Colin's Blog

Profitable Content Creation – Content Is Cash and How to Get Your Fair Share (About Time, Right?)

Join us for the solution. A free webinar with master content creator, Jeff Herring.   Tuesday Feb. 28th at 4:00 pm EST.

Content is the basis of EVERYTHING online. Creating your content and then marketing it well is how you profit from your content online.

Create It – The key to successful content creation is to be prolific. What most people do is wind up staring at a blank screen. I don’t want you to do what most people do because most people are broke.

Instead of staring at a blank screen I want you to use templates. Create a 7 tips article or a 3 mistakes article. Then all you have to do is fill in the blanks with your information.

Another great way to become prolific is to just write on regular basis. Make it a habit, and you’ll find yourself the flow.

Market it – So many people create their content and then do nothing with it. Again, don’t be most people.

There are so many ways to market your content that you really can’t run out of ideas. Start with your blog. Then post your article on EzineArticles and other top Article Directories. Next is Social Media. Use your article content or parts of your content on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also turn your content into teleseminars and webinars.

Convert it into products & services and sell it - What most people do not realize is that while you are creating your content you are also creating your information products.

For example, a simple 7 tips article expanded on easily becomes a great eBook. In a similar way, a collection of several articles on a specific topic gathered into one document becomes an ebook or mini-guide.

And that’s really just getting started. There is so much more you can do. One of the best ways to offer an info product is in multimedia, and you can easily create print, audio and video training from your content.

Join us for the solution. A free webinar with master content creator, Jeff Herring.   Tuesday Feb. 28th at 4:00 pm EST.

Spread Me Around!

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Above is a snapshot of my inbox. I’ve made my judgements known with the cute icons. 

Yea, so you have an email list of 80,000. Awesome. Are you the one who keeps sending me the crappy emails with boring subject lines that I never open? If you have 80,000 people on your mailing list and only 12 open the letter, how are you making money like that?

Along the same thought pattern as “It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you” is the saying: “It’s not the size of the list, it’s the size of your open rate.”  It’s still amazing how many great marketers are still writing boring subject lines. If I won’t open the letter, your pitch is lost. And it’s not even your pitch that’s important: it’s the things you can teach me, the way your brand your business.

Too many email subject lines are playing it safe.

* Make $5000 a month, every month. I’ll show you how. (Not with a subject line like that you won’t)

* Check out our latest news and programs! (Like I need another one of those)

* Free tips and tricks to make you ______ .  (“Hey, Martha!” I said as I awoke this morning. “I realized I need more _____! That will solve all of our problems!”)

Try something that invokes curiosity. Make them scratch their heads with wonder. Play fun games with your subject lines. People get WAY too much email already. Your competing against a sea of information overload, and most marketers feel guilty if they’re not offering the world to their list. “These people have put their trust in me. I have to give them everything I have to reward them.” Have you ever heard of ‘killing someone with kindness?’

When people feel overwhelmed, they have a tendency to give up. It’s almost painful to have to sort through so much info crap to reach a simple result. If your subject lines are promising the moon or trying to stuff too much information in hopes of “getting the point across,” your seriously hurting your chances of anyone even seeing it. Try these for examples:

* Today You Will Meet the Most Beautiful Person in the World  (perfect for relationship advice, life coaches, weight loss. etc…)

* [STEAL THIS]  A Video That Made Me $11,680

* This Guy Is Making Me Really Angry…

* Yes. There is a Satan in the Real Estate Industry. Know who it is?

* I made this one mistake and I know you have too…  (Kind of cliche because it’s overused, but it still works)

The point is to invoke curiosity and wonder. Frank Kern calls it “rubbernecking” subject lines. We know there’s a wreck, but we’re still compelled to look. Ask questions that imply that the email body holds the answer. Touch on their joy, their fear, their worries, their hope. Twist the knife, be subtle, be creative. And most of all…

Spread Me Around!

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Most business sales letters, promo pages and lead generation pages love to focus on one main item: themselves. It stands to reason that a website promoting a business should talk about themselves as often as possible: how great they are, how easy their products are to use, how often they ‘beat’ the competition and other self-aggrandizing features. However, it is becoming clearer to online advertisers and copywriters that concentrating on the visitors themselves has a wider range of interest. Anything that sounds too ‘pitchy’ can easily raise walls of objection in the visitor, even if it is crafted to sound like useful features. Remember, it’s all about them.

