Whenever I get a call from a new client, they are very interested in what type of copywriting projects I usually work on. At cocktail parties (OK I don’t really go to cocktail parties, but you know what I mean) I get asked the same question. But like the weather in New England, the answer can depend on the hour.

Over the course of my 15+ years writing mostly B2B marketing communications, I have worked on just about every type of writing project there is. Of course, what I am working on tends to change with the times; 15 years ago I was less likely to be writing blogs and web copy, while today I am less likely to be writing direct mail pieces and physical sales letters, since these have almost completely morphed into email marketing.

To satisfy the curious, I thought I would share a list of the projects I have worked on this month.  While not totally representative, it should give the curious a peek into what types of copywriting and design I do.

This month I:

• Finished up a 12 page web copywriting project for a Cloud-based search portal company
• Created the design – in Microsoft Publisher – for a case study I wrote last month for a Cloud services vendor
• Wrote over 100 “ghost blogs” and keyword optimized press releases for various attorneys and law firms across the US
• Finished up several pieces of sales collateral (brochures, solution briefs, sales sheets) for the world’s largest IT company
• Started creating a Power Point Presentation on writing copy for the web, which I will share with the marketing department of a billion-dollar corporation
• Updated a LinkedIn profile and gave some social media tips to a busy executive
• Wrote email newsletters for a law firm, a school supply company, and an internet sales distribution consultant
• Met with a financial services client about creating a website for the firm’s new direction
• Began updating a series of product manuals for a company that manufactures clean-air monitoring devices for materials processing plants worldwide
• Went to lunch with one of the greatest professional copywriters of all time, Peter Bowerman, who was kind enough to meet some of his fellow professional copywriters for lunch one day during his vacation
• Completed a few blog posts for www.savvyb2bmarketing.com, a marcom blog I started with 5 other professional marketers about a year ago.

Some months I do more web copy, other times I am totally immersed in creating a white paper, and still others I crank out sales kits and product sheets. But all in all, it was a pretty busy, fairly typical month for me.

If I can help you with a case study, blog, white paper, some web copy, or anything else, please don’t heistate to contact me!

You have created the perfect white paper.  But you can’t drive leads or close sales if your target market doesn’t notice it.

Luckily, grabbing your prospect’s attention is as easy as spending some focused energy on your title. And once you understand the formula, it takes almost no time at all to transform your paper into the sought-after gem it deserves to be.

To understand how important titles are to the success of your white paper, imagine that you have created a white paper about your company’s newest software offering. It is designed for improving throughput in a manufacturing plant. Your preliminary title reads:

 ABC’s new software positively affects throughput for manufacturing plants

So far this title sounds very professional and seems pretty focused. But try to imagine how it sounds to your ideal target. A little self-serving? A little dry? Delving into what your prospect wants to hear can help you craft the titles that will grab their attention.

Step One: Identify the problem

Business executives buy solutions to problems. When creating the title for your white paper, ask yourself “What’s in it for them?”

In our example, it sounds like we have identified the problem: a need for better or faster throughput. But let’s dig a little deeper. What does a manufacturing company get when they have better throughput that they are not getting now? If they can produce more units with the same number of employees, they are lowering their costs and therefore increasing their profit margin. That’s way more exciting than “throughput.”

Step Two: Identify the prospect

No one wants to waste time reading about a solution that is not relevant to them. Again, in our sample title, it seems that we have identified “manufacturing plants” as our target, but we can be even more specific. The IT director is the person who is likely to making the decision on software purchases.

Step Three: Identify the solution

Our solution is a software product. But there are a lot of software products out there. If look closer, we can also identify that it is a user-friendly software product that requires little technical savvy and that it can be implemented in less than a day.

Voila: The perfect title for your perfect paper

Now all you have to do is put it all together:

 A manufacturing IT director’s guide to user-friendly software solutions that can begin increasing profit margins today

Following these three simple steps will help your white papers stand out and help you get more return on your white paper investment.

If you know anything about SEO, you know it’s a big, complex subject with a lot of elements that feed into that final rank. Even better, the rules vary from engine to engine and they are constantly changing.  Today I am going to give you the 411 on a few quick and easy fixes you can do (probably today – or possibly tomorrow if you have to get your designer involved) to plug up some common SEO holes. 

