Dynamic Copywriting

One of the greatest treasure troves full of knowledge on all things related to marketing, advertising and copywriting is David Ogilvy's book, "Ogilvy On Advertising." He is a legend in the field and was the creative genius behind more successful ad campaigns than anyone can keep track of. (And by the way, if you are in marketing, copywriting or advertising, and have never HEARD of David Ogilvy, you really should consider another line of work).

Okay, I know I get a little full of myself sometimes, so let's get down to what this article is all about.

Is Direct Response Advertising Right?

Let me quote from a section in his book called, "The lessons of direct response."

"For all their research, most advertisers never know for sure whether their advertisements sell. Too many other factors cloud the equation. But direct-response advertisers, who solicit orders by mail or telephone (and nowadays by the internet), know to the dollar how much each advertisement sells. So watch the kind of advertising they do. You will notice important differences between their technique and the techniques of general advertisers. For example:"

"General advertisers use 30 second commercials. But the direct response fraternity have learned that it is more profitable to use two-minute commercials. Who, do you suppose, is more likely to be right?"


"General advertisers broadcast their commercials in expensive prime time when the audience is at its peak. But direct response advertisers have learned that they make more sales late at night. Who do you suppose, is more likely to be right?"


"In their magazine advertisements, general advertisers use short copy, but the direct response people invariably use long copy. Who do you suppose is more likely to be right?"

Results vs Creativity For Creativity's Sake

There. It is one thing for me to proclaim the benefits of direct response techniques and how they allow a marketer to measure and test the effectiveness of their ads, websites and every element of their copy. But to hear it from David Ogilvy is like having the Word brought down from the mountain.


Ogilvy also believes that every copywriter should start his career by spending two years in direct response. I agree. Every day I see websites and ads that are creative masterpieces, but have little effectiveness in selling.


Common errors I see are: too much white space, headlines that appeal only to curiosity but not to the customer's "what's in it for me?" motivation, no call to action, and too much design and too little copy.

Ogilvy's Best Work

Ogilvy concludes his thoughts on imitating direct response, by saying:

Do I practice what I preach? Not always. I have created my share of fancy campaigns, but if you ask which of my advertisements have been the most successful, I will answer without hesitation, that it was the first ad I wrote for industrial development in Puerto Rico. It won no award for "creativity" but it persuaded scores of manufacturers to start factories in that poverty-stricken island.

Advertising, marketing creating business websites are not art forms. They are business strategies that are intended to bring in new clients, new business and make sales. Even David Ogilvy tells us that we forget that to our peril.

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown

Hopefully I have been preching to the choir in all my many articles urging marketers and site owners to use their websites as “lead-generation machines,” to gather email addresses and build your lists of prospective and existing clients. I hope as well you have been doing just that for a long enough time that you get a little irritated with me when I harp on the subject again and again.

But have you been subdividing your list into specialized lists that allow you to target your market more and more precisely?

For example, have you subdivided you prospects from those who have actually bought from you at least one time in the past?

Also, have you subdivided your prospects based on what types of products or services they are most likely to buy from you in the future?

Other ways to subdivide your list is to distinguish geographic areas, b2b prospects vs. consumers, industry fields, income levels, business sizes, and on and on. Some of these distintions will make sense to your business and others will not, but always be on the lookout for ways you can present highly specialized offerings to your customers and prospects.

A very easy way to do this is to continually offer new opt in opportunities to the people who are on your list. To do that, you must create new enticements that will appeal only to certain subscribers on your list. In other words, let your subscribers self select themselves and tell you what sub categories they are on based upon what interests them.

If your list consists of small businesses and large corporations (but you have something to offer both), create free information reports or CDs that will appeal only to the executives of large organizations on your list. At the same time, create another product that will appeal to the small business executive.

You then create additional autoresponder campaigns for both groups (I am personally very happy with Traffic Wave, which allows me to create an unlimited number of campaigns with an unlimited number of letters, for a monthly price of $17.95).

These multiple lists then enable you to make offers that are attractive to the small company executive that would just elicit a yawn from the large company executive (and visa versa). Moreover, the more precisely you target your customers, the more effective your sales messages will inevitably be.

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown

Hopefully you have a system in place to capture data on how visitors arrived at your website. This is very important information, because it tells you if you are doing the right things to get more visitors and if you are satisfying the problems and questions that brought these people to your doorstep.


For example, if you are using a tool like Google Analytics, you can track all the search terms (or "keywords") people typed into the various search engines like Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc that led them to your site.


What does this information tell you? Well what if the search engines are sending people who want something altogether different from what you offer? This happens all the time when the content on the site uses key terms that different meanings in different contexts.


If this happens, don't regard it as a total loss. Often the problem can be fixed by a small tweak. For example if your company sells Red Delicious Apples, and search engines are sending people who want Apple Computers, just go back through your content and add "Red Delicious" to the word "Apple" where ever it is found on your site.


But this data may also give you the opportunity to write more content on those same keywords (search terms) if they ARE in line with what business you are in. This would enable you to get MORE of this kind of traffic, but instead of getting it by dumb luck, you would be getting it by design.


When you decide on a list of keywords / search terms you want to target, you can have all your content written to emphasize these terms so that the search engines will give you higher rankings. After all, you won't get too much traffic if you are on the 85th page of a term's search results on Google.


But if over time you write more and more content that diligently features these keywords, you will find your site moving up in those search engine rankings.


Not only that, but the people who find your site in this way will be targeted potential customers, because those search terms they typed represent problems they want solved, or questions they want answers to. If you are in the business of solving those problems or answering those questions, these visitors are gifts.


So make sure your web content is written to emphasize specific keywords or search terms that pertain to the business you are in. Use analytic tools to make sure your keywords are working and to find new search terms that are getting people to your site. And finally, write more content emphasizing these search terms so that your site will get more of these specific kinds of visitors.

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown

freelance copywriter, Sales letters, ad writer, web content writer, white papers

For those of you just coming out of a coma, Ashley Alexandra Dupre, is the high-priced call girl who is at the center of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's recent downfall and resignation. She is also a newly-minted millionaire.

It took all of two days for her to go from a call girl to having a bank account of over $1.4 million dollars.

