Men with Pens » Taylor

How to Please Your Client Every Single Time

Taylor — Mon, 10 May 2010 05:00:00 +0000

Photo credit Gualtierro Boffi

I have the secret. The never-fail secret to making sure your client is thrilled with the web copy you write 99.999% of the time.

Gather round me, children, for I am about to speak a word of power. Contained within this word is the secret to web copywriting that knows the heart and mind of your client – yea! Knows even their hopes and dreams and deepest desires for their online presence.

Come closer. I shall whisper the word in your ear.

Questionnaire.

That was rather anticlimactic, wasn’t it?

Yeah, okay, so using a questionnaire to gather information from a client isn’t a mystic legend, but it does work. We started using a basic questionnaire quite awhile ago here at Men with Pens, and doing so has accomplished two things for us:

Saved us, the guys who put the words on the page, a lot of time
Made our clients very, very happy indeed

What’s not to love about that?

Why You Should Use a Questionnaire

Questionnaires don’t just work for web copywriting services. They work for pretty much any service you offer, from web design to marketing consultation to any type of business where you need information from your clients.

The questionnaire’s job is to save you time. Years ago, we used to ask clients questions as they came to mind during conversations. “How do you want it to feel?” we’d ask. “What sort of laywer/blogger/sponge connoisseur are you, exactly?” “Do you really, really hate any particular colors or adjectives?”

(Answer: everyone hates the color puce and the word “moist”.)

That method of gathering information worked out pretty nicely, and not just because we were good at asking the right questions. And we realized that we generally asked more or less the same questions for each type of project. We had a pretty good idea of what we needed to know in order to do our job well.

Except the times when we didn’t.

Sometimes we’d forget to ask a question and have to send a new email to confirm a detail – that wastes time. Sometimes we’d word our questions in a way that the client would give us an answer we couldn’t use. Sometimes the client misunderstood our questions. “Well, I have a certification in windsurfing . . .” “No, sorry, we meant your qualifications for, you know. Your job.”

Sometimes we just plain didn’t have the time to ask the really good questions that helped us save even more time and do a spectacular job. When there are fifteen clients clamoring for blood, everyone gets distracted.

The questionnaire solved all these problems.

Ah, but not just any old questionnaire. We took our time with it. We included the questions we usually ask clients, and then we began asking more. And then – this is the tricky part, folks, pay attention – we saved it in a Word doc and worked on it even more.

I know. I am just going to let the genius of that sink in for a moment.

Not Just Any Old Questionnaire

Over months, we altered our master questionnaire. We added new questions that had been cropping up more often and we took out questions that weren’t really necessary. We began getting specific, asking questions that helped us get our clients even better results, and we saw results in our own success rate shoot up as well.

That success rate? It’s extremely rare to hear anything but, “I LOVE this,” around here.

Every single client gets the same questionnaire, and sometimes we need more in-depth clarification, but most of the time we don’t. Most of the time, that questionnaire gets us all the information we need to rock the client’s world.

Because when you have all the information you need to do your job to perfection – what tone and feel the client wants, what adjectives come to mind, the history and the story of their business, the way they want their customers to think about them, whether they want to be seen as funny or professional or cute or consoling . . . .

You are pretty much guaranteed to deliver exactly what they’re looking for.

So ‘fess up. Do you have a questionnaire for your clients? And if you don’t, why don’t you?

From the Pencil Cup

If you want to be one of our success stories with results you want to take to bed every night, contact us today. We'll ask all the right questions to make sure we give you everything you need to fall in love.

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

Taylor Lindstrom (fondly known as Tei) is a twenty-something copywriter and journalist from Boulder, CO. She’s the team’s rogue woman who wowed us until our desire for her talents exceeded our desire for a good ol’ boys club. She loves the color green, micro-point Uniball pens, and medieval weaponry.

Another rockin' post from Men with Pens!
How to Please Your Client Every Single Time first appeared on Men with Pens
Copyright 2006 - 2011, All Rights Reserved.

What To Do When You’ve Been Insulted

Taylor — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:00:07 +0000

The other day, I got an email from a client whom I like very much. He’s a cool guy, profitable business, generally fun to work with, pays on time, all the good stuff. His emails are usually brief, casual, and mention something like, “Have a nice weekend,” or “Hope everything’s good with you.”

So it was weird to get an email that was so stilted and formal that it sounded like it was written by the Queen of England’s chamberlain to someone she was too polite to outright call a waste of space.

