Freelance SEO Copywriter

Reading fellow blogger Michel Fortin’s post “Does Your Copy Have Personality?”, I was reminded that personality self-assessment tests have been around for years. I personally remember the Xerox version (back from insurance sales training days), while today as a college career mentor, I discuss Meyers-Briggs results and DISC profiles with my student mentees.

Different types of assessments tests have been popular at various times over the years, and there have been different names for the four different “quadrants” on the diagrams. The general idea is that understanding and relating to people with styles different from one’s own is a skill well worth perfecting.

• Drivers  (aka “directors “) are concerned with results.
  To appeal to drivers, blog about how your products and services helped solve problems, how long that took, and how much it costs to get there. In short (literally), give ‘em the bottom line!
  
• Expressives (aka “relators”) care most about how they’re perceived and about feelings.
  To appeal to blog readers in this category, emphasize the prestige that comes with using your products or services, and how customers can use those to express their own creativity.
  
• Analyticals (AKA “thinkers”) are preoccupied with details.
  To appeal to this audience in blog posts, offer lots of statistics, measurement, steps in a process, and lists of product ingredients.
  
• Amiables (aka “sociables”) are interested in relationships and in pleasing others.
  To appeal to blog readers who are in this category, blog about how your product helps others and helps build and strengthen personal relationships.
  

Now, not all of your blog visitors will fall neatly into one of these categories, and not every blog post is going to hit the spot with every reader. As Fortin puts it, you can’t be all things to all people. In fact, when it comes to ads, he says, writing copy that’s bland and “vanilla” in order to avoid offending anyone is a strategy that will, more often than not, prove appealing to no one.

As a business blogging trainer, though, I can offer reassurance. In blogging for business, there’s more “wiggle room” available.  You can write with one audience in mind today, and appeal to another tomorrow or next week. The trick, of course, is learning, over time, what works best for your business.

That’s not a lesson any business owner can learn by skipping over the trial-and-error part of the course!

Randy Michaels could have made an excellent blog trainer, but the CEO of the Tribune is far too busy training his news anchors not to use newspeak.

We bloggers for business tend to be preoccupied with words we should be using (those keyword phrases that help our blogs get found by the search engines), but Michaels has come up with a list of words and phrases to avoid. With the idea of delivering news in a down-to-earth, conversational manner, he trains his newsmen and women to pretend they are "speaking knowledgeably to one person".  By NOT using what he calls "newspeak", they enhance their reputation as communicators, he teaches.

What a great standard for blog-writing for business, I thought while reading the article. Write copy that reads as if you (or your ghost blogger) were sitting down talking to readers one at a time. (The expression "all of you" is near the top of Michaels' no-no list; others include "flee", "seek" "aftermath", "alleged", "area residents", "at this point in time", and "behind closed doors").

One question I pose to business owners prior to beginning a corporate blogging project is this: "If you had only 8-10 words to describe why you're passionate about what you sell, what you know about, and the services you provide to clients, what would those words be?" (If you're really being passionate, you're probably using words from Michael's approved list!)

In Personal Branding with Social Media, Spinweb CEO Michael Reynolds wrote something that really connects with Randy Michael's rules about using conversational language:

"People want to do business with people they like and trust.  All the business branding in the world will not close a sale if the prospect does not like and trust the person with whom he is doing business….Social media allows us to deliver those trust factors," concludes Michael Reynolds.

Next time you're composing a blog post for your business - shoot for the one-on-one style!

 

"It's easy, it's fast, and it's proven to increase results," says direct response copywriter Michel Fortin, referring to adding pictures, photos, clip art, and graphics to salesletters. Using pictures along with text, according to Head First Labs, increases brain activity and aids learning. It stands to reason that including photographs or pictures in business blog posts makes the blog more interesting and engaging to readers, besides offering a hint of what your website is about.

Again talking about salesletters, Fortin stresses that better headlines have been proven to increase readership and response by as much as 700%...."But adding photos and graphics near the headline", he adds, "has equally boosted response, sometimes even more."

The types of photos Fortin recommends using for printed marketing pieces are the same types, I think, that are perfect for business blogs.

• Photo of the author. In the case of ghost-written blogs, there would be a photo of the business owner(s) whose "voice" is expressed in the blog
   
• Photo of the product being offered
   
• "Before photo" representing the problem suffered without using the product or service
   
• "After photo" showing successful results or relief
   
• Graphics and clip art images to portray abstract concepts. 

One really important tip Fortin offers is adding captions to photos.  "Captions are powerful, as they're almost always read," he claims.  What's more, he points out, a caption can add an interesting fact or tidbit related to the graphic.

By providing recent, frequent, and relevant content on your topic, you've "gotten found" on the search engines. The next step, of course, is to "get read".  "If you don't get people to start reading your copy," Fortin warns, "it doesn't matter how good your copy is." Pictures and photos can certainly help in that department.

 

(Can you see what happened here?  Now you're focused on the word "negative".  Had I titled this blog post "Being Positive in Blogs", I would have focused your thoughts on ways to make a positive impact.

Business blogging, of course, is all about "up".  To be found on a search engine by more potential customers and clients, your blog needs to move "up" in search engine rankings and appear on Page One of Google (and Bing and Yahoo). Even more important, blog titles and content need to focus on the positive results customers can expect from selecting your products and services.

Copywriter and consultant Michael Fortin says that most of the copy he critiques disobey the cardinal rule of selling, by failing to use "upwords", Fortin's acronym for:
 

• Universal
• Picture
• Words
• Or
• Relatable
• Descriptive
• Sentences

To "up" sales, "up" words, Fortin says. Words need to paint vivid pictures in readers' minds, rather like icons on a computer desktop. In order for our minds to translate words and phrases into something we can refer back to, we need a visual equivalent in words.

Leave out the "buts", advises Fortin, and substitute "ands".  Rather than saying "It's a great concept for a website, but it's going to take at least a month to put together" (a negative in the customer's eyes), say "It’s a great concept for a website and it will take only thirty days (imagine getting that whole wonderful job accomplished in only thirty days!) to get it up and running."

When I train business owners and their employees how to develop content for their blog posts, I try emphasizing the positive in a different sense as well. Although one approach in a business blog is to compare your products and services to others', it's important to emphasize the positive rather than "knocking" a competitor. Rather than starting with what "they" (the competition) is doing wrong, devaluing other company's products and services, use the power of WE to demonstrate what you value, and the way you like to deliver your services.

To "up" online rankings, blog "up"!

 

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!