It seems Ms. Dupre is also an aspiring singer, who had two singles available online. When the news hit about her liaison with the governor, the internet gold rush was on to find out all things "Ashley Alexandra Dupre," and people downloaded her songs by the millions.

And although she earned what seems a modest $.69 per download, millions of people downloaded her instant hits before the news cycle began to wane.

So are there lessons here for those of us who market other "products?"

As a matter of fact, yes.

First, although few companies would purposely want to be in the eye of such a publicity hurricane as Ashley Alexandra Dupre finds herself, publicity can reach many, many more people than paid-for marketing efforts.

One way to get free publicity is to piggyback onto a hot news story (as I am shamelessly doing right now in this article).

My favorite, and most dog-eared book on publicity is Marcia Yudkin's 6 Steps To Free Publicity. Simply put, Marcia is a genius, and I say that without reservation. This book will show you how to look for publicity opportunities and how to ride the wave along with them.

Second, appeal to the very human impulse to instant gratification. Ashley Alexandra Dupre had her songs on the internet in a downloadable format, and you can do the same thing.

It is simply a matter of "packaging" your knowledge and expertise in the form of information products. These can be ebooks, tip sheets, white papers, downloadable audio or video files or software programs.

Moreover, your downloadable product can either be free enticements to get your website visitors to opt into your email list, or you could charge for them. (you can already see how quickly $.69 adds up when tied to a lot of publicity).

Riding a publicity wave and offering downloadable info products can be a powerful marketing strategy. I'm sure Ms. Dupre never saw this coming, but if you are nimble enough to tie what you do to a hot news story, you can reap much of the same benefits (without having to hide your head in public).

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown

One of the first jobs of communicators is to know their audience. The more we can understand about the audience, the more effective our communication will be.

This is why public speakers often conduct some "intelligence" work before giving a speach. I have known some presenters who will ask all kinds of seemingly unnecessary questions about who will be in an audience, what they do, what they all have in common, and what kind of peeves or problems they all face.

One particular speaker I know, who is known for his humorous speeches, will then weave that information into his speech to make his audience roar with laughter.

Writers too can use this same technique to better connect and communicate with readers. The more a writer knows about the audience, the writing can be targeted to that particular readership.

Here are a few questions to ask about your readers the next time you sit down to write for them:

• What things do your readers have in common with each other? Are they in the same profession? Do they work for the same company? Do they live in the same community?
  
  
• Is there a common interest or problem that makes them your readers? Will they be reading what you write to solve a particular problem or achieve a certain goal?
  
  
• How much prior understanding do they have on your topic? You will lose readers if you write significantly over or under their heads. Advanced readers do not want retread information on a topic they've read about many times before, and novice readers will get lost if your information assumes too much background knowledge.
  
  
• Are they looking for condensed information on your topic or are they looking for in-depth analysis?
  
  
• Do they share a common vocabulary on the subject?
  
  
• What demographic information is available on this readership? (Tip: If you are writing for an established publication that sells advertising, you can count on the fact that it knows what the demographics of its readers are. Just ask.) What is the age range of the readers? Do they mostly live in one geographical area? Do they have a common education level?

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, lawyer marketing, lawyer advertising, web content writer, white papers

I read Jonothan Leger’s blog, www.jonathanleger.com, every day and always find new and useful information on his pages. His advice ranges from how to get more traffic to your website, how to improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to make more money with adsense ads.

Recently, he wrote an article called, Should You Hire People To Write Your Articles For You? on his experience hiring a ghostwriter to write online articles to get more traffic to one of his websites. He placed a project on eLance and got three bids for the five article project.

The lowest bid, was for a mere $10 per article and that is the one he chose. Not that Jonathan was being cheap, but the other two bidders neglected to provide any feedback or ratings to justify their higher prices. (This should be a lesson for any freelancer, provide credibility information when you solicit new work)

The ghostwriter got the work done quickly and emailed the five finished articles back to Jonathan within 48 hours.

Problems With Cheap Ghostwriting Work

But, it didn’t come without a few bumps in the road. As Jonathan puts it:

”But the articles were clearly written by somebody who did not speak and write English as a first language, and so there were little grammatical issues that I would have to go in and fix. Having to go in and fix these grammatical errors takes time, and the whole purpose of hiring a ghost writer is to save time, so this extra step took away some of the value of hiring out for the job. However, as the saying goes, you get what you pay for, and I hired the cheapest group to write the articles.”

Hiring a ghostwriter is a viable way to publish online articles that will drive traffic to your site if you do not have the time or skill set to write them yourself. But as Jonathan Leger’s experience shows, hiring the cheapest writer may cause problems. You do not expect to have to rewrite something you have already paid for.

Moreover, as I mentioned the other day in my article, 10 Tips For Choosing A Ghostwriter For Your Online Articles, it takes a certain skill set be able to write a good article AND write HTML code AND know how to include your target keywords in order to produce online articles that drive traffic to your website.

I’m curious to know if any of you has had experience either doing ghostwriting work for others or hiring ghostwriters to get a project done on your behalf. Send me your feedback and comments.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

More and more businesses are discovering that hiring ghostwriters to write online quality articles for them is one of the fastest and best ways to drive traffic to their websites and enhance their professional reputations.

For your own business, you might want to consider this: These online articles, written by ghostwriters, are possibly the best types of links you can get to point to your website. Because the readers have read the articles and clicked on your link, they are highly targeted visitors who want more information about what you can do for them.

In other words, not only does your ghostwritten online article lead visitors to your site, it also pre-sells those visitors by giving them a reason to find out more.

Here are some tips to help you choose the right ghostwriter to help you build your online presence with quality online articles:

1. Make sure your ghostwriter knows how to incorporate search engine optimization (SEO) techniques with your article. This means the writer must have an understanding of how to include your targeted keywords into the text so that your articles will be picked up by search engines like Google and Yahoo. There are many ghostwriters who know how to write, but know nothing about how to get high search engine rankings. Choose a writer who can help you get more traffic in addition to writing your article.



