Group: http://groups.google.com/group/publish-these-articles/topics
- Article Marketing From the Customer's Perspective [1 Update]
- Should You Test Company Names Or Product Names on Google? [1 Update]
- Six Things You Probably Do Not Know About Distributing Press Releases [1 Update]
- Teleseminar Versus Webinar? Determine Your Most Profitable Teaching Format [1 Update]
- Branding Solution: Creative Spelling Options May Help You Achieve a Trademarkable Company or Product Name [1 Update]
- Use the Charm of Contrast For a Great Company Slogan or Advertising Tag Line [1 Update]
- Personal Branding: Settle These Issues First Before Creating a Slogan, Moniker, Motto or Tag Line [1 Update]
- Considering a Free Company Name Generator? Ten Great Naming Techniques They Overlook [1 Update]
- Teleseminar Pricing: Two Highly Recommended Teleseminar Pricing Models [1 Update]
- Crowdsourcing: 9 Hidden Disadvantages of Crowdsourcing as a Method of Generating a Great New Business Name [1 Update]
- Five Ways to Make Your Company Slogan Catchy or Your Tag Line Terrific [1 Update]
- Postcard Marketing Model #22: Spark Repeat Business [1 Update]
- Postcard Marketing Model #20: Get Important People to Take Your Call [1 Update]
- Service Providers and Experts: 6 Ways You Profit by Creating Information Products [1 Update]
- The Three Biggest Mistakes First-Timers Make When Developing Information Products [1 Update]
- Your First Information Product: Choosing a Topic That Will Sell [1 Update]
- Product Creation: How to Create a Product You Can Sell Easily Via SEO [1 Update]
- Postcard Marketing Hands-Off Case Study #1 – Local Printer [1 Update]
- Postcard Marketing: Recession Rescue Case Study [1 Update]
- Postcard Marketing Model #12: Generate Immediate Cash Flow With Special Offers [1 Update]
- Beware of Undercutting Your Promotional Pitch! Avoid These Seven Pitfalls of Copywriting [1 Update]
- Postcard Marketing Model #11: Generate Leads [1 Update]
- Copywriting Can Help You Generate a Lead or a Sale Using Words in a Huge Variety of Situations [1 Update]
- But is it Really Proven to Work? Eight Research Studies Related to Copywriting [1 Update]
- Practical Copywriting: 10 Steps to Improve Your Marketing Copy Today and Tomorrow [1 Update]
- "Marcia Yudkin" <submissions@isnare.net> Apr 23 04:10PM +0800
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Article Title: Article Marketing From the Customer's Perspective
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 554
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Last week I went on an intensive search for articles to populate my new site for a vacation rental condo in Maui. Since Maui is a very popular tourist destination, I assumed it would be easy to find some good-quality content about it. In fact, this was a difficult and frustrating search. Here are the pervasive problems I encountered in my hunt as an article marketing customer.
1. Insipid content. Some articles appeared to cover a topic I was looking for, but nearly everything they said about it was silly and uninteresting. For example: "Maui has great places of attraction and people have lots of fun filled activities. This place has got bountiful fun activities for children too. This is a perfect place for people of all sorts of ages." Would anyone in their right mind actually want to read something like this?
2. Poor writing. Some articles that had decent content badly needed grammatical editing. If I had a choice, I would select the article that didn't need me to go through it fixing it sentence by sentence. However, I rarely had a choice because of the next issue.
3. Poor topic coverage. I had hoped to find and feature an article on each adventure sport that is prominent on Maui. Nope - many of them were not covered at all, or had just one article that was unsuitable for other reasons. Examples: windsurfing, kayaking and parasailing on Maui.
4. Too short. For my site, articles have to be at least 400 words, and over 500 words is much better. Otherwise the layout will look funny. Occasionally I ran across a very good article that was 350 words. It was going great but quit just when it was getting started.
5. No personality. It was a relief to come across articles that read like they were written by a real person, not some term-paper machine. An article written in first-person ("I") worked well for me, but a third-person style with some pizzazz and spunk in the wording was also welcome (and rare).
6. Stupid resource boxes. By far, this was the biggest flaw in what I found. For example, one very good article on whale watching in Maui had a resource box promoting discount tours in 2010. There was no way to contact the author to request a change in the resource box, so I reluctantly had to eliminate this candidate. What I wanted to see in the resource box was something about the author that would tie into the topic and indicate how they knew about the topic they were writing on, along with their link. This was extremely rare in my search.
Of the 15 or so articles I published on my site, I ended up using a few that were on the topics I wanted but guilty of problems #1, 2 or 5. When I have time I will replace these with my own articles. Problems #4 or 6 disqualified articles for me.
As you have undoubtedly gathered, my dream would be finding articles on the topics I wanted for my site, at least 400 words long, grammatically correct, well written with some personality and followed by an author bio and link in the resource box. Keep that goal in mind and you'll succeed beyond your dreams with article marketing.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin's 16 books include Meatier Marketing Copy, Publicity Tactics and Persuading People to Buy. This article recounts her experience in compiling articles for her web site, http://www.mauibanyancondorental.com, which attracts visitors to her Kihei, South Maui vacation rental site.
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Article Title: Should You Test Company Names Or Product Names on Google?
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 551
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A few years back, the firm MarketingExperiments ran tests of product names and domain names using Google Adwords, with results that could very well impress company and product namers to employ this method. By changing just the name in identical ads, the research team was able to show significant differences in click-through rates from otherwise identical text ads.
You "no longer have to rely on guesswork or personal favorites to try to predict which domain name will perform the best," the research report concluded. In one test, they extrapolated from a 9 percent increase in click-throughs to a possible $1.3 million increase in revenues over the course of one year from using the name that tested better on Google.
Wow! Should we all abandon our non-empirical naming methods and select names according to such tests?
No. While suggestive, these experiments have limited applicability. Indeed, MarketingExperiments themselves noted that their projections assumed that the differential click-through rates would not affect the rate at which click-throughs led to sales. In real life, however, it's quite likely that different names attract different kinds of people who have varying propensities to buy.
Consider these additional factors limiting the relevance of this testing method.
1) Do almost all of your customers use search engines to shop for what you sell?
Company names and product names that excel in search engine ads can tank in print ads or on billboards. They can be easily confused with competitors, sabotaging word of mouth sales. They can look terrible on signage or be tongue twisters to pronounce. They can have negative appeal to those who don't shop online.
2) Do your customers tend to buy on their first visit to your web site?
The longer your typical customer takes to buy, the less relevant the gain in initial click-through becomes, and the more important it is to have a memorable name that makes a positive, relevant impression away from the computer screen.
3) Are repeat sales important in your business?
MarketingExperiments recommends starting your testing with highly descriptive names, such as PowerScreener Pro or StockScreener Plus, which have had a terribly hard time carving out a firm place in people's memories. People who buy once from a search engine and then go back to the search engine when it's time to reorder, because they can't recall who they bought from previously, quite likely buy from a competitor of yours the next time.
4) What about other drawbacks of names?
Nowhere does MarketingExperiments remind people to make sure names that test well are free of legal risks, including trademark infringement or over-promising in the name. There's also the risk of attracting people who buy but differ greatly from your ideal customer.
In short, I would recommend testing names with Google Adwords ads only if you sell something exclusively online that people tend to buy on their first visit from a search engine. Even then, you need to be mindful of the considerations I noted above.
For most of the clients who come to Named At Last for help, this testing method would be quite irrelevant. Broader strategic concerns are as important or more important than click-throughs from search engines.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, a naming company that brainstorms catchy tag lines, company names and product names according to the client's criteria. Download a free copy of "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line" at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm .
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Article Title: Six Things You Probably Do Not Know About Distributing Press Releases
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 568
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In recent years, while helping clients distribute press releases on PRWeb, Ereleases, Emailwire, Officialwire and a few other paid press release distribution services (and using those services myself), I have learned a few important pointers that I haven't seen other publicity experts discuss.
1. Press releases can deliver traffic for years. Every day, my web site gets visitors who have found and clicked from releases posted two years ago or earlier. Therefore, if you use press releases to promote a transitory event or limited-time product, either update your landing page from the release to something people can now buy or redirect traffic to that landing page to a closely related, still relevant page.
Not all services keep your releases active indefinitely, however. One subscription service told me that if I didn't renew my account, all the releases I had posted through them would become invisible. Ask about this before buying a monthly or annual subscription to a distribution service.
2. Google News - where journalists, researchers and news hounds like to search - keeps releases active for about a month. Thus, if you promote the same item or use the same set of keywords just once a month, you keep up your presence in Google News nicely. More often than that, you're not getting much additional bang for your effort and investment.
3. Always link to HTML pages. One client wanted to link directly from her release to a PDF document, and I told her to link to an HTML landing page instead. Why? If people downloaded the PDF from the release, they wouldn't be exposed to her web site and its descriptions of her other products and services. Also, media people consider offering publicity-related material in PDF format a sign of cluelessness.
Another client wanted to include a shopping cart "buy" link in her release - also not a good idea. Hardly anyone is ready or willing to buy after reading just a press release. They want the reassurance and credibility of reading more about the offering on a web site before pressing the "buy" button.
4. Twitter is a player now in press release distribution. One press release distribution service owner told me that 90% of the releases from his service now get tweeted. Sometimes it's "bots" that do this, but often it's humans. To maximize tweetability, keep your press release headlines at 100 characters or less, and do not use special characters, like $, %, & or @, in your headlines, as these can interfere with the way the "bots" are programmed.
5. Use graphics. Many of the distribution services now let you add a graphic or two to the release at no extra charge. Whenever possible, take advantage of this option, which helps your release attract more attention in a list of releases on a certain topic. For the graphic, use a product shot, a head shot of your CEO or the company logo.
