Aware Copywriting ./../index.html Lovingly crafted for humans. Methodically optimized for robots. Thu, 09 Mar 2023 20:09:19 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.7.1 Is content originality over-rated? ./../is-content-originality-over-rated/index.html Mon, 30 Jan 2023 16:00:37 +0000 http:https://strangeports.com/awarecopywriting//?p=58932 After “reading” my twentieth or so book on the amazing app Blinkist several years back, I came to a disheartening realization. If you strip a modern self-help book of its cover and its exposition, peel back the skin and pry away the muscle, the underlying ideas and even a fair amount of the supporting information [...]

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After “reading” my twentieth or so book on the amazing app Blinkist several years back, I came to a disheartening realization. If you strip a modern self-help book of its cover and its exposition, peel back the skin and pry away the muscle, the underlying ideas and even a fair amount of the supporting information are nearly identical from one to the next.

If you’re reading any one of the hundreds of books on productivity, those gold nuggets of wisdom probably include:

  • Prioritize important tasks
  • Trust your gut
  • Make time for exercise
  • Create short, daily to do lists
  • Say no to non-essentials

In a nutshell, almost every communications expert has this to say:

  • Be brief yet specific
  • Be authentic
  • Be vulnerable
  • Listen
  • Check your body language

Marketing gurus (myself included, though I’m not technically a certified guru if you want to quibble) are also repackaging these weatherworn aphorisms under thrilling titles like “5 shocking truths about marketing”:

  • Understand your audience
  • Tell a story
  • Keep it short
  • Agitate the problem
  • Solve the problem

To rehash or not to rehash, that is the question.

Is it true that there’s nothing new under the sun as the author of Ecclesiastes suggested thousands of years ago? Or has publishing become so ubiquitous that we’ve gotten lazy in our messages, preferring the straightforward route of the reboot to the more exhausting effort required to come up with an original statement?

Your first idea has probably been done already.

I’m often approached by business owners who want to create lead magnets to capture leads. As we brainstorm, the first half hour is spent throwing out ideas because they’ve already been done a million times before by other entrepreneurs who similarly wanted to create lead magnets.

Chances are if it’s the first idea that pops into your head, it’s already popped into at least fifty other heads (and the lead magnet has already been designed, written, and proudly offered fifty times). The question you have to ask yourself then is: Do I have anything new to add to this conversation?

What if you’ve got nothing new to say?

If your answer to the above is no, another question or two should follow: Do I care? Is originality a core value in my organization?

If your answer to these questions is also no, you might choose to run with the less than original idea even though it’s been done before. (Obviously, you should make a go of doing it better.)

People like confirmation of things they already know, and maybe we benefit from the unified if redundant message of every productivity expert to “just get your priorities straight, for Pete’s sake.” (Or maybe reading another productivity book buys us a little extra time to put off being more productive, so who cares what it says?)

But what if you’re hell-bent on originality?

You may choose another route. You may decide that you want to say something new, something ground-breaking.

New and ground–breaking aren’t easy to come by. First, you have to be familiar with the existing data in your field. Second, you have to be willing to question that data, to look at it from another perspective, or to toss it out altogether.

Why do we often choose the familiar message over the innovative insight?

Innovation is exciting, but it’s also intimidating. Innovative insights demand we look at something in a whole new way and maybe even change how we do things. It forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. Familiar messaging, on the other hand, reassures us that everything is fine just the way it is. It offers some comfort in a world that’s already changing all the time without people going out and intentionally innovating it.

If you’re an industry expert, expressing novel ideas can also put you at risk of sounding like a lunatic to others in your field. As a rule, we know an expert by their adherence to industry standards. When experts stray, their expertise may be called into question.

Back to the original question: Is content originality over-rated?

There’s room for both original and familiar messaging in most industries. It’s not necessary to jump on every trend or invent new ones to connect with people. Word of mouth marketing is the oldest strategy in the book, but it’s new and novel again because so much of marketing has gone online.

While content originality may be over-rated, an original brand voice is not. Shirley Jackson, Stephen King, and more recently Jonathan Stroud of Lockwood & Co. notoriety all wrote haunted house stories. The content of their ghostly tales is nothing new. Storytellers have been sending blithely unaware protagonists (and readers) into spirit-plagued places since the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the philosopher Michel de Certeau even argued that “haunted places are the only ones people can live in.” But when Jackson, King, and Stroud wrote, their authorial voices transformed those bare, bony tropes into distinct, memorable, and completely original exemplars in the horror genre.

