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5 Situations That Demand You Hire a Professional Copywriter

by Sonia Simone on March 16, 2011

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A couple of weeks ago, one of our guest writers wrote a post about a powerful copywriting technique that can be used to get great results even if you aren’t a professional copywriter.

In fact, we write a lot of posts on Copyblogger about how entrepreneurs can apply the techniques used by professional copywriters. Strong calls to action, compelling benefits, fascinating bullet points, magnetic headlines.

With all of this information, no one should ever need a pro, right?

Well … I wouldn’t say that.

Sometimes it can make sense to do it yourself, and sometimes it’s a very good idea to call in a professional writer. Today we’re going to talk about five scenarios when you’ll want to bring in a pro.

1. You just aren’t any good at it

Talent is about 90% a function of putting in the work, but it’s hard to put the work in for something you don’t feel any connection with. Plus, sometimes you have a pressing need where you don’t have time to get good enough to do it yourself.

Lots of people hate to write. If it’s just a phobia about hitting those keys, you can try speech recognition software, which can be a fantastic time-saver. But if the thought of writing is about as appealing as dental surgery, you’ll never put the work in to get good.

Do more of what you’re good at and less of what you hate. If writing isn’t for you, hire or partner with a really good writer to make sure that part of your business is getting the attention it needs.

It doesn’t matter how fantastic your product or service is if you can’t communicate that to customers. Every company needs to communicate a powerful message — and that means you need strong writing.

2. You don’t have the bandwidth

Even if you love writing, there’s a limit to how many words we can consistently get onto the page or screen every day. Marathon writing sessions can work for some people, but they can also lead to burnout and sabotage your productivity in the long term.

Copyblogger Media is a writing-based company. All of our founding partners have written their own content at various points in our business lives. And of course, Brian Clark built Copyblogger in the early days purely on the strength of his own writing.

But as our business has grown, we’ve needed to grow our writing staff with it. We pulled in additional writers to help us out with the sheer volume of content and copy we need to create.

Professional copywriters know “the more you tell, the more you sell.” And that’s even more true in the content marketing world — the more high-quality content you can create, the more authority and customer connection you can build.

Just realize that you need to understand the strategy behind the content you’re creating. Don’t add a writer for the sake of getting more words generated. Understand the business purpose behind all the copy you create, whether or not you do the actual writing.

3. You need particular expertise

You may create really good daily content for your blog, but you need a persuasion specialist to write sales letters that convert fans into customers.

Or you may need a subject matter expert to write a white paper.

Or a strong SEO copywriter to write content that both serves your business needs and can rank well in search engines.

Realize that you’ll pay more for a copywriter with specific expertise, rather than a generalist … just like you pay more for a Mercedes mechanic who’s been in business for 30 years over some kid at the quickie oil change who’s always wanted to try fixing a Mercedes.

4. You’re too close to the topic

The reason it’s so hard to move from features to benefits is that it can be really tough to be objective about your own business.

You know all the blood, sweat, and tears you put in to make your product or service great. (In other words, the features of your business.) You understand the details behind the scenes.

But your customer may have no interest at all in those things. In fact, they might care deeply about something that’s barely on your radar.

Sometimes a pair of outside eyes can be just what you need to communicate your most important benefits. Your winning difference could even be something you take for granted, but that your customers find wildly impressive.

Just make sure that your writer is looking at real customer feedback. This could come from survey responses, from social media listening, or from conducting interviews with customers. Your copywriter should have direct access to real customer language about why people like doing business with you.

5. The stakes are high

If you’ve got a big launch or an important marketing campaign, you need to make sure your copy is making a great impression.

  • That means a terrific headline that gets attention immediately.
  • It means well-structured content that conveys your authority.
  • It means writing that gets to the point without a lot of fluff or verbal clutter.
  • It means customer-focused copy that clearly conveys valued benefits.
  • It means making sure you know the difference between your and you’re.

Professional copywriters are perfectionists about language. They’re obsessive about tone, subtle shades of meaning, copy structure, and the finer points of grammar and usage.

If that’s not you, you may want to bring in some help. Clunky, error-filled writing is a serious credibility killer.

But … the message still belongs to you

While a talented, well-trained copywriter can help you find your strongest possible marketing message, ultimately that message does need to come from you.