Finding your SEO blind spots

There are a couple of sites that offer this service, but the one I use is http://whois.domaintools.com/ . Go there now, and type your web address into the big empty box on the landing page. I’ll wait.

Look at the first section, called “Front Page Information.”  For a sample, I picked Visa USA, just to show you how even a really big company with a lot of money to spend on SEO can miss the “gimmees.”

What to look for

Here we can see that Visa has pretty low scores on relevancy for all of their meta data. What this means is that the search engine matches the websites reported (meta) title, description, and keywords against their actual site content. A poor score alerts the search engines that Visa might be stuffing its meta data to mislead searchers, and negatively affects its rank. I am sure that Visa is not doing that, so we can only assume that their meta data is not up to snuff.

The two other lines we are going to worry about today are the “Links” and the “Images.” Links are how many internal and external links you have in your site. The more of these you have, the better, especially the outbound links. Images are literally the jpegs and gifs that make up your website. Alt-tags describe the picture for your visitors, in case it doesn’t load correctly.

The Fix

Most of these fixes can be done very easily with a simple html editor. You can read a pretty good article about creating and adding your own tags here http://www.fg-a.com/MetaTags.htm.  If you don’t “do” your own website, gather your changes together and send them to your web designer.

Meta Keywords: Visa fell victim to a lot of mistakes in their keyword selection. The first being that they seem to think potential customers are going to type “more people go with visa” or “print advertising” into Google when they want a credit card. The second being keyword overload: trying to fit every conceivable search term into the keywords, instead of focusing on the top six. Once you have the right keywords selected, you will use them to rewrite the meta description and the meta title.

Meta Title: Visa went with their company name and tagline for the title of their website. This is good branding, but not necessarily good SEO. So that the search engine will consider the title more relevant, they have two options. That can either add their name and tagline to the footer of each page, so that the search engine sees the terms being used throughout the site, or they can change the title to reflect their improved site keywords.

Meta Description: This is the text that will show up under your website on an organic search. Visa went with a very conversational sentence here. The problem is that if they don’t repeat many of these words regularly throughout the site, they will get dinged. The easiest fix for this would be to re-write the description to be keyword dense.

Images: Alt-tags are one of the easiest fixes. Click the image (inside the web editor) and select “properties.” The alt-tag box will be empty. Write something in it. Use a keyword if you can. If you are going to do this yourself, consult the help section of your editor for more exact instructions. Otherwise, throw it over the wall to the web designer.

Links: The search engines love links. Internal ones are good, external are even better. Links should be made on keywords whenever possible. For example, “Find out more about Visa credit cards.” Instead of: “Visa offers a wide range of credit cards. Find out more.” Go through your website page by page and look for places where you can link keyword terms to other pages within your site. Also look for places where you can link out to other sites for more information or complementary products and services.

These five fixes won’t guarantee your site will be at the top of the list, but they are the basics that will get you headed in the right direction.

Have any more easy SEO tips? Share them in the comments section!

For years “they” have been telling us that the next generation is going to heck in a handbasket. This includes a serious decline in the nobler pursuits, including marriage, lifetime careers, and reading.

According to an article in the NY Times, a recent report released by the National Endowment for the Arts  -“Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy” – shows that people are reading more, and not just tweets and texts, either.

The report is based in part on information derived from data gathered by the United States Census Bureauin 2008. The good news for civilization as we know it, is that the percentage of adults who admitted to reading at least one work of fiction in the past twelve months has risen for the first time in nearly thirty years. The greatest gains were made in the 18-24 year old set. This is good news for the publishing industry, which was already struggling when the economic downturn hit last year.

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts was quoted as saying that “in a cultural moment when we are hearing nothing but bad news, we have reassuring evidence that the dumbing down of our culture is not inevitable.” I enjoyed the movie “Idiocracy,” but I am glad that it might not actually happen that way.

What does that mean for us as marketers? Well, when the Millenials become the next generation of C-level execs, they will have the attention span to keep reading white papers, case studies, and all of the other in-depth marketing collateral they need to make good business decisions. MTV who? 

Do you read more now than you used to? Is ten pages still the right length for a white paper? Chime in with a comment!

So maybe you’re a start up with limited funds, or maybe you’re one of the growing number of larger companies with no internal marketing department and a limited marketing budget. Whatever the reason, when you suddenly need a new brochure for the upcoming trade show, a website makeover, or you’re launching a new product and need to update all of your marketing collateral and send out a press release too – who do you call?

