Marketing Writing Resources for Creative Copywriters

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Web sites run by small businesses far outnumber the Web sites run by large corporations. This means that most sites are produced and operated on a relatively small budget. Each dollar counts, and must be used carefully. But few small business owners are spending enough time figuring out what constitutes an effective Web site before they pour money into the project. Time and time again, small business Web sites waste their resources on the wrong Web site elements.

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Services marketing efforts are moving online not because a few marketing consultants and strategists say they are—but because your clients and prospects are online, and their online experiences are influencing all buying decisions. Here are four arguments you can use to help your firm boldly enter the new world of online marketing.

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This week, add your two pesos to the SWOT Team dilemma: When inventing brands, what works and what doesn't? Also this week, read your answers to last week's query: What approaches work best for holiday campaigns?

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Correctly executed, the written word can be a powerful means of establishing your business in the hearts and minds of your potential customers. Many of us are inhibited, however, by popularly held—yet largely mistaken—ideas of what good business-to-business copywriting should be. Here are five of the most common and destructive myths that may be undermining the impact of your copy.

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This week, add your two cents to the following dilemma: What can a business do to determine which marketing tools are best for a particular project? Also this week, read your answers to the previous problem: How do you market without an advertising budget?

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Sure your Web site looks great, but are you turning enough Web visitors into leads that your sales force can target? Your answer can be the difference between a site that is a moneymaker and one that is nothing more than a glorified brochure. Your Web site can offer your company many opportunities to generate leads and cultivate new business. Here's how.

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A doorway page is content created specifically for the purpose of garnering high placements in the search engines. Search engines generally advise to avoid such pages as well as other "cookie cutter" approaches, such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. There are, however, acceptable alternatives.

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Developing a great logo is a strange mix of art, science, psychology and (in most cases) a good amount of luck. Last week, in part one of this two-part series, we discussed some fundamentals of logo development and design. Here, in this final installment, we delve deeper into the nitty-gritty: How to choose the right logo, the pitfalls of a too-literal logo, and, yes: size does matter.

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You must make very difficult choices if you want your Web site to work. You can't serve everybody. If you try to, you will serve nobody. The first step in developing successful reader personas is to decide which readers you are *not* going to focus on.

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Writing blog posts (and comments on blogs) is actually very simple. Keep your copy lively, factual, tight, clear, short and search engine optimized. Here are basic blog style guidelines to follow.

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Developing a great logo is a strange mix of art, science, psychology and (in most cases) a good amount of luck. In this, the first of a two-part series, we'll explain what a logo really is (and isn't!), suggest how to start development, and ask a few questions you'll need to answer before you begin.

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If you have clients (or bosses) who want you to write about who they are, you probably witness them thrusting a list of attributes in your face. On the list, you'll find the usual suspects: quality, commitment to service, out-of-the-box this and proactive that. But such vague attributes have little credibility. Instead, consider the following three techniques for transforming unclear attributes into compelling copy.

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With our focus on bold, blunt, "write-as-people-speak" prose in business, we no longer have any fancy phrases to lurk behind. We're on our own. Why has business writing become so much more direct in the comparatively short period of two generations or so?

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We have wonderful tools today that will tell us the value of the physical things in our factories and offices. Now we need to create wonderful tools and disciplines to measure all our information assets.

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This week, add your two pesos to the dilemma: What steps can you take to ensure your email newsletters get through spam filters (and don't bounce back)? Also this week, read your answers to: What do you do when your audience doesn't respond?

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Marketing departments often have the challenge of dealing with too much data. This week: How do you collect the right sort of data and measure the efficiency of a marketing campaign? Join the conversation! Also this week, read your answers to last week's dilemma: What is the best approach to ensure your newsletter code reaches the right inboxes?

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A single op-ed article will not change the way you or your organization is viewed overnight. But combined with other related initiatives, they are an integral part of an expertise-oriented PR program that will help solidify your firm's standing as an expert in its field.

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This week, add your two cents to the dilemma: What should publishers do to build reader involvement? Also this week, read your answers to the last issue: What makes long Web copy effective?

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The consulting proposal is a necessary evil. A great proposal can be decisive in winning a project; a poor one can cause you to lose a project, even if everything else in the sales process has gone flawlessly. Use these guidelines to a write a killer proposal every time.

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In the first part of this two-part article, we took a look at the heart of the Australian Spam Act and how it differs from other legislation. Here we conclude with a description of message types, together with some examples, as well as a brief discussion on penalties and international implications.