reynoldswriting.com Blog

When you think of a freelance copywriter, what comes to mind? A hungry-looking person slaving away at a keyboard morning, noon and night? A creative partner in your marketing strategy? A brilliant wordsmith who uses language the way a great painter uses a canvas and brush? Some poor jerk who can’t leverage his Liberal Arts degree into a real-world job that doesn’t involve fried foods and paper hats?

Because we writers make up a diverse population, and because everyone perceives the occupation differently, I’d accept any of the above answers. But in my case, another definition applies: I’m a service provider.

What difference does it make to think of me that way? Plenty. Let’s take your cable provider as an example. If you needed Internet, phone and cable TV services, imagine what a hassle it would be to call a bunch of different companies around town and say, “I’d like, uh, some Internet and some phone service and some cable TV.” What does that mean? How many TV channels did you have in mind, and which ones? What speed of Internet connection do you need? How many long-distance minutes do you plan on using every month? When the customer faces all these unanswered questions, suddenly the idea of a quiet room and a dark TV seems oddly soothing.

That’s why service providers have found a way to make the choices a lot easier — through productizing and bundling: “Here’s the Starter Pack, and here are the Bronze, Silver and Gold Levels. Oh, and here’s our menu of individual services and fixed fees.” Suddenly you have something concrete to point at and say, “I’ll have that one, please.” Multiple problems solved, with minimal loss of brain cells.

That’s why I offer clear, fixed-rate products such as my Small Website Package and Blogger’s 4-pack. Productizing takes all the uncertainty out of the process. You, the prospective client, always know what you’re getting and what it costs, just as if you were ordering a cable, Internet or phone package. This gives me a huge advantage over other freelancers who simply name an hourly figure for “whatever you need.” “Whatever you need” doesn’t evoke a clear image or help define what those needs might be. A well-defined product package does.

My next step? I’d like to collaborate with an increasing number of marketing companies in the creation of product packages and bundled services, allowing those companies’ clients to buy different combinations of Web-marketing or print-marketing products in one fell swoop. If you’re in the marketing industry and you’re already offering package deals to your clients, why not throw copywriting into the mix and give yourself one more edge over your competition? I know a guy who can help….

For more about my writing services and current deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Ah, the lovable anti-hero. We’ve seen many incarnations of this iconic figure in the movies, including Indiana Jones, Rocky Balboa, various Ghostbusters, and practically every protagonist Tim Burton ever framed into a closeup. The anti-hero is the character you cheer for precisely because he’s not bullet-proof, the one we can relate to as a real human being. In many cases, these figures force themselves to reach beyond their ordinary mortal frailties through sheer determination, grit and moral fiber, transcending their limitations and scaling genuinely heroic heights.

And then there’s Jack Burton.

Burton, as played by Kurt Russell in John Carpenter’s 1986 film big Trouble in Little China, doesn’t bother to surpass himself — he simply is himself. The dimwitted truck driver finds himself trying to rescue his friend’s lady love, not to mention a female reporter he has his own eye on, from an evil Asian sorcerer entrenched in San Francisco’s Chinatown. The sorcerer, Lo Pan, seeks to escape from an ancient curse that can only be dispelled when a green-eyed girl agrees to marry him. (Of course the plot really doesn’t matter in a slam-bang martial-arts fantasy-comedy, so with a sigh of relief I will abandon any further attempts to recount it here.)

Jack Burton has two things going for him in this heroic quest — guts and stupidity. That’s about it. He’s lucky to have some powerful allies in his martial artist, magic-using pals, because they end up doing most of the hard work. In one scene, Burton leaps into the fray only to discover that his buddy has already taken out all the bad guys by himself. In the big climactic fight scene, he fires his gun up into the ceiling to call attention to himself — and then gets knocked unconscious by falling debris. The fight proceeds without him.

So if Jack Burton is such a moron, why do we root for him? Because he’s a fun guy to watch, his heart is in the right place, he sticks by his friends, he’s quick with a punch line, and once in a while he gets something right. (He even dispatches Lo Pan, eventually.) In other words, he’s real, warts and all.

“Warts and all” can work as a marketing approach, too. We don’t always have to trumpet ourselves, our products or our services as the greatest thing since sliced bread. We don’t necessarily have to project an air of perfection or invulnerability. Sometimes our shortcomings have their own appeal, especially if we’re upfront about them.

I’m certainly not the right solution for every copywriting need. I’m not the fastest guy in town, or the cheapest, or the most versatile, or the most experienced. But I’m open and honest with all my prospective clients about what I can and can’t do for them, and if I’m not the best guy for the job I’ll say so. People respond to that, because they know they’re dealing with a real person who will do his best. Rocky lost that first fight, remember?

