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5 Situations That Demand You Hire a Professional Copywriter

by Sonia Simone on March 16, 2011

image of red telephone

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 Your Prospect’s Brain Becomes Your Secret Persuasion Partner

by Marcia Hoeck on December 20, 2010

x-ray of human brain

What if you could have a secret ally working behind the scenes, steadily working to convince your ideal customer or client that you are absolutely the right person for her to choose?

Well, you can. One of the most potent marketing forces you can use in capturing, holding, and influencing the attention of your prospect’s brain is the power of consistency.

You can easily trip yourself up without meaning to. Many bloggers get bored with their message and think their prospective clients are, too. This can lead to the thought that you have to constantly reinvent yourself to liven things up. You think you should start to write new things, put out new opinions, shake things up a little.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

About the time you’re getting tired of being The Fish Pickling Guru, your prospects are only just getting used to it. They’re just starting to “get it” and really hear what you’re saying. They don’t want you to change it, especially if your message is a good fit for you and for them. Change it, and you risk losing the attention and influence you’ve gained so far.

You also risk confusing their brains. And you want their brains on your side.

The brain remembers relentlessly repeated messages

The brain can’t pay attention to everything and it doesn’t let everything in. It figures anything that is repeated constantly must be important, so it holds on to that information.

Consistent, emotionally-driven messages are remembered too, for the same reason: your brain thinks those messages must be important.

Advertisers know this. How many of us can still repeat commercial slogans from our childhoods when we can no longer remember our fourth-grade teacher’s name? That’s the power of repetition and consistency.

Some experts say that it takes a minimum of 7 to 9 impressions for direct mail to make an impact on you, and it can take up to 56 times for an ad to enter your conscious awareness. So even the most clever, catchy ad needs to be repeated so often it would certainly seem to most of us like it’s becoming boring.

But it hasn’t. It’s just starting to sink in.

The brain likes to group things

It assumes that elements having something in common go together. Your awareness may see a group of messages like this:

image of disordered figures

At the same time, your brain is trying to organize the information. It saves time and energy by processing things in groups, and is categorizing the messages like this:

image of figures in order

This is a really good reason why you want to be consistent — so that your clients’ brains can recognize your repeated messages and put them in the correct group “container” in their brains.

Every message you put out, they immediately group in the “Fish Pickling Guru” category, which means they have a steadily-growing supply of consistent messages that show what you have to say is important.

By sheer volume, those messages become more influential.

The brain likes to link things

The brain links new information with existing knowledge it already has stored, from the conscious to the subconscious, so it will pay attention faster to information it’s already used to.

Think of the Nike logo. Just by bringing up the image in your head, your brain thinks: There’s something familiar! I’ll let that enter my attention, and I’ll file that with my already large depository of Nike information.

This is why so many companies work so hard and spend so much on their branding. Inconsistent branding won’t encourage the brain to link one piece of information to another. Those messages wind up in different categories in your brain and become less influential.

Know your personal brand and make sure your messages stick with it to hold the attention of your prospect’s mind.

The brain values consistency

Familiar things are comforting to us. That’s why you always go back to the same restaurants even if it’s not your favorite food. It’s because you know what you’ll get — no surprises. As far as your brain is concerned, familiar things are safe. No danger, no worry. And that’s just what your brain wants.

Your consistency develops trust with your audience — we trust people who consistently behave in the manner we expect them to. You probably didn’t trust Uncle Eddie if he picked you up after school some days and not on others. On the other hand, you trusted your brother even if he was consistently a total pest, because you knew what to expect.

Building meaningful consistency takes time, but there’s one thing anyone can do. When you’re getting bored with your message, when you feel the urge to shake things up just to do something different, resist. Don’t throw it out just when it’s starting to work.

Being consistent can be one of your most powerful tools for growing your business — all by making an ally out of the human mind.

About the Author: Marcia Hoeck helps entrepreneurs create businesses that will run without them. Join her complimentary Indestructible Business webinar series or catch her Breakthrough Business blog. (And yes, the rumors are true, she did give birth to Johnny B. Truant.)

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How Your DIY Attitude Is Keeping You Poor

by Johnny B. Truant on December 17, 2009

image of hammer and nail

The way people talk, you’d think there are like four customers in the world. Maaaaybe five if you look around really hard — but that’s about it.

So whatever you do, if you’re lucky enough to have one of those customers, you’d better not do anything that minimizes the income you receive from them.

You’d certainly better not share them. You’d better cut your expenses to the bone on the back end, and hey . . . if you know that a competitor is courting one of the other three or four customers? Well, then you’d better get over there and work on stealing them away.