What resonates with most readers is what can benefit them right now. On the Internet, most people are searching for information as opposed to radio and television, where commercials are a break in entertainment. The Internet above most other media, is a vehicle for making decisions: where to find the best deals, how to locate the nearest dentist, how to save money on their taxes and other information. This ultimately means that the end result needs to look more like ‘immediately usable benefits and answers’ rather than sales pitches. Good website copywriting can include both the elements of benefits and subtle pitch.

One thing that stands out to visitors subconsciously is the overuse of the words “We” and “Our” in the copy. While it is a very small error by most copywriters, it has a negative effect on the reader. It has a sense of ‘inward’ marketing, trying to draw the reader into the copy, rather than an ‘outward’ or inclusive feel to the reader. Reaching out to your prospect and touching the points of why they ended up on your website in the first place (concerns, understanding, problem solving, empathy) can make them drop their defenses and open up to receive a subtle pitch. If you feel that your copy is all about you, there is a cool piece of programming that will analyze your website for overuse of the terms ‘we’ and ‘our.’ Check it out: http://www.futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm  (see above photo of one of Tom Antion’s sales letter’s results)

Just add your website URL to the form and see how customer-centered your website copy is. Good copy has a 2 to 1 ratio of customer focus to company focused jargon. This can make you very valuable to big businesses because you will understand what elements drive online sales more effectively than their in-house marketing people (who love to focus on company ‘benefits’), or any outsourced people could ever dream of being.

Spread Me Around!

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Thanks to Heather Lloyd-Martin  for this post.

Is the latest “Google Plus” news making you think that traditional copywriting is dead – and it’s all about social?

I received this note from a talented SEO copywriter:

“It’s really true that it’s important to do what one loves – and because I have ADD, I find social campaign management/monitoring, etc. to be extremely difficult, staying on top of Twitter and Google+ and FB and LinkedIn and StumbleUpon and YouTube and and Hootsuite and hash-tags and likes etc. It’s downright painful for me and I’d rather chew glass I’m afraid…

Is there a place for an SEO Copywriter who has very strong skills in writing website core content, email/landing page campaigns, blog posts, case studies, reports, ebooks, etc. (which is a heck of a lot) — and not do social posts/monitoring too? I was recently asked to submit a proposal for a social campaign and I’m actually dreading it. I don’t even want the project. “

If you cut your teeth on traditional print copywriting, this may really hit home. Once upon a time, you may have been writing catalog copy (for print catalogs,) direct mail pieces and display ad copy.

Today, you’re being asked to research keyphrases, keep up with the latest search engine changes and watchdog social media campaigns.

Which leads many copywriters to ask the question “Is traditional copywriting dead?”

The answer is no. Not really. But things certainly have changed.

Many folks know that I cut my teeth on print copywriting. Long before we were Googling, I was writing ad copy for a local newspaper and developing marketing collateral for screw compressors (really.) Moving to an online environment was a very different experience 14+ years ago. Readability rules changed – since people were reading off of a monitor, that meant presenting the content in a slightly different fashion. Skill sets changed – I had to learn how to research keyphrases and segment them by buyer’s intent. And yes, I did have to keep up with the latest search engine changes and learn the technical lingo.

I think the definition of “copywriter” (and “copywriting”) has changed and morphed over the years. Today, a copywriter may still choose specialize in print communications (print is not necessarily dead and can still gain some great returns.) Or, a copywriter may love writing emails, landing pages and special reports. Or, some copywriters (sometimes called social media writers) may love tweeting, Google+-ing and Facebooking.

At the same time, how we write what we write goes back to traditional copywriting techniques. Show, not tell. Make sure your reader knows “what’s in it for her.” Know what makes your reader tick. The list goes on and on…

So “traditional copywriting” isn’t dead. There’s just more opportunity.

Does this mean that you, as a copywriter, need to embrace and do everything? No. It is perfectly OK to tell your clients, “I specialize in X copywriting” rather than tacking on Y and Z and gritting your teeth the entire time.