6. Don't limit yourself to launches. More than 80 percent of the time when a client hires me to write and distribute a release, it's for an upcoming event or a new product. However, trend stories and timeless tips are appropriate for press releases, too. In fact, I'm now in the process of rewriting the 100+ tips articles I've posted on article sites into press releases for a second, powerful hit of human attention and search engine love.
About The Author: Publicity expert Marcia Yudkin is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity, and 13 other books. She helps organizations generate publicity angles, spark the interest of the media and be findable by journalists. Download her free one-hour audio recording on publicity: http://www.yudkin.com/publicityideas.htm
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Article Title: Teleseminar Versus Webinar? Determine Your Most Profitable Teaching Format
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 549
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"Aren't teleseminars being superseded by webinars?"
This is a reasonable question. A webinar, in case you're not sure, is a seminar that people listen to and watch on the web, via their computer, while a teleseminar involves listening only, via the telephone or computer.
Webinars have numerous disadvantages in comparison to teleseminars:
* Increased preparation time. For a webinar, you need to prepare visuals as well as what you'll say. Generally there is a Powerpoint-style accompaniment to the talking that must be organized, written and polished ahead of time. If you use photographs or other graphics instead of bulleted summaries of your points, those still must be prepared. The recommended guideline is about one slide per one minute of presentation. That means 60 slides are needed for a one-hour webinar, or a bit fewer if you're planning a question-and-answer session at the end. For me, webinars take five to ten times as much preparation time as teleseminars.
* Added costs. Webinars require a reliable hosting service that you need to pay for. Some high-quality teleseminar vendors, however, are free.
* Technology barriers. People who have dialup service or Satellite Internet usually cannot participate in webinars. Some corporate folks can't join a webinar because of their company firewall. And serious technical glitches are multiple times more common with webinars than teleseminars.
* Computer dependency. Participants must be at a computer to access a webinar. If you expect people to participate from the office, this is not a problem. If you target a consumer audience, webinars are less of a fit. Unless you convert a completed webinar to an audio-only presentation, a recorded webinar likewise can't be accessed in the car or while running or walking as a teleseminar can.
* Bigger learning curve. The last two times I participated in webinar-based conferences, I was required to take part in a one-hour training session first, so I would understand how to operate the controls while presenting. For me, having to simultaneously think about moving the slides and giving my talk makes a webinar much more stressful than a teleseminar. I'm still tense giving a webinar, even after more than a dozen times. The interface is so much simpler for running a teleseminar that only a short run-through is needed, if that, for a first-timer to feel relaxed while presenting.
Webinars do have some advantages over teleseminars:
* Visuals. For teaching how to do something, or for keeping the audience engaged in more than one perceptual channel, webinars rule.
* Higher tech. As the question implied, webinars appear more "advanced" than teleseminars. In some markets this is a significant plus.
* Bells and whistles. One webinar I led last year incorporated real-time polling of the audience. It was very cool to be able to ask a question and get participants' instant answers. That's not available with most teleseminar systems.
To make the right decision between these two modes of presentation, think about the subject matter you are teaching, the expectations of your audience, their technology setup, whether it's a work or non-work presentation, your budget and your own comfort level with the two types of technology.
Good luck with your teaching program!
About The Author: Veteran teleseminar presenter Marcia Yudkin specializes in high-ticket, high-value teleteaching courses. To find out more about your teleseminar options, download a complimentary copy of "66 Ways to Use Teleseminars to Promote Your Business or Your Cause" at http://www.yudkin.com/teleteach.htm .
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- "Marcia Yudkin" <submissions@isnare.net> Apr 23 03:40PM +0800
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Article Title: Branding Solution: Creative Spelling Options May Help You Achieve a Trademarkable Company or Product Name
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 537
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More and more business owners, entrepreneurs and corporate marketers get discouraged while trying to name a new venture. Each great inspiration leads to disappointment because the corresponding domain is already taken. Or the lawyers advise that the name in question is too generic and cannot be trademarked.
If this applies to you, consider creative spelling options, which take a familiar word or phrase and spell it idiosyncratically. Eccentric spelling can clear the way for both an available domain and trademarkability.
Using actual examples, here are particular spelling contortions to try when starting with a word whose sound and meaning you like.
1. Add a consonant. Normally this would happen at the end of the word, as with the social bookmarking site Digg.
2. Add a vowel. This tends to add a humorous, childish, cute tone to the new name, as with Piizza.
3. Insert an initial letter. You'd then get vAuto and Wpromote. Count on being asked what the extra letter signifies, and have a plausible and interesting explanation ready.
4. Drop a consonant. One name fitting this pattern is Singshot, an apt name for an online Karaoke community that lets you record your own versions of thousands of songs and share them with the world. Its resemblance to "slingshot" makes it come across as a pun.
5. Drop a vowel. This gives you BildNet, which a software developer chose because BuildNet wasn't available. Note, however, that the entrepreneur eventually rued this choice and changed the company name to BuildEZ, which has also apparently been abandoned.
6. Drop all vowels. Recently I saw the company name SCVNGR in a magazine. Without much context, I was baffled about how to read it. It stands for "scavenger," and it names a company that organizes scavenger hunts that take place using cell phones. Once you know that, the texting shorthand seems perfectly attuned to its audience.
7. Change a vowel. Epinions, Farecast and Rylaxing fit this model. The first two of these three examples have pleasing double meanings, which add to the effect.
8. Change a consonant. Many businesses use "Kidz" in their company name, which is appropriately informal, considering the group referred to.
9. Change several letters. Thus we get Takkle, Mozaique, Topix and Syfy, all of which are correspondingly harder to remember than spelling variations where only one letter is changed, added or removed.
Be mindful of the tone created by your spelling gyrations. Using Railtronix instead of the more logical Railtronics or Thinkworx instead of Thinkworks heightens the "techiness" of these names. On the other hand, the spelling Tasti D-Lite instead of Tasty Delight sends the name downmarket, suggesting affordable treats rather than exclusive ones.
Be aware also that critics and the public may be ready to pounce when you take a conventionally spelled name and change it to a quirkily spelled one. Dozens of articles mocked the Sci Fi channel when they rebranded it to SyFy for trademarking purposes.
Creatively spelled names are much harder on the eye and ear than conventionally spelled ones. But they do often solve the problem that sparked their creation.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, which brainstorms catchy company names, product names and tag lines for clients around the world. Download a free copy of "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line" at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm
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Article Title: Use the Charm of Contrast For a Great Company Slogan or Advertising Tag Line
Author: Marcia Yudkin
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At the bottom of page 1 of my local small-town paper, the following headline for our hometown hospital caught my attention:
Nationally Ranked. Locally Loved.
I read it a few times and smiled. This headline has so much going for it. It's a perfect illustration of how to use contrast effectively in an advertising slogan or tag line.
Notice first the double use of contrast. Anyone who understands English knows at a glance that "nationally" is the opposite of "locally." Using the exact same grammatical form (an adverb ending in "ly") makes the contrast as attention getting as possible. And although "ranked" is not a strict opposite of "loved," it comes across like a second contrast because we see two "-ed" adjectives that have significantly different meanings.
Second, the meter or rhythm of the line is almost flawlessly balanced. If you're a stickler for precise pronunciation, "nationally" has four syllables while "locally" has three, but most people pronounce the former as if it has three syllables. The double periods invite you to read the headline in two distinct chunks, which enhances the balanced rhythm. The capitalization of each word slows down your reading just a bit, so you can savor the contrast even more.
Third, consider the meaning. The ad copy beneath the headline explains the national ranking, but even if we don't read it, we're impressed. It's unquestionably an actual distinction, not just marketing hype. This headline wouldn't pack the same punch someplace like Boston, where they take for granted having world-class hospitals. But 90 miles west, in little Northampton, Massachusetts, being nationally ranked is a big deal.
All in all, a powerful impact.
In the same issue of the paper, I found another line using the technique of contrast just a bit less successfully. It introduces a "green" real estate agent. Let's analyze the line and see why:
small town charm, big picture thinking...
On the surface, this uses contrast equally well, with "small town" versus "big picture," and "charm" versus "thinking." However, "small town" is not an exact opposite of "big picture." Although "small" is the exact opposite of "big," "town" and "picture" have little or no relationship. This makes for a slightly weakened contrast.
The rhythmic contrast is weaker, also. Whereas "town" has one syllable, "picture" has two. While "charm" has one syllable, "thinking" has two. Using all lower case and a comma and three dots after the segments is weaker than using matching periods, as well.
As for meaning, it comes across in a vague way - not as sharply as in the hospital example. It's clear this contrast is pointing out a positive thing, but we're less likely to understand what it refers to without the explanation that follows.
Overall, the second example shows a good, but not world-class, use of contrast.
When brainstorming for company names, product names, advertising slogans or tag lines, always stay on the lookout for opposing ideas. Then add the enhancements indicated in this article. Although it may be difficult to create a contrast as strong as the first example, even an amateur deployment of contrast adds zing and power.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, which brainstorms exciting company names, product names and tag lines for clients around the world. Download a free copy of "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line" at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm
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Article Title: Personal Branding: Settle These Issues First Before Creating a Slogan, Moniker, Motto or Tag Line
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 663
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Not long ago, I dissuaded one of my regular clients from working on a catchy new business name and tag line. She expressed surprise, because thinking up appropriate company names and tag lines is one of the services I provide. "I need some branding," she had said. "Don't I?"
In fact, personal branding involves much more than a flashy or witty new identity. A new company name, a nickname for herself or a memorable little slogan are actually relatively minor ingredients of effective branding. Much more importantly, she needed to have clearer, more compelling answers in her own mind to certain central branding questions.
Branding Questions
· What are you an expert in or on?
· For whom are you the expert of choice and why?
· What skills are your top strengths?
· What's your point of view?
· What is your promise?
· How can you be controversial or provocative?
· What character traits and values do you want people to know you for?
· What else can you provide that others can't?