I sat there dumbfounded. This was not the client I knew. This guy sounded overly formal. He sounded like he had a huge stick up his butt. He sounded like he didn’t like me.

He sounded, in fact, like he was pissed off.

And I was a little insulted myself. There were a few comments in the email that were very polite little jabs at the quality of my work, or so they seemed to me.

I was riled up. My face flushed, and I had enough adrenaline going to make my hands shake a bit as I started to type out a response. “Bang” out a response is probably more appropriate. No delicate tippy-tapping on the keyboard for me. This guy had just insulted me.

Or had he?

I paused. It really didn’t seem like this client to act this way or to take this tone. Maybe there was something going on that I didn’t know about. Maybe he had just come out of a meeting with a client himself and was in a cranky mood. Maybe he simply had no idea that his language sounded insulting.

A lot of people have no idea how they sound in emails. They’re not professionals, and they don’t use email as their main source of communication. They often don’t realize that the same words said aloud in a meeting room would be incredibly insulting in text.

So I waited until I caught my client on chat the next day.

Turns out, he wasn’t angry with me at all. He wasn’t unhappy with my work, and he hadn’t meant anything by those comments. He just hadn’t realized how his email would sound to me.

And I had almost written him an extremely nasty note.

Email is one of the most common forms of communication between freelancers and clients, and all too often, the clients have no idea how they come off. If I turned around and bit the head off every client who roused my ire, I’d have some extremely angry clients.

Many of whom didn’t even deserve it.

That’s not good for my professional reputation. I’d have clients who would otherwise be singing my praises saying to one another, “Don’t hire Taylor. She’s got a temper and blows up at absolutely nothing. You don’t need that. Go with someone else.”

It’s not worth it to win a fight that might not even exist.

So take a lesson from my experience. The next time you get an email that seems to be a thinly veiled jab – or even an outright insult – to you or your work, take a deep breath, wait a bit, and write back a quick email that asks if you can discuss this either via online chat or over the phone the next day.

Be polite. Be friendly. Act as though nothing is wrong.

Chances are that nothing is. But if you react the way your gut tells you to react and shoot back an insulting email of your own, something might go really wrong, really fast.

No freelancer can afford to have that damage to his reputation. Keep a cool head and find out what’s really going on before you go off.

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

Another rockin' post from Men with Pens!
What To Do When You’ve Been Insulted first appeared on Men with Pens
Copyright 2006 - 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Imperfection is a Good Thing

Taylor — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 05:00:43 +0000

Do yourself a favor and look around the blogosphere. Look at the people who have almost obsessive cult-followings. The people who have started their own movements and revolutions. The people whose fans would knife you if you said an ill word against their favorite blogger.

Realize something with me:

We are not looking for perfection.

If anything, perfection kind of pisses us off. The high and mighty are not our favorite people. We like people who can acknowledge their imperfections, people who admit they screw it up not just sometimes, but often, and the people who can say, “Yeah, I’m really scared too, but I’m going to do it anyway.”

We don’t like people who don’t have a past.

Think of it this way. I’m a millionaire. (I’m not actually a millionaire, but I am in this hypothetical scenario. And yes, my bathtub is made of gold in said hypothetical, thank you for enquiring.) You, as my reader, get to decide which kind of millionaire you would rather I become. You have two options:

Option #1: I have always been a millionaire.
Option #2: I have become a millionaire through my own hard work.

Which one did you choose? I’m betting on Option #2, not just for the totally selfish reason that maybe I’ll give you tried-and-tested tips to become a millionaire yourself, but because no one likes the guy who’s already achieved what we’re hoping to achieve through no work whatsoever.

We don’t like the people who have achieved perfection.

We like the people who strive, every day, to reach perfection and fail.

We like them because even though they fail at reaching perfection, they are still much, much farther along than the rest of us because they’re trying. And we think, “Okay, so-and-so isn’t perfect, but she’s doing much better than I’m doing. So maybe if I stopped trying for perfection and just started trying, I could do pretty well too.”

That’s inspiring.

Imagine this scenario: A unicorn appears before you. An actual unicorn, and it’s sparkling in the sun and has rainbows dancing around it. A small, evidently invisible, angelic choir is singing extremely choral praise-songs to the beauty that is Unicorn.

The unicorn says, “Look at me! I am magical and powerful and amazing! Go unicorn!”

You say, “Um, okay. Why are you here, unicorn?”

Unicorn says, “TO BE AWESOME.”

You say, “All right . . . um. Am I getting anything out of this?”