Having said that, there are some things that you may want to consider:

If you’re working online, it’s crucial to keep up with the latest search engine changes. Sticking your head in the sand because SEO is “too technical” can hurt your clients (something may change that you need to know about) and makes you look dumb (you want to be able to answer your clients’ questions.) It doesn’t mean that you need to be an expert. Just know what’s going on.

If you’re getting a lot of requests for X, partner with another copywriter. If you’re a print copywriter, the smartest thing you can do (assuming you don’t want to learn how to write online) is work with another copywriter. Then, when a client requests something you don’t like to do, you can hand it off to someone you know and trust. You could even build up a powerful virtual agency with this technique. Imagine being a “one-stop shop” for print, online sales pages/email and social – wow!

Always try something new – but be gentle with yourself. It’s easy to get caught up in the “I don’t want to learn that – I’m already overwhelmed” trap. And yes, it really is easy to overwhelm. Choose one “thing” a quarter that you learn more about. Maybe it’s learning more about SEO copywriting. Or try setting up a Google+ account and build your Circles. Or if you’re more of a sales writer, try your hand at an ebook. Trying things new keeps you fresh and curious. And besides, you may discover that you actually like whatever you just tried – and you can develop a brand-new profit center.

Spread Me Around!

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I have been a radio host for a long time. I started my first show with my partner Gabriella  Hartwell back in 2009 on the Be You To Fullest relationship advice show on BlogTalk. I have since started a new new show on BlogTalk, Internet Marketing Answers Revealed. I have been a guest on  numerous shows as well, all over the web. Internet radio is a great way to get your message out to a mass audience and promote your business. I originally met Gabriella through Twitter. She wrote me a private message and we connected from there, developing the show month by month through our social networking. We never paid a dime to produce and promote the show, using our Facebook and Twitter accounts to attract guests.

There are a ton of new Internet radio shows that have cropped up during the last 2 years. They have a need for quality guests to keep their listeners coming back. This creates a great opportunity for you to get your name out. Use your own show to build your expertise and put the word out on Facebook that you’re looking for guests and you’ll be flooded with offers. Over the years that I hosted Be You To Fullest, we had some really heavy-hitters as guests: big name authors that would tell their peeps that they were going to be on the radio, and we would get the traffic. Our show grew rapidly to over 1500 listeners a week. How could that kind of attraction help grow your online business?

BlogTalkRadio is still a free service for a 30 minute show a week. Build one for yourself and get comfortable with the format, then put yourself out there as a guest to all of the thousands of shows that can help promote your expertise. While your here, listen to a show I did with the Linkedin Lady:

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That‘s a mouthful. What do I mean this time? (Most of my friends seem to throw their hands up in disgust every time I come up with some new-fangled marketing concept craziness. They never really understand what I’m talking about.)

Expert Framing:  a calculated campaign to get ‘experts’ in your field to acknowledge YOU as the ultimate expert on their blogs, websites, white papers and email blasts. Why would they want to do this? Well, money and favors of course. Framing, believe it or not, is a natural occurrence of affiliate marketing. Your affiliate partner might say: “Colin is the leading authority on video marketing today. Join Colin and I for this powerful class on Tuesday.”

There. He just ‘framed’ me as an expert. Get enough affiliates to say this and your name recognition and reputation goes through the roof. Ok. So we all have some affiliates here and there selling some of our stuff for us. For the most part, they may have one of your product banners on their site – a site probably no one is visiting. This is where most affiliate marketing fails: supplying banners and links to website owners who think they are the shit, but aren’t really. Every site owner thinks they will get traffic, but they rarely do. So you get no sales, and no framing. How do you fix that?

Article contests. Get your affiliates more involved than just pasting a lame banner on their website. Supply them with copy and resources to publish articles all over the web: article distribution sites, free PR sites, blog posts, article pages on their own sites, Tweets and Facebook… even Youtube videos. Here’s the catch: they have to write some copy in their own words about how great you are and great your product or service is, mentioning you and your products by name. Their affiliate link in the article is unique and traceable: you can see exactly which of your affiliates have gotten the most impressions, leads, clicks or sales. Then the winner gets a prize.

