I got a new blender yesterday. A totally excellent blender with a special dispensing spout for a less messy smoothie experience in the morning.

This morning I was really looking forward to treating my family to some yummy fruit & yogurt smoothies, but I was having technical difficulties.

I had washed the glass jug and the blade and had it all together, but I was getting nowhere trying to attach the spout. I was turning clockwise just like the instructions told me to but it would not lock in to place. I tried pushing harder cause that always works, right? I even thought the problem must have been the person who assembled it screwed the piece on wrong so I was rooting around to find a screwdriver to try it a different way. Believe it or not, didn’t work. (Sorry for doubting you, assembly person.)

I was getting hungry and frustrated so I decided to just put the optional little attachment thingy on and forgo the cool spout pouring option this time. I was pretty sure I’d have to call the Black and Decker people later and take it up with someone there.

When husband came into the kitchen and saw the spout sitting beside the blender, of course, he had to try to fix it for me. And, annoyingly enough, he did.

He told me that our first instinct, to turn it harder, was wrong. He said you have to barely touch it and it locks into place.

I was happy, even though smoothies had already been poured. We’ll have more tomorrow afterall. But I was thinking about how much energy I exerted over that stupid spout this morning and how if I just went against my instinct to push it harder that I would have been able to enjoy the full spout-poured smoothie experience.

Are you pushing harder in your business and still not getting anywhere? Have you taken it apart and tried to put it back together to no avail? If you were to talk to my husband today, he might suggest you just ease off and try something else. No matter how little you think it would actually help.

We tend to underestimate the power of good content as a sales vehicle.

What good is a fantabulous promotion if it leads your customers back to the same non-compelling, ineffective web content every time?

Instead of pushing harder, what if you tried calling a copywriter to review your existing content and propose if and how they might make it better?

I’ll tell you, the harder you push, the more frustrated you’re going to get when you don’t see results. Plus there’s always the chance that the whole thing will go to pieces under the strain.

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If you’ve been living in a cave and aren’t familiar with Twitter, feel free to “follow me” and see what it’s all about. But I’m writing this post under the assumption that you’ve heard of it and/or are already on there.

Twitter is amazing. It’s such a tremendous marketing tool it almost feels like cheating, using it to get people more interested in your product or services.

I’ve been introduced to tons of awesome new stuff by following links posted by cool people on Twitter and most of the requests for quotes I get these days are a direct result of my personal Twitter activity.

Now, what do you do when you know Twitter can help grow your business (or at least send more traffic to your website and/or blog) but you have no time to use it? Or what if you want to use Twitter but you’re aware that your poor grammar and spelling could detract from your brand (seriously, some people do still care about spelling and grammar)?

Believe it or not, you can hire people to tweet for you.

Is using a ghost tweeter ethical?

Yes and no.

If you want to reap the rewards of Twitter by hiring someone to pretend they’re you, tweeting about the sandwich you’re eating or the movie you watched last night…well…I think you might as well just shut ‘er down.

I would suggest that if you don’t have the time to invest in building relationships with your followers and you want someone to pretend they’re you so you don’t have to, that you shouldn’t even be allowed to have a Twitter account.

All it takes for you to really start doing some meaningful relationship building on Twitter is about fifteen minutes a day.

• Check in before you start working for the day, maybe with an update about what your day has in store.
• Check in before lunch to tell your followers how your day is going, or to share a link you found or to retweet something cool.
• Check in later in the afternoon and then again when you’re finishing up for the day.

That’s it. That’s all it takes.

If you want to hire someone to post stuff as you in between those times, fill your boots. If you trust someone enough to sound like you, go ahead and let that person link to one of your recent blog posts or to an article you were featured in. I just don’t think you should be outsourcing your personal tweets to someone because to me, that feels wrong.

I think it’s fine to outsource what I consider to be “corporate” tweets to a ghostwriter or tweeter or whatever you want to call that person.

I do this for several business. I will go through a company’s website, blog posts, articles – basically all existing content – and come up with cute/informative/funny/interesting tweets and send those back to the client who generally gives them to his/her assistant to take from there and enter into SocialOomph or something similar.

So that’s it. That’s how ghost tweeting works. In my opinion, ghost tweeting isn’t entirely unethical, but there’s a fine line as far as I’m concerned. My advice is to do what you feel comfortable with, but I really hope you don’t knowingly try to deceive your followers because they’re following you not me. Know what I mean?