Unicorn says, “NO. Revel in my beauty! Bring me tribute! Be excited, for I am unicorn!”

Then you stab the unicorn and have steak for dinner, because you can’t do anything with that unicorn. It is totally useless.

This is what a lot of blogs out there sound like. “I’m perfect, I’m amazing, I know all the secrets.” But those bloggers aren’t realistic, and they aren’t of any use to you unless you feel like sitting around and watching someone else talk about how great they are.

We don’t want unicorns. We want human beings who are just like us. Human beings who are flawed and who are willing to give a helping hand to other human beings because they know it’s rough out there. Human beings who get knocked down and have to get up and try again. Human beings who need you as much as you need them.

Human beings are not perfect.

If you’ve been thinking about starting a blog but you’re afraid it won’t succeed because you’re not smart or funny or interesting enough, then repeat after me:

“I do not have to be perfect. In fact, it is better if I am not perfect.”

(Because then no unicorns get stabbed. )

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

Another rockin' post from Men with Pens!
Imperfection is a Good Thing first appeared on Men with Pens
Copyright 2006 - 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Are You Becoming a Lazy Blogger?

Taylor — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 05:00:09 +0000

As your readership grows, it’s easy to think you’ve got this blogging thing down pat. Everyone likes you, you have lots of subscribers, and your posts are Tweeted and Dugg and Stumbled all over the place. You can kick back and relax, right?

Afraid not. There’s a growing trend around longtime bloggers: newbie mistakes.

Producing Lackluster Content

This is perhaps the most common problem among longtime bloggers. If you’ve been around for a few years and you enjoy even moderate popularity, it’s almost a guarantee that newbies show up, all wide-eyed and open-mouthed, to gape at your brilliance.

Even if it’s nowhere near as brilliant as it was two years ago.

Because you’re not trying as hard as you used to.

It’s understandable. If you can put in less effort and continue to enjoy the same perks as when you put in hours for each post, why wouldn’t you slack off?

The problem with that logic is that some new up-and-comer is going to steal your show. People only have so much room in their RSS feed. If they get tired with lackluster posts, they’re going to decide you’re not worth it anymore. They’d rather read that new guy. He always has something new and innovative and well reasoned to say, and his writing is just so clean.

It should be. He’s putting in the hours, and you’re not.

Complacency is a terrible thing. Don’t let it get you.

Not Keeping Up With New Trends

As blogs develop and evolve, new technology emerges to accommodate the needs of your readers. For example, threaded comments wasn’t the norm a year ago.

Now it’s almost everywhere – and many readers are thoroughly enjoying it. It’s an excellent addition for many blogs, and it’s helped foster debate on blogs that encourage community interaction in the comments.

It’s also something that newer blogs are more likely to have than older ones, simply because they were forming their blog at about the same time this trend came out. Newer bloggers saw this tool and decided to throw it in there.

Many older bloggers are often not even aware the new tools exist until their readers start to kick up a ruckus about the absence.

This isn’t to say you need to pick up every single new trend that goes by. (We chose to opt out of threaded comments here at Men with Pens.) But keep your ear to the ground and consider what your readership would enjoy.

What would keep your blog fresh? What would make those whose interest is waning find a new reason to hang out on your blog? Odds are good that there’s a new tool out there your readers would love.

This is also true for different kinds of layouts, better ways of getting in touch with you, and social media tools. Remember when every blog had a Reddit button? You don’t see those often anymore. That’s because all the bloggers saw the way the wind was blowing.

Make sure you’re not left in the dust.

Getting Repetitive

I know it’s hard to come up with new content, but that’s no excuse to start repeating yourself. I’ve seen some popular blogs with posts that sound eerily similar to ones I’ve read on that very same blog. Perusing the archives, sure enough, there that topic is, only a few months earlier.

Naturally, you’ll wind up saying the same thing a few different ways, but push yourself to find new examples and anecdotes. Take rom pop culture, from your own experiences in the offline world, from a new book you’ve read – but find new ways for your ideas to grow and flourish.

Or they’ll become stale and repetitive.

Forgetting to Make a Connection

If you’re super-huge, you don’t have time to answer every single comment. We understand that. We live that ourselves some days.

But if you do have time, respond to people who had something interesting to say, and make them feel that you see them, and that you appreciate they even took the time to comment in the first place. You can’t afford to start ignoring your readership until you’re so ridiculously famous that it’s unreasonable to expect your personal attention anymore.

If you’re not there yet, make an effort.

