I recently came across blogger and copywriter Ryan Healy, and really enjoyed his blog. I took the liberty of sending him an email with a few questions, and what follows are Ryan’s responses…

Hear Ryan’s top 3 tips for growing your online business, and why copywriting is an important skill for all bloggers to learn!

Hi Ryan! You have an impressive history of working online as a copywriter for the last 8 years. What was it that inspired your transition to working online?

When I went freelance back in 2005, I had already been doing a lot of online marketing for the company I worked for. Plus, online advertising was exploding. So it seemed to make the most sense to focus on helping online businesses to improve their marketing.

Of course, I’ve been fortunate to have been involved with a few off-line projects as well. But to this day most of my work is online.

In addition to being a highly referred Direct Response Copywriter, you’re also known as a Business Growth Expert. Do you focus mainly on the growth of online business?

Yes. I help online businesses get more sales from their current advertising efforts. If they’re making 1 sale for every 200 visitors, I want to help them make 2 or 3 sales from the same volume of traffic.

Most times I’m hired to write a direct response sales letter. Sometimes I’m hired to do a copy critique or write emails or run some split-tests. Every situation is unique.

I’ve also helped a few off-line businesses in the sense that they generate leads online and close them off-line. Or vice versa: They generate the lead off-line (through direct mail or space ads), then bring them online.

With every year that passes it becomes harder to define businesses strictly in terms of “online” or “off-line.” Many businesses choose a hybrid approach. And why not? There’s money to be made in both places, and it’s silly to cut off one or the other “just because.”

What 3 tips would you share with ClickNewz readers to help them grow or improve their online business?

Only three?? Just kidding.

Here are three tips that come to mind…

Improve Your Online Business Tip #1:
Master the Execution of Fundamentals

The fundamentals of building and growing an online business never change. The basic formula is:

Targeted Traffic + Conversion + Remarkable Product = Sustainable Online Business

What have you done today to get more targeted traffic to your site? What have you done today to improve your conversion rate? What have you done today to make your product better?

You don’t necessarily have to tackle all three areas in a single day. But I believe you should be doing one of these things every single working day.

It’s work — but it works.

Improve Your Online Business Tip #2:
Automate What Can Be Automated

If you were a door-to-door salesman, you’d have to knock on dozens of doors every single day to have even a fighting chance at earning a living. This is not something you could automate. You’d have to do it yourself.

One of the advantages of running an online business is that many sales functions and even fulfillment functions can be automated.

For instance: You can load up an autoresponder sequence with quality content and a few sales messages mixed in. The emails will be sent out automatically on the schedule you determine.

Surely I’m not telling you anything new. Most people who’ve been online for more than a couple months understand the importance of an autoresponder sequence. And yet very few people actually build out their follow-up sequence like they know they should.

This gets back to Tip #1. You need to become an expert at execution.

Here are a few things that can be automated: follow-up emails, opt-in processes, delivery of electronic products, delivery of physical products, etc.

If you begin to automate your business, you get to do the work once and then enjoy the fruits of that labor for a long time. (There is almost always a degree of ongoing maintenance involved, but it’s minimal compared to the initial work.)

Somebody will point out: “But Ryan, you’re a copywriter! You’re just trading hours for dollars!”

Point taken. And it’s something I continue to work on: Shifting my income away from activities that pay only once and toward activities that generate income for the long-term.

Improve Your Online Business Tip #3:
Avoid Unnecessary Distractions

There are a million and one things demanding your attention when you’re online.

There are emails, Facebook updates, news alerts, RSS feeds, tweets, etc. If you’re not careful, an entire day can flash by — without you getting a single thing done to advance or improve your online business.

So whereas the first two tips I shared were “offensive,” this one is “defensive.” It’s imperative that you stay focused and cut out unnecessary distractions.

Do you have email alerts turned on? Turn them off. Does Tweetdeck run in the background alerting you to every new tweet? Turn it off.

Half the battle is usually just managing and controlling the tyranny of the urgent-yet-unimportant things that crop up every day.

Do you feel copywriting is important to bloggers, since they don’t create products & sales letters?

Absolutely! After all, every blog post title has to “sell” people on taking the time to read what follows.

(I’ve actually studied the most popular posts on my blog and on other people’s blogs and have made some interesting discoveries, particularly about blog post titles.)

One commonality among all top bloggers is their ability to write well and be entertaining. Too many blogs have no life in them, no passion. They just bore me (and everybody else) to tears.

Plus, there’s much to be said for learning how to engage people. By studying copywriting, you can learn a lot about how to capture people’s attention and engage them — both important skills for bloggers.

You offer a Free 39-Point Copywriting Checklist on your blog. Who is this checklist best suited for, and can you tell us what to expect from the download?

The check list is specifically designed for people who are selling things online. But affiliate marketers and bloggers can pick up a few good ideas as well.

When you get the check list, you’ll see that each item is phrased as a question. And there is a check box next to it. After you read the question, you can then check it off if it is complete.

For instance, the first question is, “Does your headline enter the conversation that’s already happening in your prospect’s mind?” There’s a check box to the left of the question so you can check it off.

There are 38 more questions like this. And while there isn’t a precise order, the check list is organized so that things you should think about first are at the top, and things you should think about later are at the bottom.

The 39-Point Copywriting Checklist is available for free (with opt-in). Or feel free to simply peruse the 200+ free articles on my business growth and copywriting blog.

Ryan M. Healy

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TELEPHONE:
Open call-in hours 2-4 p.m. MST,
Monday-Thursday: 720-344-7788

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WEB SITES:
Blog – http://www.RyanHealy.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/healymonster
Copywriting – http://www.CopywritingCode.com

As bloggers, we put a lot of effort into telling our readers how to do things.

We believe that if we can just give them enough informative content that they’ll subscribe to our blog and never leave. We try to become the best teacher we possibly can, instilling wisdom down into short, usable posts that our readers can put into action right away.