2. Does the writer know HTML code? Can he or she embed your key words into links in the article so that they point to several different pages on your site? Is that writer’s HTML proficiency enough to make the article’s layout look appealing to a reader’s eye and to avoid making it have a “big block look” with lots of unbroken text. Remember, just publishing the article is not enough if readers don’t read it.




3. Make sure your ghostwriter has a track record and samples of articles you can see and read. Has this writer published his or her own articles online at sites like ezinearticles, searchwarp, articlecity, goarticles or any of the other big article banks? Not only will reading this writer’s own articles give you an idea of that person’s writing skills, it will also show that the writer understands the concept of article marketing.




4. Can the writer write like a native speaker of the language? Most of the time you will want these articles written in English because this language still dominates most of the article banks and newsletters. Of course a writer does not have to speak English as a primary language in order to write flowing prose. But many people have paid low prices to have an article written by an inexpensive ghostwriter only to receive an article that is written in a choppy, awkward syntax. Again, you can avoid this by seeing the writer’s own articles if he or she has a website and has written articles for the online article banks mentioned above.




5. Is the payment arrangement reasonable? The common practice is to pay half the writer’s fee up front and only pay the remaining half after receiving the articles. Understand that the writer still holds the copyright to these materials until you have paid the entire fee, and it only transfers to you when the final payment has been made. But be wary of someone who wants it all up front, just as a writer will understandably be wary of you if you only want to pay after the articles are written.




6. Are the ghostwriter’s fees ridiculously cheap or outrageously expensive? You get what you pay for in all areas of life. You should expect to pay a minimum of $50 to $75 for a well-written article with SEO techniques. On the other hand, for a very technical article that requires a lot of research, you should expect to pay as much as $150 or more. Even at the high end of these ranges, you are still getting a very good price for an experienced writer who can often get $1 per word for commercial writing work (these online articles average about 500 words so at these rates you are paying between 10 cents to 30 cents per word). If you go after the bargain basement writer, you will get bargain basement results.




7. Does the writer finish the project in a timely manner so you don’t have to wait weeks and weeks for your finished articles? Another reason to check the writer’s status on article banks like ezinearticles is that you will see if this writer is prolific enough to write quality articles quickly and have them back in your hands in time to do you good. Check to see if the writer has achieved special status with the article banks like Platinum Writer or Expert Author. These designations will help you determine if this writer can produce the output fast enough, without sacrificing quality, to suit your needs.




8. Does the writer’s fee include re-writing? As long as you gave the writer clear directions about the content you wanted, reasonable rewriting should be part of the fee. As a writer however, I have had to put my foot down on a few occasions when the finished article came back meeting the original instructions given to me and the client just changed his mind and wanted a whole new type of article written. In those rare instances (it has only happened to me twice) I insisted on a new fee for a totally new article. But ordinarily, you should not have to pay more for a little rewriting within the scope of your original instructions.




9. Does the writer package the work in a reasonable number of articles? This means, writing several articles on the same topic all at once. I generally feel that a minimum of ten articles on the same topic is needed for the project to pay off for me and for the price to be reasonable for the client. This way, all my research is spread over ten or more articles and I can price my work accordingly. Besides, writing one article at a time will not make a significant impact on the amount of traffic you get to your site. Depending on how much competition you have for that keyword, you will probably need 20 or more before you start seeing significant gains in the number of visitors coming your way.




10. Does the writer have an online presence other than just an email address? You want to avoid someone who can only be contacted by email. So you should be able to see an actual website owned by the writer, have a telephone number and be able to read samples of this writer’s other articles. When someone actually has a website, you have more assurance this person is a committed business person who is not likely to take your up front money and disappear. A well thought out website indicates someone who takes a professional approach to being a freelance writer.

Online articles are powerful and fast ways to drive traffic to your website. Working with a good ghostwriter can greatly improve the process and deliver results to your bottom line faster.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, lawyer marketing, lawyer advertising, web content writer, white papers

Here is an excellent article by Elaine Berry that provides a different spin on why a copywriter must give customers a reason to act. Often we assume readers of our delightful prose will just fall into our laps by the sheer beauty of our writing. Not so. If we are in the business of getting people to take action, we must spell out a clear reason for them to do so.
Charles Brown

Have you ever had this experience?

You are selling what you believe is a very valuable product. You are marketing it for $97 and have written a brilliant sales letter. But sales aren’t what you hoped. So you step up your sales pitch: “Order by midnight tonight and this $97 product is yours for $47!”

You sit back and wait for the sales rush. But it doesn’t happen.

Why not? Almost certainly, because you haven’t given a REASON! If it cost $97 yesterday, how come I can get it for $47 today?

People are suspicious. And the more seductive the offer, the more suspicious they are. They want to know:
· WHY should I buy this product?
· WHY will it work for ME?
· WHY are you reducing the price?

There is one word above all that you need to include in your copy. This word alone has been shown to have a massive impact on sales. This word is “BECAUSE”.

· WHY should I buy this product? Remember BENEFITS sell products. Tell people that they need to buy this product BECAUSE this is what it will do for them or this is the problem it will solve for them. If you are marketing a hair-restorer, emphasize that the customer needs to buy it BECAUSE it will improve confidence, end embarrassment, help in attracting the opposite sex, lead to a happier life and so on.
· WHY will it work for ME? Give very specific reasons. If you have a scientific-sounding reason, so much the better – these are always very reassuring. For instance, you should buy this hair-restorer BECAUSE it contains the brand-new product “X” which has been scientifically proven to be effective in 99.9 percent of cases.
· WHY are you reducing the price? Remember that the most potent “reason why” is always the TRUTH! If you are reducing because you are experimenting with prices, say so! If you need to raise some cash in a hurry, say so! If you are aiming to build a relationship with your customers so that they will buy more of your products in the future, say so! People will respond.

There was a famous social psychology experiment in which the experimenter, standing in a line to use a copy machine, requested people ahead of her to allow her to get to the front. A much larger percentage of people agreed when she gave a reason, than when she did not. But, remarkably, in a third experiment, she simply asked, “Could I use the machine first BECAUSE I need to make some copies?” A full 93 percent agreed, yet this time there was no reason given – the effect was achieved just by the inclusion of the word “BECAUSE”!

