I get cornered all the time by folks desperate to learn the secret of writing perturbingly powerful prose. And while writing damned good copy could (and has) filled volumes, the best advice I can give anyone who wants to pump up their writing is this: Write like you talk.
Yes, I know you feel like you’ve got your fifth grade English teacher standing over your shoulder ready to slam your wrists to hell for splitting infinitives or starting a sentence with “and.”
But if you want to sell to people, you’ve got to sound like a real life human being.
So here’s your copywriting trick of the day: Next time you need to write an email, a brochure, a sales letter or even a laundry list, do it out out loud.
You can whisper if you have to (or if you’re afraid that Jenny from accounting–you know, the one with the hips–will think you’ve gone nuts). Or you can put on your phone headset and pretend you’re on a very important call.
But just start talking. And type down exactly what you say, complete with weird pauses, strange sentence starts and off-color colon use. In the end you’ll have done your part to fight back against the epidemic of “corp speak” and will have a piece about 15 thousand times more likely to get a response.
Stay chilly.
c
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Tuesday night Dominic Canterbury and I rolled out our “Top Ten Marketing Mistakes Made by Small Businesses and How To Avoid Them” class for a third go-round. It was a raucous group, including a tech writer, a private investigator a “poly-positivity” crusader and, of course, a couple real estate agents.
You can see what folks thought of the class by heading over to the Biznik Events Page.
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The lovely and talented Alyson Boote turned me on to This Site.
Good niche. Though, as a bald-by-choicer 5 years running, I’m not sure I see a huge need in the marketplace. It’ll be interesting to see how successful these folks are.
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I was at an AMA members only even the other day and got into a nice discussion about some of the most overused parts of the marketing lexicon. Here are my two favorites. These are words you are quite simply never allowed to use in your marketing copy:
1. Optimize. This one’s mostly found in internal marketing communications where some low level director is trying to impress her superiors. In use it goes like this: “We plan on optimizing ROI with optimetrix optimizator.”
2. Solutions. Solutions is the devil of marketing copy. What makes it so bad? There’s not a damned word in the world that says the same thing. Strangely enough, Solutions used to be a jim dandy of a word, but overuse by hyped up marketers has rendered it absolutely useless. Common use these days? “We’ll optimize your solutionator with our solutionazation stream.”
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I popped into Brookstone in the mall today to kill a little time before meeting up with friends. While I was checking out the foam mattresses, wireless speakers and ball polishers, I glanced over and saw a middle-aged overweight guy on one of these:
Pretty hot, right?
The idea–and this thing comes from Japan–is that the horse-riding motion of the saddle will work and tone your buttocks, back and abs helping you get that hot cowboy (or girl) figure you’ve always dreamed of.
Of course the girl who works at the store thought it was the stupidest thing ever.
And of course I couldn’t bring myself to get off the damned thing for like ten whole minutes.
Yee haw!
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You know the old adage about squeaky wheels? Sure you do. They get all greased up and taken care of while the quiet ones get completely ignored.
I went down to take my 4PM yoga class yesterday expecting to spend an hour and a half sweating and stretching with Bret, my favorite teacher. The guy is a motivational monster. He has a way of making you do things you didn’t think were possible, practical or cool and have you loving him for it at the end of class. He’s single handedly helped me deal with (if not overcome) some painful physical challenges and I always found myself looking forward to his classes.
Until yesterday.
Because yesterday I showed up for class and found out that some squeaky wheels complaining about classes being too hard made it so Bret doesn’t teach there anymore. Not to say the other teachers are bad. They all know their stuff. They all know how to make you stretch. But they aren’t Bret.
And after class, a gaggle of us were sitting there saying “You know, Bret was a big part of the reason I come here. Bret was a big part of why I do yoga at all.”
I’m wondering how this is going to shake out. I’m wondering if the powers that be are going to find out the hard way that it’s the quiet ones you need to pay attention to. It’s the quiet ones who are the core of your whole damned business.
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Over on the Biznik Blog Scott Bourne has a post about his Radical Approach to pricing his services.
Basically, he asks for a flat startup fee and then says “Pay me what you think the work is worth.” And that’s that. No invoicing. No chasing down checks. Just Scott standing there with a smile and waiting to see what customers do.
In a way it reminds me of my friend Kevin Goldman. Kevin never orders at restaurants. He just sits down, grins up at the waitress with his overwide smile and says “Bring me something good.”
And what does the waitress do? Well, it varies. Sometimes he gets shellfish. Sometimes he gets steak. But he always leaves happy.
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I wrote a guest post for Dominic Canterbury’s blog today about just what the heck a copywriter is and when you do (and don’t) need one.
Check it out here.
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Coming back from my camping trip this weekend I spotted one of the simplest written billboards in Madison Avenue Advertising History.
It said this:
“Free Wi-Fi at Tully’s”
And guess what? Next time I’m faced with a Tully’s or a Starbucks for sitting down and getting some work done, you know full well Tully’s will be getting my business.
Tangentially, while thinking about this I stumbled on The Clear Channel Outdoor website. Scary stuff. This is where the brand building crush comes from my friends. Be afraid!
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Just put up episode 3 of The Biznik Podcast.
In this rollicking half hour of an episode I sit down with Guerilla TV entrepreneur Stephen McCandless to talk about how not to rate your employees, why saving lives for a living isn’t as fun as you would think and why “Money can’t buy you happiness, but it can buy you any kind of misery you want.”
Check it out at The Biznik Podcast Page or just search for Biznik in the iTunes podcast directory.
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