Ponder these questions until you can confidently answer at least five of them. Compose a short summary of your thoughts, for reference. Then take your knowledge of what you stand for into your use of particular marketing tactics.
Put Your Branding Answers to Work
If you blog, make sure at least 60-80 percent of your blog posts are in line with what you most want to be known for. Once in a while, look at whatever blog posts happen to be showing on your blog's first page and ask yourself whether someone seeing those as their introduction to you would get the right impression of what you're about and want to hire you. If not, adjust what you blog about or how you write about it in your blog.
Do likewise with your Twitter postings. Look through the most recent 20 posts and ponder whether or not they show you as the kind of person you want to be perceived as. From time to time I get curious about people who have signed up for my Twitter feed, and I look through the posts showing on their Twitter home page. Often I feel like I've stepped into a cocktail party with a lot of incomprehensible but emotionally charged crosstalk. Other times I quickly get a positive sense of what makes this Twitterer tick. When you're on Twitter to advance your business, the latter is what you want to happen.
If you participate in topical online discussions, in forums, on discussion lists or in other social media venues, be mindful of how you might be coming off behaviorally as well as focusing on the content of what you have written. Are you hotheaded or reasonable? Do you put down people who mean well but don't know any better, stick up for those who are being unfairly targeted or always seem driven to get in the last word? Make sure these tendencies are consistent with your branding intent.
Branding can also show up in your photos. Have you selected a traditional corporate head shot or a whole-body shot where you're doing something unexpected? The style of the photo can reveal as much as your facial expression, the colors you are wearing and your hairdo.
The same goes for your voice mail. Do you come across as impatient, upbeat, dreamy or commanding? Again, make sure that fits with your desired branding.
Finally, think about whether a tag line or motto might pull together all the strands you're creating in everything you do. This is an optional step that has power when it sums up your clear, authentic self-expression, instead of representing some Madison Avenue invention that you chose because it sounds cool or clever.
About The Author: Besides serving as marketing mentor for dozens of North American business owners, Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, which brainstorms exciting company names, product names and tag lines for clients around the world. Download her free naming guide: http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm
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Article Title: Considering a Free Company Name Generator? Ten Great Naming Techniques They Overlook
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 866
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Type "business name generator" into a search engine and you'll discover a number of online tools that purport to help you come up with a catchy new company name. Use these automated tools, though, and you'll find yourself lulled into a very limited set of naming options.
They're excellent at combining two words into one or suggesting a second word for your one, then checking with just a click to see which domains are available. However, they offer just a fraction of the name possibilities that a human being can make up. And the human-generated options can be far fresher and more fitting than the computer-generated ones.
As proof, here are ten naming techniques humans can use that computers (so far) can't.
Ten Naming Techniques Overlooked by Automated Generating Tools
1. Syllable Substitution. A clever naming method takes a known word and transforms it into a cute made-up word with a very different meaning by changing one syllable in it. For instance, we have the word "quintessence," which we can modify into a sparkling name for financial software, Quantessence. Similarly, if we're naming a deli that serves Jewish specialties, we can take the Yiddish "nosh" (which means "to snack") and get Internoshional House. Such names are way beyond the reach of automated name generators.
2. Spelling Variants. Some years back, a search engine called Backrub was looking for a name implying multitudinous, nearly infinite search results. Name generation software contains only a minuscule percentage of the estimated half-million words recognized in the English language, and of those it "knows," it can't meaningfully play around with the language. Thus it would never have come up with Google, a misspelling of the obscure word "googol," which means a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. Backrub renamed itself Google and hurtled into Internet history.
3. Fractured Sayings. Another highly recommended technique for generating interesting company or product names is listing popular sayings related to the subject matter and tweaking them. For naming financial software, we'd list the word "figures," which might prompt the saying, "It figures." Modifying that slightly, we'd get It All Figures for the name of the software. Ironically, software itself wouldn't give us that solution.
4. Literary Allusions. Starbucks, the coffee chain, was named after the first mate of the Pequod in the novel Moby Dick. Likewise, anyone who's ever read F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic novel The Great Gatsby would smile hearing about an oceanside café called The Light at the End of the Dock. Yet never in a million years would either of these names come up in a computerized name generation session.
5. Pop Culture Allusions. As long as they're not trademarked, references to elements of popular culture like songs, games, sports, TV, clothing styles, and so on can serve as sources for names. Thus we have a brilliant name for a simplified cell phone that's perfect for the over-60 set: Jitterbug. This name could never have been generated from giving keywords like "cell phone," "simple" and "seniors" to a software program.
6. Historical Allusions. Consider John Hancock Insurance, Franklin Mortgage, Knickerbocker Trust Company and Alexander Hamilton Life, all in the general field of financial services. You need a knowledge of history to understand why those names inspire trust and, for instance, Benedict Arnold Bonds would be a disastrous choice.
7. Puns. Take a look at the creativity compressed into these names: The Lawnranger (garden services), Aquaholics (a dive shop), Melon Cauli (a greengrocer), The Vinyl Resting Place (a record shop), Sew 'n Sews (tailor shop) and Fleurtations (florist), which all placed as winners or runners up in company name contests run by the Yell Group in the UK. If computers could generate such names, they wouldn't be running such contests!
8. Nicknames. Automated name generators don't ask you questions like, "What was your childhood nickname?" And that's why they'd never come up with Kinko's, which was company founder Paul Orfalea's nickname, because of his kinky hair. Ditto for the FatBoy Cookie Company, whose owner was called FatBoy as a kid.
9. Complete Fabrications. Random combinations of letters give us weird names that look and sound like computer-generated names. But I haven't seen a name generator program that can spit out only unique names that can actually be pronounced by humans. Entrepreneur Rick Raddatz wanted a name for his business software conglomerate that had not yet showed up in Google, and he selected Xiosoft.
10. Slang. No Malarkey is the name of a web design company in Scotland that implies they give you the straight stuff. Dead Tree Publishing is even more tongue in cheek, implying an affectionate relationship with the medium of print. NinetoFivers Productions is a film company that implies business-related content. All of these use slang in ways that go beyond what computers can spit out in a search.
As you can tell, I'm a big fan of human creativity in naming. For a slam-dunk, out-of-the-park company name or product name, you should be, too.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, which brainstorms catchy business names, product names and tag lines without relying on software. Download a free copy of her how-to report, "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line," at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm
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Article Title: Teleseminar Pricing: Two Highly Recommended Teleseminar Pricing Models
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 542
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"Should I charge more for those who attend my live seminar than those who buy the recording?"
The answer depends on your primary purpose for presenting teleseminars. Here are two pricing models I strongly recommend, each for a different situation.
Pricing Model #1 works well when you are publicizing your seminar beyond your own list, where you hope to entice new people to opt-in so you can sell them on a certain product, service or paid event.
Offer the live teleseminar at no charge, with a nominal charge (such as $20) for the MP3 or CD recording. This encourages those who can to attend the live session, while it also gives you access to those who cannot attend. You need the live attendees so you have informational exchanges during the seminar, avoiding the monotony of a lecture.
People exposed to your knowledge and personality for an entire hour, either on the phone or on their audio player, then feel they know you and become receptive to a related follow-up offer.
I have used this model successfully numerous times as a lead generator for my copywriting mentoring program. The $20 charge for the recording usually brought in a few hundred dollars, and it may have also increased the perceived value of the live session for those who called in at no charge.
Colleagues of mine successfully use this model for a teleconference with numerous sessions or a longish series of related sessions. Attendance at the live calls costs nothing, but you can buy recordings of all the sessions for a fee like $97. As with the single-session arrangement, the free option generates good will among attendees while the paid option generates income that makes the effort financially worthwhile.
Use Pricing Model #2 when you have something new and valuable for those who have already opted in to your list.
Here, charge a single price for your content (such as $37 or $49) whether people attend live or listen to the recording. For the one price, your buyers get both access to the live session and the recording.
In this case, buyers are not in "get to know you" mode but rather are primed to learn. Your session provides a substantive educational event on a specialized topic. You go into your subject matter in more depth than you would with Pricing Model #1.
I used Model #2 in November 2009 when I interviewed a business attorney on what marketers should do about new Federal Trade Commission regulations that were about to go into effect the next month. This was information some people on my list were strongly motivated to learn about.
When I run a multi-session teleseminar course, I use this model as well, emphasizing to registrants that it doesn't matter whether or not they can fit the live sessions into their schedule. Within a day after each class, they receive the download address for its audio, and at the conclusion of the course, they receive all the recordings bound in a CD album they can keep on their shelf for future reference. This arrangement raises the perceived value of the course while eliminating objections based on scheduling or time available.
About The Author: Veteran teleseminar presenter Marcia Yudkin specializes in high-ticket, high-value teleteaching courses. To find out more about your teleseminar options, download a complimentary copy of "66 Ways to Use Teleseminars to Promote Your Business or Your Cause" at http://www.yudkin.com/teleteach.htm .
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Article Title: Crowdsourcing: 9 Hidden Disadvantages of Crowdsourcing as a Method of Generating a Great New Business Name
Author: Marcia Yudkin
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Want to get a spiffy new company name or product name fast, at low cost? A lot of Internet-savvy people are looking into a method of finding new names called "crowdsourcing." Actually, there are three methods that fall into that category, with one of them at least decades old, another one as about new as the Internet and the third much newer than that.
The oldest method, running a naming contest, involves no advanced technology. Just let people know about the contest and tell them how to enter. Have one or more judges choose a winner and award a prize.
The second oldest method consists of asking for naming suggestions on an email discussion list or web-based forum. Usually there's no reward; people help because they enjoy being creative.
The newest method of crowdsourcing involves sites set up explicitly to facilitate a web-based competition for the new name. Examples of this kind of site include Naming Force and Name This, with Mechanical Turk also being used for this purpose, even though it also runs other kinds of online work projects.