What are your thoughts? Hiring someone to tweet for you…ethical or not? Please share your thoughts, I know you have some!

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When I was a little girl, I used to watch soap operas with my great grandmother. She lived with us when I was very young and I don’t remember all that much about her, but I remember she liked to watch hockey and her soaps.

I haven’t watched a full episode of All My Children since I started my maternity leave with my first born…four years ago. Before that, I would watch it on days I was home sick from work or back when I was going to school, I’d watch it on my days off and during the summer I’d always get sucked in.

The other day I was putting in a video for my daughter, the TV happened to be on ABC and sure enough, All My Children was on. So I watched about five seconds about it. That five seconds was enough to bring me up to speed on an entire storyline.

See, soap opera writers are brilliant.

They are constantly working entire plot lines into one script for a 60 minute show…about 45 minutes when you remove commercials.

If you don’t know what I mean, just turn on a soap opera. Doesn’t matter which one, they all do the same thing – Days of our Lives, All My Children – whichever you like.

Notice how the characters say things like:

“You can’t blame me for not trusting you, Crystal. You did set the fire that supposedly killed Rachel and remember the time you beat Naomi and left her for dead when you found out she was cheating on you with Nate?”

That’s a dramatization, but throughout the script, the writers are always weaving in bits and pieces from past story lines. That way, when a fan hasn’t tuned in for a week or a year or two, they can get caught up within a half hour.

What does this have to do with writing website content?

Lots, actually.

When someone lands on your site, you have no idea if they’re there for the first time, if they’ve landed on your contact page, your services page or your home page.

You don’t know if they understand what you do or whether they’ve ever heard of you before.

Most of us make a lot of assumptions when we write our content.

We think everyone will land on our home page, then visit our about page, look at our services then contact us for more information.

But like the soap opera writer, we should make no assumptions.

• What if someone lands on your contact page and sees nothing more than your PO Box number or an interactive contact form? Do you think they’ll navigate through your site if they know nothing else about you?

• Does your contact page have your mission statement or a brief recap of the services you provide, to bring the visitor up to speed quickly on what you do?

• What if your services page is the popular landing spot for your visitors. Do you go right into a list of the services you provide there, or do you give a little overview of why your services can help people?

Go ahead and “land” on one of the pages of your website you never imagined a visitor landing on before. What do you see? If someone had never heard of you before and knew nothing else about your business than what’s on that page, would they  be compelled enough to browse your site some more, or have you lost them due to vague information that’s meaningless if they’ve deviated from the navigation pattern you assumed they’d follow?

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Last week I got a postcard in the mail. I love junk mail because I’m a copywriter and I love to dissect direct mail pieces and think about what I would have done differently if I were the writer or a member of the creative team.

I save the best and worst pieces of junk mail I get in a special folder in my filing cabinet.

The postcard I got last week was shocking. I’ve blacked out the name of the company because I don’t really think I need to go there, but I will say it’s a company that’s been steadily going in the toilet from what I’ve seen and experienced over the past ten or so years of dealing with them. I will quite often go out of my way not to deal with this company these days because the customer service is horrible, the prices are much higher than their competitors and they charge a special fee when you pay cash instead of charging your purchases to an account…but I digress.

Maybe you received this same postcard in your mailbox and didn’t pay attention to it. This is the front:

Let’s examine the message.

First of all…I feel a bit cozy because I always like hearing that I’m a valued customer. This company wants to help me start my year off right by offering me 10% off my next purchase of $100 or more. Wow! (Strong headline – very important)

Notice that big huge 10% off? Kinda stands out. And 10% off of $100 or more…I’m going to save at least $10 on something that will help me start my year off right. How great! (Draw attention to the discount, grab the reader’s attention – very good)

Now I better hurry because as you can see at the bottom of the message, the offer is going to be ending soon. At the end of the month. (Creating urgency, adding a call to action – terrific)

So I flip over the card to find out more and here’s what we see:

Pretty self explanatory. In a big blue box we see that we have a Bonus Offer Number to use when we place our next order of $100 or more so we can save 10%. Great! (Telling me exactly what to do – perfect)

But wait. Look at that huge paragraph of small print.

Let’s take a closer look:

Okay. There are some exclusions to this “any purchase over $100″ and it looks like as a valued customer, I’ve received a 10% coupon that I can only use when I buy more than $100 worth of bedding, clothing, shoes or a small kitchen appliance from this major department store. Oh wait. Maybe not, because apparently if it’s a “shop by phone” item that doesn’t qualify either.