Whether you’re in shipping, insurance, real estate, personal coaching, or any other trade or profession, you can always score points with your target audience by admitting that you’re human — because, after all, so are they. And human’s a pretty good thing to be, unless of course you’re an evil sorcerer.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

I just read an interesting article on Copyblogger that reminded me of the reasons business owners and marketing firms need copywriters. I’ve mentioned a few of them before. Maybe you don’t happen to have a talent for writing. Maybe creating your own marketing content takes up a huge amount of time that ought to go toward doing your day-to-day tasks that keep your business running. Maybe you do have the talent, but you hate, hate, hate using it. (Hey, some people just don’t enjoy writing.) Maybe the copywriter you’ve been using suddenly retires or goes on a sabbatical or gets too busy to take on additional jobs. These are all valid reasons to hire a copywriter, and in each case I’m happy to step in.

The article mentioned another good reason, though — the possibility that you may be “too close to the topic.”

Let’s face it, you know your business inside-out. You’re immersed in it on a daily basis. You work with other people who also know the industry, and you communicate with colleagues that speak the lingo as well as you do. You live in the world of your business. The problem is, your customer probably doesn’t.

You may find it impossible to see yourself objectively enough to put yourself in your reader’s shoes. Sometimes it’s hard to pretend you’re John Doe instead of Jane Manufacturing Incorporated long enough to really grasp what the reader wants to know, as opposed to what you want to tell him. Time to bring in an objective party — one who happens to write marketing content for a living. Your copywriter can see John’s perspective as well as Jane’s, creating a message informed by one and aimed at the other.

You may also find that your industry speaks a language the general public doesn’t understand. I recall the time I walked into an engineering company and the owner said, “Ah, so you’re the guy who’s going to rescue us!” The company’s leadership team had spent so many years talking engineer-speak to engineers that they’d lost a handle on how to translate their features and benefits into common English. Again, copywriter to the rescue!

Whatever your writing roadblock may be, don’t keep suffering from it. Offload that specialized work to a specialist, and welcome a new brain to your company’s think-tank.

You can check out the rest of the Copyblogger article here.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

“Wow,” says FBI Agent Peters to her colleague Tom Greer (Bruce Willis) the first time she meets him in the flesh. “You look a lot like your surrogate!”

No, Greer isn’t paying someone to carry his baby. Surrogates, in director Jonathan Mostow’s film of the same name, are lifelike androids built to live out the everyday lives of humans, who direct the surrogates’ actions through a mental link. See, now that practically everyone in the world can afford a synthetic lookalike, humans need no longer face work-related injuries, traffic accidents or other hazards. People sit or recline safely at home, connected to an electronic interface that lets them see, hear and feel through their surrogates’ artificial senses and perform their daily tasks via surrogate arms and legs. You can even customize your surrogate with any features you prefer — and of course this has led to a society peopled (surrogated?) by model-gorgeous men and women. That’s why Greer’s partner is so surprised. Who would want to look like himself?

Greer’s wife certainly wouldn’t. Maggie Greer lives with disfiguring scars from an old accident, or rather she refuses to live with them. She stays in her locked bedroom, interacting with the world — and with her husband — only through her blandly pretty surrogate. But Greer doesn’t want a surrogate. He wants his wife, the woman he fell in love with and married. He wants the real person hiding behind the image.

When you create a brand for your business, you build a persona, an avatar designed to project a calculated image to your target market. That image is the public face of your company. If you run a personality-based business, however, your clients will ignore generic branding statements. They want to know and work with you, based on your skills, experience and personal values. People work with me, for instance, because of my track record, the fact that I’m easy to work with, reliable and so on. I am my brand.

If people respond to your business specifically because they respond to you as an individual, than you must try to make your own positive traits shine through your company’s branding. Make sure your surrogate walks, talks and looks like you. Then when your client meets the person behind the image, they won’t feel surprise or disappointment — just a comforting familiarity.

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Ever feel like you’re repeating the same day over and over again — and not a particularly pleasant or productive one? Has the groundhog gotten a glimpse of its shadow and high-tailed it for the comfort of his living room, leaving you to experience more of the same old situation instead of looking forward to a change? If so, then you’ll sympathize with Bill Murray’s character in the movie Groundhog Day, even if you don’t like him much.

That’s TV weatherman Phil Connor’s problem, in fact — he’s just not a likable guy. in fact, he’s an arrogant grump who resents his assignment to cover celebrity groundhog Punxsatawnie Phil’s prediction for winter’s end. The only way his February 2nd could get any worse would be if it happened again. And then the morning, it happens again, and again and again. He keeps having the same conversations with the same people until he’s literally ready to kill himself.