Advantages of Crowdsourcing
All three of these methods of collecting name suggestions have obvious advantages. First, the cost ranges from free to $100 or $200. Second, ideas generally come in rather fast. And third, the thinking power of so many people often yields many promising name candidates.
Disadvantages of Crowdsourcing
However, crowdsourcing also brings with it quite a few disadvantages. Since these tend to be much less obvious to the average business person looking for a name, let's consider them carefully one by one.
1. No confidentiality. This is the deadliest downfall of crowdsourcing. Soliciting suggestions makes your plans and the competitive advantages of your company or product public. Putting your naming challenge out for crowdsourcing can clue in competitors to what you're up to and make it possible for someone else to see your great new idea and run away with it. Someone watching the entries come in can also hurry to register the best domains before you have a chance to do that. On the other hand, if you try to be cagey and provide less information for these reasons, namers don't have enough to go on to offer usable ideas.
2. Poor quality entries. Crowdsourcing contestants normally submit whatever comes to them off the top of their heads. They may not know much about your industry and don't take the time to learn about it. They often ignore any naming criteria you stated, so you have to wade through a ton of wildly off-target suggestions. They don't think carefully about all aspects of your naming challenge the way professional name consultants would.
3. Wrong direction. Because amateur naming helpers don't look at the whole business landscape, they can lead you in a foolish direction. This pitfall snared Kraft Foods Australia, when they asked the public to suggest names for a new Vegemite spread. What were they thinking when they selected the entry "iSnack 2.0" as the winner from 50,000 submissions? Was it because it was so different from the more obvious options? Their announcement of the new name caused such an uproar in Australia that within four days, Kraft retracted it amidst a public relations disaster.
4. Popularity misleads. The number of votes received by an idea has nothing to do with whether or not the target market will find it appealing, whether a name is legally free for use, whether it contains any connotations that can backfire on the company, whether it sufficiently differentiates the item to be named from the competition, etc.
5. Stolen or recycled names. Contestants in crowdsourcing competitions have been known to deliberately submit ideas they copied, plagiarized or submitted in other competitions. One high-tech company turned to crowdsourcing when they received a cease-and-desist notice about their new logo. However, the exact same thing happened after they unveiled the winner of their competition. It too prompted a cease-and-desist notice, from a company charging that the new logo looked too similar to theirs. Ironically, this high-tech company ended up spending much more on PR spin control and legal fees by turning to crowdsourcing than it would have cost to hire a naming firm.
6. Coming up empty. Contestants don't normally have to ensure that their suggestions are legally available, as well as linguistically wise and appropriate from a marketing standpoint. Therefore, all the submitted options that stand up and sing may need to be eliminated from consideration, leaving nothing worth using. On the other hand, naming companies assume responsibility for delivering smart, feasible possibilities.
7. Derailment. When NASA asked the public to help name a new room to be added to future American space stations, comedian Stephen Colbert asked his fans to suggest it be called "Colbert." And indeed they did, in droves, so that he received 40,000 more votes than the runner-up name. The US space agency was not amused.
8. Missing the best talent. Those who are eager to contribute to a crowdsourcing competition may not have the keenest talent, since those with the greatest experience and skills are probably being handsomely paid for what they do. An episode of the TV show House MD spun a story where a patient got so frustrated with his misdiagnoses that he posted his symptoms online and asked the public to diagnose him in exchange for a $25,000 reward. At the end, viewers discover that Dr. House anonymously submitted the correct diagnosis because he had recently quit his job, was bored and needed a challenge – not for the reward. While fiction, the show nevertheless made a valuable point: Experts are much more likely than novices to nail the assignment.
9. Hidden costs. Culling through 50,000 submissions takes vastly more time than considering the top 5, 10 or 25 suggestions offered by a professional naming company. Since the legal risks of intellectual property infringement are high with crowdsourcing, legal expenses can mount, too, especially when the process goes awry or hasn't been set up properly to start with.
You Decide
All in all, you may feel that the lure of free or cheap, fast, eager help outweighs the pitfalls listed above. But if any of the pitfalls caused you to stop and worry as you read, you may be wiser to entrust your naming project to professionals.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, a company that brainstorms catchy business names, product names and tag lines according to the client's criteria. Download a free copy of "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line" at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm .
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Article Title: Five Ways to Make Your Company Slogan Catchy or Your Tag Line Terrific
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 592
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Whether you call it a company slogan, a tag line, a strapline, a logline, a branding statement, a positioning statement, a motto or a memory hook, this refers to a phrase that follows the company name in website headers, in print ads, on business cards and everywhere else.
Ideally, the slogan should say something interesting in a snappy way. In many cases, however, it just says something ordinary in a snappy way, and that gets the job done. The slogan makes the company stand out from competitors and stick in the minds of customers. It performs marketing magic.
Let's start with a couple of bland company names and then see how to jazz them up with five tag line techniques.
Example #1 is Benton Motor Rental. It rents cars to tourists and business visitors in Boston. The owners don't think it's all that special or exciting, but let's see what happens when we apply some creativity.
Technique #1: Alliteration. This means repeated initial sounds or letters, as in:
Benton Motor Rental: Boston's Best Rides
Note that all the words in the business name and tag line need not start with the same letter for alliteration to add pizzazz.
Technique #2: Contrast. This means a juxtaposition of opposites or extremes, such as day/night, minimum/maximum, rich/poor. Let's add this to the previous example to get:
Benton Motor Rental: Boston's Best Rides, by the Hour or the Month
The contrast in the added phrase conveys flexibility and range and makes the company sound like it caters to the convenience of the customer.
Technique #3: Rhyme. Again, let's reuse and tweak an idea we already thought up:
Benton Motor Rental: Your Best Ride is Our Pride
Although that's a little hackneyed, the rhymed tag line still adds energy and a promise of customer service to the company name.
Technique #4: Make an unexpected connection. Boston's nickname is Beantown, and this company's car rental service costs less than some competitors. So that yields:
Benton Motor Rental: Beancounter's Delight
Technique #5: Riff off a popular saying. Find a cliché related to car rental and add a clever twist, or take a saying having nothing to do with car rental and make it relate:
Benton Motor Rental: Making Boston Your Oyster
Well, anyone who knows Boston's twisted street system and aggressive drivers won't believe that slogan for a minute, but you get the idea, right?
Example #2 is Cathy's Fruit Shop. It sells both seasonal local fruits and fruits from overseas. It's known for being a friendly place with fresh, attractive produce. Again, let's get creative.
Technique #1: Alliteration.
Cathy's Fruit Shop: Pears, Papayas, Plums… Plus
Or, Cathy's Fruit Shop: Fundamentally Fresh and Friendly
Technique #2: Contrast.
Cathy's Fruit Shop: Earth's Bounty, Heavenly Fresh
Technique #3: Rhyme.
Cathy's Fruit Shop: Always the Freshest Crop
Technique #4: An unexpected connection.
Cathy's Fruit Shop: Fresh Fruit on Fridays – and Every Other Day of the Week, Too
Technique #5: Riff off a popular saying.
Cathy's Fruit Shop: Compare Our Apples and Oranges
It's so much easier to pull captivating slogans out of your hat when you have these guidelines for combining words in punchy ways!
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin is Head Stork of Named At Last, a company that brainstorms catchy business names, product names and tag lines according to the client's criteria. Download a free copy of "19 Steps to the Perfect Company Name, Product Name or Tag Line" at http://www.namedatlast.com/19steps.htm .
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Article Title: Postcard Marketing Model #22: Spark Repeat Business
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 846
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Did you know that it costs five times as much to sell to a new customer as to sell something else to the same customer? Although this fact is far from a marketing secret, it's a rare company that takes full advantage of this important dynamic. Online, you can follow up a purchase using autoresponders. Offline, you can inspire a buyer to purchase again and again with postcards.
Here are some inexpensive and powerful ways of using postcards to inspire repeat business.
1. "Thank you"s. Three to seven days after a purchase, mail a simple postcard to the purchaser saying "thank you." Even if the postcard isn't very personalized, in itself it makes a significant impression. By getting across the message that you don't take customers for granted, it creates good will and encourages the customer to shop with you again and tell friends about your company. Don't forget too that postcards often get posted on refrigerators, slipped into briefcases or file folders or propped by the telephone as reminders.
For this kind of a postcard, try for something eye-catching, unusual, scenic or humorous rather than a clichéd image. A "thank you" makes an especially deep impression when the purchase was downloaded. Intensify the "wow" experienced by the customer by signing postcards with handwriting in ink before they go out.
2. "Stick message." Information marketers recommend a message congratulating the purchaser, providing instructions on how to get started with the product and reiterating the benefits of the item purchased. While this is often enclosed with the product, it can also be sent afterwards on a postcard. Stick messages reduce refunds and lay the groundwork for a great long-term customer relationship. Include contact information – your email address and/or phone number – and invite questions for even greater effectiveness.
3. Unannounced bonuses. Deepen customer loyalty by sending some or all of your buyers a postcard that they can redeem for a gift by bringing it into the store, calling your office or using a coupon code at your web site. I can still remember my surprise when online bookseller Amazon sent me a branded travel mug out of the blue and Google sent me a little cookbook and apron for being a good customer. The postcard is a cheaper yet still effective way to deliver a bonus gift, as well as to train customers to pay attention to your mailings.
4. Revised versions. Use a postcard to let past buyers know that a revised version of the product is now available. Of course not everyone will want to upgrade, but such a card helps maintain the thread of your relationship with each customer and helps you stay top of mind when a related need arises.
5. Complementary products. Figure out which other products might appeal to those who bought Product X, and create postcards pitching one of the complementary products at a time. Send them a month apart. When the marketing copy makes clear the connection with what they've already bought, customers tend to like being pitched. Again, recipients start to welcome your follow-ups and become more likely to recommend you to others and to repurchase themselves.