And even if you are there, do your best. Your readers are a huge part of your success. No matter how big you get, show ‘em some love whenever you can.

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

Another rockin' post from Men with Pens!
Are You Becoming a Lazy Blogger? first appeared on Men with Pens
Copyright 2006 - 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Do You Ask for Permission or Forgiveness?

Taylor — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 05:00:26 +0000

You’ve heard the old saying, “It’s easier to ask forgiveness than to get permission,” right?

It may be easier. But it’s still not a good idea.

I’ve been seeing a lot of this sort of thing lately. I’m on a bunch of lists I never signed up for. I have people following me on Twitter who say things like, “Hey, if you’re looking for new writing markets, you should try this website.” I get snail mail from credit card companies who could not possibly have my new mailing address unless they scammed it off some list.

These are all examples of someone choosing not to ask permission to get me interested in their stuff.

They could have asked. I’ve happily signed up for all kinds of email lists. I have a crazy-busy RSS feed. I get lots of coupons in the mail for companies I frequent, because I signed up to receive those coupons.

Those people asked for permission. The people who sent me unsolicited stuff? They didn’t.

So what’s the big deal? Now I’m getting all this stuff I didn’t ask for, and maybe I’ll actually be interested in it, right? No harm, no foul, and other clichés that may or may not apply here.

Nope. That’s asking for forgiveness. It’s like saying, “Hey, so, sorry we stole your information without your knowledge from Facebook, but we’ll make it up to you by offering you 0% APR on a credit card! See? We’re really sorry. We can be friends now, right?”

No. No, we can’t. Because while it may be easier to ask forgiveness, it’s damned difficult to BE FORGIVEN.

I have not forgiven any of the companies who send me unsolicited stuff. I have not forgiven them to the degree that if one of these companies offers me something I actually want, I purposely go buy from their competitors instead.

Why? Because I don’t want to encourage that kind of behavior. I don’t want anyone to think it’s okay. And I definitely don’t want to purchase something from a company I can’t trust to ask me nicely to pay attention to what they’re doing. I’m mad, and I will probably stay mad at them until someone calls me personally to apologize.

I am not the forgiving sort. You probably aren’t either.

So what does all of this have to do with being an entrepreneur, a copywriter, or a freelancer? Just this:

If you are trying to give yourself a shortcut by not asking for your clients’ permission before you sign them up for your sales list, newsletter, or any other form of unsolicited information, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

It’s easier, yes. It’s way easier to just buy a list or automatically sign people up without their express opt-in. It’s easier because you don’t actually have to persuade them that what you’re offering is something they want.

This is a lot like saying it’s easier to steal a loaf of bread than it is to work for the money to pay for it. Definitely easier. Totally unethical. And if you get caught doing it, you’ve just slimed your reputation for a good long while.

This is one instance where “easier” isn’t worth the consequences.

Get permission from your clients before you decide to put them on your list. If you don’t, you’re going to have to ask them for forgiveness later.

And while asking is easy, being forgiven is not.

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

Another rockin' post from Men with Pens!
Do You Ask for Permission or Forgiveness? first appeared on Men with Pens
Copyright 2006 - 2011, All Rights Reserved.

Should You Go Back to School?

Taylor — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:00:17 +0000

Don’t fret, good people. I’m not here to tell you that you should consider going back to school for a second degree. Most freelancers have enough trouble scrapping together money for the rent without having to worry about paying another couple of tens of thousands.

Especially since no one cares about your degree.

That’s right. No one cares what degree you have. You’re a freelancer. People want to see your portfolio, your testimonials, and your professional-looking website.

But maybe you should go back to school. And what kind of school gets you more of what matters to your business?

The school you make yourself.

How to Start Your Own School

The nice thing about creating your own school is that you’re the one who creates the curriculum. You can structure it entirely around what you need to know for your business.

Some good general courses (the core curriculum of freelancing, if you will) include marketing, SEO, and copywriting, but you can specialize in something that’s just for your particular challenges in business, like this:

If you’re really shy about reaching out to new clients, you might consider taking a class in how to make cold-calling or cold-emailing a little less painful.
If you want your blog to get a whole lot more readers, you should think about taking a class in how to write better articles and be noticed on the web.
If you keep seeing clients come to your sales page and run off without buying, you probably want to take a class in writing killer sales copy that converts.

That’s okay. You aren’t going to go find a class to attend. You’re going to create your own class.

It All Begins with Textbooks…

Don’t run off yet. It’s about to get really fun.