Right now, you’re rolling your eyes at this dumb picture I’m painting. But just for fun — just to see if I’m totally off base — ask yourself the following:

  • Are you willing to partner with someone if it means that you’ll make less profit per customer, but have access to more customers?
  • Are you willing to pay handsomely for referrals — 50% or more in some cases?
  • Would you be willing to share your business with a competitor who does the same basic thing as you do?

If the answer to any of the above is no, then you’re suffering from a scarcity mindset.

You don’t really believe there are a lot of fish in the sea. You believe there are only a few fish. Or, maybe there are more fish way out deep, but in order to get to them, you’ll need to charter a boat, which means trusting some skeevy boat captain. And what happens when you get into a boat with someone who you can’t trust? You get whacked while baiting your hook, like Fredo in The Godfather.

I’m going to suggest getting over that perception.

There are a LOT of fish in the sea. And the sooner you learn to work with other people to help you get them, the faster you’re going to get ahead.

Anatomy of a successful partnership

One of the things I do in my business is set up WordPress blogs for clients. Just a few months ago, I met Genuine Chris Johnson of Flat Rate Web Jobs. Now, Chris does something interesting in his business. He sets up WordPress blogs for clients.

So what did Chris and I do with this apparent conflict of interests? We teamed up, of course.

See, if you do business in the way I tell readers and consulting clients alike, you’ll soon realize that there are “your people” and there are “not your people.” And once you figure that out, you’ll see that most of your seeming competitors really aren’t competitors after all. Even if your services are the same, your people probably are not.

Yes, Chris and I both set up blogs, but our audiences are very different. Chris’s customers come mainly from the offline world and are learning the power of blogging for the first time. My customers usually already understand the internet and the blogosphere.

The way he finds and contacts clients (often including a phone call) is very different than the way I do (social networking and blogging, never using the phone). The questions and pain points that he addresses for clients (”What’s a blog, and how will it help my business?”) are different than the ones I address (”How quickly can I get my blog off of Blogger?”). His packages include a ton of training material. My customers don’t usually need much training, at least in the basics. Accordingly, our prices are fairly disparate.

Lastly, our personal strengths are different, and complementary. Chris is very good at sales and would rather that someone else handle customer service and implementation. Conversely, I don’t want to sell. I’d rather implement and do customer service.

We could pretty easily have decided that we were competitors. Chris could have kept selling his packages, and been bogged down each time with building sites, answering emails, and so on. I could have stuck solely with “my people,” and worked to sell each job I did.

But instead, the partnership has allowed each of us to make thousands of extra dollars a month.

Now, that’s a dramatic example (side note: it gets more dramatic when you realize that Chris dated my wife before I met her, a fact that caught both of us by surprise), but there are a few ways that you can increase your business through strategic partnerships that don’t necessitate seeking out apparent competitors.

Here are a few ways to start small:

1. Get a team

Or at least get an assistant. You can only do so much as one person, and insisting on holding all of the reins yourself ensures that not only will your business not grow past a certain point, but also that you’ll be stressed out and unable to take time off.

2. Start paying for referrals

A lot of people are reluctant to pay for referrals (or to start an affiliate program) because it means shrinking your profit margin.

That’s short-sighted thinking. If you offer commissions to people who send you business, those people send you more down the road.

Remember, a referral is business you would otherwise not have gotten. So be cool and kick a thank-you to the person who sent it your way. For services and tangible products, 10-20% is a good commission rate. For digital products, it should be 50% — or even more.

3. Bundle your products with other people’s products

If you sell your Widget Buster Extraordinaire for $50 and another person sells Widget Smashing Secrets for $50, consider making a deal to sell both products together for $80 and split the profits.

Yes, you’ll make $10 less each time you sell a Widget Buster. But the new Buster + Secrets offer is so much more attractive to customers that you’re almost certain to sell enough more to make up for it.

Don’t be short-sighted. Assuming your margins still support it, 50 sales at $40 is better than 25 sales at $50.

Getting beyond doing it yourself

There’s a certain romance in “going it alone,” especially for bloggers. But taking the DIY (do-it-yourself) mindset too literally just ensures that your business will never be able to grow beyond the capabilities of one person.

Trust me, other people are cool. Partnering with them is fun. And doing so is absolutely the way to accelerate your progress. So have a little faith and try it already.

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is a website builder and consultant extraordinaire who wants everyone to know that he’s raising his rates on January 1st — so if you’d like to work with him, now’s the time. (Contact him now and he’ll even build you a free blog.) You can also follow him on Twitter, where he’s moderately amusing.

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