The most well-known option is a marketing agency. A full service agency might have anywhere from 3-30 people on staff and can provide the full range of marketing services from branding to concepting right down to putting the finished product in your hands. Of course, all that overhead has to be recaptured somewhere. That is why agencies command a hefty fee for services, and many will only take on clients with an extended monthly retainer contract.

Now let’s say you just don’t have that much need, or you have a one-time project that will require a lot of heavy lifting and not much after that. Or you don’t want to contribute toward the rent on those fancy downtown offices. There are options out there that can give you just what you need for a lower cost AND with more personalized attention. You can hire freelancers to take care of every aspect of your project from start to finish.

I know what you’re thinking but…

Some common misconceptions abound about freelancers:

It is easier to just hire an agency because they will provide all the services and manage the project with one point of contact.

If you want one-stop service from a freelancer, ask. I personally have a network of freelance marketing and branding strategists, designers, photographers, public relations specialists, social marketing consultants and even a packaging designer and printer that I can coordinate for a completely turnkey project. Most freelancers do.

The agency will have better, more experienced talent.

A lot of agencies keep the core staff to just project managers and outsource all the creative to freelancers. I work for several agencies in this capacity. The only difference between hiring me or the agency is that they tack on a 50-100% premium on my regular hourly fee when they send you the bill.

An agency will be more professional, and more accessible:

Freelancers are running their own one-person business. That means they are heavily invested in their relationship with you and highly motivated to give you the best possible results. Even if you would be a small fish for an agency, you are probably a big fish for your freelancer. My biggest clients are around 300 people. My smallest are around 3. All of them are equally important to the success of my business so I make sure they all get great service and attention.

Have you had any experience hiring freelancers in your business? Or do you currently use a marketing agency?

I do a lot of work with start-ups and so I run into this issue frequently. They either have a limited amount of time, money, or both, but suddenly have a trade show coming up and they need something to give to prospects. Or they simply need to start creating marketing materials, and don’t know where to begin.

The following are ”must-have” pieces of marketing collateral:

1. Website: It seems almost too obvious to mention, but the website is the place to start. If you already have a website, you need to look at it critically. Is it customer focused, professionally designed, and easy to navigate – or was it hastily thrown together just to “get something out there?” I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to have an inviting and informative website. After all – you are hoping all those trade show attendees will eagerly check you out after the show – don’t turn them off before they get started.

2. Company and product /service literature: For those on a very tight budget, a two-sided sales slick with an overview of company offerings and a boilerplate about the company can be a suitable amount of information to hand out to overwhelmed trade show attendees. For those with complex offerings and a larger budget, a series of two-sided solution/product briefs tucked into a well-designed folder along with a one page company overview and a business card will do the trick nicely.

3. In-depth research and information: If there’s still time (and budget), the next step on the collateral ladder is creating information-rich documents that take the prospect further down the sales cycle. These include white papers, case studies, and relevant third-party research. Case studies are particularly helpful when prospects might have a hard time envisioning how a solution will be implemented and what they can expect from it. White papers are great tools for establishing thought leadership and providing in-depth information on the benefits of your solution.

Don’t forget your hook

Collateral alone is not enough to make sales. You need to have a strategy for how to use it. What can you offer the prospect that they would deem valuable enough to give you a chance to win their business? What you come up with will depend on your product, your market, and your prospects.

 If you have developed white papers and case studies, don’t just freely hand them out – offer to send them via email to prospects who request it. When you don’t have a white paper to offer, you can get a little more creative. As an example, a client of mine (who didn’t have time to revamp any collateral before the trade show) recently offered green energy show attendees a free initial assessment of whether their property was an appropriate candidate for solar or wind energy. Because they were offering something of real value to the prospect, they had a very high sign-up rate.

What are your must-haves for the trade show? Do you have a no-fail hook you’d like to share?

I have been hearing the same complaint for a long time now: people don’t read anymore. Especially on the web.

As a professional writer, I found this information more than a little alarming. So I did a little research and found out what I suspected all along – people do read, but only if they want to. So how do you make them want to?

Understanding how people read web copy

The truth is people DO read web copy. And marketing brochures, and even white papers (12 whole PAGES!?!?!?!?), and they do so eagerly if you make it worth their while. They just don’t read them the same way they read – say – Wuthering Heights, the newspaper or Tweetdeck.