If you haven’t been using this secret weapon, you’ve been missing out on what has been found time and time again to be one of the most powerful triggers for massively increasing sales. Try it – BECAUSE it works!

Elaine Berry is the owner of Bizwrite, the only one-stop-shop for help and tuition on all aspects of writing. Come and find out about our copywriting, ghostwriting and article-writing services and get a FREE 12-part e-course on copywriting!

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Elaine_Berry


COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

One idea a lot of marketers have never tried is writing articles for trade publications.

If your business serves a particular industry group, chances are that industry has at least one trade magazine that needs good articles to publish.

This is one more reason to target a niche in your marketing efforts. Everything seems to go so much more smoothly when you zero in on a group of potential clients who all have similar needs.

The easiest way to find these trade publications is to go to your local library and look through the Handbook of Associations. Under almost all of these associations is a trade publication and a description of this magazine’s focus and mission.

Next, subscribe to the publication and join the association. If you are serious about targeting this industry group, this fee is simply the cost of doing business. Then, as a member and subscriber, approach the editor with some article ideas.

You will find that you have a very good idea of getting your idea accepted by these editors because trade magazines are often in dire need for quality articles.

If you have the writing skill, write and submit your article. If you do not, hire a ghostwriter to produce these articles for you with your byline (did I mention that I do a lot of ghostwriting?).

After getting a few of your articles published, you will have earned the status of a regular contributor. You may then wish to propose a column idea.

But by virtue of being a regular contributor of this trade publication, you will now have a certain cache when you approach the association’s members.

Writing articles for trade publications is an excellent way to make inroads into a certain industry group or clone your best clients who belong to that industry.

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, lawyer marketing, lawyer advertising, white papers

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

A significant part of this blog’s focus is to help law firms and other service businesses develop new business. But getting an entire organization aligned with marketing goals is no easy task.

This is illustrated by an article Larry Bodine wrote about in his Larry Bodine’s LawMarketingBlog called, "Can You Beat This 25 –Question Sales Training Quiz?" A few of the questions on this quiz are:

• Most of our rainmakers are over 65.
  
• Few or no partners have individual business development plans in writing.
  
• Most of our lawyers are active in only bar associations and lawyer groups -- not in any organizations of clients.
  
• The firm does not premeditatedly identify industries where it has experience with the aim of pursuing potential business clients in those industries.
  
• Business development time spent by lawyers is not tracked.
  
• The firm has never broadcast a Webinar.
  
• The firm has no blog.
  

These are all signs of an internal focus that is easy for any organization to slide into. A thriving organization, whether it is a law firm, a consulting practice or a service business, must have an external focus.

This means to have a real finger on the pulse of the marketplace. It is simply not that hard to find out what potential clients want and need. And it should not that hard to get out of the office and join groups of potential clients or take part in charitable causes that can bring your people into contact with potential clients.

If your organization does not track and reward it’s key people for getting actively involved in new business development, nothing will happen. In law firms, and I suspect many other organizations as well, key people are actually penalized for taking time away from performing billable work to get out there and meet new potential clients.

Check out Larry’s article and see if your firm needs to make some changes.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

Do you want to drive more traffic to your website? Do you also want to build a reputation online as an expert in your field?

There is a very simple, low cost way to do both. Write and publish articles online. Hopefully you’ve seen sites like www.ezinearticles.com, www.articlecity.com or www.ideamarketers. These sites are places writers can submit short, 250 to 900 word articles and make them available for webmasters to use for their own websites.

This is the perfect win-win arrangement. The webmasters get free content for their sites, as long as they do not make changes to the articles and give the author a link pointing back to his or her site.

The writers, in my opinion, get a lot more. They get to include a “resource box” at the bottom of their articles that tells readers a little bit about themselves, a link back to the author’s site and the author keeps his or her copyright on the material.

A single article can become a viral marketing tool if it is picked up by dozens or hundreds of other websites. I have one article that is now posted on 167 different websites, and each of those websites now has a permanent link pointing back to my site.

The cumulative effect of writing a lot of articles is enormous levels of traffic to your site. Depending on how competitive your particular niche is, a critical mass level might be 50 articles, or it could be 100. But once you hit that level, you will never have to worry about getting enough traffic to your site.

But what if you have neither the time nor the skill to write these articles? The solution is simple. Hire a ghostwriter. For example, I have had several clients hire me to write articles in their names to post on these sites. I typically charge between $50 to $150 per article, depending on how much research I have to do. In a few cases, the cost has been higher, but those are rare occasions, and the work I had to put in to write those particular articles was quite significant.

If you choose to work with a ghostwriter, you will benefit from the economics of scale. Hire the writer to produce a minimum of ten articles. The research needed to write a dozen or so articles is often not much more than it is for one article. I have found that writing articles for a client in batches allows me to charge fees at the lower end of my fee scale.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

I recently started reading an interesting book that, on its surface, has nothing to do with copywriting or writing web content. And yet, I think this book could have incredible value to those who must write any form of business communication.

The book I’m talking about is “Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft PowerPoint to Create Presentations That Inform, Motivate, and Inspire,” by Cliff Atkinson. This book is primarily designed to teach business people who to create better Microsoft PowerPoint presentations using a story-driven format.

Atkinson, who is a communications consultant for a long list of major U.S. corporations, confronts those typical, bland PowerPoint presentation we’ve all had to endure, that consist simply of long lists of bullet points. These kinds of presentations are not only marvelous cures for insomnia, they almost universally fail to get their point across (no pun intended).

Instead, Atkinson has adapted movie making and screenwriting techniques to tell a story with presentations (hopefully you are now beginning to see what this all has to do with copywriting and writing web content). He brings in the concepts of storyboarding and the three-act play structure to be used in communicating to audiences.

I see several applications here for copywriters and web content writers.

1. The human mind tends to think in stories. Stories have been essential to our ability to understand new ideas and information. But even more importantly, stories make ideas more believable and persuade us to act on these ideas.
   
   
2. Atkinson advocates beginning with the script or narrative text, just as a film company would begin creating a movie with the script. Many presentations (and websites) are created with the visual elements first. Instead, begin with the story or the message. A pretty website won’t sell, but the words written on that site can and should.
   
