Freelance SEO Copywriter

According to advertising guru David Ogilby, "On average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy of your ad.  It follows that, unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90% of your money." Headlines that work best, Ogilby taught, are those which provide a benefit.

Rifling through the January 2007 issue of People Magazine, blogger Brad Shorr reports, he found headlines that fit the Ogilby standard:

"He's never laid eyes on wet food this good!"  (Eukanuba Cat Food)

"Will you find the person who will change your life? (Match.com)

"100% tasty, 45% less fat." (Kraft)

My own favorite of the headlines chosen by Shorr comes from Olay:  "DO try this at home." What a clever contrast, I thought, to all the warnings we hear about NOT trying  the showy but risky maneuvers we see professional drivers performing in TV ads. What I like about the Olay tactic is that it takes something I'm already used to hearing and turns that on its ear.

A similar tactic is great for blogs, I think.  Find something in your industry that people consider a "given" and come at it in a whole new way.  Cooper, Grutzner, and Cooper, authors of Tips & Traps for Marketing Your Business, agree. They recommend making fun of something in your own industry, focusing on a common problem, then showing how you helped customers solve that.

"There are no dull products," the authors conclude, "only dull copywriters." I take that to mean that, if you can't get excited about why your blog readers DO need to "try this at home", those readers aren't likely to get excited, either!

Multi-tasking is the big word around job interviews these days. Most small business owners find themselves wearing many hats and playing many roles in running their business. It’s important for entrepreneurs to use a “multi-tasking” approach when it comes to their marketing efforts as well.

As I work with business owners on their blog marketing strategy, I’m finding at the start of the conversation that most are already fully aware that blogging has become an indispensable part of any business tool kit. The only problem is that their efforts are being devoted to playing all those different  roles just to keep the business running, and so they lack the time and inclination (and sometimes, as my clients readily admit, the talent) to compose blog posts.

I want to share a true marketing story, recounted in Don Voorhees’ The Book of Totally Useless Information, about Blue Bonnet Margarine.  During World War II, butter was in short supply, and the Standard Brands company decided to add margarine to its product list, sponsoring a contest to name the new spread.  A company employee in Texas suggested naming the margarine after his state’s flower, the bluebonnet. That was the winning entry, but, as Vorhees goes on to explain, the company “didn’t use a bluebonnet flower for the logo but opted to use a blond woman wearing a blue bonnet”. They had re-purposed the name!

Remember that blogs can multi-task and re-purpose, too. There’s more than one important way in which small business owners’ or professional practitioners’ business blogging efforts can have a disproportionately large effect on their marketing results.  As professional website copywriter and blogger Matt Rouge puts it, "Blog posts contain valuable information about your business and your industry.  This information may be further used in email and print newsletters, white papers, brochures, and other media."

The blog can reflect different aspects of the business and different personalities. 
Whether you propose to do the blog writing by yourself, have your entire team participate, or collaborate with a professional ghost partner like me, the content in the blog posts will be a way of continually thinking through and reinventing your business brand.

Then, the material in those posts can be used to market your business offline as well as in the blogosphere.

 

Economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction" to describe the process of new technology continually replacing the old. Nowhere is creative destruction more evident than in business marketing.  "It's a whole new ball game," say David Verklin and Bernice Kammer, authors of the book Watch This. Listen Up.Click Here. Blogging for business is certainly one of the new ways to play ball when it comes to marketing strategy.

By the time you've finished reading one page of their book, Verklin and Kammer point out, 200,000 would-be car buyers and 5,000 would-be brides will have researched wheels and weddings on Google. In fact, using "search" to navigate the Net is so ordinary, google has become an accepted verb! 

If your business isn't being "creatively destructive" by adopting online marketing strategies, the implication clearly is, you'll be inhaling competitors' dust! Roughly three new blogs are started each second of the each day, according to Technorati. Only problem is, keeping them up with enough consistency and frequency to make a difference has proven a problem for more than half of business blogs.  In fact, my profession of ghostblogging was born out of this very not-so-creative "destruction" on the part of business owners too busy running their business to also write about it!

A small business owner's or professional practitioner's business blogging efforts can have a disproportionately large effect on marketing results - IF those efforts are kept up.  Those positive effects are enhanced when the information in blog posts is "re-purposed" for print newsletters, brochures, and ads, as professional website copywriter Matt Rouge remarks.
It's ironic, but true.  With blogging, business owners can have the "creative" without the "destruction"!

The newer technology of blog marketing and more traditional marketing methods can enhance each other, with "old" and "new" playing off each other's strengths, creating business as they go!

“Good”, or “good enough”?  That’s one of the big debates in business blogging circles these days. As a professional ghost blogger, I’m always reading what other bloggers have to say, and just the other day, I found two blogs representing the two extremes of business blogging strategy.

Computer programmer Robert Plank calls himself a fast food copywriter.  That means, he says, he can write sales copy “that’s good enough”, and he can do it quickly and consistently.

When you go to a fast food restaurant, you go there to save time and money, Plank points out. You get your food in a matter of minutes. The food doesn’t have to be healthy, nor is it necessarily unhealthy, either.  It just has to be fast, and taste the same every time.

I must confess that, before coming upon Plank’s blog, I’d never thought of my blog posts in terms of restaurant menu items. I would hope every blog post I create conjures up an image of a maitre d’ and linen rather than one of golden arches! To be sure, Plank writes sales letters for clients, not blogs. Anyway, Plank’s big on seven word sentences and the “copywriting equivalent of a McDonald’s fast food worker…and NOT an artsy fartsy gourmet cook.”

Representing the total opposite end of the business copywriting thought spectrum was a blog by Roman Jelinek (writing a guest post on David Risley’s blog) Jelinek shares his view that few but quality posts are better than frequent and rushed posts.  He recalls the 19th century scientists Gregor Mendel who collected data and studied results for seven years before publishing the paper that led him to be recognized as the father of modern genetics.

Before you make a post, says Jelinek, do research, looking in odd places for sources to which most people don’t have access. Make connections in your blog post.  Show your readers something they don’t see every day. Time spent preparing will be returned to you in blog readership, and in driving business to your website, is the implication).

So where do I stand in all this?  I agree with David Risley when he says “If you take forever to write your posts, you will probably not see the rewards for your time.” Fact is, search engines reward frequency and recency of blog posting, so one very high quality blog post each month or even each week simply isn’t going to even “place” from an SEO standpoint.

I’m probably closer to Jelinek’s corner of the ring, though. Blog posts are out there, and stay out there, representing your business. Blog posts do need to be well-researched, they do need to make unusual connections to create interest and to keep readers coming back - you definitely want to aim for quality. After a couple of years and thousands of blog posts on behalf of different business clients, I can tell you, quality beats fast food - forks down!