Likewise, your business voice is one of the things that sets your business apart from the competition (for good or ill), so it’s important to cultivate it, refine it, and in some cases, revise it to better fit the story you’re trying to tell.

How does your brand voice stand out from the rest? What makes your business exemplary?

How can a professional copywriter help brands find their voice?

An original take on conventional product descriptions made for more memorable marketing for a New Orleans-based digital woodshop and helped to establish the uniquely playful voice of the business owner.

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]]> Use science to become a Time Lord (kind of) ./../use-science-to-become-a-time-lord-kind-of/index.html Tue, 24 Jan 2023 16:00:17 +0000 http:https://strangeports.com/awarecopywriting//?p=58844 A great man once said, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.” Even if you don’t belong to the legion of Dr. Who fans who join the Doctor on his [...]

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]]> A great man once said, “People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint – it’s more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly… time-y wimey… stuff.”

Even if you don’t belong to the legion of Dr. Who fans who join the Doctor on his regular excursions through space and time, you’ve probably wished (maybe more than once a day) that you could control time. Bend it to your bidding. Lengthen it or shorten it or even freeze it.

Though you may not come from an ancestry of Time Lords with these particular skills, you actually do have more control over time than you might expect. If you feel perpetually rushed, you may be creating your own time deficit. On the other hand, if you take things slowly, you have the potential to actually build up a time surplus. Sound too good to be true? Let’s see what science has to say about it.

Your spatial perception of time affects how you experience it.

In one study on spatial metaphors of time, researchers discovered that two unique perspectives on time profoundly affect how we experience it.

If you see yourself as moving through time, you have an ego-moving perspective of time.

If you see time as moving towards you, you have a time-moving perspective.

Most of us move between the two viewpoints.

When we imagine negative events, we feel as if they are moving towards us. Makes sense, right? We usually don’t choose to participate in negative events, and so they are inherently out of our control. They’re coming right at us whether we like it or not. Imagine that jury duty date or any other dreaded event, and you can almost picture it speeding in your direction.

Conversely, we perceive ourselves as moving forward through time towards positive events. Imagine your next holiday. The one you’ve been eagerly planning. If you’re anything like me, your mind is already there, and you’re moving as quickly through all of your daily routines as possible to get to that point in time. Most positive events are planned. We have control over them. We’ve chosen them. And so we have a sense of autonomy and power over – not only the event – but the time leading to it.

So how can we use this data to control time?

Re-frame your perspective of events.

Negative events that are moving through time feel as if they’re approaching too quickly. For example, deadline pressures distort our sense of time, making us feel as if there isn’t nearly enough of it to accomplish all that we need to accomplish.

By choosing to adopt a more positive attitude towards events, you’ll take back some control of time. Hard as it may be to believe, it’s possible to spin anything in a more affirmative direction (take it from a spin-master). In this case, you need only change how you describe time. Research shows that by simply changing your description of an event from time-moving (“Ugh. My annual review is coming up next week.”) to an ego-moving description (“I’ll be going to my annual review next week.”), you trick your brain into not only feeling as if there’s more time to prepare but that it’s also a more positive event in general. True story.

Music has the power to stop time.

While we usually measure time using minute hands on a clock, that all changes when we listen to music. Because music is composed of repeating patterns and intervals, it becomes its own measure of time. And when you listen to music, your brain adopts this new measurement as its own.

Change your metronome.

Novelty in any form tends to speed time up while familiarity slows it down. That’s why a road trip through new terrain will zip past while the last five miles to your doorstep will drag on forever. It’s also why the last coat of paint takes forever if you’ve already rolled on two earlier coats.

If you need to slow down time, listen to slower, more familiar music. When you want time to pass more quickly, scan Spotify for a faster playlist that’s new to you.

Your emotions impact your sense of time.

When you’re experiencing periods of high emotional arousal, your internal clock runs faster. Stress, anger, anxiety all contribute to a sense that time is running out.

Take control of your emotions.

This is a tough one because emotions can be difficult to control, but by learning to step back and take a more objective outlook, you can slow time down to its normal speed again. That should also make the situation more emotionally tolerable, creating a positive feedback loop.
You might do this by focusing your energy on a familiar, methodical task like washing dishes or through a mindful decision to take a walk through your neighborhood. However you do it, the bottom-line is you are taking back authority over yourself and your time.

Deadline pressures warp time.

