I’ll admit it: I have Christmas Tree Brain. I’m so excited about this launch that it was hard to put my head on the pillow last night. So I spent a couple hours late last night getting the word out on social media to let my friends and business associates know that my new site is now LIVE. A number of you have liked the announcement and a significant number of you shared it. I’ve already received a potential new client as a result. (Thank you, Jeffrey Gordon Parker, for recommending me to the new client! I look forward to hitting his home page out of the ball park for him…)

 

And get this. Howard Weinstein (the amazing Star Trek author and huge DeForest Kelley fan) just shared my announcement post, too. Getting his endorsement is HUGE and means the world to me.  He is a terrific fiction writer.

 

Candace Thompson of Wild Child Group Ltd has endorsed me… and even has me share my insights (live) with her clients from time to time. THIS is huge because she is a business coach of the highest magnitude here in the Pacific Northwest. She can take a struggling start up and turn it into a high-profile presence that rakes in one million a year within two to three years usually. (Of course, the business owner has to actually do what she says to make it happen! She won’t drag them kicking and screaming every inch of the way–and she puts them through their paces and stretches them miles beyond their comfort zones–which is where most success lies.)  Candace’s endorsement says (I’m paraphrasing here) that she has been in business for decades and that copy writing is a HUGE hill to climb for business owners. (You can read the actual testimonial on the Testimonials page.)  She sends clients my way as often as she can.

 

With endorsements like these (and for the endorsement-to-end-all-endorsements, you ought to check LET NO DAY DAWN THAT THE ANIMALS CANNOT SHARE. DeForest Kelley wrote the foreword and I’m still blown away by it twenty years later!) to add to my clients’ testimonials, my guess is that I’m about to get busier…

 

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Lisa Taylor let me know that one of the first things I should blog about are the differences between a good or great writer (in general) and a good or great copywriter. That’s a tall order, but let me give it a whirl.

 

Good/great writers of all stripes who manage to make a living at it are engaging (to varying degrees). We know how to string words together in ways that keep eyes, minds and hearts glued to the page. We’re all decent communicators or we’d be doing something else for a living.

 

That said, not all writers are trying to sell a product, service, cause or idea. And not all who are selling know how to do it. So you’ll often run across ham-handed practitioners whose conversion rates are anemic or non-existent. They’re usually newbies and wannabes who haven’t been totally discouraged yet from pursuing this profession. These folks get taken in by the myth that a good writer can automatically be a good copywriter without  a learning curve. They get sold quickie courses that promise them riches beyond their wildest dreams and engage, only to find out that great copy writing isn’t just an art but a science.  It’s far harder than it looks. It can sometimes take a tried-and-true professional like me fifteen minutes to get 35 words just right. Not always anymore…not even very often anymore…but it happens…even after almost ten years in the trenches.  A great copywriter creates magic by inducing a willing, 100% agreeable waking trance inside her readers.

 

Copywriters are chiefly sales-oriented. (Content writers are primarily information-oriented.) A sales writer knows she has just seconds to rivet her Ideal Client into place and that every time a period appears after a sentence, the reader has permission to leave. If the next word in the new sentence doesn’t cue her readers’ (or viewers’/listeners’) brains to stay tuned to the message, there are a thousand and one distractions just waiting in the wings to pull them away.  In a nutshell, copy writing ain’t easy!  Copywriters break rules all the time–rules your English and Creative Writing teachers would (metaphorically speaking) slap you silly for doing.

 

A great copywriter is a spellbinder. We have to be. The average American is exposed to more than 6,000 advertising messages every single day. You can’t go to the bathroom in a public place without finding yourself staring at an ad, an offer, and invitation, an inquiry. You can’t drive your vehicle very many places without passing billboards, neon signs, and other ‘Listen Up’ attractions (or distractions). And I don’t even have to mention radio and TV, do I? We’re inundated by ads every which way we turn!

 

And if your copywriter doesn’t know how to sell without coming across like a salesperson, he or she is going to shoot you in the foot. Today’s shoppers are both savvy and connected. If you want to see how fast they’ll disconnect from you, simply hire a clueless copywriter to find out at warp speed.

 

I don’t mean to scare you. My aim here is to forewarn you. Anyone can hang a shingle and proclaim him- or herself a copywriter. And plenty of people do.  Due diligence is the watch word here.  Don’t just say a prayer, cross your fingers, hold your nose, and pick someone without looking at their portfolio, reading their testimonials, asking to speak to former clients, and asking where or how they learned to write sales copy. If they can’t name a single high-profile copywriter or the book titles they read to get up to speed, they probably aren’t up to speed.

 

If a copywriter is cheap to hire, you’ll likely find yourself lining the bottom of a bird cage with the results of his or her efforts to serve you. If they’re foreigners (with regard to where you live or the people you want to sell to), they probably don’t understand the idiomatic vernacular in which your clients operate and they’ll come across as foreigners…usually not a good thing. (High-profile foreigners are endearing and worth the extra effort it takes to understand them, but many peoples’ tolerance for hard-to-understand communicators is often low to non-existent an you’ll leave money on the table as a result.)  Ideally, native UK writers should serve UK clients and their UK customers.  US writers, ditto.  Bangladeshi writers, ditto.  Indian writers, ditto. Otherwise the copy comes across as more alien and less comfortable to the eye and ear than it needs to be to create the “know, like, trust” factor.

 

There are a lot of things that a copywriter does that a writer of any other stripe isn’t privy to.  I’ve just scratched the surface here. But this gives you some idea of the difference between a copywriter and every other kind of wordsmith.

 

Bottom line: Buyer beware. Your due diligence will pay dividends. Picking a name out of a directory or off the Internet and just hoping for the best will not usually end well.  Look for the copywriter that knocks your socks off. And expect to pay very well for the thrill ride you’ll enjoy when your Return on Investment starts showing up!