website!
“I’ve had people tell me they sat down and really read my site — every page. I’ve never had that before. It’s always been ‘there’s words on the page, but look at the offers, look at the portfolio, look at the design.’ Having that level of engagement with your actual words is such a big deal. The people I work with — and want to work with — value substance and expertise. Having well-developed, thoughtful copy alongside the design isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s everything.” — Stacy
Want to finally get the words right on your own website, so it handles all the convincing and converting FOR you? Join Cook Your Copy and leave with a completed website copy draft in just 6 weeks (and do it all with the support of a professional copywriter answering your questions and perfecting your ideas).