News flash! When someone lays eyes on your website, they know you are trying to sell them something. The question they immediately try to answer is: Do I want to buy it? Your copy needs to help them answer “maybe” as quickly as possible. (“Yes” comes a bit later.)

If you make it hard for readers to instantly see what’s in it for them to read further – guess what? They won’t.

So what’s the secret to web copy that gets read?

Your website is only the first step in the sales cycle. Try to think of it as getting a date with an attractive stranger you meet at a cocktail party. Try to be something you’re not and they will see right through you. Talk too much and you turn them off. Propose marriage and they run away screaming.

The purpose of the website is to grab their attention, pique their interest, and let them know how to get more if they want it. (You do have links to case studies, press releases, solution briefs, and white paper registration – right?)

Make your heads and subheads work for you – Leave clever word play for journalists, and the suspense-building for novelists. Titles and subtitles are the first things web cruisers read, and they use this information to make a snap decision about whether to read more. Your title needs to lay it all on the line; don’t be subtle. Subheads need to clearly point readers to places in your copy where they will want to stop and stay awhile.

Be clear – PLEASE, I am begging you, do not start out your conversation with your customers by saying “we are dedicated to achieving maximum effectiveness by providing state of the art implementation of IT with leading-edge technology that enables businesses to achieve faster ROI.” What do you do and why do you do it? Tell them.

Keep it short  –  Web copy should be 3-4 short paragraphs. Fewer on the home page. If they want more they will keep digging. Just make sure you have more available (case studies, white papers, solution briefs) when they want it.

For an example, try the following:

Kiss IT downtime goodbye

Stop annoying your employees and driving away customers

Paragraph 1 (Paint a picture of the pain your prospect is experiencing)

Guaranteed 99.999% uptime

Paragraph 2 (Introduce your company’s offering and how it eases the pain)

Paragraph 3 (Back it up with some proof of expertise, figures, qualifications, examples,  etc.)

Want to read more? Find out how great .0001% downtime feels for one of our clients.

Ready to experience it for yourself? Contact us for a free consultation.

Ready to learn more about great web writing?

Contact me to discuss your upcoming web project.

A tight economy means you need more focused marketing efforts

In a tight economy, doing more with less is the reality for product marketing managers. Many companies slash marketing efforts that focus on branding and name recognition and get back to basics – lead generation. In recent years, white papers have emerged as a staple in the product marketer’s toolbox, largely due to their reputation as powerful lead generation tools with an attractive cost-benefit ratio.

 In fact, the power of an effective white paper to connect with prospects and produce abundant, quality leads is unparalleled. According to the TechTarget 2008 Media Consumption Benchmark, “80.5% of buyers find white papers to be either very effective or somewhat effective in the decision making process, more so than any other marketing tool.”

 Why white papers fail

Even so, some white papers simply fail to generate leads. And no one can afford to spend precious resources on efforts that return lackluster results.

 When white papers don’t perform as expected, the quality of writing is usually at issue. According to a recent MarketingSherpa report, the main reason white papers fail is their readability factor; “the topics are uninteresting, titles blah, and content far too salesy or just plain dull.” 

 Many organizations make the mistake of thinking that a white paper is just another data sheet, or just another product brochure, and turn this critical piece of writing over to an engineer or junior marketing copywriter.

 The problem for product marketers is that, in a market saturated with marketing messages, a poorly written white paper is not only a waste of the time it takes to produce it, but could end up turning off prospects and sending them running to the competition.

Outsourcing costs less and produces better results

Creating white papers that command attention and deliver leads is a highly specialized skill. A professional white paper writer charges from $4000 to $7000 for a white paper depending on the market and their experience level. While hiring a professional writer may, at first glance, seem like an unwarranted expense, when you look at the numbers it starts to make a lot of sense.

Tasking an internal employee to write a white paper when they are not practiced at it can take their time and focus away from more business critical projects for a considerable period of time. The deadline tends to slip as other initiatives pop up and take precedence, and soon your white paper is not only poorly written, it’s late to market and has cost the whole team in productivity and added stress.

By outsourcing your paper to a professional, you get a compelling white paper with a greater ability to attract leads, much faster and without the drain on your internal team. Still think it’s not worth it? Ask yourself this – how many solutions do I have to sell to recoup the investment? Now, in this economy, can you afford not to?