6. Reorder reminder. For consumable purchases like vitamins, toner cartridges, auto maintenance services and so on, a well-timed postcard letting your customer know they may run out soon and giving them a special offer if they reorder now usually gets results. Such a program almost always adds to your bottom line, because when customers order before they use up what they have, they purchase more times per year.
7. Seasonal offers. Contact customers by postcard to let them know how you can help them with tasks that are especially appropriate for a certain time of the year. Be creative, and the postcards can miraculously bring in revenue during predictable slow times. For instance, a landscaping company can offer stone wall or driveway maintenance just before winter sets in, or a B&B can send a "staycation special" postcard to past visitors when gas prices have spiked and fewer folks are traveling.
8. Useful information. Simply staying in touch reminds customers you exist and reminds them to call you about a current need. So monthly or quarterly postcards to your customer base could present snippets of useful content, such as recipes, statistics, case studies, industry news, a short editorial or opinion piece, and so on. Be sure to include a call to action on such an information piece, such as an invitation to visit your online catalog or to call about an upcoming project.
Don't forget that postcards are versatile! Besides sending them out in the mail, you can enclose many of the above types of cards with a purchase, hand them out at a trade show or stack them on the giveaway table at a networking event. Even though they're designed to be mailed, postcards are much more magnetic than a typical invoice, sales sheet or business card.
About The Author: Veteran postcard marketer, consultant, author Marcia Yudkin is the creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of postcard marketing. Download her free 1-hour audio interview on postcard marketing: http://www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm
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Article Title: Postcard Marketing Model #20: Get Important People to Take Your Call
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 878
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Imagine how far you could go in your career personally or how far you could take your company if you could snap your fingers and get an audience with a Senator, a CEO, a New York book publisher, Oprah Winfrey's producer or some other VIP.
Postcards can open the door. If you use them with creativity and persistence, postcards can take you from a total nobody in the eyes of a busy person who is guarded by effective gatekeepers to someone whose call gets through. Here are three proven strategies. They use the power of assumption, the power of curiosity and the power of personal humor.
Postcard strategy #1. Would a conscientious gatekeeper toss a personal message from an old friend into the trash along with the junk mail? Not a chance. This strategy takes careful planning, and it's not for the faint-hearted.
First, research your target VIP's avocations – perhaps rock climbing, the opera or southern barbecue. Find a postcard image or a commercially sold postcard of a place that vividly evokes one of those avocations, and create a bold statement tying together the theme in the image with what you hope to discuss with the person. Then hand-write your bold statement casually on the card, then say you'll be calling soon to discuss it. Sign the postcard with your first name and a surname initial or an illegible last name.
For example, the image is of a climber on Yosemite's Half Dome, because you've read Mr. College President likes climbing. Your handwritten message, slanted up the card rather than straight and neat: "Without knowing the ropes, no one makes it up Half Dome. We've pioneered a new route for budget forecasting that's double the accuracy of our closest competitor. Talk to you soon! – Marianne C." Be sure to use a stick-on postal stamp. Send two variants of these with different images, then call and introduce yourself to the gatekeeper as the Marianne who sent the climbing postcards. Ask when would be a good time to speak to Mr. College President. Repeat until you get his ear.
Postcard strategy #2. Think up a question that Ms. Importante and others in her position would very much like to know the answer to and that's related to what you'd like to discuss. The question must concern something that wouldn't be considered a personal or organizational secret, and it should be an open question rather than one asking for a yes or no.
This postcard should look much more business-like than the one for strategy #1. On the image side, use something graphical that's not especially eye-catching or indicative of the topic, so the recipient will turn the card over to see what it's about. On the message side, present your question in bold, and underneath, explain that you're surveying ___s (fill in the blank with their title) on this question. You need less than five minutes of phone time for the survey, and anyone who participates receives the anonymized results of what the other folks in the poll said. After sending the postcard, call to set up the appointment.
After you've done a handful of surveys, redo your postcard so that just after the question, you add a teaser indicating a preliminary finding. Emphasize that it's inconclusive, and you're still surveying, and so on. Again, after sending the revised card, call to set up the appointment.
After you've completed a reasonable number of surveys, send the results to all the VIPs you spoke with. Then call each one to set up an appointment to discuss the results. Finally you're in a position to broach your real motive for setting the whole strategy in motion! Ms. Importante is just about guaranteed to listen at that point.
Postcard strategy #3. Here you send a cartoon rather like those in The New Yorker magazine that includes the name of the recipient in the humorous caption. According to Stu Heinecke, whose company CartoonLink supplies such personalizable cartoons, this technique has succeeding in winning appointments at a rate as high as 100%. It has also worked with Presidents, Prime Ministers, celebrities and CEOs. Not only does such a postcard become a keepsake, it nearly always gets shown around and displayed for months.
Heinecke recommends sending the personalized cartoon, then calling and identifying yourself as the person who sent the cartoon. You're going to be tempted to include the name of your company in the cartoon, but that never works, he says. The cartoon doesn't work because of branding, but because the caption and humor create a clever point of agreement about the situation you are proposing to help your prospect with. In addition, the person's name in the cartoon makes a unique impression.
All of these are low-volume, high-touch ways to use postcards to start a conversation with important, hard-to-reach people. When you consider the potential value of getting through to the VIP who has the power to endorse and aid your project, careful execution of this type of postcard campaign is certainly worth the effort.
About The Author: Veteran postcard marketer, consultant, author Marcia Yudkin is creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of postcard marketing. Download her free 1-hour audio on marketing with postcards: http://www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm
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Article Title: Service Providers and Experts: 6 Ways You Profit by Creating Information Products
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 1053
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Here's a question I received not long ago from someone whose income consists of writing and editing fees from clients: "Is it really worth all the time it takes to create and market infoproducts? If your normal revenue-generating activities bring you $50 or $100 an hour (or more), why spend it on planning, writing and marketing these little projects? Isn't it better to engage with a prospect for a $4,000 white paper than work on a $29 or $129 infoproduct?"
If this skepticism rings a bell with you, see how you feel after reading my list of six ways that developing information products benefits any service provider.
Reason #1: It's a great way to get potential clients over the trust hump to hire you.
Just as the ice cream store gives you that little spoonful of an unfamiliar flavor so you can find out whether or not you like the taste before you commit to a full ice cream cone or dish, your infoproduct provides a sampling of your intellect, talent, knowledge and writing flair. Having someone read or listen to your infoproduct certainly takes up less time on your part than giving a free introductory consultation.
One copywriter says his writing career was going nowhere until he developed a few infoproducts. Then instead of him unsuccessfully chasing down clients, they came after him and said, "Hey, your copy is pretty good. What would you charge for a sales letter? I'd like to hire you."
I've seen it happen for myself, too. A man in England was wavering on whether or not to hire me to create a tag line, and I saw that he ordered a little $29.95 report I wrote. Then about 40 minutes later, his tag line order came through. That report gave him enough confidence to hire me.
Reason #2: You have something to sell to do-it-yourselfers who'd rather save money or think they can't afford you.
Interestingly, the do-it-yourselfers think they are buying a report or a home-study course to save money and learn how to do something themselves. But often what happens is that they learn what's involved, they sort of understand it, but they don't have the time to do it, or they're concerned they'll mess it up, and besides, you know so much more than they do, they've just seen the proof, and they end up hiring you to do it.
I've seen this happen again and again, both with inexpensive infoproducts and with expensive ones. If you don't have an infoproduct for them, do-it-yourselfers will go away and buy one from someone else – and then the other person gets the follow-up project as well.
Reason #3: Infoproducts increase your perceived expertise.
You can compare this effect to public speaking. By the mere fact that you're up in front of the room rather than in the audience, in the eyes of the audience you are an expert. It's also been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that publishing a book vastly increases your perceived expertise and earning power.
In 2006, the web site Rain Today released the results of a survey of 200 authors of business books. Whereas the median direct income from their book was $34,000, the median indirect income – from more speaking engagements, ability to generate more leads, charge higher fees, close more deals, etc. – was $100,000. Of those authors, 84% said their books had a strong or very strong influence on their ability to stand out against competitors, and 63% reported a strong or very strong influence on generating new clients.
I don't know of a comparable survey of people who have published non-book infoproducts, but all of those relationships are still there, although in slightly weaker form. When a potential client is trying to decide between a service provider who has an infoproduct and one who only has clients, the one with the infoproduct comes across as more of an expert.
Reason #4: Infoproducts give you additional income.
One copywriter said in her newsletter that she's made more than $100,000 from her various infoproducts. That's a nice chunk of change.
Some people think of infoproducts as only little ebooks that cost $10 or $20, and that's probably the level at which you should get started, but they go all the way up to $1000 and more. My most expensive home study course is $1,297, and while I don't sell one of these every day, it's very nice when I do. I've already done the work.
Reason #5: Infoproducts enable you to earn while on vacation or in retirement.
When you earn money by serving clients, the income stops when you go on vacation, get sick or retire. In contrast, infoproduct income just keeps coming whether you're asleep, in the hospital or on the beach.
This vacation earnings factor was the real motivator when I decided to develop more expensive infoproducts. In 2006, my most expensive product was $95. In 2007, my husband and I were able to take almost three months off to drive to Alaska and back (from Massachusetts) and finance the trip by sales of infoproducts while we were off having fun. I did not do any client work at all during that trip, and yet the money kept flowing into my bank account.
Infoproducts make it easier for you to make it through slow times, or when you have family issues to take care of, when you want to switch niches, and so on. They give you breathing space when you need it. Whenever things slow down, you just step up promotion of your infoproduct or create a new one.
Reason #6: Creating infoproducts helps you understand your topic better.
When you invest your mental energy and brain power in creating an information product of any kind, you develop a deeper view of your subject. Before making my list for this article, I knew anyone would benefit by monetarily and psychologically from creating infoproducts. But now I have much more ammunition to win the argument with the skeptic who suspects he's better off staying away from the infoproducts path!
