Ever hear of a “hook”?

It’s that clever angle - a powerful and uniquely-positioned entryway - into an article, press release, or other piece of communication that grabs your readers’ attention and compels them to take the bait into your world.

Author and Communications Guru Jonathan Kranz enlisted a bunch of his “Bulgarian friends” to nab MY attention and lead me to this fab article on www.RainToday.com.

As Mr. Kranz explains:

By “Bulgarian,” I mean a proof point or intriguing “thing” that makes your promise credible or at least provocative. Bulgarians can be:

• Numbers: Use statistics to quantify the value of your benefit:
  • TrackStar’s Automatic Verification Data Eliminates 30% - 35% of Home Delivery Errors
• Stories: Demonstrate your benefit in real-life action:
  • Learn How Bling Co. Leverages TrackStar to Reach New Markets in Record Time
• Secret Ingredients: Introduce something new and unfamiliar into the benefit message:
  • Transportation Transformation: TrackStar’s “Feedback Loop” Corrects Addressing Errors In Real-Time

He goes on to show you how you can “recruit Bulgarians” to help you with your special reports, articles, press releases, white papers, and smorgasbord of other marketing materials - and specifically in that all-important HEADLINE.

What I love about Kranz’s article is he invokes all the tricks and tools he talks about in this article - weaving a story about a copywriter’s before-n-after victory, using lots of quick examples to demonstrate his point, showing how numbers in headlines can make all the difference - skipping along the whole way, hand in hand with his favorite Bulgarians.

In fact, I think it’s fair to say this:

Using “Bulgarians” effectively is a prime and wonderfully fun way to “A-Ha Yourself!”

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 6:37 am and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve got a bit of a confession to make:

Over the years, we’ve been much better at giving testimonials than we’ve been at asking for them.

If we haven’t weighed in publicly on why testimonials are so valuable, allow me to do so in four quick bullets.

1. A testimonial isn’t coming from you. Of course YOU love your product or service. But what does your client or customer think of it?

2. A testimonial is authentic proof of goodness. If it has a full name attached (and even a web address), your prospects can - if they want - dig deeper and hear more from the horse’s mouth.

3. A testimonial reflects your prospects’ wants and needs. By sharing testimonials, you tap more directly into your prospcts minds than you could with the same message coming from your sales or marketing messages.

4. A testimonial tells a story that connects with its readers. A simple “I like it” isn’t a testimonial. A true testimonial wraps the positive feedback in emotional story elements. And people buy based on emotion - they use facts later to justify their emotional decisions.

These are just a few reasons why it’s good to collect testimonials for your business. But as it happens, it’s also good for business to GIVE testimonials.

For instance, in February 2007, we gave this testimonial to Alexandria “The Ezine Queen” Brown for her Online Success Blueprint Workshop home-study course:

After working our butts off for several years as “freelancers,” we put all our work on hold so we could radically reinvent our business. On March 6, 2006, we met in our living room. Our first order of business was to press “PLAY” on our CD player. Why? Because we had invested in your Online Success Blueprint, and we were determined to give 100% of our attention to it. We knew you held the answers to our financial freedom.

Now, less than one year after that fateful meeting, we’re on track to make $150,000 - $200,000 MORE than we did last year…and that’s without any new clients. (Did we mention it’s only February???) Your OSB course gave us the specific steps to take, the strategies to implement, and the mindset to succeed – AND it inspired us to take bold actions we hadn’t had the courage to pursue previously. Your course literally changed OUR course. And now that we have our second child on the way, we’re more grateful than ever that we trusted you with our success. THANK YOU, ALI!”

- Lani & Allen Voivod, “The Content Lovers”, Epiphanies Inc., Gilford, N.H., www.epiphaniesinc.com

Granted, she’s not the only person whose materials we’ve studied - and we’ve worked more closely/personally with other people, including a certain “Marketing Mentor” I’ll mention in part 2 of this testimonial rant on another day - but Ali helped us lay much of the groundwork that got us to where we are today.

And here’s how it’s good for business: Ali’s using that testimonial on her website for the live, in-person Online Success Blueprint Workshop coming November 8, 9, and 10 to Los Angeles. So everyone who sees that page has a chance of finding and connecting with us.

And she’s promoting that workshop to an ezine list of over 21,000 people. 21,000! Not to mention any other joint venture promotions she or her affiliates have done for other large list memberships.