But what if that’s not what they really want?

What if they don’t want a teacher to tell them what to do?

What if all they’re looking for is a warm and understanding person who understands what they’re going through and is willing to love them, no matter what?

Someone like (you guessed it) Mr. Rogers.

Do you care how they feel?

Being a kid can be tough.

Everyone is always telling you to be quiet. No one wants to listen to what you think. Your parents make you go to bed, just when all of the fun is starting.

But not Mr. Rogers.

Fred Rogers made you feel like it was just you and him hanging out. He respected what you thought. He loved you, not because he had to (like your parents), but because he genuinely believed you were special.

After a while, you believed him. You felt special. You came back to the TV, day after day, just so you could feel that way again.

The best bloggers do that too. I read Copyblogger everyday for years before submitting this guest post, and it wasn’t just the information that kept me coming back. It was because, when I was done reading, it made me feel smarter, like I was one of the few people on the web who was truly in the know.

The more I think about it, the more I believe that’s a part of our job. Our job is bloggers isn’t just to inform our readers, but to make them feel special.

And yes, I realize it’s a little hokey, but I think Mr. Rogers can show us how. Listen to some of these quotes:

Lesson: For your audience to love you, first you have to love them. And they have to know it.

You know, I think everybody longs to be loved, and longs to know that he or she is lovable. And, consequently, the greatest thing that we can do is to help somebody know that they’re loved and capable of loving.

How much do you care about your readers? I mean, really care?

Mr. Rogers didn’t just talk to children on television. He also visited them in person. On a regular basis, he would go out into public and ask kids about themselves. He would bend down and look little boys and girls straight in the eyes, so they knew he was fully focused on them. Then they poured their hearts out to him right on the spot.

No, he wasn’t compensated for that time, and neither are we. Most popular bloggers spend inordinate amounts of time reading every comment, responding to every email, and watching what people say on Twitter. None of this has any direct effect on traffic, but what it does is build goodwill. One at a time, your subscribers find out that you really care, and it transforms them from readers into raving fans.

Lesson: Before you can be a leader, first you have to be a neighbor.

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.

Mr. Rogers didn’t pretend to be better than the children who watched his show. He didn’t point out how young and ignorant they were. He didn’t appoint himself as an expert and command them to listen.

Instead, he decided to be their neighbor: someone just like them, who knew what they were going through, and was ready to help in any way he could, not because they were defenseless children, but because that’s what good neighbors do.

The same is true for bloggers. If you really want your audience to listen to you, you need to take the time to tell them your story, pointing out the ways you’re similar to them and inspiring them through your example.

Lesson: Create an environment where it’s okay to be imperfect.

I like you just the way you are.

Most kids are terrified, not just of getting caught with their hand in the cookie jar or their parents finding a bad grade on their report card, but of the possibility that they’ll do something so bad that their family will stop loving them. They believe that love is only for “good” children, and they worry that they don’t deserve it.

This quote was Mr. Rogers’ gentle way of correcting (and comforting) them. Over and over again, he would tell them that, “I like you just the way you are,” not just because it sounded good, but because it was what they needed to hear. They needed to know that love wasn’t conditional, and that they were safe enough around him to make mistakes and learn how to improve.

I believe it’s important for us to create the same environment for our readers. You may not realize it, but lots of your readers are probably intimidated by you, believing that they can never be as good as you are, and they’re afraid to reach out to you for help.

It’s important to remind them that you like them just the way they are. Maybe you don’t have to tell them as often as Mr. Rogers, but take a moment every few weeks to mention how impressed you are with the creative ways they’ve implemented your suggestions and how are honored you are to have them as readers.

It’s a small thing, but it matters.

Lesson: Keep what works, throw out what doesn’t, but always know what and why.

Propel, propel, propel your craft softly down liquid solution. Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, existence is simply illusion.

Every day, Mr. Rogers honed his craft, paying attention to even the smallest of details.

One time, he asked a fellow actor to say “the dog is going back home” instead of “the dog is going back to his owner.” He didn’t like the word owner because it was too possessive for the children viewers.

He also stuck with what worked. “Won’t you be my neighbor?” wasn’t just the theme song for the show; it was a way to set the tone at the beginning of every episode, getting children ready to listen. And so he repeated it, show after show for years.

It’s our responsibility as bloggers to hone our craft in the same way. You should experiment, not just with headlines or post ideas, but with new openings, new closes, new pictures, and even new words. It’s how you improve.

And at the same time, take a lesson from Fred Rogers and don’t be afraid to repeat what works.

Lesson: Seize your opportunity

When will your opportunity be?

Every day that communicate from the heart, you have a chance to change the world.

Back in 1969, Nixon proposed cuts to PBS, leading the Senate to hold a hearing that would decide the future of the station. And who do you think appeared before them and melted their hearts with words?

Mr. Rogers.

He wasn’t the CEO. He wasn’t a Washington insider. He wasn’t even well-known to the committee. Yet he showed up, spoke from the heart, and transformed some of the toughest, most hardened politicians in the country into raving fans.

It was the opportunity to create change that many of us dream of, and he seized it. But here’s the real question:

When will your opportunity be?

Watch this video, and think about it. Because when it comes, we’ll be counting on you.

About the Author: Karl Staib writes about building stronger relationships and being happy at work: Work Happy Now! If you enjoyed this article, you may like to subscribe to his feed, follow him on Twitter, or read one of his most popular articles: How to Write a Career List.

I’ve always been of the opinion that if Carrie Bradshaw had popped onto our television screens in 2010 instead of 1998, she would have been a blogger. But alas, she didn’t, so she wrote a (gasp!) print column for the fictional New York Star newspaper.

Yes, before there were blogs, there were newspaper columns – where readers couldn’t talk back or share good content. ‘Carrie the blogger’ would have been huge.

