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How to troubleshoot your sales copy today

By Patrick Gant

Photo by Patrick Gant

Struggling with sales copy that’s just not doing what it should for your business?

Here are five easy things you can do right away to make your copy connect with your readers and sell.

Get rid of everything that doesn’t identify a problem that your customer has and how you can solve it. Build out from there.

Take a red pen and circle every instance in your copy of “we,” “us” or “I.” Ask yourself if there’s a better way to make it about you—your customer.

Speak directly to your customer, rather than in that vague, disengaged voice of corporate authority.

Be succinct. Stop being afraid that doing this will dumb things down too much. Succinct is hard. It’s the outcome of making hard but necessary choices.

Pay closer attention to typography, spacing and graphical elements that complement your text. Design isn’t just prettied up text. If copy is what you have to say, design is how you say it.

Q&A: What is copywriting, anyway?

By Patrick Gant

Copywriting is the act of writing text that is used for the purposes of selling a product, service or idea.

Selling in this sense does not necessarily involve a financial transaction. Rather, it’s about being persuasive—motivating an audience to take a specific action or specific steps that you want them to take.

Copywriting is a science. It is also an art.

On one hand, it relies on proven, time-honoured methods and techniques of gathering an audience’s attention, presenting a business case to them, and convincing them to respond to a call-to-action. On the artful side of the equation, it involves inventiveness and a talent for playing with words in a manner that is memorable to an audience. These two disciplines combined have the potential to inform and entertain an audience. It’s a powerful combination, when done properly.

Traditionally, a copywriter would ply his or her skills in creating direct-mail products, advertising, commercial scripts, billboards, brochures, postcards and sales letters. They often worked in partnership with musicians to develop jingles (and many still do). With the rise of online media, new products have become part of the copywriter’s domain, including web copy, banner ads, email blasts, landing pages, multimedia scripts and presentation content.

Elements of copywriting are also found in feature article writing, social media content, white papers and technical writing, in which the selling imperative isn’t as great, but the need to attract and retain a reader’s attention remains as important as ever.

[Update] Interesting fact: While copywriting has been the home of many successful writers for the duration of their careers, it has also been an important launching pad for many notable fiction authors.

The wisdom of uncrowding: why I don’t auto-follow with social media

By Patrick Gant

Last summer while I was in Boston on a trip with my family, we decided to take a boat tour of Boston Harbour. I didn’t get much from the experience. Granted, the operators did their very best to provide everyone on-board with a safe, informative tour, but the boat was awfully crowded and it didn’t take long before there was a palpable sense on the faces of most around me of “how soon will this thing be over?”

In contrast, a few days earlier we joined a small group and did a guided walking-tour of a coastal New England town that had a rich history and a great story to tell. Not only was the tour a lot of fun, we had the opportunity to get to know some of the others in that small group, such that by the end of the tour most were acquainted on a first-name basis.

Following large crowds are fine for certain things. They’re an inevitable part of professional sports and music, for instance. But the dynamic there is one on which you’ve all gathered to see a spectacle, getting to know the people around you is secondary. Networking, on the other hand, is more like a series of smaller groups. Each cluster has its own conversation, and each one works best when everyone is as engaged as a listener as they are as a speaker.

Too often, social media tends to be treated like a mass spectacle. For many, it’s tempting to assume that the end-game is about seeing how many follows they can get. They’ll engage auto-follow on twitter and sit back and watch as the numbers grow.

This is a mistake. Aggregation keeps you from finding out what’s important. And it impedes you from being able to demonstrate meaning and value to others.

I don’t auto-follow on Twitter. I never have. I’m choosy about whom I add, and the same is true of my activities on LinkedIn. There’s no value for me in amassing a large crowd if I can’t engage them in a meaningful way. Auto-following says “I don’t really care who you are” your main purpose is to just to add to my audience size.”

Here’s the real problem with being indiscriminate about amassing social media follows on a large scale. Unless you are a skilled performer and have an incredible amount of free time on your hands, you are not going to be able to reach out and get to know the people you are supposedly friends with. What’s more likely to happen—even after you weed out the thousands of tweetbots and other detritus—is that you’re still going to wind up with thousands and maybe tens of thousands of people who you don’t know at all and who contribute a great big zero to your conversations online. It’s also rather likely they are going to feel the same way about you.

As Jeff Howe, author of Crowdsourcing, advises how important it is to pick the right crowd. That means it’s important to find a shared interest.

