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My 4 year old daughter came home from preschool last week with a picture of a penguin that she had drawn.

I still can’t see a penguin in that picture no matter how many different ways I look at it.

The thing is, my daughter is very talented when it comes to drawing. At the age of four, she’s actually better to draw than I am, so I knew there was something going on when I saw that picture.

Don’t get me wrong, we’re not crazy parents putting pressure on the child to be the best artist in her class, but this was obviously not my daughter’s style.

I was looking at it and going, “Look, Daddy, Casey drew this beautiful penguin at school today.”

Then Casey said, “I copied off of Jane.” (I’ve changed the name to protect the innocent.)

Aaaaaahhhh. That made sense.

I told Casey I would rather see a penguin that she drew by herself without copying off of anyone.

She quickly churned out this photo:

See the difference?

I had to try to explain to my daughter that she could do a better job if she did her drawings on her own, without copying off of anyone else. As I was explaining this to her, I realized that lots of adults still don’t get this.

If you’re marketing your business in the way that everyone else in your industry markets their businesses, just because you think that’s how you should be promoting yourself, did you ever stop and think you’re basically being a copycat?

There’s an excellent chance that if you’re trying to be someone you’re not, you’re stifling something great inside by doing so. Like my daughter’s own penguin drawing.

Market with your own personality. Be authentic. Be yourself. Make your own unique, individual mark on the world and be proud of it.

You’ll attract better clients, you’ll do better work and you’ll have a happier existence.

It’s true what they say, you know, you learned everything you needed to know about life before you finished kindergarten. Think about it. Would your teacher let you get away with copying off your neighbor?

Didn’t think so.

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When my daughters want pigtails in their hair, they come to me because I’m more gentle and their hair gets tugged less.

When they want to play Lego, they go to their daddy because he’s the expert at building things with blocks.

I’m the one they ask for snacks, he’s the one they ask for piggy-back rides.

Kids learn very quickly how to get what they need and they learn which avenue to take to get it fastest.

It didn’t take too many times for Daddy to put the wrong sized dress on the children before they just quit asking him to help. I only made so many pathetic attempts at drawing things for them to start walking past me to go to Daddy when they wanted to make pictures.

Do you think your customers are any different?

This is why finding a niche is so important. So very, very important that it can never possibly be stressed enough.

Let’s consider a bakery for a minute. A bakery opens in a town that already has a bakery. Old bakery has been the only bakery for many miles, for many years. Their stuff is good, their prices are good. They deliver consistent quality. They sell all kinds of baked goods from bread and rolls to cookies and cakes. They sell preserves for you to put on your bread, and they have every different kind of pie you can imagine.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the bakery.

But then another bakery opens up in the same town.

Townspeople think it’s crazy – there’s never going to be enough business to support two bakeries!

But the new bakery is a very different operation than the old bakery.

This new bakery offers gluten-free products, diabetic-friendly desserts and it’s a peanut-free zone. They sell health-foods disguised as cookies, loaded with flax, raisins and other healthy things. Their jams and jellies are certified organic.

Even though there are two bakeries in town, they serve completely different customers. They each have their own niche.

Do you think either bakery would suffer from the others’ presence?

I’m thinking not.

People still wanting the gooey, sugary treats go where they’ve always gone. People wanting a healthier choice probably haven’t been frequenting the first bakery anyway so they try out the new place.

Do you make it very clear to your prospective customers what you do better than your competitors?

Do you even know what you do better than the competition. Do you know why your customers are choosing you?

If you do, are you highlighting that information in your copy?

Do your website visitors know why they should choose to work with you?

If you’re not seeing the type of conversion rates you’d like from the current marketing material you have out there (including your website), I challenge you to look at it with an open mind, as if you were a potential customer viewing it for the first time.

Do you have to sift through a bunch of dry information to find out the bottom line – why you’re better than the rest?

I ask you this because if you can’t find that information yourself, then how can you possibly expect someone who doesn’t know you to find it?

If you’re not really sure what that is, think back to my opening “pigtails” example. What are your current customers coming to you for most? Take a look at your most popular service and you can probably figure it out pretty quickly. Remember, you’re constantly evolving. What you do best now might be different than what you did best when you first started your business!

A “copy polish” (as I like to all it) will cost less money than you think and when you consider the ROI and the fact that you could possibly be losing scores of potential customers from the get-go right now, you can’t afford not to have your copy revised to make it clear as to why your customers should choose you.

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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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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 participated in one of those silly little Facebook exercises a few weeks back. For my status, I posted something along the lines of, “Pick the one word you feel describes me best and post it below as a comment. Then I’ll do the same for you.”

I don’t normally participate in these things, but this one sounded fun. A lot of my Facebook friends posted words I wouldn’t think would top the list of ways to describe me like, “strong” and “inspiring.” I was expecting more “goofy”s and “nuts”s to be honest. These things were wonderful to hear, but one of my friends who I’ve known for years in real life and in the social networking Internet world, PEI real estate agent Carol O’Hanley, left my favorite reply.

The word she chose to describe me was “genuine.”

I can’t even tell you how much that meant to me, especially since Carol knows me in person and we bump into each other all day long in places like Facebook and Twitter. If she perceives me as being genuine, then I’ve accomplished my goal because the last thing I want is someone thinking I’m completely different in person than I am online.

When I started my copywriting business, I already knew exactly the type of clients I wanted to attract because I know what kind of writing I love to do and what kind of people I love writing for. I made the decision to become a freelance copywriter because writing makes me happier than doing anything else and I didn’t want to waste a single day as a writer working on projects that made me stressed out or cranky.

That’s why I market my personality. The content on my website is me. My branding is me. Facebook updates and Twitter one-liners come from me, I share what I’m feeling and what I’m doing even when they don’t make me sound professional 100% of the time. Because ya know what? I’m not professional 100% of the time. I take breaks throughout the day to play with my children and to bake cookies. I conduct myself professionally with my clients, but not to the point of being stuffy.

I guess I found the key to attracting my ideal clients is to be transparent.

My ideal clients will love that my websites are always decorated for the holidays – it’s my absolute favorite part of the Mann Made brand. The people who appreciate my Halloween pumpkin and spider web are the exact type of people I love working with. If someone thinks it’s foolish, that’s the perfect prequalifier for me.

When someone follows me on Twitter, they’ll know right away if they like me or not. They can get a sense from my 140 character tweets of whether or not they like my writing style. When they read through my website and blog posts or browse my portfolio, they’ll like it or they won’t. And I’m just fine with that either way.

If I were to hide the quirky, fun, creative side of my personality by agonizing over every personal Twitter update I made or holding off on the silly humor in my blog posts, I wouldn’t be being me. And being Jaime has worked out pretty well for me so far. I attract awesome clients. I stand out because my website is colorful, fresh and fun. I end up working with people who want to inject their own personality into their marketing because they realize that’s what attracted them to me.

If you wish you had clients with more of a sense of humor why not focus on attracting those types? If you only want to work with people who are serious and focused, work on attracting them.

Afterall, if you’re not being authentic, do you really think you’re doing anyone any favors?

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