Though the words of Carrie and her cohorts have not been etched in permalink stone, their messages linger on. And despite the fact that Carrie was allergic to the internet and only used her Apple Powerbook for word processing her articles, the lessons, ideas and, more pointedly, the actual quotes that came barreling out of Sex and the City still speak directly to us Copybloggers.

“You sleep with someone, all of a sudden you start rationalizing all of the red flags away.”

Now, hopefully, you aren’t sleeping with your clients, readers or other bloggers (on a regular basis). Typically, the copybloggers’ dangling carrot (no pun intended, I swear) isn’t sex, it’s money. The woo of money or product can, sometimes, have a debilitating affect on a blogger and their writing. Recently, an intern at TechCrunch got into heaps of trouble for exchanging a blog post for a laptop – for example.

But what about these red flags? For Carrie and the girls, the sex pulled the proverbial wool over their eyes, for bloggers, it’s the cash. These red flags could be anything from illicit blogging behavior, a client that is extremely difficult, a blog that practices black hat SEO, selling a product that might do harm or agreeing to write really bad copy. Will we rationalize these red flags away for income? Heck, will we even rationalize the rationalizing for income?

“The only thing you need to get a date…is another date.”

No truer words have been spoken. How do you get traffic to your blog? With traffic. How do you get guest posting opportunities? By guest posting. How do you get more followers on Twitter? By having a lot of followers on Twitter. How do you get a lot of inbound links to your blog? By having quality inbound links that tell more and more people about your blog.

The concept is based on two facts. One: people are followers – not everyone – but the majority of folks. They hear that Copyblogger.com is a great blog so they stop by and see that there are 100K+ subscribers and so they subscribe, because if everyone else thinks this blog is great, well then, it must be.

And two: success makes us pretty. When you feel good, when things are going well, it shows. Think about being in love – you look handsome, you feel thin, good hair days abound, you have that ‘glow’. When things are going well at the old blog, it’s contagious. Your writing flows, the comments are long and thoughtful, your sidebar fills up with stylish ads, quality inbound links stream in. And all of this makes people step up their level of engagement with you. They want to be around your success, they’re attracted to it and hoping your hotness will rub right off onto them. Like a moth to a flame, and your flame is on fire.

“Coulda, woulda, shoulda…”

Have you noticed that the blogosphere moves fast? Someone recently remarked to me that, ‘Yes, everything has already been created – but not by us.” It is the plight and rabid complaint of the blogger to say that everything has already been written about. To me, that’s the equivalent of saying that all of the letters in the alphabet have already been used, so there is nothing left to write. Are you kidding me?

You are unique. Sure, a zillion people are writing about SEO or hats or astrology. But there is only one you – with your experiences and thoughts and context – writing about it. So don’t live to see your ideas under someone else’s byline. Don’t say, coulda, woulda, shoulda. Seize the moment of inspiration. Write it down. Publish it. Share it with your community. Blogging affords us each ‘our moment’ of opportnity 24/7/365. Take it.

“Everyone thought Batman could beat the Green Hornet, but the Green Hornet won because he had Kato.”

Blogs are the ultimate platform for the underdog, the every person, the ‘nobody’. You don’t have to be batman to win – even the Green Hornet has a fighting chance. Yes, we do have our blogebrities, but new ones are ‘making it’ everyday. Remember two years ago hardly anyone had heard of Twitter. Blogs have made it possible for a broke, depressed woman to cook and share a la Julie Child and get a book deal and a movie option. And a couple of dudes made an online college yearbook that, within a few years, has grown to hold the pictures and information for a gazillion users. While we all can’t reach superstardom, many of us leverage our blogs for decent product sales, service business platforms and advertising traffic.

And don’t forget the Green Hornet’s secret weapon. Yep, Kato – the sidekick, the friend…ah, maybe even the JV partner? Blogging is simply not a solo pursuit. We need readers, we need community, we need mentors. If we’re really lucky, we have a partner or a small crew of people that support us, send readers to us, have our backs and generally serves as our ambassadors in the world. We do the same for them. I don’t know about you, but if I was going up against Batman, I’d want Kato on my side.

“The flowers were supposed to say ‘I’m sorry, I love you’ not ‘You’re dead, let’s disco!’”

When Miranda’s mom dies, Charlotte arranges to have flowers sent for the casket. Obviously, it didn’t go well. There are two issues at play here. The first is about being appropriate. Know your audience and community, know the blog that you’re writing for, know the product or service or person that you’re selling. If you don’t take the time to listen and get your context, you’re liable to send a wildly ill-suited message – the equivalent of showing up at the school dance in a tux when everyone else is wearing jeans.

The second issue is that Charlotte gave specific directions to the florist on what sort of flower arrangement she was looking for, she trusted they would listen and get it right…and they failed. As bloggers, we have to trust writers that we hire to create copy for us, guest bloggers whose content we rely on to feed our pipeline and other bloggers who promote us. These people bring their own personalities and agendas. Sometimes their arrangement is a match, sometimes it’s a disaster. When you depend on others, calculate the risk.

“Monogamy is fabulous. It gives you a deep and profound connection with another human being, and you don’t have to shave your legs as much.”

Monogamy is like the ultimate in stickiness. It happens when you find someone who is so irresistible that you want to be with them and only them all the time. We all want a blog that sticks. One that people read religiously every day, one that they love so much they tell all of their friends on Twitter and Facebook and Stumble and Digg about us. And when our content and design and value is as sticky as can be, what we really have is a deep and profound connection with our readers. We have trust, we have two-way communication – and hopefully resulting sales.

The end of this quote deserves a closer look. If you stop shaving your blog’s legs – if you let the content get stale, get lazy with your tags or compromise the UI, you’ll likely weaken these relationship bonds. Your value will go down in your readers’ eyes. Sure, no one will bat an eye if you forget to shave a few times, or even if you grow a little stubble…but, if I were you, I wouldn’t let the hair get so long you can braid it.