For a long time now, I’ve been reading blogs about marketing. I have books on marketing. I have ebooks on marketing. I have a whole lot of stuff on marketing.

And that’s all well and good, but so far I have done absolutely diddly with this knowledge laying about at my fingertips, which is why I decided to create my own class on marketing. Here’s how it works:

Go gather up all the books on the subject you need to be better at if your business is going to succeed. Apply some logic and decide on a topic for your course, and your course textbooks. I decided on my textbooks. They are:

Dave Navarro’s What’s Holding You Back
IttyBiz’ Marketing School
Guerrilla Marketing on the Internet – Jay Conrad Levinson

This course takes a steady progression. First, I figure out why the hell I haven’t done any marketing (What’s Holding You Back). Then I figure out what I should be doing (Marketing School). And then, all wild and crazy from my success at the two other sections of the course, I dive into the elusive world of guerrilla marketing, which can basically be summed up thusly: Do something no one else has ever thought of.

We saved that one for the end because it’s hard.

And You’ll Have Some Homework…

Not only do you have textbooks for your class, but you’ll also have assignments. For example, all of these books I chose for my marketing class have exercises in them or suggestions on how to apply their advice to your own business, which means – and this is killer – I can give myself assignments. I can actually say, “do the exercises on page 43 for Tuesday.”

See how that works?

Even if I there weren’t exercises or worksheets, though, it’s pretty easy to set your own assignments. In any how-to book, every chapter is essentially an expert explaining how to do something. So you say, “Awesome, let me try that myself.”

That’s your assignment: to try it yourself. Simple.

Pick your class, decide on your textbooks, and give yourself assignments. The easy way to do that? Just read each of the books all the way through and take notes whenever you see something that could be an assignment. Give that assignment a due date.

Yes, you’ll probably re-read the book when you actually do the assignment. But that’s sort of the point. Most of the time, we just read a book and skim through it. We think, “Great idea. I should do that.” But we don’t put it into action.

This is class, people. You’re not just going to read a book. You’re going to take a course and put it into action. By the end of it, instead of just having read the book, you’ll understand how to do what the book is describing.

And You Will Be Graded On . . .

At the beginning of every course, you known the breakdown on how your final grade is calculated. 10% on quizzes, 20% on tests, and 70% on that giant essay due at the end that you forgot to write until the last minute and stayed up all night to do but couldn’t get done so your mother, like the champ she is, called you in sick so you had a whole extra day.

This isn’t like that. Your course is going to be something you really want to do, and really need to do, so there’s no putting it off any more. You’re doing this for you.

That means you get to decide what you’re going to be graded on. In my case, for example, I want to have a whole marketing campaign planned out by the end of my course. Not just how to do it, but an actual plan I’ve made.

That’s my final marketing course assignment. What’s my grade? Whether that marketing campaign is successful. If it is, I get an A. If it’s not, I get an F. If it’s medium-successful but could be better, I’ll get something in between.

The good part about getting grades as an adult is that A translates into money. That never happened in high school.

So talk to me, people. What course would you create for yourself? Whose materials would you use? How would you grade yourself?

Not sure? Just ask. We’re happy to make suggestions for any and all experts we know on the subject you want to study. Actually, we’re happy to put ourselves forward as the expert for anyone who wants to learn how to start your kick-ass web writer business. You know, seeing as we wrote the book on it and all.

But beyond that! Who wants to learn about OIL RIGS?

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

Another rockin' post from Men with Pens!
Should You Go Back to School? first appeared on Men with Pens
Copyright 2006 - 2011, All Rights Reserved.

How to Write Sales Copy When the Standards Don’t Apply

Taylor — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 05:00:11 +0000

Recently, we did some work for a couple of folks with a product marketed to rock fans. Specifically, fans of one particular band. These folks needed a sales page to sell their product, and since James is a ridiculous rock freak, he was falling all over himself to oblige.

I came along for the ride. Passive observer here, people. I am just reporting the facts.

Usually, in a sales page, you want to make sure the benefits of purchasing this product are obvious to your audience. Your two go-tos are as follows:

This product will help you succeed at something you want to do
This product will make you rich

Now, this particular product was a book all about one rock band. It looked interesting, but as someone who could give a good goddamn from which poppy field in Afghanistan Kurt Cobain’s heroin overdose originated, I can tell you right now this is only interesting to people who love this band.

Like, really love this band.

Might possibly have shrines in their attics, love this band.

Which means that our normal go-tos for why people should buy this book are out the window. It’s not going to be useful to anyone’s success. It’s not going to make them rich.