Eventually, however, Connor realizes that this bizarre Groundhog Day has its upside, because he has an opportunity to become the kind of man his beautiful news producer Rita would find ideal. He spends February 2nd after February 2nd learning to speak French, create ice sculptures, play the piano and so forth. Along the way he comes to know and appreciate the people around him. By the time the calendar finally does start moving forward again, he’s a new and better person.

If you feel paralyzed in your attempts to grow and market your business, maybe it’s because you’re trying to master everything at once. A full-scale marketing campaign, for instance, can be an intimidating thing to envision, build, launch and manage. I don’t now about you, but when I see an insurmountable hurdle dead ahead, I stop in my tracks and think twice before surmounting it.

At times like these it may help to take a page from Phil Connor’s playbook. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, goes the old joke. Director Harold Ramis estimates that Connor relives at least 30 or 40 years of Groundhog Days to master all the new skills he displays. You can become effective at marketing your business in far less time than that, and you can do it incrementally. Get the website done. Get your print marketing looking sharp. Learn how to use social media. Sharpen your networking skills.

If you screw up you can always make repairs, learn from the experience and keep going. But unless you do something every day to move forward and improve your marketing knowledge and skills, your business will remain frozen in place, experiencing the same day over and over again. Phil Connor broke out of that loop — and so can you.

Here’s to an early spring!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Ah, Google — keeper of the sacred, secret formulae that determine whether your website link appears on Page One of the search results, above the “fold” so viewers don’t have to scroll down to see your listing, or at least higher up on the list than your competitors’ links.

Year in and year out, companies try to crack the Google-relevance “secret code,” throwing all sorts of strategies at the search giant’s algorithm to see which ones get results. If you’ve ever sat down with a web strategist, you’ve heard about how important it is to optimize your website so that Google rewards you with a higher ranking in search results. And it’s true. People don’t just search for products, services and information, after all — they “google” them. I should be so lucky: “I need to Reynolds my company’s marketing content.” Has a nice ring, doesn’t it?

Why, then, do even the most skilled and experienced web professionals find Google such a tough nut to crack? Because Google remains a moving target, that’s why. The company constantly tweaks its systems, with the result that yesterday’s great “Google buster” strategy becomes today’s disappointing search result. I recently wrote up the results of an exciting, cutting-edge study performed by a web optimization company, only to watch the owners go pale as Google suddenly changed the way it did things once again, rendering all their hard work yesterday’s news before the study could even hit the news feeds.

What can you do to remain in the sights of this attention-impaired giant? Well, you certainly want to make sure your web provider stays on top of all the latest industry news and builds enough flexibility into your site to enable fast, easy updates. This flexibility enables another great, all weather-strategy for online success — a steady stream of fresh, useful, well-written content.

In fair weather or foul, regardless of what Google’s algorithm of the moment seems to favor, engaging and useful written content will always make your web presence more, well, present. You’ll find that visitors don’t just land on your page — they actually read it. They stick around. They might even contact you and buy stuff.

Now, that’s relevance!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

You know that powerful new marketing campaign you’re unveiling in 2011 — the one that will help you turn your business’s fortunes around, build upon current successes, or establish you as a new player in your industry?

Well, here’s a gentle reminder: 2011 starts in January. January 1st, to be precise. Have you got that shiny new marketing ready for rollout?

A strong, comprehensive 12-month marketing campaign typically involves some combination of several individual elements — copywriting, graphic design, web development, social media platforms, multimedia presentations, et cetera. These elements work in concert to create a coherent, cohesive statement about your company. So as you can imagine, this stuff doesn’t fall together overnight. You have research to do, battle plans to construct and several skilled professionals to corral. If you haven’t put the pieces together by now, your marketing calendar could miss the starting gun for the new year.

But don’t panic. If your dreams ran ahead and left your implementation behind in 2010, all is not lost. You can still assemble your creative team and produce some interim or “pilot” marketing pieces to keep yourself visible until that bigger machine powers up. Remember, a professional copywriter or graphic designer can dream up brilliant content in a fraction of the time you’d spend at the drawing board yourself. And a good copywriter can also refer you to plenty of other marketing pros to help you move forward.

Even if you can’t get your full-scale blitz going by January 1st, you can still do something. So — do something!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

Now that the holiday season has arrived, many of us will find ourselves reading roadside billboards and other signage to stave off the boredom of the road. We will view countless holiday ads online and in print, and if we own a business we may even create some ourselves. If we’re in a hurry to beat a deadline, we may rush the copy to the printer after a quick pass through a spell checker. Bad idea.

Proofreading matters, if only because the errors you pump out will live forever on the Internet. Even if you’re producing a sign or advertisement in a language most of your viewing public doesn’t understand, somebody out there has devoted a humorous website to you.