And those, are words to live and blog by…

Want more Sex and the City? Me too, always. Check out Jeff Sexton’s Copyblogger take on the four temperaments, the SATC ladies and what they tell us about headlines and titles. Good stuff!

About the Author: Lover of butter, wordplayer, marketing writer, ghostwriter, Julie Roads is the owner/founder of Writing Roads. Follow her on Twitter @writingroads.

If you’re like many bloggers, you have (or you’re thinking of developing) products and services to sell to your readers.

Your instinct might be to write the sort of hard sell copy you’ve seen so much of, because you will assume that’s what always works.

But will it? Maybe. Maybe not.

The trouble with hard sell is that it’s overused, it can destroy your credibility, and many bloggers just don’t feel comfortable being so aggressive.

So what do you do?

I’d like to show you a different approach to selling that turns conventional wisdom on its head, replacing hard sell with a less aggressive and more natural way to write copy. We’ll call it Zen Copywriting.

The limitations of writing hard sell copy

Most of the techniques for hard sell copy come from the world of “direct response” marketing, which is the business I work in.

This sort of selling is often highly aggressive. We want to “capture” the attention of our audience, “push” their hot buttons, and “force” them to act immediately.

It’s a good approach. It’s based on sound behaviorist principles that do, in fact, work. We operate with the functional analogy that copy is a “sales person” speaking to prospective buyers. We want our sales person to coax, urge, persuade, and sell — just like someone going door-to-door.

However, this is only an analogy, a way of thinking about what we do. It is not reality.

Unlike face-to-face sales, words can’t force anybody to do anything. A car salesman can grab you by the lapel and sit you down in the vehicle he wants to sell. He can, to a certain extent, push you past many of your doubts and objections with an aggressive approach. But written words can’t be that forceful.

In copywriting, there is a line beyond which the aggressive approach cannot take you. When you reach this limit, it’s time to think of a different analogy.

Zen Copywriting: The “passive” approach to selling

Let’s reverse our typically aggressive thinking that casts us as the hunter and our prospects as the prey.

Instead of thinking “I’m going to capture a sale,” think “I’m going to remove the barriers to buying and allow people to follow their natural inclination to make purchases from me.”

No, I’m not wearing a tie-dyed shirt and hugging trees here. I’m just talking about understanding the modern consumer and writing copy in a way that’s more natural and appealing to a wider segment of your audience.

Consider a few basic principles:

Principle #1: Your readers WANT to buy from you. We live in a highly evolved consumer culture. Shopping and buying are the modern equivalent of the hunting and gathering of our ancestors. People don’t just buy necessities; the majority of purchases today are discretionary. Luxury cars, smart phones, designer clothing, gourmet food, books and magazines for every interest. People are in a daily frenzy to purchase products of every kind, including yours.

Principle #2: You CANNOT force anyone to do anything they don’t want to do. No matter how good your copy might be, it is not endowed with magic powers. For all the huffing and puffing we copywriting gurus do about persuasive communication, the reality is that you can’t force a sale with words. The best you can hope for is to capitalize on an existing need or want and turn it into a buying action.

Principle #3: Selling does not require brilliant copywriting. (Don’t tell my clients this. It will be our little secret.) Since people are natural consumers, we don’t need clever ideas to sell them our products and services. They are actively looking for things to buy, because they want to solve problems and better themselves. Yes, there’s a certain amount of want-making you can do, but you’ll find much more success if you offer items for which there is an established need or want.

Principle #4: You must remove the barriers to buying. If we agree that people naturally consume, that you can’t force a sale, and that clever copy is not a requirement, we must ask ourselves why prospects accept one offer and reject another. What is stopping the natural inclination to buy? What are the barriers to buying? All things being equal, isn’t it reasonable to conclude that if we identify and remove these barriers, our sales will increase? When we take away all the reasons prospects have to say, “No,” what can prospects do but say, “Yes?”

Are you starting to feel excited? Can you see the possibilities here? Keep reading, I think you’ll like this.

The benefits of Zen Copywriting

Going beyond the behaviorist approach of hard sell and adopting a barrier-removal mindset presents a host of benefits for the smart blogger writing copy:

• You see your audience as real, individual people, not just faceless targets.
• You start making a genuine effort to help people, rather than just sell stuff to them.
• You decrease your reliance on random copywriting techniques.
• You increase your chances of finding meaningful appeals that hit the real hot buttons.
• You reduce the “perceived risk” your potential customers feel about buying from you.
• You ensure more long term business by avoiding tricks and deceptive ploys.
• You develop a more realistic, practical approach to writing and selling.
• You have a better sense of when to follow copywriting rules, when to break them, and when to make up your own.

Overcoming the barriers to buying

The barriers to buying include everything — physical, emotional, intellectual, and financial — that may stand in the way of your prospective customers responding positively.

Your goal is to ask yourself questions about your copy to identify and remove every conceivable barrier so that absolutely nothing stops the sale.

The identification barrier

All of us have a certain image of ourselves which helps determine how we think and act. Does your copy make your prospect think, “Yes. A person like me would buy this” or maybe “I want to be like people who would buy this, so I’ll buy it, too”?

Does your copy clearly target the prospect you’re aiming for? Does your headline get the attention of your particular prospect? Is your message interesting to your prospect? Does your copy have a distinct personality to which your prospect can relate?

The clarity barrier

Don’t expect to sell something to someone who doesn’t understand what you’re selling or the benefits of accepting your offer.

Is your offer absolutely clear? Does your copy say what you really intend to say? Are all the details about your product or service fully understandable to your prospect? Is your copy easy to scan and easy to understand at a glance? Is it simple, straightforward, and to-the-point?

