COPYblog

Before I work with clients I ask them a series of questions designed to help me understand their business, and how well they understand it themselves. One of the most frequent stumpers is “What’s your unique positioning?”

Typical responses:

“Well, let’s see…we really focus on the client’s needs.”

“Oh, you know, I’ve been doing this for years and…”

“I’m a really good listener. I get right to the client’s problems.”

“We have XYZ process – a proprietary system that targets a company’s weak areas blah blah blah.”

These comments represent about 80% of the answers I get. And there’s nothing terribly wrong with them, except they’re dreadfully dull and generic. After all, who doesn’t focus on client’s needs?

The good news is it may not matter much. I think Unique Positioning Statements are over-rated, because prospects can rarely match the tagline to the business name anyway.

Clever taglines have NEVER caused me to choose one vendor over another. Domino’s Pizza used to promise to deliver hot pizza within 30 minutes or it was free. Great tagline, but far more important to me was the easy phone number…1-800-Dominos. Convenience trumps clever.

Bottom Line: Don’t sweat over clever headlines, mottos or even positioning. The much greater challenge is to prove your worth.

It’s one of the most common mistakes I see in business websites.

You want to tell your reader EVERYTHING about your business, but that’s no better than telling them nothing. People don’t want to know everything about you and your business. You’re lucky if they stick around for more than 10 seconds.

I was watching a director in rehearsal today. Yelling, screaming, running around flapping his arms…quite a performance. But he wasn’t directing. He was showing, doing, peacocking.

He scared the wits out of me, and the actor was reduced to mimicking.

Do you shadow your housekeeper around telling them how to clean? Would you explain proper snaking technique to your plumber? Do you follow your child around the playground? Or do you leave them alone and let them do their thing?

Let your visitor know how you can help them, and then let them do their thing. Guide them, but do it gently. Allow them to make up their minds about you (and make it really easy).

To find out how to look like the expert sans swagger, join our free webinar this Wednesday, “My Website’s Not Working Hard Enough!”

Details can be found at:

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/294333190

I like things to be simple. Copywriting is about clarity. You want to get your message across clearly and powerfully.

So as a writer I struggle with the sizzle and razzle dazzle of crazy graphic design. I’ve learned to talk the language and when I work with designers I get my way about 50% of the time. That’s pretty good, since I work closely with someone who designs a lot of stuff and who’s crazy about “image”.

Image Image Image.

Well, I got my comeuppance yesterday. I’m beginning to see that there’s something to be said about pretty packaging. She reworked some PowerPoint slides I’ve prepared for a presentation. They look nice. Maybe they’ll make me look good. I don’t know.

If you want to judge for yourself, and get some really great ideas on how to make your website start paying you back, join us for a webinar entitled “My Website Isn’t Working Hard Enough” on March 16th. It’s free, and there are prizes, special offers, and dazzling content.

It’s easy to increase your ranking by adding a few SEO elements, so why not do it? There are many, many tools that help with keyword research. Adding these to your titles and tags won’t rocket you to the top of the charts, but combined with good copy you’ll have a much more effective site.

One of the simplest tools is the Google Keywords tool, which allows you to enter a search term and compare its popularity to similar terms. For example, if you sell rakes for gardening, Google will tell you that “Gardening Rakes” is a much more commonly searched term that “Garden Rakes”. It may seem like a tiny distinction, but it can dramatically increase the amount of traffic you get.

When you’re compiling your list of keywords, another factor to keep in mind is your competition. You can also find some information here on Google, although it’s a little difficult to interpret.

What you’re looking for is a popular search term with low competition. The trick is that in Google, the competition is a factor of the number of sites that use that key term. This can be misleading. “Gardening”   has a huge popularity number as you can imagine. Millions of people type “Gardening” into their search box.  But it’s also listed as a low-competition site. Why? Because the competition figure is relative to the number of sites using “Gardening” as a keyword.

Another popular free site is KeywordDiscovery.com. In this much simpler site you can get an idea of how many times a keyword has been searched for in the past 12 months. There are many other free keyword analysis sites, most of which are very straightforward. But note that there are also subscription sites which will give you much more sophisticated information.

Bottom Line: Start small with your keywords, and gradually add them to your pages, posts, and articles.

One ad is never enough. The beauty of pay-per-click advertising is your ability to test different ads against each other, to determine the most effective. To do that…you need an AdWords campaign.

What makes a good AdWords campaign?

AdWords can help you tap into what your prospect really wants. For example, if you’re offering a new book on Puppy Training, you can use AdWords to determine the best title for the book, the best marketing blurb, and the best offer.

A campaign is just multiple ads. This gets a  little tricky, and I suggest developing two ads for every element you want to test. So if you want to figure out the best offer for the puppy ad, run two ads concurrently with each line identical except for the offer line.

For example:

“Free Checklist with every purchase” OR “Free teleclass with every purchase”.  By running the ads at the same time, you can see which resonates with your audience. The more click-throughs an ad gets, the more popular. So if the checklist gets 4 times as many clicks as the teleclass, you know it’s more popular.

You can test different elements of the ad, by simply changing one line at a time. You can tweak to your heart’s content because Google allows for endless experimentation. The caveat…you could lose your shirt. Next week I’ll be discussing how to stay within a budget, but I’d love to hear any success stories or disasters using AdWords. I know I learned the hard way many years ago…