How do you find a selling point, one that isn’t about your usual standards?

Here are the selling points of the book:

It will make other aficionados of this band weep with envy that you got a first edition and they did not.
It will give you even more information about a band that you already knew way, way too much about.

Those are pretty unconventional selling points.

It helps to consider the most outlandish possible ideal customer for this product. In our case, it was the guy who has the shrine in his attic. That guy is going to freak out if he has the opportunity to see just one, ONE more photo of one of the band members doing a sound check.

It doesn’t matter that he’s seen eight million photos of this band. It doesn’t matter that many of these photos are of the band doing sound checks. It doesn’t matter that he could actually recite the exact words the vocalist said into the microphone to test it before any given conference.

To this guy, any new information at all is solid gold. It’s worth the world.

New information that no one else has? It’s the Holy Grail.

Now, this customer may or may not actually exist. For all we know, no one in the world actually has a shrine to this band in his attic. But it does help to imagine the motives of the extremist. He’s not motivated by usefulness or by personal success.

He likes to feel like he has something no one else has.

It makes him feel special. It makes him feel like he’s someone important.

To him, that’s success. To him, that makes him the richest guy in the world.

It really does always boil down to those two points: money and success. The reason it boils down to those two points is because money and success are our tickets to happiness.

Sometimes, though, it helps to just cut to the chase and ask, “What would make this customer happiest? And why?”

If it’ll make your customer happiest to have one more photo of a rock band that existed before his time because it makes him feel special, then go ahead. Let him know you have just what it takes to make him happy and to feel like he’s the richest, most successful person in the world.

And the next time you have sales copy to write for a client where the standards – money and success – really do apply, ask yourself why customers want them for and for what purpose. Chances are, you can figure out what makes them happy, too.

Not a writer? Get us to write your sales copy. We know exactly how to make happiness happen.

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

Another rockin' post from Men with Pens!
How to Write Sales Copy When the Standards Don’t Apply first appeared on Men with Pens
Copyright 2006 - 2011, All Rights Reserved.

What To Do When Your Client is Boring

Taylor — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 05:00:14 +0000

Clients often contact us hoping we can jazz up their current copy. They’re looking for something a little funnier, a little more out-of-the-box, a little less like the next guy.

No problem, we say. Why don’t you answer a couple of questions for us about who you really are, and we’ll use that information to make your web copy sound more like you? Because we’re sure you’re a really awesome person with an interesting take on your industry and lots of good reasons your business is way better than the competition’s.

We say to our clients knowing very well that they have trouble writing this down. They don’t know the reasons, or they don’t have the ability we have to work them into their own web copy. We know clients struggle with writing fantastic web copy – that’s why they came to us. Stands to reason.

So we’re not expecting killer answers when we ask clients these questions. We’re just hoping for a nice, real person telling us about themselves.

What we get often sounds more like this:

Question: What kind of person are you? Easygoing, professional, casual, authoritative, fun, devoted, covered in bees?

Answer: I am someone who gives 110% to every project. I always go above and beyond the call to make sure my client is satisfied. I am a professional with excellent communication skills. I work well in teams and independently. I am goals-oriented and have great attention to detail.

Oooooookay.

It Isn’t an Interview

You’re all savvy readers, so I’m sure you recognize the problem here. This sounds like the generic stuff you put on your resume when you’re just out of college and don’t realize that your resume shouldn’t sound like everyone else’s, and also that everyone in the world is lying when they say they are “goals-oriented.”

No one is goals-oriented. Everyone is chocolate-and-sex-oriented. Make a note.

So what the hell do you do when your client gives you answers that makes him sound so boring that you fear committing fraud by writing web copy implying this is a person you would enjoy having a cup of coffee with, much less to whom you should be willing to trust with your money?

You have a couple of options.

Fun Gets Real Answers

Write your client back and explain that this isn’t an audition or a job interview. You aren’t a scary HR person. You’re just a very nice copywriter who wants to make a great human being sound human. You can explain that a few of the things they tell you will wind up in their actual web copy, so you’d love their help to create tone and a realistic voice.

You can then tweak your questions in a way that emphasizes on this point. Instead of asking, “How would you describe your business?” you can say something like, “If your business were a puppy, what kind of puppy would it be?” Except James would never let me ask that. But you get the idea.

Make it fun. Make it obviously not business-oriented. Make it something practically impossible to turn into corporate-speak.

