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LinkedInYour 10 favorite ProCopyTips posts for 2010
When you publish a blog, you never know what subjects are going to be popular.
On my other blog, I tossed off a post about Facebook Fan Pages a while back, and to my surprise it drew huge traffic and rocketed to page one of Google for the search phrase “facebook fan page.”
So I got curious about what items people liked best on this blog.
You can’t always tell by comments or tweets, so I used Google Analytics and discovered that the following were the 10 most popular posts for 2010.
They weren’t all written this year, but they represent the posts with the most readers since January 1, 2010.
Do your headlines pass the critical 4-Task Test?
The headline is the heavy hitter in any piece of copywriting.
It’s the salesperson’s opening line, the foot in the door, the first and most lasting impression. A headline wields the power to attract, repel, or slip by readers unnoticed.
The question you must always ask yourself when writing a headline is, does my headline pass the 4-Task Test?
To write effective headlines, you must understand how words affect people and generate action. Specifically, most effective headlines perform four critical tasks: they attract attention, select an audience, deliver a complete message, and draw the reader into the body copy.
Don’t look at these four tasks as a sequence of events. A headline performs them all simultaneously and immediately.
11 powerful emotions to supercharge fundraising letters
To some extent, all commercial copywriting is based on emotion.
Whether you’re writing marketing copy for a car, a mutual fund, or a can of cheese spread, emotions play a part in the decision-making process.
However, nothing relies on emotion quite so much as a fundraising letter. How people “feel” about the cause will determine how they respond to your appeals.
While we humans are capable of an infinite variety of emotions, there are a few basic ones that work well in fundraising appeal letters. Here are 11 of them:
Altruism — Whether people are truly altruistic or have self-serving motives for giving is often debated. The best approach is to assume altruistic motives and appeal to other motives subtly. Assume the best of people and you usually get it.
Anger — Some highly emotional issues can cause feelings of outrage. This is a powerful motivator, but a tricky one. If you decide to be angry in your letter, maintain your anger throughout. Don’t drop out of character and slip into fuzzy wuzzy language on page 2. Your appeal should be along the lines of “This is outrageous and we have to stop it!”
The one simple secret for earning top freelance pay
You can do all sorts of creative promotions and aggressive marketing to increase your value to clients.
But in the end, it’s what you deliver with your freelance services that will make or break your business.
Quality work is the best marketing there is.
Many freelancers or those considering freelancing sometimes want the quick and easy way to achieve the high pay they’ve heard is possible.
But the fact is, there is no shortcut. You have to be good at what you do. Clients must value the service you are selling to them.
Even marketing that is pure genius won’t take you from earning $50 an hour to earning $250 an hour. Marketing opens doors. After that, you have to come through with great work to earn top freelance pay.
With experience, you will come to know the standards in your chosen specialty. But from your first project, and on every project, large or small, you must strive to deliver the best work you are capable of within the time available.
Clients don’t expect brilliance, but they do expect quality.
Can you get freelance clients with social networking?
A few weeks ago, Allison Marquardt commented on the post When freelancing fails and asked some great questions:
I’m wondering about the role of the web and social networking in freelancing. I’m a working writer, but I’m curious about what you think about these things as a promotional tool for freelance writing.
Should I spend time with these things first, or should I just try to get some more work? Things like Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, creating my own blog, etc. I mean, I could spend hundreds of hours bringing these things up to par in an effort to get more clients. Or maybe they aren’t so important. Can I get clients without having 100 connections on LinkedIn, a big Facebook presence and my own daily blog? Do most clients expect to find you on LinkedIn and Facebook? Or don’t they really care, as long as you do good work and meet their deadlines?
Is a good electronic portfolio adequate these days, or is full participation in the social media game a necessity?
Here was my answer to her:
Wow. That’s a lot of questions. And all good ones. Maybe I should write a post on this to answer it.
The short answer is that you can promote your services and find clients in many different ways. It all depends on who your clients are and what works for you.
I still think my short answer was spot on, but let’s take a look at the long answer to fill in the details a little.