The product identity barrier

Your product or service should have a distinct identity.

Remove your product from your message and replace it with a competitor’s product. If your copy still makes sense, you have not established identity.

Do you provide a “big idea” for your product or service? Can your prospect instantly grasp your unique selling proposition? Have you proven your superiority? Have you turned all your features into benefits that are meaningful to your prospect?

The involvement barrier

Have you given your prospect a choice to make? Do you encourage involvement with a quiz or checklist? Do you ask your prospect to complete something (like an order form) to accept your offer? Have you offered your prospect something of true personal value? Do you use audio, video, photos, illustrations, or animations to help activate the senses?

The credibility barrier

You may be truthful, but does your prospect actually believe you? You can’t argue a prospect into trusting you. You must remove all doubt with tangible displays of credibility.

On what authority do you make your offer? Do you show how other people have used your product or service? Do you communicate your reputation without chest beating?

Can you show how there’s a trend for using your product? Do you provide testimonials from satisfied customers or experts? Have you featured your guarantee? Do you show who personally backs up the guarantee? Do you make clear any qualifications to your offer? Do you have teeny legal type that might arouse suspicion?

The immediacy barrier

Have you expressed why it’s so important to respond now rather than later? If your offer is really urgent, does your copy make it sound urgent?

Do you tell people what you want them to do in clear, specific terms? Have you painted a “word picture” of how your prospect will immediately benefit by responding? Do you have a deadline? Have you talked about the scarcity of your product (only 100 remaining)? Instead of punishing those who order late, can you reward those who order early?

The acceptability barrier

Have you put yourself into the shoes of your prospects to consider whether your offer is really acceptable to them? Have you made an appeal to your prospect’s emotional needs? Do you also make an appeal to logic? Is your product, offer, and overall presentation “likable?” Does the idea of responding make your prospect feel good?

Have you made an effort to show how desirable your offer is? Does your offer allow prospects to feel that responding is consistent with their self-image, goals, and past actions? Do you give prospects the logical justification they need to make a purchase?

The accessibility barrier

Is there any physical barrier your prospect must overcome to respond?

Is your order button easy to see? Does your web page load quickly? Is your site able to handle the traffic you expect to generate? Are you using popups, scripts, or animations that may cause problems with certain browsers? Are links obvious or do you confuse people with underlines that don’t link to anything? What can someone do if there’s a question about your offer or if something goes wrong?

With hard sell copywriting, you try to beat your prospective customers into submission with line after line of copy. With Zen Copywriting, you offer something of high quality that people want, then focus on making it so easy to buy that people can’t refuse.

Wearing a tie-dyed shirt while you’re writing your copy is optional.

To learn more about how to understand and write copy for today’s buyers, read A copywriter’s guide to consumer psychology at Pro Copy Tips.

About the Author: Dean Rieck is one of America’s top freelance copywriters and publisher of the Direct Creative Blog and Pro Copy Tips, a blog that provides copywriting tips for smart copywriters.

This morning I grabbed a copy of Chris Garrett’s new guide on Guest Blogging from http://guestposting.info.

It’s a 20-page detailed PDF for only $10, which gets you a membership with even more helpful guest blogging tools & guides to come.

Guest blogging is actually one of my favorite marketing methods. It’s one of the best ways to gain exposure, build a list, grow a readership, and get high quality one-way inbound links for traffic and search engine rankings.

You don’t even need a blog of your own to put this strategy to work for you. It’s a great way to get exposure to any website or offer online. And offline businesses would do well to work with local community bloggers…

This video explains exactly what you can expect for your ten bucks:

I decided to grab this great resource in addition to Nicole Dean’s guest blogging guide, as I like to learn from a variety of resources. Put together you’re spending less than 30 bucks for something that can dramatically increase your traffic, readership, search engine rankings – and ultimately your online sales.

Chris Garrett is the co-author of Problogger the book alongside Darren Rowse. Darren also has an amazing special going on, which actually ends later tonight. The last I checked there was about 15 hours left to go…

http://www.probloggerworkbook.com

If you order now, you’ll get 3 new exclusive bonuses:

1. a report: 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track in The New Year
2. a 55 minute podcast with successful blogger Leo Babauta
3. a 45 minute podcast with successful blogger Neil Patel

All in all the extra content is a bit under 2 hours of audio and an extra 9 days of teaching and exercises – it is a content rich bonus offer on top of the existing 1 hour Question and Answer podcast that he’s already been offering.

See http://www.probloggerworkbook.com for the details on each bonus. The price is still under 20 bucks!

3 great blogging resources to make 2010 a huge success

Best,

Feedback is the cornerstone of community-oriented, kumbaya-style blogging. Like a beautifully polished mirror, we take our best ideas from the wants, needs, and desires of our readers.

So as we all know, the smartest thing content creators can do is to solicit feedback. If our readers unsubscribe, cancel, or stomp off in a huff, we want to know why so we can make our content better.

Right?

Actually, I don’t think so.

I recently found out that the famously cranky marketing writer Dan Kennedy doesn’t give out those “tell me how I can improve” cards when he gives a talk. He’s interested in one thing and one thing only: how much did he sell. (Kennedy long made his living by selling information products on the speaking circuit.)

I find myself agreeing with Kennedy with disturbing frequency these days. Although this bit of behavior goes against what 98% of people will advise you to do, I’m finding that his approach is actually followed by most of the successful business owners I know, especially online.

You tend to move toward what you focus on

I don’t believe in the “Law of Attraction,” but I do believe in a basic tenet of good driving. If you put your focus on a certain point in the road, you tend to steer the car there, consciously or not.

Focus on the wall and you will tend to hit the wall.

Focus on the center of the lane just ahead of that tight little curve and you’re much more likely to nail it gracefully.