About The Author: The author of 14 books and 7 multimedia home-study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information since 1981. Download a free recording of her answers to commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information in the box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm
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Article Title: The Three Biggest Mistakes First-Timers Make When Developing Information Products
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 625
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"Is it really worth developing information products instead of spending that time and energy working for clients?"
I'm often asked this question, and the answer is yes… as long as you avoid the top three mistakes I see others make when creating their first infoproduct.
Mistake #1 is starting too big. People think they should start out writing a book, or something of that length and complexity. But your first book can take years to finish. The same delay can happen if you decide to start out with a grand home-study course concept.
One product developer asked to interview me as one of 12 experts in a big home-study course and promised to send me the whole package when it was done. Every couple of months I would email her to ask could she please send me a copy of the product, and she would tell me it still wasn't done yet. It took her almost two years to finish creating that course! And when I did finally receive a copy, I could see half a dozen ways in which she had made her project much harder and more complicated than it needed to be. Worse, some of the information from the experts in her course was already out of date.
I'm not saying don't write books or don't create big, complicated infoproducts. I am simply saying don't begin with one of those. Start with an easy project that you can start and finish in a week or less, such as an audio interview of an expert or a compilation of commonly asked questions and answers. Start earning from that. Then tackle a bigger project.
Mistake #2 is creating a product focused on what they should want to know, what's good for them to know, not what they actually want to know.
For example, a small-business marketing expert creates a terrific workbook on how to translate features into benefits. This would be extremely beneficial to anyone who wants to find more customers or clients. However, the average small business owner has never heard of features and benefits, so they are not looking for this information and they may not understand its significance for them even if they accidentally stumble across a promotion for such a product.
Another example would be creating a program for parents on how to listen better to their children. I'm sure that plenty of parents would create better relationships with their kids with advice on that topic, but if they don't already know that listening is a key to better parenting, they wouldn't gravitate to, seek out or respond to the topic.
Mistake #3 is producing a grab-bag product. This often happens when someone has audio or written content hanging around in their files that they want to repurpose. Miscellaneous or semi-miscellaneous collections of written or spoken information do not sell.
One entrepreneur was struggling to make money from a collection of audio interviews with successful women. This was not specific enough to appeal strongly to women or anyone else. Another entrepreneur I know is determined to pass along all the secrets to running a business he's accumulated while writing about owning an antique shop, running eBay car auctions and buying and selling Internet domains. These activities are so different from each other that they don't belong in the same infoproduct, if the goal is a product that sells.
So start small, start on a topic people understand they need information on, and start specific. Then you're on solid footing and have a far better chance of the rewards you're seeking.
About The Author: The author of 14 books and 7 multimedia home-study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information since 1981. Download a free recording of her answers to commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information in the box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm
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Article Title: Your First Information Product: Choosing a Topic That Will Sell
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 539
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The other day I asked about 100 people who had signed up for a session on developing infoproducts what was their biggest concern about creating their first information product.
To my surprise, less than 10 percent said they worried most about the technicalities of the product creation process or felt a lack of confidence that anyone would buy. A bit less than 20 percent indicated that their biggest obstacle was lack of time. And a whopping 72 percent said that most of all, they weren't sure what their product should be about.
Two Topic Selection Strategies
There are two sound ways to select an infoproduct topic. Strategy #1 is to pick a topic that positions you well with your target market and has synergy with your ongoing business. For example, someone who specializes in writing autoresponder copy would logically create a product explaining how to win over customers, email by email. Maybe you help people plan healthy menus after a diagnosis of diabetes – that's a terrific topic for a small report.
Strategy #2 is to look to a hobby you're passionate about, that's separate from your business or profession. Where one person is passionate about coffee, maybe your thing is working with rescue dogs or beginning Urdu or winning in fantasy football. If you're going to focus on your hobby, you probably already know where people who are into the same thing you are hang out online, and that's a big advantage when it comes to marketing your product.
Three More Tips
Remember also that it's going to be much, much easier to sell information that solves a problem for a set group of people than information that's simply interesting or simply informative, for no one in particular.
Likewise, it's much, much easier to sell information that someone has to have, as opposed to hmm, that would be nice to know. And sometimes the difference between saleable and unsaleable consists in how you pitch the information rather than the intrinsic nature of the information content.
For example, an infoproduct called "Understanding Employees' Personalities" sounds like it's a noble and nice thing to learn, but definitely not necessary. Transform it into "17 Ways to Turn Staff Who Think Selling is a Dirty Word into Sales Stars," which solves a certain problem for some managers, and you'll find it much easier to sell.
In the same way, a report or recording called "Raise a Happy, Healthy Dog" seems valuable, but change it "The 11 Most Common Dog Health & Happiness Problems – Solved" and you have made it far more compelling to someone who has even one of those issues with their dog.
And last, never pick a topic solely because you know of a group that would find the topic irresistible. Don't forget, you need to bring the content of that product into being and promote it effectively so customers buy. Do not select a topic that bores you. Choose a subject that gets you excited, and that enthusiasm easily passes along to your ideal customer, who presses the "buy" button after consuming what you wrote or spoke.
About The Author: The author of 14 books and 7 multimedia home-study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information since 1981. Download a free recording of her answers to commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information in the box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm
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Article Title: Product Creation: How to Create a Product You Can Sell Easily Via SEO
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 523
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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful no-cost way to attract potential buyers to your home-study course or other product. However, to get the best results with this marketing method, begin your consideration of SEO not after you have created your product but way earlier – before you've even selected the topic. Then keep your SEO efforts going even after you create your sales page. That's the formula for search engine traffic without spending a fortune!
Step 1 – Make sure your infoproduct idea is commercially viable. Use keyword search tools such as Google's keyword tool or Wordtracker's free trial to verify that people are already searching for what your information product proposes to teach.
In addition, check the search engines to see whether anyone else is already offering a course or report like yours. You may be surprised to learn that it's better to discover a few products already in existence than none. This tends to show there's a market. If your search turns up people using pay-per-click to advertise their product on the topic, that's even better, because most of the time it means buyers, not window shoppers or information gatherers, respond to those ads.
Step 2 – Create the title for your infoproduct. Instead of a cute or mysterious title that might resonate with those who happen to find out about the product apart from search engines, build your product title around an important keyword phrase that people so actually search for. For instance, don't title your course on collecting quilts "Ancestral Fortunes"; "Collecting Antique Quilts for Fun and Fortune" is far better for SEO.
Step 3 – Write the sales page for your product in close conjunction with creating the infoproduct. Some people write their sales copy before creating the product, while others do it immediately after finishing the product creation. Whichever order works best for you, make sure you include keyword-rich headlines and subheads in your sales page.
Step 4 – Add SEO elements to your sales page. Your title tag – what shows up in the upper left corner of the visitor's browser – should contain your most important keywords. Your headlines should be coded with "h1" tags and your subheads with "h2" tags. Add keyword-rich "alt-text" to every graphic on your sales page. (If you're not building the web site yourself, pass these instructions along to your webmaster/web developer.)
Step 5 – Write and distribute press releases and articles that incorporate your infoproduct keywords in the headline and sprinkled throughout their text. This step in particular gets missed by so many product developers, yet it's what drives your search engine listings best toward the top of page 1 of the search results. Search engines give heavier weight to content published on news sites and third-party content sites.
Whether your product concerns collecting antique quilts, raising children with healthy self-esteem, touring South America on motorcycle or preventing employment discrimination lawsuits, follow these steps and interested strangers will be regularly finding and purchasing your infoproduct. You'll be celebrating buyers ringing up your virtual cash register.
About The Author: The author of 14 books and 7 multimedia home-study courses, Marcia Yudkin has been selling information since 1981. Download a free recording of her answers to commonly asked questions about information marketing by entering your information in the box at http://www.yudkin.com/infomarketing.htm
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Article Title: Postcard Marketing Hands-Off Case Study #1 – Local Printer
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 570
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Here's an incredibly simple system a smart local printing company uses month after month after month to get new customers into its shop to place an order.
Like all successful postcard marketing campaigns, it started with strategic thinking: What category of people could serve as a reliable source of new customers? The owner's answer: new business incorporations within a 10-mile radius of his print shop.
A list company provides him once a month with a data file of prospects that meet that description.
Note that not all new incorporations are brand-new businesses, but because of the incorporation, they now have a new business designation, "Inc.," to add after their name. So whether or not they're a new business, they're a perfect prospect for printing services since they have a new business name they want to get out into the world.
Next, what offer would entice them into the shop? The owner's answer: a bundled offering of printed stationery, envelopes and business cards at 40% off.
Using the online interface at PostcardBuilder.com or another online print-and-mail company, he designs a postcard containing that offer. To get the discount, the recipient needs to bring the postcard into the shop with them.
Once a month, his assistant uploads the new list of newly incorporated businesses to the print-and-mail company, presses a few buttons, and that's it. Two business days later, that month's postcards go out in the mail, and a few days later, owners of the nearby newly incorporated businesses begin showing up at his shop to use the discount.
After it's all set up, the process takes less than 20 minutes a month to manage.
Results are predictable.
To adjust the results, the print shop owner can change the geographical radius, reduce or raise the number of postcards he sends – or schedule his mailings once a week or every other week instead of monthly.
I've seen this model work for financial professionals, restaurants, hair salons, and many other types of businesses that tend to build a clientele of "regulars." All regulars, of course, start as new customers, and one of the easiest way to find new customers is this kind of a postcard campaign.
To follow in the printer's footsteps, think first about who and where your best source of new customers might be. A financial planner I recently worked with decided to target people in their 20's and 30's in a certain neighborhood who did not yet own a home. His aim was to snag upwardly mobile individuals and couples before they were working with any other financial professional. A restaurant might decide to target businesses with more than 25 employees within five miles of their location, knowing that if people were pleased with their meal, word would quickly spread to coworkers.