What’s more, she’s offering a series of free teleclasses in advance of her workshop, and I’m going to be speaking on the live call tonight at 8PM Eastern to the 500 live attendees, plus the 2,000-or-so other folks who register for the call so they can receive the free MP3 recording to listen at their convenience. That’s up to 2,000 more exposures to coaches, consultants, authors, speakers, and other solo-preneurs - a very targeted audience, if I may say so.

In short, the act of GIVING a testimonial has served as a marketing tool for our business! Cool, huh?

So, if you, like us, are not so good at collecting testimonials yet - or you feel shy about asking, resist asking, fear asking, whatever! - then try it the other way around for a while, and send a few unexpected testimonials out to the folks whose products or services made a big impact in your life.

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Posted in Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 5th, 2007 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Dances With Gurus, Fun With Marketing, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Good writing makes me giddy inside. Great writing makes me long for a post-sex cigarette. And I don’t even smoke.

Tara Zucker’s writing makes me want to join a naked hippie commune so I can revel in an ecstatic and hedonistic existence of reefer, bongo jams, and round-the-clock sensual massage parties.

My most recent dip into the impossibly dry wit, fantastic humor, and stylistic sensibilities of this talented chick is in the singular universe of her “Doll Cannot Fly” blog.

Even the name of the blog KILLS me. You see, I met Tara while we were both “Content Specialists” at Mattel (home of Barbie, among other toys ‘n games). As you’ll see from her blog’s header, the blog’s name is a nod to our good ol’ corporate days, when Mattel’s Legal department always made sure we included cautionary tales with our fantastical copy.

Anyway, Tara and her husband Rick co-own a “small but feisty” (or should I say “fesity“?) media company called Post Haste Media. They specialize in things like promos, trailers, music videos, behind-the-scene vids, etc., and they’ve got 20+ years of experience and serious bragalogue street cred from working with the likes big names like Thomas Dolby, John Fogarty, Burt Bacharach, Sly Stone…even the incomparable Rick James! 

So Tara has begun to weave her day-to-day biz experiences with cultural non-sequitors, meandering musings, and a healthy dose of self-flagellation. The “Doll Cannot Fly” blog is filet mignon for the solopreneur or microbusiness used to dining on the gristle of overused marketing lingo and drab biz blather.  

Check out why she doesn’t want you to check out their company’s website, how she almost outed Jimi Hendrix, or how some missing powdered sugar inspired her to question her worth as a hostess and write a letter to the makers of Chantilly cookies.

It’s her willingness to be totally transparent as she and Rick navigate their biz successes (and oopsies) around their lives and dreams that I really respect and appreciate:

The great thing about having your own company is you can make mistakes and no one is really going to yell at you. The bad thing about having your own company is you can make mistakes and no one is really going to yell at you. You have to be all over yourself like a cheap suit, watching yourself, giving yourself your own little staff evaluations (”Tara, we feel you need to make more of an effort.” “Thanks, Tara. I’ll work on that!”) When you’re your own boss, you have to set the bar high for yourself. If we promise our clients that we pay attention to the details, we can’t be making spelling mistakes all up in here, can we? Hopefully we’ll catch all our errors, but I know that inevitably things will slip by. We’ll just have to hope that our brilliant ideas and sparkling personalities will prevail, despite our tendency to occasionally be a little “fesity.”

Tara and Rick are in this crazy adventure with us. They get it, and we feel less alone having them in the blogosphere with us.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 25th, 2007 at 7:43 am and is filed under Blog Bits, Fun With Marketing, Microenterprises R Us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Dear success-minded professional,

We understand you’ve been wondering how to get more prospects, customers, and clients to your business.

You’re definitely not alone.

However, because you’re reading this, it’s clear you’re thinking beyond your next one-shot marketing effort to The Big Picture, where all of your marketing pieces work together to drive people to one central, informative, evangelizing hub:

Your website.

Smart thinking, friend. Very smart, indeed.

Since a lot of the business you’re getting these days is coming from online sources, you’d be best served to consider marketing tools that are more content-driven. Press releases, articles, lists of valuable tips and advice, and a blog, to name a few.

The reason why we recommend these tactics is threefold:  

1. Using targeted content to reach your ideal audience allows you to leverage the content over and over, to make it COST EFFECTIVE. 
2. Content-driven marketing makes search engines very happy, and this makes it EASIER for people to find you online.
3. Instead of being assaulted by “generic” or “in-your-face” marketing efforts, your audience receives information they’re searching for, that’s valuable to them, and that offers a friendly, helpful voice and style. THIS BUILDS TRUST AND GOOD FEELINGS, which invites a relationship, which in turn becomes that coveted “warm ‘n fuzzy” emotion, driving prospects to your front door.
   (Knock knock! It’s your next opportunity!)