They get more than just a commission if they sell stuff. The winner gets a real cash prize, say $300 or more. It’s easy: whoever gets the most leads or sales wins. What do YOU get? Besides the sales and inbound links to your website? Well, framing of course. Now you have dozens, possibly hundreds, of people stating that you are the expert. And not just on their websites, but all over the internet. Depending on how many articles your affiliates submitted and to where, you could Google your name and see thousands of entries in the results with your name as the pre-eminant expert in your field. The real value is not in the sales you’ll make from this campaign, but in the ability to ask a premium fee for your services. Want to be the world’s highest paid copywriter? The most highly esteemed leadership expert?

Easy. Get everyone else to say it for you…  

Spread Me Around!

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The benefits about your business that are most important to your customers are a mixed bag to say the least. As website owners writing our own page copy and sales letters, we believe that the greatest benefits are the ones that seem most obvious to us, thus these are the ones we should fixate upon in our copy. To often, however, sales copy is loaded with “who cares” benefits that can make our prospect roll over and play dead. A more subtle play on words can touch and respect what really matters to your prospect without looking tacky.

The biggest benefit that ends up most often on the cutting room floor is time. It’s the one touch that we as marketers think has the least impact on our prospects buying decisions. We love to focus on the Big Daddy benefits: making more money, looking better, being healthier or associating ones self with an expert of some sort. Do you realize that as these major benefits come and go in importance, time is the one gift that is hardest to attain, the easiest to lose and the one thing that many of us would trade all of the above benefits to have more of? 

I saw a movie recently titled “In Time” with Justin Timberlake. The citizens in some alternate reality are using time as currency: when they turn 25 years old, they only have 1 year of life left. To add to the ‘life-clock’, they work to get paid in time and use time to pay for things like rent. The richest of their kind can live for thousands of years, the poorest of society are typically only a few days away from death. While this is a heavy bit of ‘sci-fi’ screenwriting, it’s not far from an unspoken truth. How much would you pay to have more time for loved-ones?

People work so hard to provide for their families while harboring a secret desire to walk away from their jobs and be with their children. It’s unspoken because it’s silly to walk away from a job and put your family at risk of being put out on the streets. But time is the most valuable psychological factor, hidden deep away in the crevices of the mind. How can you ‘sell’ your service or product with this time factor in mind? And in your copy, are you putting this in the forefront?

In content marketing, this can play an important role for making money for smart marketers. Putting as much content out there for free can lure valuable prospects to your website. That same content can be packaged in the form of ebooks, e-course and videos. When I once asked a prominent Internet marketer: “Why would someone want to purchase information that they could find all over the web for free?” He replied: “Because it’s all in one place. They don’t have to waste time searching for it.” 

Good advice, an even better benefit.

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I came across this video on Youtube the other day. It is a remake of a Cannes Film festival short about a blind beggar who everyone seems to be ignoring until a stranger writes something on the beggar’s sign that makes people start throwing money in his can. Check it out here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hzgzim5m7oU  so you can understand the rest of this post.

It was recreated by a copywriting firm to promote their services. So well done, (even though it is a blatant rip-off without any credit) I wish I had thought of it. Besides the marketing impact of the “power of words”, I saw some elements here that I am using for my own copywriting techniques.

In a typical written style of communication, I believe there are 3 main elements: Love, Conflict, Resolution. In creative writing classes the love can be exemplified by character build-up or relationship building: the ’getting to know you’ element that makes us care about the characters. Secondly, the conflict, is probably the most familiar to us psychologically because we can all relate to it, and third, the resolution. In storytelling, the resolution is where the character solves the problem. In advertising, its usually a call to action.  

In this video, there are only two of these elements at work with the beggar’s sign. In the first sign: “I’m Blind, Please Help” we have the elements of conflict and call to action. There is no Love element present – nothing that makes the reader think. No matter how badly we would want to help someone in need, most of us put up a wall of resistance when we see a call to action. This happens whenever we see an ad on television, enter a furniture store or run across someone who needs our help. This wall happens subconsciously without our knowing.

In the second sign, “It’s a beautiful day, and I can’t see it” there are still just two elements present: Love and Conflict. Where is the call to action? And without a resolution or call to action, how did people know the right thing to do? As copywriters, sometimes we need to RELAX and trust that when presented with Love and Conflict, our readers will know instictively what to do next. Or at least they’ll make a more impressionable perspective about our story than simply putting up a wall of resistance. I believe copy that shoves a call to action down the reader’s throat, no matter how subtle it is, can restrict conversion.