   
3. Don’t try to communicate with raw data. People are not computers. Craft that data around human problems, needs, goals, changes and experiences. People relate to those things on an emotional level. And they are more likely to believe and act on this information when they can emotionally relate to it.
   
   
4. Make the reader the star of the story. Either literally bring the person into the copy by addressing him or her in the second person, or tell a story about someone who is similar to the reader.
   
   Think about all those commercials for weight loss products. They all use real people giving their testimonials. Potential customers for these products can relate to being overweight and unable to get the pounds off. Seeing someone like themselves who successfully lost weight with this product is strongly motivating.

Check out Atkinson’s book, Beyond Bullet Points. I think it has a lot of applications beyond just PowerPoint presentations.

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, lawyer marketing, lawyer advertising, white papers

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

I think marketers and copywriters of all industries could benefit from a recent article in Binary Law,which discussed a survey conducted by Primary Research Group. The survey is called, "Survey of [US] Law Firm E-marketing Practices", and it shows how law firms are now marketing their legal services.

One statistic jumped that jumped out at me is 20% of U.S. law firms now have active blogs. Although the survey used a tiny sample of 46 law firms, which limits the applicability of it's results, I still found it exciting to learn that more lawyers are marketing their services with blogs.

Why lawyers should market with blogs

Blogging is one of the best ways out there to generate traffic to your website. Search engines love blogs because of the frequently updated material on the topic a serious blogger produces. A case in point is a recent article I wrote called, "Marketing For Law Firms" about a Kansas lawyer named Grant Griffiths who eventually stopped all his advertising because his blog on Family Law was pulling in all the new clients he could handle.

Another wonderful benefit lawyers can see from writing regular blog posts is the fact that over time, these blog articles become material that can become drafts for magazine articles, white papers, and even full-length books.

Many lawyers and other professionals I know want to write a book "someday" in order to maket their law practices or other businesses. But the project seems impossibly large to them and they are so busy.

Blogging just two or three paragraphs a day can quickly add up to an impressive amount of material. Include reader comments and questions, and the bloggers responses, and this material grows even faster and can soon become a book length manuscript.

The take away from all this is that lawyers are beginning to market themselves in smarter ways. Perhaps the days of inane and useless lawyer ads are beginning to wane.

This lesson is instructive for lawyers and non lawyers as well if they are looking for ways to market themselves and attract new clients.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

This is the year law firms, professionals and service providers finally start seeing real results for their marketing efforts. This will be the year that their advertising, direct mail and websites finally start bringing them the targeted new business and new clients they really want to work with.

How? Because I believe those people who market professional services will finally wake up to the fact that "Multi-Step Marketing" is far more effective than "One-Shot Marketing."

Why One-Shot Marketingwhite Isn't Working For Law Firms or Other Professionals

As a former lawyer myself, most of my attention is focused on marketing ideas for law firms, but what I am about to say is equally applicable to other professionals, service providers and even sellers of products if their expertise is part of the package that comes with their products (large B2B computer systems or software programs would be an example).

One-shot marketing is when you see an ad or visit a website that asks you to contact the company for more information.....and that's it. That simple (and often understated) request for a contact is the only call to action such an ad or website makes.

One-shot marketing gets one, and only one, chance to influence the prospect to act. And if that ad doesn't dramatically reach out and grab the reader's interest, it will be forgotten in 2 seconds.

Look at most of the ads in the Yellow Pages or in business news publications. Do any of them just reach out and grab you that way? Do any of them offer anything really different from their competitors' ads? Rarely.

Why Law Firms and Other Professionals Must Adopt Multi-Step Marketing

As the name suggests, "Multi-Step Marketing" takes advantage of multiple contacts with prospects. When you see an ad, a website or a direct mail piece that offers you a free DVD, CD, white paper, report or ebook on a topic that is currently a source of problems for you, that is the beginning of a multi-step marketing program.

When you request that free information because it sounds relevant to problems you need to solve or changes you want to make, you are "opting in" to the marketer's mailing or email list. This is called "permission marketing" because you are giving that company permission to contact you again. In so doing, you have identified yourself as a prospect with at least some level of interest in what that company does.

If the free information piece you receive from that company is well written and seems to offer a solution to your problem, you may decide to do business with them on the spot. In most cases, this information will help you form the opinion that this company is an expert in this area. It may also position that company as the front runner in your mind in case you ever decide to do business with someone in that field.

But you may not decide to act right now. It is what happens next that truly delivers the remarkable success for multi-step marketers. Over time, you will receive occasional follow up mailings and information. If you weren't ready to do business when you first received the information, your circumstances may change over time.

The long term effect of repeated contacts by the company (because you gave them permission to market to you) is that this company increases its positioning in your mind as THE experts in their field and as THE company you are most likely to do business with when and if you decide to act.

Multi-Step Marketing Helps Law Firms and Professionals Measure Their Marketing Results

Law firms and other professional services have a very difficult time measuring how effective (or not) their advertisements, websites or direct mail really is.

How do you know which calls were produced by your Yellow Page ad, the ad you put in the local newspaper, from your website or from other sources?

Multi-step marketing gives professionals an instant tool to determine how well an ad or website is doing. The number of requests for the white paper, DVD or other information product is the measurement of how effective your ad or website is.

You can even give the same product different titles so you can test whether one ad generates more inquiries than another.

Multi-step marketing eliminates the feeling that advertisers often have of stumbling around in the dark.

Will my "prediction" for 2007 come true? Well I intend to do my part to get the word out to law firms and others who need to hear about multi-step marketing. I'd also love to hear from you. What experiences and recommendations do you have?

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

Website Copywriting Designed To Focus on the Sale

I just read an interesting article by Todd Follansbee in Web Marketing Today. Todd is a website "Usability and Conversion Expert" who has conducted extensive research on what makes people buy when they visit a website.

Based on his research, he recommends that instead of following the traditional, "put up the home page and add other elements later" model, companies would do far better to design their websites backwards.