You know the customer you want to reach. You know the little details that will make your copy more interesting. No one will ever know your business like you do, and you need to recognize the hidden remarkable benefit that becomes your best marketing story.

That’s why it pays to study copywriting and marketing even if you turn over every word to someone else. A terrific copywriter can make you sound fantastic — but as the business owner, you’re the one who’s ultimately responsible for your story.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is co-founder and CMO of Copyblogger Media. Share your charming, colorful, vivacious self with Sonia on twitter.

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How to Show Up and Write

by Taylor Lindstrom on October 15, 2010

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Ask any writer how to write, and they will tell you, logically enough: Write.

Write every day. Write at the same time. Write for hours. Write for 20 minutes. Just show up and write.

You’ve heard this advice before and you haven’t taken it yet.

You meant to. But you haven’t.

This is not entirely your fault, because while the advice is not complicated, it’s nearly impossible to follow.

Mostly because it’s way too simple.

Don’t get me wrong. We love simplicity. Simplicity is great and useful when you want practical steps to solve a problem.

Simplicity is lousy when what you really want is a reason for not doing something.

Why there’s such a thing as “too simple”

A friend of mine has been asking me for years to run marathons with her, so I started asking marathoners for their stories on training and running.

I have favorites. They usually involve blood.

Why? Because marathon running scares me. I don’t want to do it, not really.

When someone tells me a story about collapsing from dehydration halfway up a mountain and having to be hospitalized, it makes marathon running sound difficult. Complicated. Terrifying. With dire consequences for getting it wrong. It gives me a fantastic reason for not doing it.

Show up. Run.

That’s too simple. That’s the kind of simplicity we love to hate.

Why we like to hear that writing is difficult

Anne Lamott wrote a book on writing, Bird by Bird.

In the book, her students ask her how to become writers, and she describes the writing process in terms that would not be out of place in a psych ward. She mentions, in no particular order, banshees, drunken monkeys, and Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Lamott alludes to autism, hypochondria, and meningitis. She holds a gun to her head. She brings out the machetes.

The word doom is in there somewhere. Actually, the word doom is in there everywhere.

For writers, this sort of talk is incredibly comforting.

Who, after all, goes to meet their doom with open arms? No one. The fact that we have not yet become writers is a purely practical matter. Writing is obviously one of those painful things best avoided in life, like war, or sunburn.

We enjoy being told writing is difficult. It gives us a reason that we are not doing it. Clearly our aversion to sitting down and stamping words onto the page is merely evidence that we are neither mentally ill nor masochistic, and I think we can all feel good about that.

This sort of self-congratulation lasts about as long as it takes to get to the next chapter, which is where Lamott stops being tongue-in-cheek and starts giving purely practical advice on how to write. And what is this advice?

Show up. Write.

Well, damn it.

Why we don’t want to believe writing is simple

If writing is simple, then why aren’t we all writers? Why haven’t we done it yet?

We want to believe writing is complicated so that we have an excuse for not doing it. We want to think that we just don’t get it. That there’s a switch inside us that hasn’t been turned on yet. That there’s a password, a correct time of day, a special brand of computer, possibly named HAL.

What we really don’t want to believe is that we just need to sit down and write.

That’s depressing. We could have been doing that all along.

There must be something else we could do, or better yet, something we can’t do.

It would be fantastic if someone could just come up with a reason that we can’t write, a good reason, a plausible one. Virginia Woolf did her best: she said that to write we must have a room of our own, and a fairly significant independent income.

If you don’t have either of those, you’re off the hook.

For the sake of our pride, our shame, our egos, we want there to be a reason we haven’t done it, other than fear. There must be an enormous obstacle in the way. There must be some labyrinth to get through. There must be some kind of enlightenment that needs to be found first, some code to crack, some mantra to chant.

Show up. Write.

Oh, shut up.

Simple doesn’t mean easy

We’re comforted when we’re told writing is difficult, because we think this negates the fact that it’s actually simple.

But of course, the opposite of difficult isn’t simple. The opposite of difficult is easy.

I am not about to tell you that writing is easy. Writing is hard. Writers never stop fearing that what they write isn’t good enough. They can’t come up with good ideas. They come up with brilliant ideas that don’t work. They write terrible things and good things. And they try to make sure that people never see the terrible things, and that as many as possible see the good things.