Next, be careful to craft a compelling offer. It must be bold enough to be fiercely tempting, yet not quite bold enough to lose money for the postcard sender. The hair salon's offer might be "Bring a friend and you each get 50% off your haircut."
Finally, polish up what advertising professionals call the "creative" - the wording and design - so it's appealing and mistake-free. The last thing you want is people passing around your postcard because you left out the "l" in "public"!
About The Author: Veteran postcard marketer/consultant Marcia Yudkin is creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches the strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of successful postcard marketing. Download her free 1-hour audio on marketing with postcards: http://www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm .
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Article Title: Postcard Marketing: Recession Rescue Case Study
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 531
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Someone asked me if postcards are a good marketing tool for a recession. Yes, they are! Indeed, postcards pulled me out of the 1990-91 recession.
With a business partner, I had started a training company that presented seminars and worked with clients on writing skills. We rented an office at the prestigious Statler Office Building, adjacent to the Park Plaza Hotel in Boston. As the recession deepened, companies froze their training budgets, and all of our hot training leads evaporated.
However, we had two significant assets to exploit. First, our office rent included access to a classy conference room we could reserve and use as much as we wanted, and second, we had a list of 3,000 people who'd been in one or another of our adult education classes on writing in the previous two years.
We wrote up three classes we could give in the conference room, reserved the dates and mailed postcards to my list. People called to sign up! For the next few years, until the economy recovered, postcards reliably filled our classes.
Several lessons I learned about postcard marketing during those years remain true today.
1) Responses from a "warm" list of people who know you will always be greater than responses from strangers. Our classes were $99 each, and I'm not sure the postcards would have yielded such a nice profit had they been sent to "cold" prospects.
2) For seminars, you need sizable mailings to get enough participants to fill the room. The response rate would have been the same had we sent just 1,000 postcards, but that might not have generated enough people for each class. We rarely had to cancel a class for low enrollment. If you are promoting a one-on-one service, of course, this factor does not apply.
3) Consistency and repetition help. We mailed postcards every two months for a new round of classes, always using magenta card stock from the Kinko's copy center. From what people said when they signed up, it was clear they had come to recognize the hot pink postcards as coming from us. People paid more attention to the postcards as time went on, not less.
4) Color attracts, but images are optional. I used boldface strategically on the postcards to create a readable layout, but the cards contained no images – only words. If you look at galleries of sample postcards online, you'll see no pure-text samples, but for certain purposes they can work extremely well. We used just about every available space on the postcard to say as much as possible about our offerings.
One thing that's changed since postcards pulled us out of that recession is that you no longer have to mess with address labels and stamps or postal permits to send postcards.
Choose the right postcard vendor, and you can design your postcard online, order up the right list in a few minutes, if not using your own database, upload the list and place an order so the cards get sent out on whatever date you specify. The whole process of marketing with postcards is so much easier now!
About The Author: Veteran postcard marketer/consultant Marcia Yudkin is creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches the strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of successful postcard marketing. Download her free 1-hour audio on marketing with postcards: http://www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm .
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Article Title: Postcard Marketing Model #12: Generate Immediate Cash Flow With Special Offers
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 540
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You're having a slow week or a slow month. Or you see a week or month looming that's been slow in the past. Or you're not sure why, but no one seems to buy on Tuesdays. Or you have a whatever that no one wants to buy at full price.
Postcards to the rescue.
Postcards today are fun, colorful, eye-catching, cheap, quick to send and effective. And when you send established customers cards bearing a special offer, they bring in fast cash.
Design your special offer to be at least very appealing and even better, irresistible. According to advertising experts, a discount of 30 percent gets almost everyone's attention.
But your special offer doesn't have to be money off. You can run a two-for-one special, promise a free whatever with any purchase over $XX or specify that no payment is due for 60 days. You can even tie the offer to a charity or cause: Bring in canned goods for the poor or a used winter jacket in good condition and we'll do such and such for you. Or you can say you haven't taken new clients for a particular service in several years and you have two openings now – first come, first served.
If you have a retail location, tell postcard recipients to bring in the card when they come in, to get the discount. If customers typically buy online or by phone, provide a coupon code they can read off or type in to get the discount.
Either way, be sure you clearly state a deadline for the offer – including the year. Not only does this prevent misunderstandings about the offer, the deadline motivates people to act rather than putting the card aside for later. Usually, later means the card never gets looked at again. The deadline should be no more than two weeks from when you expect the cards to land in people's mailboxes.
Don't think that if one offer is tempting, two offers would be even better. More than one offer sparks indecision rather than desire. So present only one offer per postcard.
Since you never know which side of the card recipients see first, design your postcard so the reader sees your offer at a glance, whichever side happens to be facing them when they go through the mail. Colorful design and images help grab attention, but make sure the graphics support your concisely worded message rather than overpower it.
The quickest way to get postcards to your list is to use an online vendor that enables you to design the card online and then upload a data file containing your customer list. Postcard Builder, Amazing Mail and several other companies offer this convenient service. This is totally hands off in the sense that you never touch the postcards and do not need specialized knowledge of postal procedures and regulations.
Put your own address on the list, and you'll know exactly when the cards arrive in the homes or offices you were sending to. Then wait for the sweet sound of ka-ching! ka-ching! as orders stream in.
About The Author: Veteran postcard marketer/consultant Marcia Yudkin is creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches the strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of successful postcard marketing. Download her free 1-hour audio on marketing with postcards: http://www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm .
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Article Title: Beware of Undercutting Your Promotional Pitch! Avoid These Seven Pitfalls of Copywriting
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 645
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When it comes to copywriting, you must assume all readers are in the stance immortalized in Missouri's unofficial state motto: Show me! Overcome my skepticism! While bringing forth your best arguments, you also have to avoid dozens of documented persuasive pitfalls.
The most common weakness I see in sales material is too little information. It's just as prevalent on the web, where there are effectively no space limitations, as it was in print, where adding an extra page, or even an extra line sometimes, has definite costs. Studies show over and over again that the more you tell, the more you sell. Minimalism doesn't sell – a point important enough to appear in the title of my new book, Meatier Marketing Copy.
Six other devastating copywriting pitfalls to stay away from are:
1. Jargon – terminology that may not involve big words yet still is unfamiliar to the target audience. An insurance ad in my local paper begins "For Personal Lines." Translation, please? I've also seen real estate ads headlined "Not a drive-by!" and I always wonder whether that means that you wouldn't want to drive past it or you can't, because it's not visible from the road. The best way to detect your insider lingo is to have an outsider who's not afraid to admit what they don't understand look over your copy.
2. Preaching, which we hated as kids and still resist as adults. As kids, we hated to be commanded to eat our lima beans. As adults, we don't respond any better to pitches of products, services or information that claim to be good for us. Watch out for the words "should" or "must" in marketing copy, which may backfire because of an evangelistic attitude that closes rather than opens the minds of readers.
3. Hype, in the form of overblown claims, an overexcited tone, unsupported superlatives and wild exaggerations. To avoid a hyped-up tone, use exclamation points sparingly and never more than one at a time. Also find superlatives in your copy, such as "most advanced" or "leanest," and ask yourself whether each is puffery or a fact. In the former case, restate your point so it's unquestionably true. For the rest of your copy, use the Supreme Court Nominee Test. Is there anything else that the opposition party could challenge as exaggerated, unsupported or downright false? If so, change it or take it out.
4. Forgetting to include a way for shoppers to contact the company with questions. No matter how thoroughly you believe you've explained your offering, people inevitably have additional issues and concerns you didn't consider – sometimes very fundamental ones that you overlooked. At least one way to get questions answered helps save the sale in many instances.
5. Questions that send the reader into trains of thinking quite irrelevant to your purpose. Beginning copywriters are especially prone to rhetorical questions that show off their powers of imagination. Did you ever wonder why some homeowners never complain about tradespeople? Does your software creak with age instead of race to the finish? Unfortunately, such queries send the reader off the reader into a cloud of thought, away from your message. Statements, promises and invitations work far better.
6. Research that seems to bolster credibility but collapses upon closer examination. I once marveled at this bold statement atop a fresh pad of personalized checks: "Checks are TWICE AS SAFE as Credit or Debit Card Purchases." Wow, I thought – a strong motivator for folks to favor checks, shrewdly deployed to fatten the coffers of check printers. Yet when I looked up the research footnoted in this promotion, it talked about research on losses for merchants. Nowhere could I find support for the "twice as safe" claim for those writing the checks.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin is the author of more than a dozen books, including 6 Steps to Free Publicity and Meatier Marketing Copy, from which this article is adapted. Learn about her Marketing Insight Guides series on finer points of copywriting, persuasion and marketing: http://www.yudkin.com/guides/index.htm
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Article Title: Postcard Marketing Model #11: Generate Leads
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 541
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Whether you sell leadership training or ping-pong tables, health care plans or lawn mower gizmos, you need a constant flow of potential customers – likely ones – to turn into actual clients. Postcards are an inexpensive, easily managed, highly controllable means of generating leads. They're as suitable for high-tech offerings as for low-tech wares. Here's an overview to help you understand the power of postcards to generate leads for your company.
Mailing list vendors allow you to zero in on very specific characteristics of your ideal customer. For example, you can mail to brand managers at companies with annual sales between $5 and $20 million within 25 miles of your headquarters. You can send to Nebraska-based owners of hair salons that have been in business more than 20 years. You can target unmarried women under 30 who make more than $80,000 a year and rent rather than own a home. You can get your postcards to married men who hunt or fish and live within 250 miles of your remote resort.
Postcards also have the advantage of getting looked at. No one throws them out unopened, and during the initial five-second lookover time, you have a powerful opportunity to get your message across. Where there is a gatekeeper who goes through the mail first, creative postcards often make it through, especially if they are amusing, interesting, tantalizing or unusual.