10 Point Site Design For Higher Marketing Results

Here are Follansbee's 10 points for designing websites backwards. You will see how this approach offers a much better chance of delivering higher sales than the traditional metiod:

1. Interview clients to find out what they want and need.
   
2. Brainstorm a list of everything a client would want to know in order to feel comfortable making a purchase.
   
3. Organize this information into logical groupings.
   
4. Visualize visitors buying process and construct a "sales ladder" that leads them along this process in sequence.
   
5. Storyboard each page of the site to make sure it follows the sales ladder.
   
6. Test your ideas with real customers to make sure your assumptions ring true in the real world.
   
7. Navigation. Begin setting up the website so that it offers the design elements visitors will be comfortable with.
   
8. Hire designers only after all sales ladder has been created and the sales ideas have been tested with real world customers.
   
9. Build the site. Rather than build it first and add on later, the site is only built after a clear plan has been laid to take visitors through the entire sales sequence.
   
10. Launch, monitor and refine. Testing never ends. Keep improving, keep checking your ideas against real world customers and how they behave.

This is a very informative article by Todd Follansbee. If you would like to read his entire piece, check out http://www.wilsonweb.com/design/follansbee-website-backwards.htm.

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

All of us in the copywriting trade come across business people who are shocked that we charge money to write for them. Check out Drew MLellan's blog, Drew's Marketing Minute, for an example of what happens when companies try to do their copywriting in house. This is a funny and sad example of why a good writer earns his or her fee.

The link to Drew's article is Do You Have Any Idea What He Is Selling?, and if you can guess what this company was trying to sell, you are far better than I am.


COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

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“It was a dark and stormy night….”

I'm sure you know how Snoopy's opus goes from there: “A shot rang out,” “a woman screams,” and “a pirate ship appears on the horizon.”

As far as communication devices go, it is hard to beat the old fashioned story. Opportunities for mixing stories with copywriting abound and some of them are pretty darn good sales tools.

I like to think of a story as a “before and after sandwich.” You start with the “Before” condition. This is where your customers have a problem. The problem produces pain. The customers try other solutions to no avail, but eventually the pain becomes intolerable and they seek you out.

The other slice of bread is the “After” resolution. The problem is solved, the pain is gone and the customers are grateful to you and your company for coming to the rescue.

The meat of the sandwich is how your product or service moves this person from the “Before Condition” to the “After Resolution.” This is where you show off your skill, expertise, benefits, quality, hard work and customer care. This is also where you show how and why you are unique from all the other solutions the customer tried before finding you.

You can incorporate stories on your website, direct mail or your advertisements. If you capture the emotional import of why your customers must solve these problems, your story will be powerfully effective.

Your stories can be true, as in the case of client testimonials or case histories, or they can be fictional as in the case of a “composite” character who is made up of several of your real customers.

In order to be truly effective, make sure both the Before” and “After” situations are full of emotion. This point was brought home to me yesterday when I saw Will Smith’s new movie, “Pursuit of Happyness.” In most respects I would rate this as an outstanding movie. Smith and his real-life son both gave the acting performances of their lives. The story was gripping as well.

But the one complaint I had about the movie was its ending. After going through all the trials and misery this man went through, and after witnessing his unshakable courage, the ending came quick and was over too soon, without giving me the chance to enjoy his triumph with him.

If you are going to make your readers/audience live through all the emotional pain of a story, you should also let them experience the joy and triumph that comes at the end. As a marketing message, a story without an emotional payoff, just doesn't deliver the goods.

I’d be very interested to hear about what your experiences have been in using stories with your copywriting and marketing efforts. Make a comment and tell us what you think.

COPYRIGHT © 2007, Charles Brown

What is the one thing your business cannot do without? What one single priority outranks all others?

Whether your business is a small one-man operation or a huge, Fortune 500 behemoth, generating new leads for new business is your single most important imperative.

Without customers or clients, you have no business. And without a constant stream of new leads, you will eventually have no customers.

According to a recent survey, lead generation is the number one goal for businesses in 2007.

Generating leads to acquire customers and drive sales will be top of mind for b-to-b marketers next year.

According to BtoB’s “2007 Marketing Priorities and Plans” survey, acquiring new customers is the No. 1 marketing goal for 2007, cited by 62.3% of respondents.

That said, how are you planning to generate leads for your business in 2007?

Two immediate ideas that can get your lead generation project off to a fast start in 2007 are:

1. Create Free Information Products. These can be everything from white papers to tip sheets to ebooks to free DVDs. This strategy recognizes that all buyers go through an information gathering stage in their buying process (the exception of course is impulse purchases, which is a topic for another article). Think about the last time you bought a new car, new house or helped a child choose the right college to attend. You probably looked up a lot of information on the internet, possibly you questioned people who had direct experience with your various possible choices, or you asked the companies for information.
   
   The single caveat of this approach is to avoid selling for your competitors. Don’t just offer information that sells the entire category. If you do that, your reader may choose anyone who offers what you offer. You must sell yourself without being too self-serving in the process ( a fine balancing act, but one that can be done).
   
   Offering free information is a strategy that recognizes that each buyer has a unique buying cycle and procedure. This approach allows you to enter their consciousness at any point along that buying cycle and become a trusted resource for valuable, non-self serving information.
   
   
2. Turn Your Website Into a Lead Generating Machine. It costs most businesses $10 to $20 for every qualified visitor that lands on their websites. I would argue that if you have a choice between getting a visitor to buy something now vs. leave his or her contact information, you are better off getting them to create a lead. When someone has opted in to receive future emails from you (ie “permission marketing”), you have multiple chances to sell and then sell again. This person can become a repeat customer for life. But if you try to hit the home run every time someone visits your site, you only get that one chance to sell and at best may only sell one thing.

Lead Generation is a huge topic and I will revisit this subject many times in the coming year. But for now, I would like to leave you with some resources you will find helpful.

• Brian Carroll writes a blog entirely devoted to the topic of generating b2b leads. He offers a lot of great ideas that you can never keep up with. If you can only put one our of ten into practice, you will do well.
  
• Michael Stelzner writes a great blog on marketing with white papers. He has also written an excellent book on the same topic called: Writing White Papers: How To Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged.
  
• Anne Holland has written a very good article on Marketing Sherpa in which she offers some very practical insights and ideas on how to generate leads.
  