OK. Not really. Time is what it is. But research shows when we stack up deadlines, we impact how we perceive time. More deadlines – especially for difficult tasks – create more stress. This makes events feel as if they’re rushing towards us.

Prioritize your to do lists.

If you haven’t read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, make some time to do so because he gives some profound insight into prioritization. But in a nutshell, keep your to do lists small and manageable. Break large projects into individual steps. And chuck anything that isn’t necessary.

That last bit requires you to be really honest with yourself about your own general importance in the grand scheme of things. By recognizing that many of the chores that you believe are necessary will be fine if left undone for a while – or left to someone else to do, you give yourself the freedom to focus on top priorities.

Yet according to Parkinson’s Law, “It is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” In other words, no matter how many convenient modern contrivances and techniques we develop to free up our time, we’ll find a way to fill it up as soon we carve it out. Until we learn not to. Because this, too, is within our control.

Maybe the most valuable lesson we can take from time research is that we are Time Lords. Even if we don’t have fancy traveling police boxes. We just have to own our ability to slow time down to make room for our needs.

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]]> Customer personas: imagining your ideal audience ./../customer-personas-imagining-your-ideal-audience/index.html Tue, 17 Jan 2023 16:00:00 +0000 http://wp.awarecopywriting.com/index.php/2015/02/09/content-matters-imagining-your-ideal-audience/ Writers are a reserved lot by nature. Our minds are filled with jewel heist plots and Mars landings, dark dystopias, and enough characters to fill a major metropolitan area. It’s no surprise that developing customer personas comes easily to us. However, with a little imagination and market insight, anyone can create customer personas to [...]

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Writers are a reserved lot by nature. Our minds are filled with jewel heist plots and Mars landings, dark dystopias, and enough characters to fill a major metropolitan area. It’s no surprise that developing customer personas comes easily to us. However, with a little imagination and market insight, anyone can create customer personas to help guide marketing strategies.

What is a customer persona? Simply put, it’s a profile of your ideal client or clients. Who is it that you want wearing your clothing brand? Who would become engrossed in your new app? Taking time to imagine these people – who they are, what they worry about, what they desire – is an invaluable step in creating successful marketing campaigns and even in determining if you’ve targeted the best audience for your brand.

Let’s take a look at two customer personas to see where they might lead our content planning.

Customer Persona No. 1

Meet my imaginary friend Mary, a sixty-year old retired teacher. By the time she reached retirement, Mary was earning an annual income of $55k. She and her husband invested in stocks and bonds over the course of their marriage, and they each have retirement benefits. They’d planned ahead for their leisure years, putting aside a healthy nest egg. They’d imagined spending their retirement traveling, but they’re not sure that’s a good idea now.

Despite their financial prudence, Mary is still concerned about their security. She’s worried that the nest egg won’t be enough to sustain them indefinitely, and she’s also anxious about her daughter, who took on a huge loan for college and is now struggling to keep up with her monthly payments.

Customer Persona No. 2

Now, meet Tabitha, Mary’s daughter. At thirty-two years old, she’s had three different jobs since she graduated from college with a degree in Education like her mom. She wanted very much to follow in Mary’s footsteps, but teachers’ salaries aren’t what they used to be, and she’s having a hard time finding a school in her area that’s hiring. Currently, she’s working as an office manager, earning $34k annually.

She doesn’t intend to stay in her present job any longer than necessary, but she’s not sure that she wants to teach anymore either. She has a student loan to pay, and she doesn’t want to turn to her parents for financial aid. She’s worried about money and about her future, but despite her fears, she feels optimistic. She’s even toying with the idea of starting her own business.

What we can learn from our customer personas?

Mary and Tabitha are joined by genetics and by shared values. They’ve been drawn to the same careers, and they have some of the same concerns that we all have: money being high on the list. However, it would be a mistake to assume that the two women will be won over by identical marketing strategies. Each grew up in a unique era of American history. Each is part of a distinct generation with different perspectives on the world and current events.

Likewise, individuals within a generation are influenced by their socio-economic status, their geographies, and a myriad of other factors, and these factors impact how particular members of the cohort behave and respond to brands. Because America is a particularly diverse society, effective marketing is a constant challenge.

The question then becomes: How do you reach all those people?

The answer may be a little disappointing in its simplicity.

You don’t.

That’s where customer personas prove invaluable. By imagining particular individuals, you can extrapolate a more focused audience to target with your marketing strategy. A limited audience and a more customized marketing approach will inevitably lead to better results than blanket appeals.