When you focus on complaints from people who don’t like you, your natural tendency is to steer your blog (and your business) in a direction that will make it more appealing to them.

Why would you want to do that?

The red velvet rope

Before I started a blog or knew any bloggers, I was a fan of a business writer named Michael Port and his book Book Yourself Solid. Port teaches solopreneurs how to market their businesses without wanting to shoot themselves. I found his ideas very helpful when I was getting started.

In chapter one, Port asks readers to put together a “red velvet rope policy.” In other words, a well-defined understanding of who you want to work with, and just as important, who you don’t want to work with.

Would I rather spend my days working with incredibly amazing, exciting, supercool, awesome people who are both clients and friends, or spend one more agonizing, excruciating minute working with barely tolerable clients who suck the life out of me?

Seems kind of simple when he puts it that way, doesn’t it?

He doesn’t say, “Don’t work with evil people.” It’s not about dividing the world into the Good and the Bad.

It’s more like dividing the world into “good fit for me” and “bad fit for me.” Your repulsive toad may be someone else’s Prince Charming.

So a client I may find “high maintenance” and on the No list could be, in your eyes, “results-oriented with great attention to detail” and be a resounding Yes.

The right kind of feedback

It’s not that I don’t believe that feedback can be helpful. But most people who criticize you aren’t ever going to be a good fit for what you have to offer.

They may not be in the market, at all, for what you’re selling. They may be looking for a very different personality or style. They may love text, when your best medium is audio. They may love audio, when your best medium is text.

If your product is the Blue Man Group of your industry, and you’re talking with a Siegfried and Roy customer, you’re not likely to ever make them happy.

So you might want to ignore their parting feedback about how your site would be a lot better with more glitter, white sequins, and dangerous carnivorous animals.

The very best kind of feedback is along the lines of “I wish you offered this so I could buy it from you.” Also good is “I am so frustrated trying to find a resource meeting this description, do you know where I could find one?” and you realize you’d be the perfect person to build it.

And of course, negative comments from people who are otherwise a great fit are also often very useful. It’s called “constructive criticism.” Just be sure it’s not actually passive aggression in disguise.

“Is this person my customer?”

This is one of the most important questions to ask yourself when you get a negative remark.

If someone’s angry with you for having the audacity to offer a product for sale, it’s productive (and sanity-preserving) to ask yourself, “Is this person my customer?”

If someone quits your email newsletter with a 47-point diatribe on how lame you are, it’s productive to ask yourself, “Is this person my customer?”

If someone leaves a comment about all the reasons they wanted your blog post to be on a different topic entirely, it’s productive to ask yourself, “Is this person my customer?”

There’s a good chance everyone would be happier if they just went back to Siegfried and Roy.

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication.

Brainstorming is one of the most powerful creative techniques ever devised. When used properly, it can produce more and better ideas than any other process. It’s based on the concept that two heads (or three, or four, or more) are better than one.

Many would argue that you can’t create by committee. I agree. Writing and other creative acts are best performed by individuals. Creating by committee, well . . . sucks.

But brainstorming is not about executing ideas. It’s simply about coming up with ideas. And it is almost always more productive as a group activity. The result of a brainstorming session should be a long list of potential ideas which you can evaluate at a later time, acting only on the best.

Sure, you’ll come up with a ton of dumb ideas, but so what? Once you get the ideas flowing, the great ideas will float to the top. And some of those ideas that seem dumb end up being pretty smart — once you try them.

It’s like panning for gold. You have to sift through a lot of sludge to get to the shiny nuggets.

How to brainstorm with other bloggers

If you interact with other bloggers frequently, you probably do a little informal brainstorming already. It’s not just a good way to solve problems, it’s a great way to keep your blog fresh and interesting.

In fact, I’m thinking about brainstorming for bloggers specifically because more and more bloggers are beginning to work together to write blogs, create products, promote each other’s content, and feed off of each other’s energy and ideas.

If you’ve had bad luck with brainstorming, it’s probably because you did it in a stuffy corporate environment where no one feels free to really open up. But if you can assemble the right group of people who feel comfortable with each other, a brainstorming session can be like throwing a match into a room full of firecrackers. There’s a sudden and powerful chain reaction.

What can you brainstorm?

Anything that will benefit from sharper ideas is good fodder for a brainstorming session. Try brainstorming ideas for post topics (or perhaps a series of posts), product ideas, marketing angles, positioning for your business, contests, link building strategies . . . the sky’s the limit.

Here are a few suggestions for creating some fireworks of your own. These guidelines are intended for in-person sessions, so if you plan to brainstorm by Skype, chat, or other means, you may want to adapt the rules a little.

Before your session . . .

Select a leader. When I conduct a session, I often serve as both leader and participant. It works for me, but you may want to select a leader who will remain fairly quiet while the others let their imagination go wild. The leader also needs to keep the group on track and on a time schedule, stifle negative statements, help the group develop ideas fully, and assure that each member contributes.

Define your problem. The leader should write a clear definition for the problem the group will address. All you need is a sentence or two that clearly outlines the situation.

Create an agenda. Outline what topics you want to cover. Prepare a few ideas in advance to get things started, and be prepared to suggest questions to keep the ideas flowing.

Set time limits. How much time you spend depends on the group’s endurance and everyone’s schedule, but it’s usually best to keep it short — 15 to 45 minutes. If you go longer, take frequent breaks to keep people fresh.

Set quotas. The idea is to work fast and produce lots of ideas, which will be evaluated at another time. So decide on a quota, such as a minimum of 100 ideas. This isn’t as hard as it sounds. If you come up with just two ideas a minute, you’ll have 120 in an hour. You can set an overall quota or individual quotas for each topic.

Select your group and announce a session. Choose a mixed group whose blogs are at about the same level to participate. Avoid control freaks and people who need to monopolize the conversation. When you set things up, don’t call it a “meeting.” That conjures images of big oak tables and idiots in neckties. Call it a “session.”