Yes, your spell checker catches lots of errors, but what about that misused word it doesn’t recognize or that proper name it doesn’t have in its database? That’s why you must always give your marketing content a once-over with your own eyeballs. If your eyeballs are tired, put the content away and proofread it later. But proofread it.

Of course, you can dot every I and cross every T and still end up with a ludicrous misstatement. Somewhere along U.S. Highway 83 (I forget where) stands a roadside sign for a combination gas station and restaurant. The sign proclaims proudly — and quite seriously — “EAT HERE! GET GAS!”

You may encounter entire concepts that needed one more pass through the marketing department. How about that billboard that always seems to pop up near small towns — the one for the BBQ place that depicts a cute cartoon pig squealing in terror as he runs from a guy with a butcher knife? Sure, it’s amusing if you’re into that sort of thing, but does it really pull people off the highway with their stomachs growling? “Hey, you know that funny pig you were slashing to death? I’d like me some of that with a side of slaw.”

So consider this post a public service announcement. Don’t just run your marketing content through a spell checker and call it done. Use human eyes. And don’t just check it yourself — have someone else look at it for that extra opinion. If you really want quality assurance, you can even have a professional writer proofread and edit it. But I digress. Happy Thanksgiving!

For more about my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

In keeping with the recent Halloween festivities, I decided to re-watch the 1963 Robert Wise film The Haunting. This film enjoys a reputation as one of the few genuinely spooky examples of the “haunted house” genre. The history of the house in question contributes as much to the air of dread as the mysterious cold spots, horrific banging noises and midnight mutterings inside the walls.

A group of visitors monitor these eerie events in an effort to capture evidence of the supernatural. Hill House has remained unchanged since its deranged owner built it 90 years before; his daughter lived in the same grotesquely-decorated nursery from childhood through old age. And now that its former occupants have all died in it, the house itself has grown a personality, one literally set in stone. Sure, the nursery can be refurnished and repainted, but the source of its gloom lies deeper.

What scares us about haunted houses, anyway? Is it the idea that long-silenced voices continue to ring out, that the wishes of the dead and buried still hold sway there? Perhaps we hate the thought that the ghosts of the past can manipulate the present.

Does your business resemble a haunted house?

Think about it. You’ve grown and evolved over the years, and so has your company. And yet your marketing remains rooted in the world of What Was. Oh, you’ve refined the logo, maybe tweaked the brochure copy a few times, but the face lift hasn’t taken. The Ghost of Marketing Past still runs your house — and the branding that fit like a glove years ago becomes less relevant to your current business with each passing day.

Sometimes small changes yield big results, but merely changing the window dressing on your marketing may not be enough to bring your brand back into alignment with present-day reality. It may be time to call in an exorcist — to pull out the old marketing by the roots, demolishing that old house and rebuilding on a new foundation.

Halloween’s over. Evict your marketing ghosts!

For more about me, my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.

I pride myself on being a relatively “high-bandwidth” copywriter who can produce quality content while juggling multiple clients and jobs. Once in a while, though, if the pipeline becomes too clogged I have to refer a client to another writer. (I try to maintain good relationships with other writers, and I’m happy to send work their way when the opportunity presents itself.) The client will either nod and agree that it’s time to bring a second writer on board, or his eyes will bug and he’ll say, “Why don’t you want to work with me?” because he thinks I’m trying to dump him.

I don’t want to dump anybody. I’m happy to keep writing as much as I can for that client. But when the workload (his or mine) becomes overwhelming, I can’t continue as the only horse pulling that increasingly heavy cart. It’s time to hitch up the rest of the team.

Hey, when that day comes, congratulate yourself. If you have an ongoing need for marketing content, then your company is moving and shaking and promoting itself — or if you’re a marketing agency, then you’re building your business and gaining clients. Well done. But now you have to think about covering all your bases. A football team doesn’t consist of the bare minimum of people needed to take the field; there’s the first string, and then a second string and a third string standing by to replace a fallen player. Well, your marketing department needs depth too.

How do you maintain brand unity when you have multiple writers? Your marketing director acts as Editor-in-Chief and Head Branding Honcho, coordinating the writers’ assignments and making sure everyone’s work conforms to the company’s overall tone and message. You gain extra creative brainpower as well as the luxury of casting from strength — instead of putting all the burden on one generalist, you might have one writer who focuses on blogs, another who excels at brochures, and so on.

Best of all, the use of multiple writers allows your marketing agency or department to grow as big and as fast as you want it to. Once you have a team, and a plan for managing the team, the sky’s the limit. And if they’re all freelancers you can just assign them as you need them, growing at your own pace without having to add to your permanent staff.

In the meantime, if you only need one writer, you know where to find me.

For more about me, my writing services and current package deals, check out my website at www.reynoldswriting.com.