Want a Voice? Hear a Voice

The other option is to call up your client and ask that they talk to you like a human being. It’s almost impossible to talk on the telephone in boring corporate-speak because no one in the history of the world has ever said the following when chatting as two regular people:

“I integrate positive solutions into every customer concern, resulting in an increase in general satisfaction and business productivity.”

No one. Has ever said it.

Why they think they should say things like this to other business folk is beyond me, but there you are. Crack a few jokes right off the bat with your client and the next thing you know, he’ll be chatting away with you like a normal person.

You’ll have a great idea of who this person is and what his business is all about.

Then you can go put that voice into the web copy. See how it works?

If you want your business to have a voice that sounds real, human and jazzed up, contact us today. We know how to give your web copy a voice that reaches readers.

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

What Would You Do If You Only Had Two Hours?

Taylor — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:00:17 +0000

I’ve only taken to using Twitter as a regular thing fairly recently, so it’s entirely possible that Dave Navarro (@rockyourday) has been doing this for years and I never knew about it, but I’ve been kind of taken with the way he often starts off a morning:

“What would you work on if you only had 2 hours today? Okay, do that first.”

Combine that with a T-shirt from Woot.com that I love called Procrastinate. The shirt reads, “Because if the world ends tomorrow, you don’t have to do it.”

It’s official, you guys: I have been assimilated into the Borg. The Internet Borg.

Here’s the thing – if the world did end tomorrow, or in two hours, how would you want to go out?

If the World Ended Tomorrow

What would you want your legacy to be? Let’s pretend for the sake of argument that there’s some kind of afterlife, so you get to pass judgment on your last day on earth with a nice cogent thought process. So you’re up there on a cloud or something and some other spirit-guy, maybe your friend, comes by your cloud and says, “Hey. What was your last day like?”

Let’s pretend, furthermore, that there’s no lying in the afterlife, so you can’t get out of this one that easily. For a lot of us, this is how that conversation would go:

“Um. Well. I read some blogs. A lot of blogs, actually. I took a break and made some food and thought about getting started on that new project. You know, the one I was really excited about but never did anything with? Yeah, I didn’t do anything about that on my last day. Um. I think I called a friend, we talked for awhile. I did some work at the very end of the day, really stressed out because I’d put it off. I ate dinner. I watched TV. I went to sleep.”

That’s a lousy last day on earth, people. Think about yesterday. If the world had ended and you were up on a cloud right now thinking about it, would you have been proud of yesterday?

Me neither.

Now imagine this one:

“I got up and immediately sat down and wrote down a bunch of new ideas that I had for that project. Then I had some quick breakfast and got all my work done right away so I could work on the new ideas. I got some people behind them and started working on the new ideas, getting them into action. I called up a friend and we had lunch, had a great time, and talked about a lot of interesting stuff.”

Here’s a question: which one of those guys is going to wish the world had stuck around for another day?

The first guy is thinking, yeah, the last day sucked, I wish I could do it over, but he knows damn well that if he had had another day, he would have done more or less the same thing. The second guy? Man, he wishes the world hadn’t ended. He wanted to do that thing. He was so close.

They both wouldn’t want the world to end before they did their cool thing. But the second guy knows he would have done it. The first guy is pretty sure he wouldn’t.

If the World Ended in Two Hours

What I find interesting is that if we thought the world is going to end in two hours, we’d probably do lots of fun and wacky stuff, none of it remotely close to work. Or we’d go find all our loved ones and hunker down with them. I, personally, would find a handy good-looking fella and go out with a bang, if you know what I mean.

None of us would work. Not a one. No one wants to think they’ll spend their last two hours working at their desk. No one wants their last words to be, “Could I invoice you on that?”

But here’s the thing: the world (probably) isn’t going to end in two hours. The reason Dave’s advice makes so much sense to me is because it implies that since you only have two hours to work, the rest of your day is going to be filled with awesome stuff.

Two hours of work, and then you can get moving on that awesome new project that’s going to make you rich and famous. Two hours of work, and then you can have lunch with your favorite person. Two hours of work, and then you can spend the rest of the day getting boozy on a chaise longue while Johnny Depp feeds you grapes.

Okay, maybe that last one is just me. But the point is, if you get all your work done now, you can do whatever you want for the rest of the day. You can go do something you’d be proud of if the world ended tomorrow.

If you procrastinate, you’re going to be mulling around doing fake work. Checking email, reading blogs, watching videos on Hulu. But you’re not going to be doing something awesome. You’re not going to just disappear for the day. You’ll be at the desk; you just won’t have gotten anything done.