I don’t want the crowded, impersonal boat tour. I want that walking tour. Clearly I’m not alone. Shama Kabani, author of one of the top-rated books on social media recently explained why she unfollowed everyone on Twitter and started anew, explaining: “Anything that gets in the way of adding value is keeping me from doing my job.” Even among my small group of follows on Twitter, there’s been talk lately about how to do some much-needed pruning to get back to that sense of having valuable conversations with a well-defined audience of people who matter.

Audience attention is a finite resource. So it’s worth your while to spend it wisely. I’m online to connect with people one-on-one and to provide something useful that they can take and implement in their own work. The best way to do that is to keep things personal and friendly.

(Photo: Commons NZ Library).

21 places you can go to find creative inspiration

By Patrick Gant

I’ve long been fond of George Harrison’s “While my Guitar Gently Weeps,” and not just because it’s one of the best Beatle songs on an incredible album loaded with creative dichotomies.

It also has a great story about how it came to be.

Fresh from a trip to India, Harrison was keen to incorporate Eastern philosophy into his work. This included committing to the idea that things can happen for a reason” if you let them. Harrison decided to test this by promising himself that he’d write a song based on the first words he read when opening a book chosen at random.

From a book in his mother’s library he read “gently weeps” and interesting things happened. The outcome was a timeless song. This example teaches that inspiration can be anywhere…and that it’s often found when and where you’d least expect it.

But you need to open yourself up to new experiences to make this happen.

Here are 21 things you can do—and think of each one as a place you can go—to add fuel to your own creative fire and find new inspiration, no matter what kind of work you do”

Read about something you don’t know much (or anything) about. There’s no fiercer potential to untap than that of a beginner’s mind.

Listen more. Talk less.

Do something other than sit at your desk.

Spend time with people outside of your usual social circle.

Read Metafilter and its companion AskMetafilter. Don’t skip the comments.

Do something that scares you.

Play guitar. Or the kazoo. Or the bongos. Anything musical.

Exercise.

Learn how to bake bread.

Visit an art gallery.

Teach what you know: it will teach you what you *don’t* know.

Look for examples rather than explanations to illustrate an idea.

Listen to your music in random shuffle mode.

Read more poetry. Write some, too.

Strike up a conversation with a stranger.

Meet more people more often.

Have a nap.

Draw. Even if you don’t think you’re much of an artist.

Turn off the radio, close your book, switch your phone to vibrate, shut off your computer, and spend a little time in the company of your own thoughts. It doesn’t have to be meditation, it just has to be quiet time for your mind.

Take a position on an issue that is entirely opposite to your personal beliefs and defend it.

Stop relying obsessively on to-do lists and just do something impulsive.

(Photo: Rebelbutterfly)

Business apps for iPad: a writer’s take

By Patrick Gant

At the consumer level, it doesn’t take very long for the iPad to win people over. It’s easy to see its appeal for personal use (and I’m pretty sure I don’t need to rehash all the reasons why here).

But what about for business? That’s an area that’s still being explored in terms of finding ROI. So let me share what I know about that.

I’ve been using my iPad professionally since its US launch back in April, so I’ve had some time to really think about how I can best use this device. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time trying out a wide assortment of apps made exclusively for this iOS platform. Some apps surfaced with great promise and fanfare. Others have had to work hard to earn their keep.

So here’s my take as a professional writer on the apps that I consider must-haves:

Keynote

To be clear, the iOS version of Apple’s slideware application is not a complete substitute for its much more powerful desktop counterpart. This version is considerably scaled-down. But that’s okay, because as I see it, Keynote for iPad works best for one-on-one presentations versus addressing large groups.

When I meet clients and prospects face to face, I like to share with them some samples of my work. I used to do this by maintaining a large portfolio book—something that’s not always practical for every meeting. With Keynote on my iPad, I create customized presentations with writing samples that the reader can flip through and zoom in as needed. It’s really handy…and it is by far my most effective presenting tool for generating new business.

Instapaper
I’ve blogged about this service before and I’m glad to do so again. I do a lot of research in my line of work, plus I’m a consummate reader. It can get tricky to try and keep track of everything I want to read, particularly when I’m pressed for time. With Instapaper, I just click “read later,” and it saves the link without all the hassles of bookmarks. Later on, with Instapaper’s iPad app, I can read those saved articles at my leisure, including in “dark mode” (black background against white text), which I find is much easier on the eyes. The good stuff gets added to my Yojimbo database and I toss out the rest.