No writer I know thinks that writing is easy.

But no writer I know thinks that writing is complicated.

If you’ve been waiting to write because you think that one day someone will give you the advice that makes writing easy, stop waiting. No one can make it easy.

All we can do is make it simple.

Show up. Write.

About the Author: Taylor Lindstrom is a freelance copywriter and Assistant Editor of Copyblogger. She’d love to chat more, but she has to get back to writing now.

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Five Smart Things You Can Still Do in 2009

by Sonia Simone on December 24, 2009

image of highway sign

Copyblogger is about to go on our annual holiday hiatus. We’ll be taking a break from posting while we catch up, get rested, and get excited about what we’ve got in store for you in 2010.

You may be taking a little time off yourself. Or you may still be going into the office, but the last week of the year is often a time when routine tasks slow down or stop altogether.

So what’s the smartest, most productive use you could make of the next seven days?

Here are five ideas that will let you take what some people think of as “dead time” and use it to jump start your year in 2010. Doing any or all of these will get you energized and excited for the year to come.

1. Create a quick product

The biggest obstacle most bloggers face when they want to make money is they don’t have anything to sell.

And the biggest obstacle to creating something to sell is that it seems overwhelming. We feel like we’ve got to distill everything we know into a 400-page ebook or 30-hour marathon audio course.

That’s why I was so impressed by a recent post from Dave Navarro about creating a product over a weekend, and his follow up post on
how to know if it’s the right time to create a product.

If you’ve got even one or two slow days coming over the next week, take Dave’s advice and create a small, low-cost product. It doesn’t matter if you have four blog subscribers, three of whom are related to you.

A few people may buy it, and that’s great. They’ll tell others about it, and that will start attracting the targeted audience you need in the future (generating more sales).

More importantly, it will elevate you in people’s eyes as a solution producer and not just a blogger. Big difference.

2. Write a series

If the idea of creating a product is still too scary, put it on your calendar for January. And instead, every day for the next seven days, write a post for a series for your blog or email newsletter.

What should your series be about? It should be about the most compelling, thorny problem your audience regularly faces that you’re passionate about fixing.

Solve some problems worth solving. Don’t wimp or waffle around, and don’t sell yourself short. Give your audience real answers they can start using right away.

3. Reconnect with your favorite bloggers

Sometimes the “social” in social media threatens to eat every minute we’ve got to give.

If you find yourself with a little down time next week, spend a few minutes and reach out to some of your favorite bloggers in your topic. You know, the ones you haven’t had any time to read in the last six months.

Read through their last 4 or 5 posts. Look through their archives or popular posts. Make some intelligent comments. If something useful presents itself, link to them in your series.

4. Create some audacious goals

I know, I know, nothing is more boring than telling you to set goals around this time of year.

But here’s the thing. Wildly exciting goals lead to wildly exciting results. (Not always, or even often, the precise results you visualized. Don’t let that worry you.)

Some time before December 31st, take an hour and write down the most perfect imaginable day for yourself. Where you wake up (and with whom), what you see, what you have for breakfast, what you do and where you go and how you do it. How you feel about everything you’re doing and seeing. How you look. What you smell and hear.

Use every ounce of writing skill you’ve got to make this description vivid. Sell yourself on it.

And try not to be too “realistic.” Let your dreams soar a little.

Then set a reminder in your calendar to take a look at this “perfect day” once every three months in 2010. Each time you revisit it, re-copy what you’ve written, making any tweaks you want to.

I promise you, in December next year, you’ll be a little spooked by some of the “unrealistic” things you wrote down this year, and how much more realistic they’ve become.

5. Sign up for some high-quality (free) education

If you haven’t joined us yet for Copyblogger’s free Internet Marketing for Smart People e-newsletter, you should sign up for it now. It starts with a 20-part course on some of the most important building blocks to marketing your product or service online.

The newsletter will give you the marketing tips and techniques that work in the real world, including the smartest strategies for marketing with social media. And we do it without the annoying sleaze and hype you see from too many other “gurus.”

If you’re planning on putting one (or all) of these into action by December 31, let us know in the comments! (And then come back on January 1 and let us know how you did.)

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

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