This is particularly true of smaller businesses. While large corporations may be able to sink millions into campaigns, less moneyed brands need to make every penny count. Flops are unacceptable losses. Defining and understanding a focused segment of the population – specifically, the segment who will want what you’re offering – ensures that the money spent on marketing is worthwhile.

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]]> Micro-marketing: creating bite size content with big flavor ./../micro-marketing-creating-bite-size-content-big-flavor/index.html Mon, 19 Dec 2022 16:00:00 +0000 http://wp.awarecopywriting.com/index.php/2015/10/19/bite-size-content-big-flavor/ Creating content from scratch can be a daunting task. Trust me. I do it for eight hours every day, and it never gets a whole lot easier. Fortunately, the ever-dwindling attention span of modern humans can work in your favor if you’re struggling with content development. While there is an optimal amount of content [...]

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Creating content from scratch can be a daunting task. Trust me. I do it for eight hours every day, and it never gets a whole lot easier. Fortunately, the ever-dwindling attention span of modern humans can work in your favor if you’re struggling with content development.

While there is an optimal amount of content when it comes to SEO (and it’s definitely more than a Tweet can contain), that doesn’t necessitate the penning of epic narratives to fill up your website or blog. In fact, most readers aren’t nearly as interested in digging through lengthy paragraphs for that one bit of information as you might think, and a cleverly crafted website can make micro-content a spectacular design element.

So where can you cut corners?

Creating micro-content for your corporate blog

While 500 words may not seem like much, we’ve only just passed 100 words in this post so far. That means I still have ample room to fill you in on micro-content without getting into tome territory.

When it comes to your blog, less is more. A blog post is meant to be read in a short sitting, so don’t pressure yourself to create lengthy posts. Instead, choose a narrow topic and speak to it succinctly and with authority.

Scaling down case studies for bite size content marketing

In all likelihood, your experience with case studies involves pages of exposition when, in fact, a case study is simply meant to explain three things: the original problem, the solution, the results. It’s possible to create a compelling case study in three sentences.

When Cotinga-Soft’s brilliant developers built Lapeyre Stair’s new site, we did just that, developing brief case studies that allow engineers to quickly see the benefits of each of their stair systems.

Developing an About Us page that gets to the point

This is going to hurt a few feelings, but most people aren’t visiting your site to read the heroic saga of your business’ inception. That’s not to say visitors aren’t interested in your beginnings – be they humble or grandiose – it just means that you should respect their time and give them the abridged version.

Better yet, create a timeline. Even better still, make it an interactive timeline! There are lots of ways to capture the story of your business without resorting to a monologue. (Yes, I know. I resorted to a monologue on my About the Copywriter page. This is a case of do as I say, not as I do.)

Creating compelling content for your business’ website can be a taxing endeavor, especially when you believe it must always go to great lengths. Rather than judging content by quantity, invest in more succinct but higher quality content to save money and win prospects.

Let’s practice making micro-marketing content. Write a simple three-sentence case study that describes 1) a problem you solved for a client, 2) the solution you employed, and 3) the outcome.

How can micro-marketing content add excitement to a website?

This imaginative content strategy used bite size storytelling to boost one maker’s brand awareness.

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]]> The primer coat: how to start creating your content with less anxiety ./../the-primer-coat-how-to-start-creating-your-content-with-less-anxiety/index.html Mon, 12 Dec 2022 16:00:47 +0000 ./../index.html?p=59798 My eureka moment came while stressing out about repainting my living room walls. I'd been staring at three swatches of paint taped to one bare wall for over a year, waffling between color extremes. More than indecision, however, I was stalled by insecurity. I didn't have much experience with painting, and there was a [...]

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My eureka moment came while stressing out about repainting my living room walls. I’d been staring at three swatches of paint taped to one bare wall for over a year, waffling between color extremes.

More than indecision, however, I was stalled by insecurity. I didn’t have much experience with painting, and there was a lot of surface to cover. What if I spent all weekend painting only to step back and see streaks and bubbles and a million other newbie mistakes?

It was more satisfying to imagine the finished project than to actually commit to finishing the project. Too much could go wrong once I opened up that can of paint.

At the time, I was teaching writing, and I realized that many of my students were struggling with the same anxiety when they faced the blank page. It hadn’t occurred to me before because I enjoy writing and I’ve had decades of experience and practice. But for my students who hadn’t spent years writing, the blank page was just as scary as my blank wall.