• Another article by Anne Holland is about lead generation mistakes that get in the way of effective marketing. Anne is nothing if not candid, and her insights are always worth reading. They are also the kinds of mistakes we can all make, so her article is a good cautionary piece.

I’m interesting in hearing about your ideas and insights on the topic of lead generation. What do you think about this topic?

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown

Not a day goes by without new knowledge finding its way into my thick skull.

Here's a case in point: I just did a Google search with my name and the word "copywriter" and found something very interesting. Most of the hits I found were from two sources, online articles I've written and comments I've posted to other people's blogs. Now I didn't go through all the pages Google came up with, but the blog comments seemed to be running slightly ahead of the online articles.

I already knew that writing online articles is a wonderful way to get the word out about your expertise. Not only do other sites pick up your articles and publish them (with links pointing back to your site) but these online articles are very effective ways to improve your search engine rankings.

But what really surprised me was how much benefit I was getting from commenting on other blogs. Blogging is a worldwide community effort. There are many wonderful bloggers out there doing great work in any field. Sharing and exchanging ideas is what the whole blogging phenom is about. But I still had no idea how effective it was for my search engine rankings to simply make useful, appropriate comments on other peoples' blogs.

The blogosphere has been described as "collective intelligence," in which the minds and ideas of all sorts of individuals from all over the world are pooled together to solve certain problems or advance the knowledge in a given field.

If you have ideas and knowledge to offer others in your field, don't keep them to yourself. Find those bloggers who are already putting out good stuff on their blogs.

Don't regard these other bloggers as your competitors, but instead think of them as colleagues and peers. Put links to their sites on your blog or website and post useful, informative and non-self serving comments on their blogs and you will benefit as well.

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown

Imagine a friend has set you up on a blind date with a person your friend just raves will be the person of your dreams (can you see disaster coming?), and after much cajoling, you finally agree to meet this “wonderful” person for dinner.

Now imagine this person spends the entire evening talking about himself or herself. About his/her career, hobbies, dog, exploits, travels, etc. On and on this evening goes as you mentally plot the ideal way to murder your now ex-friend.

Unfortunately, most websites, advertisements and company brochures I see take the same approach as this obnoxious date. These ads/websites/marketing materials talk about the company, the product, the service, how long the company has been in business, vain and unsubstantiated claims, pictures of top executives’ smiling faces, or laundry lists of services offered. Blah, blah, blah.

I call this approach to copywriting, “push communication,” because these writers feel compelled to thrust their agendas on the hapless readers. The one glaring difference between culprits of push communication and the obnoxious date, is that it’s hard to gracefully escape the obnoxious date, whereas the reader can flip the page away from a self-centered ad, click away from a boring web site or throw a useless brochure into the trash.

Now let’s contrast this to what I call “pull communication.”

“Pull communication” is dictated by what the reader wants and what interests the reader. The reader’s interests “pull” the dialogue forward. Every word written on an ad, website or marketing materials is written with the intent to solve the reader’s problems or help the reader achieve a goal.

I am reading a very interesting book called, “Your Attention Please” written by Paul B. Brown (no relation to me) and Alison Davis, that talks about this very point. To cure the problem of “me” focused communications, Brown and Davis suggest taking a close look at an industry that does a remarkably good job of writing to address readers’ needs and wants: service magazines.

These magazines, like Better Homes and Gardens, Men’s Health, Money, Self, Family Circle or Prevention, craft every single article to show readers what they want to learn. Articles in these magazines are on topics like how to lose weight, how to raise emotionally secure kids, how to get the most out of a fifteen minute workout, how to grow a flower garden, how to attract the ideal mate, or how to prevent a serious illness.

All these topics are examples of “pull communication,” because the spotlight is on the reader and it is what the reader wants. The reader dictates what is said, not what the writer wants to say.

So if you find your website, advertisements or marketing materials are starting to take on a, “Hello, this is who we are and this is what we do,” character, pick up a stack of magazines and see if they will give you ideas that will improve your “pull communications” skills.

And also, pick up a copy of “Your Attention Please.” It will be money well spent.

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown

Just like a road trip, a website n must have a specific destination in mind before you start out. When visitors arrives at your site, if you have not painted them a “yellow brink road” to lead them to where you want them to go, they are apt to go just anywhere.

If your website is for business, there are only four possible destinations. Each and every word of content must be written with any or all of these destinations in mind. Your goal must be to lead every qualified visitor to take one of these actions:

1. To get the visitor to buy right now. If you are selling merchandise, you should have very clear offers, order forms and promises that lead your visitors to pull out their credit cards right now.
   
   
2. To get visitors to contact your company to do business or to find out more with doing business in mind. Have your contact information visible on every page (an all too often violated rule) and give visitors REASONS to contact you. What I usually see is content so lacking in tangible benefits, the visitor only thinks, “I’m glad I know about these guys now, if I ever need them, now I know where they are.”
   
   
3. To get visitors to leave their contact information. This is the heart and soul of permission marketing. Offer visitors something of value like free information, as an ethical bribe to get them to provide their names and email addresses. This destination is to generate leads that you can follow up with future contacts.
   
   
4. To get visitors to come back to your site. This destination leads them to bookmark your site or subscribe to your feed so they are updated whenever you post new material.

None of this is easy, but if you set up a website aimlessly without purpose, these goals are impossible. As I said before, once you know where you want to lead visitors, write every word of content toward leading them to take these actions.

What are your ideas on this? I’d love to hear any of your examples and insights into this.

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

I'll be taking a break for a few days to celebrate Christmas with my family and I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday season as well. I finally got the last of my shopping done yesterday (please, no man jokes. I've heard them all).

Anyway, I have a number of ideas ready for after Christmas and into January, so I'm looking forward to getting back with you soon.

As Tiny Tim would say, "God Bless us everyone."


freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

This is the third, final, and perhaps the most important, article in a series on the topic of features vs. benefits. It will deal with the emotional reasons people buy any product or service.

This series was inspired by the many ads, websites and marketing materials I’ve seen recently that seem to offer little or no benefits to the would-be customer. Hints, yes. Vague references to something better, yes. But very, very few strong benefit statements that boldly tell the customer how this product or service will change their lives, solve their problems or open up new opportunities for them.