Circulate background information. Prime session participants with a simple statement of the problem, background information, and examples of the kind of ideas you’re looking for.

During your session . . .

Review the problem and background information. Don’t put people to sleep, just quickly go over the problem, background data, and what you hope to accomplish. If there are questions, answer them before you get started.

Establish the ground rules.

1. Each session participant must contribute ideas or add to another’s ideas.
2. No one may criticize or evaluate any idea. Alex F. Osborn in Applied Imagination said it best: “Think up or shut up.”
3. No one will hold back ideas. When something comes to mind, say it.
4. The group will encourage wild, out-of-the box thinking.
5. The goal of the session is quantity, not quality. Quality will be evaluated later.
6. Develop ideas fully. Participants should hitchhike ideas on the ideas of others to produce more and better ideas.
7. Once an idea is developed, the group will move on.

Take detailed notes. Whether written or typed, someone needs to rapidly capture the flow of ideas as they occur. One option is to record the session and transcribe the recording. I’ve found that a combination of note taking and recording works best. The notes serve as an outline of the major topics covered and the recording fills in the details.

After your session . . .

Allow for the incubation of further ideas. If you’ve had a productive session, ideas will continue to occur to people for hours or days after the session. Ask everyone to write down these ideas and submit them later to record along with the main session notes.

Type up and circulate all the ideas generated. The final product of a session will be a multi-page document that lists every single idea created. Nothing should be edited. Organize or classify these ideas for later evaluation. Don’t be surprised if you have literally hundreds of ideas.

Evaluate your ideas and choose the best. The same group can evaluate the ideas or another group can. It’s often best for those responsible for the problem to evaluate the ideas, but you can run into “idea ownership” problems. On the other hand, another group may not be able to grasp the significance of many of the ideas generated. You’ll have to experiment.

When the dust settles, you should find yourself with some surprisingly good ideas. And the whole process often energizes all the participants.

Don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t work perfectly the first time. It usually doesn’t. Assembling the right group, creating an open atmosphere, and producing the best results often takes time. As with so many other things in life, practice makes perfect.

For more tips on being creative, read 10 easy ways to instantly energize your creative powers at my Pro Copy Tips blog.

About the Author: Dean Rieck is one of America’s top freelance copywriters and publisher of the Direct Creative Blog and Pro Copy Tips, a blog that provides copywriting tips for smart copywriters.

So I’ve created something brand new, and it occurred to me it would be pretty silly if I didn’t let you know about it.

I put it together in response to a lot of frustration I was hearing about overwhelm. We’ve got hundreds of great resources. All kinds of good advice about this big, complicated problem of marketing.

But it’s like trying to drink from a firehose. There’s too much, it’s coming too fast, and it can be impossible to get your bearings so you can actually take action and move forward.

I thought it would be useful to put together my own take on a marketing blueprint, a step-by-step process on how to do “our kind” of marketing. (That’s marketing that rests on delivering exceptional value, communicating total respect for our customers, and creating remarkable relationships.)

It’s not just for bloggers, but bloggers find the tools particularly easy to adopt.

If that sounds like something you might find valuable, I hope you’ll check out the details for the Remarkable Marketing Blueprint.

The blueprint is a step-by-step marketing course, and it’s available at an extremely attractive price, but only until 5 p.m. (Mountain Time) on Monday, December 7, when I’m planning on closing the course to new students. When we re-open in 2010, the price will be bumped up to something more reasonable.

Click here to check it out before the charter pricing goes away.

Many bloggers already know that Twitter is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your blog.

When I talked to Guy Kawasaki about my book, he called the Tweetmeme Retweet button “the most important button on the web,” because of the enormous traffic-driving power it possesses. With one click, any of your readers can spread your post to hundreds or thousands of their followers.

As a marketer, I, of course, see this as an opportunity for optimization. When I see a powerful tool, my first impulse is to figure out how to make it even more powerful.

When you click that button, Tweetmeme grabs the title of the page it’s on, shortens the URL, and combines the two into a autofilled tweet for posting. Thus, the title of your post becomes the tweet that is shared with a potentially huge number of Twitter users.

If the importance of compelling headlines wasn’t painfully obvious before, it should be now.

Nearly 20% of all “normal” tweets contain a link, yet almost 70% of retweets do. Retweeting is the most common way links are shared on Twitter.

I’ve done research into various factors surrounding retweets and found a handful of factors that you may want to take into consideration when writing headlines for posts that you hope to share and spread on Twitter.

Use nouns and third-person verbs

When I looked at the parts of speech that occur in retweets versus those that occur in normal tweets, I found that retweets tend to be noun-heavy and use third-person verbs.

This pattern is reminiscent of newspaper headlines. Highly retweetable headlines talk about someone or something doing something.

A headline should never talk about all the things you did yesterday and how you did them, as past-tense verbs and adverbs both lead to far fewer retweets.

The most (and least) retweetable words

The words that tend to occur more in retweets than in normal tweets are topped by the word “you.”

This means, whenever possible, you should talk directly to your readers. “Top” and “10″ also rank highly, showing that lists do well on Twitter. Not surprisingly, talking about social media and Twitter itself also helps.

On the other side of the coin are the least retweetable words. Random first-person verbs and details about your life, however fascinating you may find it, don’t get a ton of retweets.

Tell me something new

I compared how common words in retweets are to how often these same common words appear in normal tweets, and found that rare and more novel words are highly retweetable.

When you’re writing your headlines, you should be striving to say something new that breaks through the clutter of everyday chatter.

Don’t be dumb

I expected to find that retweets were simple and required less intelligence to understand. But my data showed the opposite.

Using two readability metrics, I found that retweets often use longer, more complex words. So don’t try to “dumb down” your headlines for Twitter; users and power retweeters are smarter than you may think.