I told myself exactly what I began telling my students when I returned to the classroom: It doesn’t have to be perfect; it just has to be done. You can’t fix nothing, but you can fix everything else.

You’ve gotta start creating content somewhere.

I know a lot of small business owners who struggle with developing compelling content for their websites. The key is to forget about compelling and just start with any content. In fact, I’d encourage you to commit to writing the absolute worst garbage you can imagine for your website. Giving yourself permission to not be good at something is the first step to getting better at it.

Whether I’m working on a marketing document or a novel, I start by dumping all of my thoughts and ideas into a document just so the page isn’t blank. I call it the primer coat. The purpose isn’t good reading. No one’s ever going to see it. The purpose is to make the final coat flow a little more fluidly, drip a little less, and generally appear more cohesive.

Make improvements to your content from there.

From that primer coat, I pick out the main idea I want to get across, and I write one single sentence that captures it. Then, I organize all the other messy thoughts beneath it, playing around with the best order and flow.

If I’m really struggling, I’ll write out what I want the page to be like when I’m done. For example:

OK. So let’s make this post about how to just get through making content already. Start with that time you were painting and then flesh out the idea of just getting started.

Remember, writing is just thinking on paper, so give yourself permission to just think on paper. Don’t feel like you have to think the best thoughts on paper the first time. Get a lot of thoughts – good, bad, and meh – and then you’ve got something to work with.

Go ahead. Right now, brainstorm a list of ten topics you could write about to spark interest in your business. That’s as good a place to start developing your content strategy as any.

As a small company of under 10 employees, we could not dedicate someone to supplying data and content. That, along with the fact that offshore fastening and stud welding is not exactly common knowledge, presented quite a challenge. We reached out to Autumn and that was the end of our worries.

Jacob Keller, PFSNO | New Orleans, Louisiana

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]]> Switching costs are killing your mojo ./../switching-costs-are-killing-your-mojo/index.html Mon, 05 Dec 2022 16:00:09 +0000 ./../index.html?p=59773 Between the ages of 15 and 27, I waited tables at dozens of restaurants, from five-star dining rooms to greasy spoon taverns. Anyone who has ever waited tables can tell you that there are times when your head spins as customers signal to you from across the room, cooks ding bells to let you know [...]

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Between the ages of 15 and 27, I waited tables at dozens of restaurants, from five-star dining rooms to greasy spoon taverns. Anyone who has ever waited tables can tell you that there are times when your head spins as customers signal to you from across the room, cooks ding bells to let you know an order is up, and your brain struggles to hold onto the last three orders you took.

For years, every busy lunch shift was a wild and hairy attempt to respond to each need immediately and juggle each request masterfully. Then, in the midst of a Mardi Gras rush in a French Quarter restaurant, I achieved minor enlightenment. The flurry of loud diners and bustling wait staff seemed to slow down, and my panic ebbed away. I realized that by rushing around in an effort to do everything at once, I made more mistakes than money.

For the rest of that shift, I worked at a steady but serene pace, stopping to speak to each table reassuringly, handling one task at a time with my full attention. I didn’t allow myself to rush or panic. At the end of the shift, I wasn’t exhausted or angry, and I hadn’t lost any tips as a result of my single-minded approach.

To this day, when I begin to feel overwhelmed, I recall that moment of complete clarity, and I apply it to the situation at hand.

Are you even multitasking though?

We often feel that it’s necessary to multitask in order to prove our productivity at work. However, switching back and forth among different jobs causes more harm than good.

Though we may take pride in our multitasking abilities, research has shown time and again that humans aren’t nearly as good at it as we think we are. Yes, I can juggle numerous tasks at once. That doesn’t mean that I’ll do it well. Or that I should do it at all.

More to the point, we’re not usually multitasking at all. Rather, we’re task-switching: moving back and forth between activities.

Task-switching comes with switching-costs.

While task-switching may create the illusion of diligence, it’s detrimental to real productivity. A series of experiments conducted in 2001 showed that students who had to switch between tasks lost time with each switch. The more complex the tasks, the longer it took for participants to switch and the more time was lost.

The switching cost may be relatively small – just enough time for your brain to recalibrate – but as we switch over and over again, i.e. multitask, that cost adds up, becoming an enormous drain on time and energy. David Meyer, PhD, one of the lead researchers on the 2001 claims that the brief mental blocks that result from shifting between activities can reduce productivity as much as 40 percent.

