I’m a learn-it-yourself kind of guy, which means I learn by doing. As a result, it’s often hard for me to teach; instinctive learners like myself don’t always understand the progressions used by other types of learners.
By contrast, Michel Fortin’s always excelled at breaking things down for his readers, and his current post hits home: finding your own Unique Selling Proposition (or “hook”):
Time and time again, I’ve told many aspiring copywriters and marketers that a USP is what distinguishes you from the pack. It increases perceived value, expertise, and credibility — without needing to state it outright.
But since I hear this question often, particularly from copywriters just entering the field, I sense that it’s because people need a little help in defining their USP.
The idea is simple: in this age of cheap (or free) content, word jockeys will end up working for pizza money, and only those who bring more to the table than vowels and consonants will truly prosper.
Fortin’s post touches on that, but it’s really about defining yourself in a way that makes prospects want to call because you do something unique.
I’ve received a whole chunk of email lately from new copywriters looking for tips, and my first two are always “get a Web presence and then figure out why anyone should call you in the first place.”
After all, if you can’t explain to me why someone should hire you, how are you going to explain it to your prospects?
Give Michel’s post a read, and think about your “hook.”
No one expects you to define your copywriting message any more than you were expected to know your career choice at kindergarten age, but damnit, I am expecting you to think about it.
I haven’t forgotten you, my little Undergrounders. Sure, I haven’t posted anything useful lately, but one look at my to-do list would suggest why.
The snow is piling up by the metric ton, the snowblower is feigning death, the clients are calling, and yes — the old desktop PC has been dead in the water and threatening to go belly up at any time.
Still, when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. So when life hands you a dying desktop PC, you make a shiny new PC.
This one’s a nice, fast, big 17" Dell Inspiron laptop, and suddenly, every room with a view is my office, an excellent idea when your new house offers treetop (and mountain) views out most windows.
Excuse me while I enjoy the view. Thanks.
All of which means I’m back in the game, and pretty happy about it.
Sadly, my enthusiasm doesn’t extend to Vista, the operating system which came on my new laptop.
I now believe Vista isn’t really an operating system as much as an elaborate practical joke played on us by Microsoft.
In fact, it’s likely the company’s employees are collectively hiding behind the couch, waiting for April Fools to roll around, when they’ll jump up and yell "gotcha!"
It’s enough to make a guy buy a Mac or go with Linux, and I understand more and more folks are doing exactly that.
In the meantime, I plan to write like the wind, even though winter is a dark, leaden time when my brain feels thick and the words flow slowly. (I’d love to know how everyone else feels about winter.)
I’ve got a couple posts on tap, so stay tuned. And keep writing, Tom Chandler.
I hadn’t visited Buzzwhack.com in a while — a serious sin of omission for any wildly hip, totally “with it” dude like myself.
If you haven’t visited, Buzzwhack catalogs the pretentious new buzzphrases and words invented to impress the less-connected among us. It’s big fun, and a great way to spend time that you might otherwise waste generating revenue.
My favorite buzzword of 2007? Narcissurfing
Narcissurfing: Spending a lot of time on the Internet to see how often your name appears and what others are saying about you. Its another way of saying ‘Googling yourself,’ although a narcissurfer does it on a daily basis.
Normally I’d include a long list of other favorite buzzphrases, but between narcissurfing and zerotasking, I’m too bandwidth limited. You Grok, right?
Still — because I care for my readers like little tiny virtual members of my own family, I’ve mined a few other favorites. Enjoy!
wikiality: User-created reality — where something becomes “true” if you can get enough people to believe it. Thanks to the growing number of wiki sites, such as Wikipedia.
Below Zeros: This is a marketing term, not a temperature. They’re customers who cost more to serve than they return in value. Example: A customer who ties up a salesperson for 45 minutes while trying on 14 pairs of Gucci shoes, then buys a six-pack of tube socks for $1.98, complains about the price and walks out. Also known as BZs.
spaghetti marketing: To spend marketing dollars randomly without a clear plan, much like throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks.
hypertasking: While we’re frequently forced to multitask just to keep up at work, hypertasking is a choice for those who thrive on doing more than one thing at a time. A hypertasker combines many tasks into one in order to experience more. He may exercise, play tourist and conduct business at the same time by riding his bike through the Blue Ridge Mountains while running a business meeting via his wireless headset.
phenomeniche: A marketing phenomenon that appeals to a small niche. Example: Trading Spaces, the TV series. While not a sweeping global phenomenon, it is the undisputed titan of one modest patch of pop-culture.
photox: The process of digitally removing wrinkles and blemishes from a photograph of one’s face by using Adobe Photoshop or other image manipulation software.
