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The higher business people rise in the business world, the more likely they are to get invitations to speak.
However, they are also more likely to have no time to craft a speech, which is where good copywriters come in.
Arvid Westfelt shares his expertise on taking a highly consultative approach to writing a speech by following 3 simple steps.
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Have you picked up Dean’s free report yet? Then you know that the 10th astonishingly simple way to dazzle your clients and double your income is to be a trusted consultant.
What it means is you’re not just a pair of hands typing copy. You are selling expertise in the broader sense of helping your client succeed.
If you get to that much-envied position, chances are your client will ask you to help her with things that are outside your specialty.
It could be radio ads, investor relations — or writing a speech!
Your 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.
How to write email marketing messages that get clicks
Email is fast, cheap, and if done correctly, incredibly effective. That’s why so many businesses, online and offline, want to use email as part of their marketing.
The downside is that unlike many other media, the technology for email marketing hasn’t progressed much over the last few years. In many ways, it’s gone backwards.
You never know what platform people will be using to access their email. You don’t know the size of their screen. You don’t know if they’ve turned off images or have a strict spam filter set up or if the email will even be delivered.
Compared to other types of marketing, email marketing can be pretty primitive. You can’t take anything for granted. And it’s wise to keep things simple.
So when you need to write email marketing messages, and you want people to click on a link (which is almost always the goal), you want to keep a few basic ideas in mind.
My grandfather’s chicken-plucking secret of success
Today is Thanksgiving. In the U.S., this is the day when we give thanks for all the important things in our lives.
I’m thankful for many things, one of which is my late grandfather.
In his simple way, he taught me the most important secret of success in my life.
My grandparents lived in the heart of West Virginia. As a child, I spent many long summer days at their home, running in the wide green yard and splashing through the creek looking for crawdads.
I’d play until my grandmother called me in for dinner.
The meals were never fancy but always fresh because my grandparents raised a lot of their own food, including corn, potatoes, green beans, strawberries, grapes, cabbage, tomatoes, carrots, onions, and a few chickens.
One afternoon, I was sitting behind the house with my grandmother, who was peeling potatoes and stringing beans. She asked me what else I wanted for dinner. I told her chicken.
Sharpen your writing skills with the stopwatch challenge
Most people who gravitate toward copywriting love words. Dishing up lots of them is relatively easy. The real challenge is editing to achieve a tighter and more lively style.
So if your writing has become bloated and sluggish, perhaps what you need is a little challenge to trim the fat and energize your selling copy.
The exercise I have in mind is based on radio advertising and will challenge you to write a complete, action-inducing sales pitch that can be spoken aloud in 60 seconds.
I have a background in writing radio advertising. And I got the idea for this challenge while writing radio ads for several products. It occurred to me that while this form of writing uses few words, it takes incredible discipline to make those words sell.
This is especially true when you realize that the words are fleeting. Unlike print advertising, your target audience cannot go back and review the copy. They have to hear it, understand it, and respond to it after just 60 seconds.
A 9-step copywriter’s guide for taking effective notes
Many people think of copywriting as a creative act. It’s true that all forms of writing fall into the general area of creativity.
However copywriting is creativity with a purpose. It’s all about crafting the right message, getting a profitable result, and meeting tight deadlines.
I’ve found that the key to efficient and effective copywriting is organization and preparation. And it all starts with taking good notes and organizing those notes into useful chunks.
Here are some tips on how to take good notes.
Collect all the information you need before you start writing. You can use my copywriting checklist to get you started. Having information at your fingertips will save you time and make your writing more specific and relevant.
Write your notes in a notebook. Yes, you could type them. But writing out notes in longhand forces you to slow down and focus your mind so that you can become familiar with the information. This is something I learned in a former life as a teacher. The physical act of writing helps you learn faster, with more retention and comprehension.