I like Dave’s way better. Two hours of the best damn work you can do and then two hours of awesome.

Either one of those – the two hours of doing the best damn work you can do or the two hours of doing something you sincerely love seem like pretty great ways to spend your last two hours.

And hey! They probably won’t be your last two hours! You can have MORE! The world’s nifty that way.

But just because you think you’ll have more hours doesn’t mean you should waste these. The zombiepocalypse could come, people. Get to steppin’.

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Post by Taylor Lindstrom

How to Organize Huge Copywriting Projects

Taylor — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 06:00:44 +0000

We often get requests to write ebooks, and most of them are a fairly moderate 5-10 pages in length. Little ebooks. About the amount of information you’d get in five decent-lengthed blog posts.

But we also get requests for huge ebooks – upwards of 50 pages. We’ve also had requests for manifestos, white papers, and from one particularly memorable client, three books. Actual books. For publication.

These are all extremely lengthy projects. In an online world, such projects are not exactly commonplace. Usually copy comes in nice bite-sized chunks: a webpage, a blog post, an article, a press release. The short ones tell a nice concise story.

The long ones tell an epic.

It’s more difficult to organize a coherent train of thought through 50 pages than it is through 5. For one thing, there are more possible sidetracks for the train to take, risking it getting lost.

I thought I’d share my personal method for organizing much longer projects just in case one of you gets hit up tomorrow for a ghostwriting project.

First, Get Some Rope

You think I’m kidding, but I’m so not. Clothesline is perfect. Twine or string works. Don’t try to pull this off with anything thinner or less strong than twine, though. Doing this with embroidery thread will only end in tears.

Now get yourself a bunch of clothespins, some thumbtacks, and a stack of index cards.

Await further instructions.

Now, Get Some Paper

Or a computer document. I am indifferent. We’re going to be brainstorming here, and whatever works best for you as a brainstorming medium is okay by me.

Pull out all the information you have on this particular topic. This can be material the client gave you, material from the client’s website, independent material you’ve found during your own research (please, please tell me you remembered to charge for research if you had to do your own), and it also includes your own brainpan.

Using the materials as a guide, write down everything that might need to go in this project. Absolutely everything. While you’re at it, jot down any ideas you have along the way. One piece of information might suggest an analogy to you, for example. Write it down.

Take a Break

Go eat something. Take a walk around the block. Find an unoffending tree and kick it if it makes you feel better. Then go home and brainstorm some more.

The Break is Critical

If you skipped the break, go back and do it. Do not skip steps. This is your captain speaking.

Get Your Index Cards Out

Transcribe (yes, by hand, I’m very sorry) all your notes onto individual index cards – one index card per insight.

Let’s say, for example, you’ve written down that male penguins are the ones who warm the eggs (I’ve decided that we’re writing a book about penguins) while female penguins are the primary hunters (I could totally be making that up), write those two facts on two separate index cards. They may be part of the same sentence in the source material, but they are two separate bits of information, and you may want to use them in different parts of your book.

You could also print out the information, cut out each snippet with scissors, and tape it to the index card, but this seems like unnecessary work. I know some of y’all do anything to avoid seeing your own handwriting (I’m looking at you, Jamie-boy), so that’s an option if you prefer.

Back to the Rope

Get out your ball of clothesline or string or whatever. Run a length all the way across the biggest room you have available and secure it with your thumbtacks. If you work in an office and your boss wants to know what you’re doing, tell him you’re thinking outside the box. That always works.

If you need an alternative to thumbtacks because you don’t want to put holes in the wall, try those hooks that have adhesive on the back. (James says to be careful when taking them off, though, because they might bring some paint along.)

The Awesome Part

Using the clothespins, hang up all the index cards in the best order you can think of. If you have colleagues, get them to come in and help you organize.

Move the cards around. A lot. Consider. Move again.

When you have them into an order you think works, start at one end of your clothesline and walk to the other, muttering to yourself all the way. You want to tell yourself the story of how these cards bleed into one another.

If you find yourself at a point where you have a new card but you can’t figure out how to make a transition, you need to re-order your cards or find some new information to bridge the gap.

Could you do this without the clothesline? Yes. But you’d need a really big table and less sense of humor.

Go forth! Create lengthy documents! I’m going to take my rope down and see if I can still jump to 100 without missing. I may even try to convince the high school students down the block to do double dutch with me. That’s if I can persuade them to stop smoking long enough to turn the rope, of course.

Up to now, how have you been organizing your big projects?

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