Stop talking about yourself

LIWC is a linguistic system designed to identify concepts in pieces of text.

The most striking thing I found when using LIWC to analyze retweets is that self reference does not get a lot of sharing.

In other words, don’t talk about yourself if you want Twitter traffic; talk about your readers.

If you’ve been in social media awhile, you probably already guessed that was the case — now you’ve got the data to back it up.

About the Author: Get more tips like this and learn about the full range of social media marketing platforms, tool, techniques and strategies from Dan Zarrella’s The Social Media Marketing Book, published by O’Reilly.

With all this talk I’ve been doing about guest blogging & blog interviews, and one way link opportunities…
I completely forgot that my dear friend (and brilliant marketer) – Nicole Dean – recently published a complete guide on that very topic!

It’s called the Blog World Tour Planner and it comes with a 38 page detailed guide, an idea generator, research worksheet, sample email for contacting bloggers, and a “blog tour” planning spreadsheet.

The price? Only $17!

Not mentioning this earlier was a major oversight on my part. I’ve been a bit out of the loop lately after that spell of my daughter being ill, and in a mad catch-up phase ever since. At any rate – my apologies. This is definitely something you’ll want to hear about, so I sat down last night to give it a proper Lynn-style review…

Nicole Dean’s Summer Blog Tour

You may recall that Nicole was a guest blogger here at ClickNewz for an entire week over the summer. My blog was just one of her many stops in what she called her Blog World Tour where she made appearances as a guest blogger across popular blogs all over the web, week after week.

It was a huge success in many respects – from high-quality inbound links to tons of exposure & traffic, and even setting up long-term passive streams of income.

Nicole is brilliant like that, coming up with creative new ideas and documenting every detail. Not only do I like and respect her as a friend, but as a marketer – I pick her brain every chance I get!

The Blog World Tour Guide for Guest Blogging

As I mentioned, this package comes with a detailed guide and a number of super-helpful bonuses to help you take immediate action and get started with your own guest blogging venture.

Sure you can go it alone, and figure everything out as you go – or you can take all the guesswork out of it and just get started for only 17 bucks. That’s kind of a no-brainer, if you ask me.

The guide starts out giving you some insight into how people think, and how Nicole’s idea was born. If you’re smart, you’ll read those couple of pages carefully and consider other ways you can apply that to your business. It’s a simple but brilliant thought process – just one of the things I love about Nicole.

Even though I was part of her summer blog tour, I never knew exactly what all went into it – or that she ultimately wrote 75 blog posts across 15 different blogs (not including her own). Wow!

Obviously you don’t have to go to that extreme – or you could set out to out-blog Nicole Dean if you like – but either way just ONE of those blog posts is worth way more than 17 dollars. Consider that just one post on one blog equals a permanent high quality one-way inbound link.

Or let’s say you have a product of your own that you sell, and your guest post ranks high for a specific keyword phrase. That one blog post could result in ongoing product sales for months – or even years…

Nicole discusses the benefits of guest blogging, or doing a “blog tour” as she calls it, and she also discusses the benefits to the bloggers – why they would agree to let you guest blog, and how to make the offer even more enticing to them.

Having been involved in her blog tour personally, I can tell you that what she did was a HUGE benefit to me. I’d let her come back and guest blog here anytime! And my personal experience from that side of her guide gets me even more excited about using her methods myself…

By the way – she details out tips for you in the guide that make blog owners LOVE having you as a guest, and BEG you to come back and write for them again. Obviously those tips worked on me, so I paid special attention there!

The guide is laid out in steps, starting with choosing your commitment and your objective. You might need inbound links, or you might use this as part of a pre-launch buzz campaign for your product, or you may be recruiting affiliates.

There are a number of reasons to consider guest blogging, and a variety of ways to use it for major leverage and advantage.

Nicole goes through the process of finding the right blogs in great detail, as well as which blogs to avoid (and why). She also gives you a spreadsheet to keep track of each blog and their details, with screenshots of how she used it herself.

Organization & scheduling is covered as well – such as creating an editorial calendar you can share with an assistant, if you choose to outsource some of the groundwork. Even if you’re doing this on a small scale and managing the details yourself, this part is very helpful. Nothing like dropping the ball on a promise made…

By the way, Page 18 shares 3 resources I had NO idea even existed. Be sure to check those out

The Bonus Planning Tools

The guide itself is incredibly rich in ideas and step-by-step instructions, but the tools included is where this product really overdelivers. The “idea generator” that I mentioned earlier is a brainstorming resource for coming up with topics to blog about. Very helpful for those that struggle with writing but really want to make this work for them.

Also included is a guest blogging planner – particularly helpful if you’re going to be doing a full-on blog tour like Nicole, but also a very handy spreadsheet to use as an editorial planner for your own blog plus your guest blogging opps.

To recap the bonus tools included, you get the 38-page guide plus:

• Content Idea Generator
• Blog Research Spreadsheet
• Same Email To Bloggers
• Editorial Calendar Spreadsheet

All that, for only $17. Click here to get started!

Best,

p.s. I was hanging out with Nicole over the summer, during her vacation here in TN and at an event where we roomed together in early August. She was right in the middle of her now famous Blog Tour both of those times, so I got to see her in action firsthand.

That’s in addition to seeing how it all worked when she made her stop here at my blog – and experiencing the sales & traffic that she brought to ClickNewz. Nothing short of amazing. But what was most amazing about it was that, while Nicole IS brilliant in her creative marketing ideas, she simply rolled up her sleeves and did it.

And that my friends is what sets Nicole Dean, and other successful online marketers, apart from the rest- apart from the hopefuls and wannabe’s.

You can sit around and need inbound links, want to sell more product, or wish you could recruit more affiliates- or you can download these tools and take action.

I’m off to quit talking about it, and get started setting up these awesome tools…