Barneyware: The purple dinosaur may have faded from the scene, but his legacy lives on. Barneyware is anything that has little or no substance. Example: A joint press release by two companies that have nothing new to announce, but in order to generate media attention declare their mutual admiration for each other. In effect, the release says nothing more than “I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family.”
reverbiagized: To reword a concept or proposal with the hope of changing the minds of the people who didn’t like it the first time around. “It’s the same ad campaign, but we reverbiagized it.”
What About 2008?
Isn’t it time we all spontaneously created a new buzzphrase — searching for our 15 minutes of Internet fame? Of course it is! That’s why — right now — I’m introducing the concept of:
Bland Marketing: That marketing activity where absolutely lifeless brand advertising is perpetrated on the public because it’s “in line with the brand vision” — a listless messaging document produced by a committee of no-talents that guarantees (or justifies) Bland Marketing. (Honk if this has ever happened to you.)
Any new entries from the Undergrounders? Why wait until 2008 to do the important work?
It’s been an intense week; I wrote a lot of words and also shipped my podcast, and despite some issues with the hardware, the final result was pretty nice. Nicer, in fact, than the client expected.
Love to hear that.
So now I’m a podcaster. Too.
Sorta.
The best part about writing for a living is that the voyage never really ends. You might dock in one harbor for a while, but you know if you stay too long, your hull will foul and your sails will rot.
So periodically you sail out into the wider, wilder ocean, knowing it’s more work, but it’s also the part of the trip that makes the journey worthwhile.
After all, if you didn’t chance it, you’d never know what the next landing looked like.
Still, while I’m a happy copywriter, I’m also a wrung out one, which is why I’m giving YOU the rest of this lovely Friday off.
I’m heading outdoors for some inspiration, leaving behind a half-finished advertising proposal and one other project.
You should do the same, and if your clients complain, tell ‘em I said it was OK (but it’s not necessary to give ‘em my email address).
Enjoy your weekend. And the rest of your voyage (which begins today, btw).
Done any free work lately? Or seen that work used in multiple places — without ever receiving a dime for the additional uses?
The never-demur Harlan Ellison — a successful, outspoken and abrasive writer — tells it like it is in this short interview. Great stuff — I would have laughed more if so much of it hadn’t been painfully on target.
Ellison still writes on a manual typewriter, and successfully sued movie producer James Cameron after noticing the original Terminator script bore a striking resemblance to two of his own short stories.
He’s fought (viciously) for writer’s rights since the early 1960s, and serves as an excellent counterpoint in the current times, where intellectual property and creator’s rights seem to be going to the way of the Dodo bird.
Bookmark this video, and when you feel yourself edging towards a giveaway — when you’re about to apply a value of “zero” to your work — give it another viewing.
And then read Michel Fortin’s latest “Olympic” pricing post. I wouldn’t apply his approach on all my jobs, but it’s a good example of thinking through the pricing process — namely, what are you really getting paid for, and what does your client know about the process?
Moving is stressful. It’s a lot of backbreaking work (and I noticed none of you offered to help).
The Writer’s Office doesn’t look like this. So what does it look like?
The good news? A new home office space is in my future. (New. That’s an exciting word).
Because I started down copywriting’s path when most copy was still being written on typewriters, I’m afraid my concept of the copywriter’s office might be a little dated.
Indeed, — in the era of powerful laptops and wi-fi — is the home office even an office? Or is it simply the whole home?
So I’m turning to you for ideas.
Where do you work? What’s your dream office look like? And what clever little ideas have you found to make your home office more workable?
It’s not exactly “Copywriters Gone Wild,” but for the next two weeks, I’ll be posting from a remote camp on East Grand Lake, Maine.
It’s a long ways from my home in the mountains of Northern California, and since I travel about as well as most cats swim, my friends wonder why I bother. Fortunately, I can offer you one very, very good reason:
The Lovely & Talented Nancy (L&T Nancy) relaxing at East Grand Lake, ME.