So now let’s get started on the all-important emotional benefits.

Emotions outsell logic and facts 10 to 1. There’s an old but true saying that goes, “people buy on emotion and justify with logic.” Even for corporate customers, your material must convince a human buyer who makes decisions in part based on how these decisions will further her career or cast her in a bad light with others in the company. Leaving out the emotional element can, and often is, fatal to your efforts.

Emotional benefits go right to the heart (literally) of why people make decisions. Often called “psychological triggers,” these reasons are the needs that operate like software in our brains.

Take, for example, home exercise equipment. The logical benefits behind making such a purchase might be to lose weight, to be healthier or to have more energy. All valid reasons that should be included in your copy if you are selling such a product.

But the emotional benefits might be to look good to members of the opposite sex, to enhance your own confidence, to help your career because you look better, to be accepted by others or to be able to wear certain clothing in the summer. All of these reasons might sound slightly shallow, but they are a part of all our psychological makeup.

According to John Caples in his book, Tested Advertising Methods (Fifth Edition) a partial list of these psychological triggers (which he calls appeals) is:

• Make more money
  
• Save money
  
• Retirement security
  
• Better health now
  
• Health care security
  
• Security in old age
  
• Career advancement
  
• Sex, acceptance by the opposite sex, love or affection
  
• Greed, including all the things that money can buy
  
• Fear of loss, fear of failure or fear of losing
  
• Duty/Honor/Professionalism, which means our altruistic motives of doing what’s right or best for others or simply doing our jobs well, or doing what’s right for our employer or organization
  
• Desire to avoid embarrassment or rejection
  
• Desire for acceptance or popularity(or as Caples puts it, the desire to be one of the “in” group)
  
• Competitiveness (which might include the desire to own a better car than your neighbor)

As you look over this list of psychological triggers (which is by no means a complete list of the emotional reasons people make decisions) you will notice that sometimes different triggers can be used to sell the same product or service.

For example, going back to that corporate buyer mentioned earlier, she might be motivated by her professionalism to do what was right for her company, her desire for career advancement, her fear of hurting her career by making a bad decision (back in the 60s, 70s and 80s a common business proverb advised that no one ever lost their job for choosing IBM), fear of making a bad decision which might turn out to be an embarrassment

With all this said, I’d like to mention a very good method for making all these emotional reasons and psychological triggers very real to the reader of your material. In her bookWeb Copy That Sells, Maria Veloso uses a device she calls the emotional scenario to paint a vivid picture for the reader.

What Veloso’s emotional scenario does is create a story-like scene in which the reader can see and feel the emotional cost of the problem they now face. Then she puts the reader right inside another scene to contrast that problem scene, which show how they could feel if the problems were resolved. This second scene allows the reader to experience the ownership of your product and assumes that the sale has already been made.

It works like this (we’ll go back to using the home exercise equipment mentioned earlier):

It’s 2:00 in the afternoon and you find that you are having to tuck your shirt back in again because your “spare tire” keeps your clothing from fitting right. You’ve been trying to catch the new woman’s eye for weeks now, but you think she doesn’t pay any attention to you because you look out of shape and over weight. On top of all that, you are getting tired and listless and don’t know how you’ll have the energy to make it until the end of the day.

Now imagine it’s just four weeks after buying your new Super Ab Cruncher. Your clothes fit great and you feel more lean and muscular than you have in years. You feel like a bundle of energy and your boss has complimented you twice this week on the productivity level you have been performing at. On top of that, the new woman just asked you out for drinks after work.

Ok that would definitely need more work before I would ever put that on an ad or website, but as rough as it is you still get the idea of to put the reader, as the main character, into an emotional scene.

Remember that your customers and clients are first of all people, not analytical machines. It takes more than facts and logic to persuade any human to make a decision or take action. If your ads, website or marketing materials fail to take into account the emotional nature of the people you are writing to, you will never see the results you are looking for.

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

Sorry folks for the delay in getting new material posted for the last few days. It's been a combination of the Christmas season (yes I am a guy, and yes I still have a few presents to buy) and some technical glitch with Blogger's system. I have been unable to log into my Blogger account for two days.

Anyway, I hope to get the new material posted later today.

freelance copywriter, ghost writer, web content writer, white papers

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown

If you haven’t yet had a chance to check out Brian Clark’s site Copyblogger.com, you are missing out on an excellent resource for anyone who uses a blog to bring in business. Like myself, Brian Clark is a recovering attorney turned blogger/copywriter, but I’m sure none of you will hold that against him (or me).

Just a few samples of the excellent and useful stuff Brian has on his site are:

• 5 Simple Ways To Open Your Blog Post With A Bang. Sometimes just starting a blog post, or any article for that matter, is difficult. Your thoughts have either already raced ahead into the meat of what you want to say or you can’t get them started until you have the beginning worked out. Regardless, this article by Brian can be a great help with this often frustrating part of writing.
  
  
• 10 Sure Fire Headline Formulas That Work. We are all probably guilty of working the list and how to formats to death on our blogs. In this very helpful article, Brian shows us ten other ways to provide valuable information to our readers without using the same tired old formulas. This article alone is what prompted me to devote today’s blog post to Brian’s work.
  
  
• 21 Traffic Triggers For Social Media Marketing. This is a superb article by Brian about how addressing the emotional needs people have can result in high traffic volume to your site. This is a great article with a lot of insights.
  
  
• If you want a really thought provoking article to sing your teeth into, check out Telling People A Story They Want To Hear. I won’t spoil this one for you by giving too much away, but it is definitely worth your time.
  
  
• Another of Brian’s series on “Magnetic Headlines” is 7 More Sure-Fire Headlines Templates That Work. It is a follow up on the 10 Sure Fire Headline article mentioned above and it contains more ideas for writing great headlines.
  
  
• Anyone with a website or blog wants attention, traffic and readers. Brian’s article How To Write A Killer How To Post That Gets Attention provides a lot of material to get you moving in that direction. More great stuff from a guy who keeps coming up with more.

To say I am a fan of Brian Clark and his Copyblogger.com blog is an understatement. I thought it was high time to give him the credit he is due by letting you know about him as well.

COPYRIGHT © 2006, Charles Brown