Take a deep breath and focus.

Mad rushing and a furor of activity may make you feel productive, but if you discern the subtle differences between being busy and being productive, you’ll appreciate the baselessness of this myth of multitasking.

Next time you’re overwhelmed by demands, rather than scurrying to get it all done at once, take a deep breath and focus on the most important task at hand. When you’re done, move to the next task purposefully but with your full attention. You’ll increase your productivity, decrease your stress, and improve the quality of your work.

What strategies do you use to tackle all of your professional and personal responsibilities efficiently?

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]]> Expertise versus authority: Which does your marketing agency’s blog reflect? ./../expertise-versus-authority-which-does-your-marketing-agencys-blog-reflect/index.html Mon, 28 Nov 2022 16:00:58 +0000 https://strangeports.com/awarecopywriting/?p=59506 Aren’t expertise and authority the same thing? It’s a subtle difference, but it’s an important one. An expert is someone who has exhaustive knowledge about a particular area. In the case of a marketing agency, you can claim expertise if you have a thorough understanding of social media marketing, content marketing, etc. If you’ve [...]

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Aren’t expertise and authority the same thing?

It’s a subtle difference, but it’s an important one.

An expert is someone who has exhaustive knowledge about a particular area. In the case of a marketing agency, you can claim expertise if you have a thorough understanding of social media marketing, content marketing, etc. If you’ve actually managed to launch and maintain a successful marketing agency, you’re assuredly an expert.

But don’t start congratulating yourself yet.

With a modest investment of time and money, anyone can become an expert in the modern era. Online workshops and certifications make it easy to learn a new field, which means experts in many areas (marketing included) are now a dime a dozen.

Sorry. Expertise just ain’t what it used to be, kids.

An authority, on the other hand, is someone who has the savvy to actually disrupt and alter a field though imaginative and surprising insights. Yes, an authority has expertise. An authority knows what she’s talking about. She knows her business, her industry, and her market. But she’s not satisfied with knowing. She wants to improve traditional methods and challenge conventional wisdom.

To put it another way, in a crowd of experts, the authority sets the bar for expertise.

Does your marketing agency’s blog reflect expertise or authority?

If you’re not sure, compare your agency’s blog with any other agency’s blog. How similar are your topics? What about your titles? Are you sharing the same insights slightly re-packaged? Or are you shaking things up with posts that offer a new take on the same old subjects?

Are you bored writing your agency’s blog posts?

Ouch.

If that’s the case, you may be stuck in expert mode. There’s certainly nothing wrong with being an expert. I like to think I’m an expert myself. But wouldn’t you like to be more? Wouldn’t you like to exercise authority? To say something different? To change minds and sway hearts? Don’t you want to stand out from the other experts?

How to shift from expert to authority mindset

As a copywriter, I have the opportunity on a daily basis to spend time dabbling in multiple industries. On one day, I might be learning about the effects of saltwater on welded joints for an industrial fabrication firm. The next, I’ll be tackling the best lighting for food photography.

Playing expert in a variety of fields (which is essentially the job of a copywriter) creates an ideal atmosphere for cross-pollination, and cross-pollination is one way to cultivate an authority mindset. When you compare notes with experts in other fields, you begin to see your own industry in a new light. When you pay attention to how innovators in other professions disrupt their industries, you’ll get ideas for how to make waves in your own pool.

Experts stick to what they know. They know it well, and that’s great. But sometimes knowing something well prevents you from seeing new possibilities.

Get out of your comfort zone. Read widely. Listen to experts in other fields. Take a new approach to an old problem. Don’t be afraid of screwing up. That’s how you shift from expertise to authority.

What are you doing to establish yourself as an industry authority?

Through independent research and a few question and answer emails, Autumn quickly proved to be a fast learner and in many cases actually taught us some things through her informative posts and blogs.

Jacob Keller, Production Fastening Systems | New Orleans, Louisiana

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]]> What your company blog and your family dinner should have in common ./../what-your-blog-and-your-family-dinner-should-have-in-common/index.html Mon, 21 Nov 2022 16:00:02 +0000 http:https://strangeports.com/awarecopywriting//?p=58789 Did you know that kids who regularly have dinner with their families tend to be healthier, happier, and more successful in school? I’d like to say that I sit down with my family every night for dinner, but y’know, life. Our son is nineteen and has cooler people to hang out with now (or at [...]