It’s pretty here. It’s pretty where I live too, but too much of the same kind of pretty breeds a familiarity. And frankly, when you start getting a little crispy around the edges, different is good. Different is our friend.
And while it’s hard to put a value on quality time with my wife when we’re both largely shorn of our career responsibilities, I will say that time’s worth its weight in gold.
Reason #2: The Copy Conveyor Belt
You know the copywriters who can churn out copy, and do so for months on end? Well, I’m one of the other guys.
As lucky as I am to write for a living, I can’t ignore the stresses it generates. We’re supposed to be creative, or persuasive, or hard-hitting, or engaging — and we’ve got to do it all on a deadline.
After a while, that dulls the mind and deadens the fingers, and when the projects blend together and you start dreaming in short, punchy paragraphs, it’s time to get away.
I’ve gotten away.
Still, expect to see a post or two. I’ve blown the dust off a couple of back-burnered post ideas, and I plan to sneak them in around all the rampant recreation we’ve got planned.
Copywriters boil away all that isn’t essential, leaving behind the essence of a product. Which is why felt strangely at home when I stumbled across a creative writing site dedicated to telling a story in a single sentence. (Consider One Sentence the forerunner of twitter, but with meaning.)
One Sentence is about telling your story, briefly. Insignificant stories, everyday stories, or turning-point-in-your-life stories, boiled down to their bare essentials.
Some sentences are humorous, and some are not. But all are pithy. Consider it today’s Underground Entertainment. Can you tell a story in one sentence?
Before PCs, writers used typewriters, and before that, they used pen and paper.
Naturally, being a largely superstitious, wholly contentious lot, battles erupted over what pen worked best, and why. Later, the word processor wars broke out, and back when there was actually a difference between products, writers in text-based online bulletin boards fought over them with an almost religious zeal.
Of course, all that has changed. With word processors largely the same, what’s left to fight over?
Any copywriter knows the right font choice affects more than readability. A good font conveys tone and attitude (imagine 1990s Apple without Garamond Condensed). It adds “voice” to your words.
That’s why the Slate article surprised me. Among those surveyed, there was a strong dependence on typewriter-style fonts like Courier.
In an era of highly readable typefaces, why are so many stuck with poor, space-hogging, slow-reading Courier?
What Have You Been Doing?
Because I want to look like I write for a living, I developed a set of copy forms, but populated them with the fonts I liked (provided most of my clients would have them, which limits you to a handful of choices).
Strangely, I never asked my clients what they wanted to see.
I never received a complaint, but now I have to wonder; do they have a preference? Do my clients sit in their offices and say “sure, I like the copy, but what was he thinking with that san serif font?”
Any thoughts on fonts in the copywriting world? Are you captivated by a font?
Reading the words of a good writer is almost as satisfying as writing something decent myself.
A recurring favorite is Garrison Keillor. I like his writing style and observational bent, and his most recent Salon.com essay lands squarely on the bullseye. He’s finishing a book project on a deadline, and experiencing all the doubts, questions, and fears that accompany it. (I love the illustrated “author’s picture” they use in the column. I want one.)
It’s not so different from my feelings when a big project goes down the wire to the client. Will they love it? Will they appreciate the creative positioning? The hook? The conversational tone?
Or will I get one of those “we like it, but…” calls of doom?
Of course, Keillor’s work appears with his name under it. There are times I wish commercial copy enjoyed the same tradition, and there are times I’m glad it doesn’t. We’d see less real crap out there, and probably a few more red-faced copywriters too.
In any case, statistics suggest you’ve been sitting at the keyboard too long. Take Keillor’s advice and enjoy a walk:
Writers get obsessed with a project and lock the doors and sit and work at it, like animals in a leg trap trying to chew through the leg, which is not good strategy. My advice is to get out of the house and take a walk, a good first cure for the depression that hits after you’ve been working for a year and it dawns on you that your book is not “Huckleberry Finn” but you must finish it anyway because the publisher’s generous advance has been spent on a new pair of shoes for the baby and she has worn a hole in them already, so you press on — on — on — though it strikes you that the world has a great many books already and does it need yours?
A recurring favorite is Garrison Keillor. I like his writing style and observational bent, and his