Yojimbo
Another long-time favourite tool of mine on the desktop. The developers just launched the iPad version a little more than a month ago, and in that short period of time it’s proven its worth to have a place on my springboard. It’s the simplest way that I know of to manage texts, PDFs and images (among other things) on multiple devices. At this stage, the iPad version doesn’t yet allow for generating new documents (the developers promise that’s coming soon). For now, it suits me fine as my one-stop reference for white papers, academic articles, favourite stories, and quotes.

IA Writer

There are two processes to my work as a writer. First, I generate raw ideas and write them down quickly. No editing on the fly. Just text in its most bare-bones form. This is an important part of my work and so I don’t want any distractions. On the desktop, I use either Yojimbo or TextEdit for that task. On the iPad, there’s Pages, which does have its place at the formatting stage (which is the second process in my work). But I want something that simply does text.

Enter IA’s Writer for iPad. Minimalist features. Just start writing. The app looks after saving your work and if you have Dropbox, it syncs your work to your shared folder so you can access your work later from other devices. But the best part of all is its enhanced keyboard. It adds just the right number of added functions that are otherwise either missing or hard to get to with iPad’s standard keyboard. Key among these: move forward/backward by word, apostrophes, quotation marks and hyphens.

Pages
As with its counterpart. Keynote, Pages for iPad is a scaled down version of the desktop word processor. It does a competent job at fine-tuning and formatting simpler documents, but I’d advise against trying to use this for performing any kind of detailed edit of a document. In my own workflow, it’s been largely eclipsed by IA Writer

TED
As a writer who is also speaker and presenter, lifelong learning is part of my craft. TED Talks are a great learning tool both in terms of having great content and powerful presentations. I much prefer watching TED Talk videos on my iPad because it feels more personal. It also forces me to pay attention more carefully than on my desktop, where there are always distractions competing for my attention.

Money
Jumsoft’s Money app makes the cut as the easiest way I’ve found to track expenses. And it does so without me having to deal with a lot of the needless nuisances that tend to plague apps in this category. To my knowledge, it’s also the only one that syncs entries between iOS devices and Mac desktops.

Penultimate

Having tried several sketching and handwriting apps, I settled on Penultimate because—like so many others on this list—it concentrates on doing one thing really, really well. In this case, it’s the ability to visualize my ideas quickly.

For me, Penultimate is the one app among so many that are out that that has the closest feel to working with a felt-tipped pen, making it a lot easier to start working with your fingertip on the screen without too much hassle. In meetings where I’m talking about an ad concept, for instance, I can sketch a rough idea quickly and email it to others if necessary. It’s also handy for writing out directions or anything else that I’d otherwise me sketching on paper.

Flipboard
Plenty of praise here for this app, which lives up to its claim as “your personal magazine.” True, Flipboard’s main purpose is to transform columns of social media into something that has the look and feel of a magazine. And it does this rather well. It also excels where most newspaper apps fail, it presents news articles in a way that encourages you to read more, but without resorting to the everything and the kitchen sink approach that tends to clutter so many apps (and I’m looking at you, Globe and Mail).

Honourable mentions…

Jumbo Calculator
It’s a mystery why Apple opted against porting to iPad their Calculator app for iPhone, but Jumbo closes that gap with a simple app with big buttons.

CBC Radio
Not directly a business tool, but sure comes in handy for checking the news when I’m on the go. Bonus points for sporting an intuitive design.

Kobo Reader
Better selection and better prices than iBooks, and none of the ridiculous kludginess of Amazon’s Kindle app.

WordPress
I use this to post to this blog and revise my website from anywhere my business takes me. It’s simple and straightforward. And free. Which is rather nice.

Mindnode
This is my go-to app for brainstorming and mapping out my thinking when confronted with a problem. It’s simple with just the bare elements of what I need in a mindmapping application. I just wish it would support Dropbox syncing.

Yoga with Jamine
Taking a health break is an important part of any healthy enterprise. A few minutes of yoga can really hit the spot on a stressful day. I find this Yoga app so much more useful on the iPad…the videos are larger and easier to follow versus on the iPhone.

Twitteriffic
Easy to use twitter app, but doesn’t get updated as often as it should by the developer. Could go from being good to great with a little more TLC.

Kayak HD
Best of the breed for booking flights and hotels online.

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