The element of Love is the most important part of copy: not the call to action as most writers would have you believe. The problem with Love is that it takes a real shedding of our thick skins, getting over our fears and touching a place that may be uncomfortable for most writers. But it’s the place where when reached by your reader, makes the resolution or call to action remain unspoken. Trust your reader… you don’t have to tell them the right thing to do. They get it…

Spread Me Around!

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I don’t know many people who stretch out on the beach with a good book or settle in for an evening’s movie in happy anticipation of being persuaded—chances are, they’re just looking to get swept up in a good, absorbing story. But stories have long been used as instruments of persuasion. Aesop with his fables and Jesus with his parables were clearly on to something when they used stories rather than sermons to nudge people toward a certain moral code. And it’s doubtful whether libertarian philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand would have won as many disciples as she did if she’d stuck to writing philosophical tracts and never penned sweeping epic novels such as The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.

The persuasive allure of stories certainly hasn’t been lost on advertisers. A vast number of TV commercials, for example, pack miniature stories into the briefest of clips, whether it’s Apple’s famous dystopian “1984″ commercial, or mundane little family sitcoms selling the latest brand of frozen dinners.

Somehow, the fictional words and actions of entirely made-up characters who have never drawn a breath in the real world can impact our attitudes and behavior more powerfully than the pleas or arguments of real flesh-and-blood people talking to us about real things in the actual world. But why should this be?

Fiction doesn’t feel persuasive. Even when it’s been created with that goal, it’s easy to lose sight of its agenda and simply sink into the experience of being entertained. Which makes it an extremely effective persuasive weapon. In a recent post, I talked about experimental results by Juliano Laran and colleagues suggesting that people automatically activate a defensive system when they detect that a message has persuasive intent. Miniature fiction is probably among the best radar-scramblers when it comes to masking the true persuasive nature of advertising.

But it goes further than that. Commercials using fictional characters can get away with trash-talking the competition in ways that would seem outrageous or indefensible coming straight out of the mouths of a company spokesperson. It’s as if the characters had diplomatic immunity from accusations of nastiness. And in a way they do. Our experience with how fictional worlds work leads us to treat them as Vegas-style universes: what happens in the fictional world stays in the fictional world. So, at the end of the play, no one shows up to arrest Macbeth for murder.

And for that matter, no one shows up to arrest Shakespeare either. We don’t hold him accountable for the actions of his creations. We automatically grant some authorial distance between the creator of fiction and whatever happens within his made-up world.

I’ve never seen any company leverage this authorial distance with greater brilliance or greater aggressiveness than Apple in the famous “Get a Mac” ad campaign featuring the dorky PC and the hipsterish Mac.

Here’s an interaction between the two characters in a highly typical ad pulled from this campaign:

Mac: Hello, I’m a Mac…
PC: … and I’m a PC, and here at PC Innovations Lab…
Mac: Wait, wait, wait. PC Innovations Lab?
PC: Well, you know how you have your patented MagSafe cord that pops out anytime someone trips over it?
Mac: Sure, sure.
PC: Well, we’re protecting PCs with this new air cushioned enclosure.
Mac: That’s bubble wrap.
PC: And you know how you have your revolutionary new battery that lasts almost an entire work day?
Mac: Mm.
PC: Well, we are offering this new extremely long cord. (Points to assistant wearing an orange construction-style extension cord looped over his shoulder.)
Mac: PC, shouldn’t innovations make people’s lives easier?
PC: Well that’s exactly why we’ve developed these. (A man walks by wearing cup holders with paper coffee cups attached to his sleeves. PC lifts a cup out of its holder). Cheers. To innovation.

Imagine Steve Jobs sneering onscreen about the pathetic, dinosaur-age attempts at innovation by competing companies. Most people would be turned off. They’d think he was going too far, being unfair to his competition. But enact the same idea with the help of a couple of fictional characters and people laugh.

In the end, which approach is more unfair: to say disparaging things about the competition in a way that transparently reveals your intentions, or to do so in a way that diffuses responsibility for your message? Objectively, we’d have to say the latter. But it sure doesn’t feel that way.

Thank you Julie Sedivy, for this post!

Spread Me Around!

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