If you imagine lead generation to be an expensive process, think again. With postcards, sending 5,000 at a time can cost less than $2,000. However, you may be better off zeroing in on a smaller number of prospects that you contact repeatedly – say, once a month for five months. Sending monthly cards five times to 1,000 top prospects costs less than $3,000 for the entire campaign. Yes, these prices include design, printing and mailing! List costs range from 9 cents a name for consumers to 35 cents a name for businesspeople.
Be sure you don't send what I call "Hello, I exist" postcards but rather ones with a definite action you are asking the recipient to take. This might be going to your web site to download a white paper or report, calling to request a free, no-obligation assessment or purchasing a low-risk starter service that serves as a gateway to a long-term client relationship. If you're sending a series of cards, the call to action can be the same each time or different.
Once you learn the logistics, postcard campaigns are so easy and quick to manage that you can turn them on and off as needed. For example, if you've just lost a major contract, you can send out twice as many postcards as usual. When you're at capacity, you can stop sending postcards until you're ready for additional customers again. And once you discover your average response rate, you can send out the exact number of postcards at a certain interval to reliably bring in the optimal number of leads month in and month out.
Have I convinced you yet to try postcard marketing? It's not the most glamorous or technologically advanced marketing method, but those who use it intelligently generate respectable profits from the leads it brings them – time after time after time.
About The Author: Veteran postcard marketer/consultant Marcia Yudkin is creator of The Mighty Postcard Marketing Course, which teaches the strategic, logistical, design and copywriting secrets of successful postcard marketing. Download her free 1-hour audio on marketing with postcards: http://www.yudkin.com/postcards.htm .
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Article Title: Copywriting Can Help You Generate a Lead or a Sale Using Words in a Huge Variety of Situations
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 531
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Most copywriting courses and books describe only how to persuade people in ads and sales letters. Yet the scope of persuasive copy includes bios that may accompany project proposals, offers in newsletters, case studies designed for prospective clients, tweets and pitches to investors. Equip yourself with copywriting techniques that cover a broad swath of settings, from tag lines and article titles to business plans and fundraising appeals, as well as for ads, web sites and sales letters.
Words are such versatile tools and important ingredients in promotional pitches that it's a shame to overlook those less-often-discussed contexts for copywriting. Many of the principles are the same, but each format or purpose may require distinct sensitivities and constraints. For example, abbreviating like a teenager is a temptation on Twitter but not so much in an ezine offer or magazine ad.
Here's a sampling of pointers that can help you with some of the copywriting challenges ignored by teaching tools that cover only ads and sales letters.
* More imaginative ingredients for a web site or business plan bio. Spice up a bio or "About" page with your personal motto, a phrase clients or an authority figure use about you, fanciful or unexpected language, concrete details, vivid extremes or contrasts, tantalizing numbers or a fact that humbles you, like being kicked off the air to make way for a superstar.
* Tactics for punchy, differentiating business names and tag lines. Try playing off a common saying, as in A Stitch in Time, for a custom dressmaker. Consider homonyms (words that sound alike with different meanings) and puns. Use a phrase that telegraphs your appeal to members of a certain in-group, like Bon Santé, for a French-run health spa. Or create a paradox, such as Earth Angel, for a garden designer.
* Ideas for making fundraising copy fun and involving. Caroline Jordan created the character of Perley, the church mouse, to raise funds for a new steeple for the South Bridgton Congregational Church in Maine. Perley was such a hit with both children and adults, he's now the star of several published or forthcoming books.
* Components to add when you're trying to convince buyers you truly adhere to green guidelines. To show that you're not just pretending to jump on today's greenwagon, incorporate into your marketing copy: hard facts (what you've done), not commitments (what you say you'll do); substantiation for your claims; third-party green certifications, with links that show what they mean; and advice for readers on how they too can follow suit.
* Techniques for conveying a full-bodied idea in a tiny amount of space, especially on Twitter. With a little practice, you can use real words in a concise style consistent with a respectable business image. Use short, vivid words, such as "ups" or "boosts." Prune multiple-word verbs, like changing "make an arrangement" to "arrange." Use a colon to replace wordy transitions, as in "Recycling technique: Save used frying oil for friends with biodiesel cars." And create compound adjectives, which eliminate a word or two: "biodiesel-car friends" instead of "friends with biodiesel cars."
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin, a mentor for copywriters and marketing consultants, is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and Meatier Marketing Copy, from which this article is adapted. Learn about her Marketing Insight Guides series on copywriting, persuasion, marketing: http://www.yudkin.com/guides/index.htm
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Article Title: But is it Really Proven to Work? Eight Research Studies Related to Copywriting
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 513
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Hang out in any copywriting forum online, and you'll soon encounter the refrain, "But what does testing show?" Educated opinions have their place, but quite often testing yields surprising, valuable insights.
Testing can involve a real-world procedure where half the customers see one version of copy or design and the other half see a slightly different version, and results are compared. Testing can also take place in a laboratory or experimental context, where test subjects who are not actually in the market to buy are presented with materials and their reactions or ratings are measured.
Sometimes testing results settle arguments. In other instances, they get us thinking along entirely new lines.
To help pass along what's known about copywriting topics from rigorous testing, here are summaries of eight research studies where people tested hypotheses related to copywriting or where they tested two versions of the same piece against each other.
1. Readability matters: Brands whose message scored at a fifth-grade reading level were 25 percent more likely to last to the five-year mark than those whose messages were more complex.
2. Puns can hurt: In one study, the cutest titles made white papers less likely to be downloaded. Shorter titles fared better as well. The most downloaded titles contained 20 percent fewer words than titles that most visitors ignored.
3. Wordiness hurts, too: When a test compared how well people performed tasks at a long-winded web site with performance at a concise one, the latter led to 58 percent more success in accomplishing the tasks.
4. Experience gets in the way: The more formal education and experience sales reps had, the more they tended to misjudge the minds of customers, in one study of 504 industrial buyers and the sales representatives who served them.
5. Familiarity helps: Comparisons with items closer to daily life lead to a better understanding and appreciation of abstract ideas. While 58 percent of people in a study rated a degree of accuracy phrased in terms of the distance between the sun and the moon as "impressive," 83 percent rated the same degree of accuracy phrased in terms of the distance between Los Angeles and New York as "impressive."
6. Focus on customers, not you: In comparing the response to a you-directed ad and one that just talked up the product, more than five times as many readers found the you-directed ad interesting than those who found the product-centered ad interesting.
7. Focus on benefits: A close look at more than 900 new product launches revealed that products using promotions that explicitly highlighted the product's benefits were 75 percent more likely to sell well than products pitched with a broad, indirect message.
8. Numerals get attention: When you have numbers in your pitch, present them as numerals rather than in words, such as "16 percent," not "sixteen percent." Eye tracking studies show that digits attract attention from web site visitors who are scanning a page, even when they're in the midst of a sea of words that users otherwise ignore.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin, a mentor for copywriters and marketing consultants, is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and Meatier Marketing Copy, from which this article is adapted. Learn about her Marketing Insight Guides series on copywriting, persuasion, marketing: http://www.yudkin.com/guides/index.htm
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Article Title: Practical Copywriting: 10 Steps to Improve Your Marketing Copy Today and Tomorrow
Author: Marcia Yudkin
Word Count: 570
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Not satisfied with the response you're getting from sales pages on your web site, email marketing blasts and other promotional copy? Hiring a copywriter for a complete makeover will cost big bucks. You can probably produce measurable improvements in results by trying these 10 practical copywriting exercises.
1. Practice perking up your wording by starting small–with the "elevator speech" you use at networking events or when asked to introduce your business to a new contact. Try out something new that's vivid and dramatic. If more people smile, look you directly in the eye and ask for your business card than with your previous version, you've got a winner. Apply the techniques you used there on a larger and larger scale.
2. Research competitors and identify the personality in which they each come across, such as bossy, friendly, rebellious or aristocratic. Select a distinct personality for your company and rewrite your marketing pieces with that personality consistently in mind.
3. Decide how you want customers to perceive you. Give your marketing copy to people who have never seen it and ask them to provide adjectives describing the company that it represents. If their responses puzzle or shock you, ask which elements led them to that assessment. Make changes accordingly!
4. When you're stuck for a fresh way to express an abstract idea, visit a stock photo shop such as GettyImages.com or Shutterstock.com and see what kinds of pictures come up for your abstract keyword. Discard the predictable images. For instance, the word "competition" brings up an arm wrestling match, two fencers and a kid shooting hoops by himself–all potential metaphors you might not otherwise have thought up.
5. Find an article, blog post or sales letter where you used a metaphor early in it. Rewrite your text by inserting so many other closely related metaphors that the device gets tiresome. Then delete three or four of the metaphor extensions, and perhaps three or four more, until your piece becomes fun but not silly to read.
6. List at least five negative policies you have communicated to clients within the last few months. For each one, consider first whether or not the negative policy is absolutely necessary. If so, create a positive way to present each policy.
7. Add live chat to your web site, or just its sales pages, that invites people to ask questions about anything that's confusing or unclear to them. Keep track of what visitors ask, and make clarifying changes in your copy accordingly.
8. Visit competitors' web sites and list the bland, boring adjectives and phrases that you find there. For each item on your list, create a more direct and concrete way to say it. Use at least three of the fresher versions on your own web site.
9. To make your marketing pitch more emotional, envision the cherished goals, dreams and hopes clients can fulfill by working with you or buying your products. Evoke those. If you find you've gone overboard with schmaltz (which one dictionary defines as "excessive sentiment"), then simply tone it down a little.
10. Think back to any changes you have made in programs or services since you created or last updated your marketing materials. Are you providing any additional benefits that you haven't mentioned? If so, revise your pitch accordingly.
About The Author: Marcia Yudkin, a mentor for copywriters and marketing consultants, is the author of 6 Steps to Free Publicity and Meatier Marketing Copy, from which this article is adapted. Learn about her Marketing Insight Guides series on copywriting, persuasion, marketing: http://www.yudkin.com/guides/index.htm
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