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]]> Did you know that kids who regularly have dinner with their families tend to be healthier, happier, and more successful in school? I’d like to say that I sit down with my family every night for dinner, but y’know, life. Our son is nineteen and has cooler people to hang out with now (or at least he thinks so). However, when he was still a kid, we did make an effort to spend a few evenings around the table together each week.

Those family dinners gave us an opportunity to share funny stories, to ask for advice, to offer support, and to generally take time to remember why we like each other so much.

Ideally, you should approach your business blog with the same generosity of spirit and camaraderie that you’d approach a leisurely family dinner. The tips that follow could be applied to either situation.

Listen first

You’ll gain more from any conversation if you start by listening to the other person. As a parent, you’ll stay in the loop longer if you actually listen to your kids when they’re rambling on endlessly about the latest video game, anime, or crush.

Likewise, when you take time to listen to your clients and your prospects, putting aside any compulsion to interrupt or respond, you gain something more valuable than you’ll get from even the most finely-crafted sales pitch. You’ll gain insight into what your audience is interested in, what concerns them, and how you can best contribute to the conversation. 

Let the other person lead

Back in 2013 (my first year as a copywriter), the data company Oribi released an analysis of 100 blog post titles that caught my eye. The study found that blog titles with words like announcing, wins, celebrates, and grows tended to rank low in popularity.

Let’s face it, the feats and accomplishments of your company probably don’t rank high on your prospects’ lists of things to read about. By comparison, just try telling a twelve-year-old about your newest client. His eyes will glaze over like a side of carrots

The good news is that if you’ve taken time to listen to your clients (or your kids), you should have a pretty good idea of what they’re interested in. Let the other person’s interests guide the conversations happening on your blog, even if that means backing away from tales of your own entrepreneurial heroics and focusing instead on topics that are only indirectly related to your brand.

For example, if you sell high-end fabric, even the most heady descriptions of those gorgeous bolts of mustache-printed burlap won’t hold the same charm to your prospects as they do to you. However, using a blog post to demonstrate how that bolt could be incorporated into a particular design scheme might be riveting to your audience.

Seek out interesting things to talk about

Even when you’ve listened and let the other person lead, meaningful conversations aren’t easy. After all, you can’t continue addressing the same concerns and solving the same problems ad infinitum. You’ve got to mix it up.

Whether you’re blogging to gain prospects or to retain clients (or you’re gathering ’round the kitchen table to spend more QT with the family), expanding your knowledge base will help you tell more interesting stories.

That might mean making time each day for a little extra-curricular reading or to take a quick TEDTalk break. The goal is to gather material for more captivating conversations, and so the farther you extend your reach, the more adept you’ll be at putting a new spin on topics that could potentially become boring.

One of the perks of being a copywriter serving various unique industries is that I’m constantly reading from a diverse array of materials. The power of that cross-pollination is surprising even to me. It’s inherently easier to come up with new ideas when I’m constantly feeding myself information from a broad range of topics.

It also makes dinner conversations more engaging. We’ve spiced up conversations about peer pressure and respecting authority figures with anecdotes about the Milgram and Stanford Prison Experiments. The kid appreciated that we didn’t preach but rather provided compelling information to help him make his own best decisions. That’s what your readers want, too.

Engage regularly

If you want your audience to seek you out for advice and support, you’ve got to show up consistently. A regular blog post schedule let’s prospects and clients know that you’re always thinking of new ways to serve and engage with them.

Of course, this is just about as easy as sitting down to dinner with family every night, so don’t be hard on yourself if you need a little help. Talk to your employees to see if they’d be willing to share the responsibility of blogging or consider outsourcing to a copywriter who can transform your ideas into a weekly or monthly dialogue with your readers.

What strategies have you used to make your company’s blog posts more engaging?

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]]> Pro-tagger: How to use categories and tags on your brand’s blog ./../pro-tagger-how-to-use-categories-and-tags-on-your-brands-blog/index.html Mon, 14 Nov 2022 16:00:28 +0000 https://strangeports.com/awarecopywriting/?p=59576 Categories and tags are both valuable in terms of SEO, but they serve entirely different organizational purposes. When business owners and novice bloggers don’t thoroughly understand the difference, they wind up with a site that’s easy for search engines to find but difficult for humans to navigate. Here’s what you need to know in terms of [...]

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]]> Categories and tags are both valuable in terms of SEO, but they serve entirely different organizational purposes. When business owners and novice bloggers don’t thoroughly understand the difference, they wind up with a site that’s easy for search engines to find but difficult for humans to navigate.