My question as a consumer is:

Why did they bother to send me something with so many conditions? If this multi-million dollar company really values me, why do they have to make me work hard to figure out which items apply for this discount?

If I’m so valued, wouldn’t this company (which is a pain to deal with) try to lighten up and give me 10% off any order of $100 or more without such a huge list of exclusions?

My question as a copywriter is:

Why on earth did this postcard ever get to the printing and mailing stage? If there were so many conditions, wouldn’t it have been a smarter “marketing” move to let people find all that out after they already got to the website and picked the things they wanted and had made a decision to buy them before realizing they didn’t apply with their coupon? Cause then although they would have been pissed off, they still may have gone through with their purchase even though they didn’t qualify for the 10% off because they’d already decided they needed and wanted those items.

I don’t know. If you’re going to call such attention to the fact that your customers are only valued enough to get a 10% discount on a $100+ purchase on small ticket items like bedding and clothing then why bother with that postcard at all?

I can’t imagine who thought this was a good idea. If that were my postcard and I was being told by corporate to promote a sale on small kitchen appliances, bedding and apparel (which appears to be what applies in this promotion) I would have made it a big deal that with this coupon code you save 10% when you buy more than $100 worth of apparel, home decor and small appliances and played that up.

Then it would be a sale based on a positive – Look at what you can save on!

Instead of the current negative – Look at what we don’t want to give you a discount on!

But what do I know? I’m just a freelance copywriter working from a little home office.

I wonder how many other people saw that postcard and had the same reaction as me. A big belly laugh and a trip to the recycling bin. Well, in my case, it’s going in my swipe file, but if I was not a writing geek it would be in a blue bag.

What do you think?

Do you think getting 10% off, even with so many conditions, is a great way to start your year off right as they state on the postcard? Was it a good marketing move? A smart promotion?

Or are you with me when I say that I feel about as much like a valued customer as I do when they charge me $2 to pay cash?

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I’m a professional writer. I maintain other people’s blogs for a living – and I do it well. When I start working with a new “ghostblogging” client, I propose a posting schedule depending on the their budget. I always stress the importance of sticking to that schedule because posting on a regular schedule is basically the cardinal rule of blogging.

I’ve broken the cardinal rule of blogging.

I’m writing this post on January 6 and the last date I published a post was October 23. If I could be arrested for breaking a blogging law, I would be in jail.

I know that I should have just picked up and gotten back on some kind of regular posting schedule at some point, but the more time that went by after that last post just made it harder to “show my face” here (at my own blog) again.

You might be thinking that it’s pretty dumb of me to be highlighting such a bad personal blogging history here, considering I am a writer by trade, but I’ve decided to be transparent about this.

I’m actually pretty lucky that I still have such a thriving business because besides this blog, I have been letting all of my marketing slide. Breaking another cardinal business rule, I have been very busy with copywriting projects and working on new ventures that (besides being really active on Twitter) I’ve all but stopped marketing.

If it weren’t for the referrals from happy clients and the time I spend on Twitter, I’m pretty confident that if all my clients disappeared one day, my business would disappear too.

You should never, ever stop marketing your business. I’ve said this to countless other entrepreneurs over the years, but I’ve let it happen to me. You don’t stop marketing, even when you’re working full time helping other people market their businesses. Because one day all that work might dry up and then where would you be? Ground zero.

I got off lucky. I still have lots of work, lots of people like me to write for them and they tell other people about me, but I need to get serious here and create a new marketing plan for the new year. One that’s easy to implement, easy to stick to and effective.

I have tons of ideas. In fact, I developed a whole new line of service offerings last fall that I just haven’t gotten around to plugging into the business.

That lax attitude stops here.

I will be setting aside some time in my week…every week…to work on marketing my business. Whether it’s doing more with my Facebook fan page, setting up blog posts to publish on a regular schedule or getting more press releases and articles written and submitted online…I’m going to actively market my business.

If you’re one of my current clients, or if you’re planning to work with me in the future, don’t think this means I’m going to allow myself to get swamped with work and there will be no time for your projects. No matter how many projects come at me, I know how to schedule myself so I don’t bite off more than I can chew.

If you’ve been feeling like me – guilty that you’re not keeping up your blog and letting your marketing slide while you’re busy working in your business – I hope this post gives you a bit of inspiration to turn over a new leaf.

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