Here’s what you need to know in terms of SEO.

Both categories and tags are useful in terms of optimizing for search and discovery if your category and tag names are commonly searched terms in your field. Use keywords that you want associated with you brand in your categories and tags.

More importantly, here’s what you need to know about site visitors.

They’re on your site for a reason, and your blog’s taxonomy, or classification system, should make it incredibly easy for them to find what they’re looking for while they’re there.

You know what isn’t easy? Trying to interpret an unfamiliar industry’s jargon or a particularly creative person’s witty but unhelpful tag names. Trying to sort through fifteen categories that all seem kind of similar to find the one that will have the specific information you’re looking for.

Forget the search bots when it comes to classifying.

Focus on your site’s visitors instead. What will make it easy for visitors to find what they’re looking for? Do that.

When it comes to categories…

Think of a Table of Contents. You should be thinking big, broad, and general with little overlap among categories. By narrowing down your categories to a few generic topics, you’re helping site users who may already be overwhelmed with information overload. You’re making it easier for them to make choices about how they interact with your content.

For example, The Blog has five categories: Content Strategy, Entrepreneurship, News, Locals Only, and Aware-ness (otherwise known as Uncategorized, a.k.a. Quirky Writer Stuff). While we could add categories for Social Media, Blogging, and Web Content, all of those are actually sub-categories of Content Strategy. I write frequently about Productivity, but that fits just fine under Entrepreneurship. When we talk about Social Media, we’re still talking about Content Strategy.

An air conditioner repair business’ blog may include categories like: Heating, Cooling, and Air Purification. Heating would include all of the posts related to the heating aspect of their business, from choosing between a gas furnace or a heat pump to tips preparing homes for the cold winter months. Cooling would cover everything from ceiling fans to energy efficient thermostats for hot summers in eastern North Carolina.

Is there a right number of categories? Not exactly. In general, I’d recommend trying to limit your categories to 5 topics. But ultimately, the number of categories should reflect the breadth of your website’s scope. If you address a variety of distinct topics, you may need more than 5 categories. If you have a very limited scope, you may need no more than 3.

When it comes to tags…

Go crazy. Your site’s tags are more like a detailed index, and so it’s perfectly acceptable to get down to the nitty-gritty with tags. A post that we’ve categorized as Content Strategy may be tagged with all of the following: social media, blogging, web content, startups, rebel branding, SEO, infographics…the list could go on, hyper-classifying the post down to dozens of possible micro-details.

If you’re still not sure you’re doing it right…

Get some honest feedback from a friend, an associate, or a professional. Let them poke around on your business’ blog and see if they can easily find important information and then revise and rework using their input.

What three Categories would be absolutely necessary to include in your business blog?

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]]> Stop exceeding your clients’ expectations ./../stop-exceeding-your-clients-expectations/index.html Mon, 07 Nov 2022 16:00:45 +0000 ./../index.html?p=59792 Clearly that’s a psycho thing to say, right? Who would ever consider for a moment suggesting that their business is in the business of falling short of client expectations? And that’s my point exactly. This falls squarely into the category of Things Every Other Person In Your Industry Is Also Saying Verbatim. “We strive to [...]

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]]> Clearly that’s a psycho thing to say, right? Who would ever consider for a moment suggesting that their business is in the business of falling short of client expectations?

And that’s my point exactly.

This falls squarely into the category of Things Every Other Person In Your Industry Is Also Saying Verbatim.

“We strive to exceed our clients’ expectations” has all the hallmark characteristics of trite, canned content. And yet that phrase – almost exactly – appears over and over (and over and over and over) as I conduct content audits.

Let’s just all assume that we’re each of us trying really hard to exceed our clients’ expectations, alright? But how? What exactly are you doing to exceed your client’s expectations?

Do you respond to their requests in under ten minutes?

Do you offer to refund their money if they’re not completely satisfied?

Do you hand-pluck your herbal remedy’s ingredients from an organic Costa Rican farm yourself?

Stop telling your clients that you’re going to exceed their expectations and tell them how you’re going to exceed their expectations. It’s a sure-fire way to stand out from the crowd.

On the other hand, if your clients go around telling people you’ve exceeded their expectations, that’s A-OK.

Autumn has been amazing and has exceeded our expectations.

Sevetri Wilson, CEO, Exempt Me Now | Baton Rouge, Louisiana

What are three specific ways your company exceeds customer expectations?

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