Now, some people have questions about what it means to leverage content successfully.

Let’s use one targeted article as an example, “5 Tips to Finding the Perfect Widget.” This one article could be used:

• To send to publications looking for content to fill space around their ads – which positions your business not as an advertiser, but as an expert with thoughtful information to share.
• To send to article directories online, creating links to your website that raise the site’s profile in the search engines.
• To send through a press release service, creating links to your website on online news services and providing additional print publication opportunities.
• To post on your website (and/or blog) as keyword-rich content, to get search engines to come back to your website more frequently and give the site greater credibility and traffic.
• To excerpt and use on a postcard or direct mail campaign, which would direct people to your website to read the rest of it.

Smart, cost-effective, guerrilla-like, and a work horse of a strategy, right?

Good luck with your growth, vision, and marketing efforts. We’re rooting for you!

Warmest regards,

Lani and Allen Voivod
aka the “Content Lovers”
Now playing at www.EpiphaniesInc.com
“A-Ha Yourself!”

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 4:06 pm and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing, Inciter Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

You have an idea. A business. A passion. Something to say.

The question is: How important is this to you?

“Well, I have a website/blog/brochure/business card,” you say. And that’s a good thing. You should. They’re all part of your self-marketing efforts. They’re all virtually essential these days. You want to have your information retold, repackaged, and reinvented in various forms, to suit your audience’s content consumption preferences.

So why not take it a step further and turn your singular information, concept, strategy, philosophy, process, or knowledge into an eBook?

Make it interesting. Make it readable. Give it titles and subtitles, sidebars and sass.

Make it easy to download and email.

Share it with people, groups, websites, and associations that would find value in it, or be entertained by it. (Or preferably, both!)

More than anything, make it available…for FREE. 

“But, I don’t have time to spend on creating and developing a FREE eBook?!!” you yelp. “Why the heck would I waste my time/energy/billable brain power on that?”

Well, don’t you already?

Don’t you already think about your own passions, ideas, business, systems, or solutions in a fairly obsessive way?

Wouldn’t you like a clean overview of your might and mission to hand off to prospects, fans, clients, consumers, strategic partners, website visitors, email recipients, and accidental tourists so they could sample your wares? Experience your voice and style? Scan over your offerings? Dig into your ideas? Benefit from your expert status?

Essentially, consume a premeditated, decently configured version of YOU?

What’s more, wouldn’t it be valuable to YOU to put your fleeting thoughts and down-the-rabbit-hole analyses into some semblance of order and refined context?

Hey - we’re talking a free eBook here. It doesn’t have to be a $20,000 project. Make it neat. Format it nicely. If you can get a designer to help it look good, that’s a plus, but if that’s not possible right now, let it go.

Most importantly - HAVE SOMEONE PROOFREAD IT so you don’t embarrass yourself, or worse, lose business because of grammar, spelling, or blatant nonsensical communication skills.

If you still don’t think it’s worth your while, check out what a free eBook did for marketing messiah Seth Godin. (Seth even has a simple “How-to” on the subject on a Squidoo lens, here, in addition to downloadable examples of his own free eBooks.)

Don’t make it harder than it is. If you’ve just got 10 pages, turn it into a Special Report or White Paper. You can always expand or add to it over time.

Bottom line: People can’t learn to know and love you - your products, services, passion, advice, know-how, brilliance, ideas, insights, offerings, deliverables, voice, style, personality, vision, business, unique promise of value, philosophies, etc. - if you don’t give them anything to know and love.

For a stellar example of a useful, informative FREE Special Report that generated more than $100,000 in new client revenue in less than two months and took about two weeks to create, check out the “The Secret to Making Your Business GO NUTS in 2007!” 18-pager we created with Acorn Creative. It’s really good stuff!!!

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 12:46 pm and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

As we were working on a client proposal on Friday, Lani siad this to me in her usual offhand way:

We’re using words to create energy.

For some reason, this made my brain go “Zing!” I got to thinking all weekend about the laws of thermodynamics - specifically the First Law, which says that matter and energy can neither be created or destroyed - you can only change their states, or transfer them. Words do have energy, and carry energy. And by that, I mean the power to cause action.

But then there’s the Second Law, which says there’s no such thing as a 100% efficient transfer of energy. In terms of writing marketing content, no matter how hard we try, we’re never going to get 100% conversion. So the best we can do is create content that carries our messages as well as we can - and that means testing, tweaking, and refining to make the marketing engine runs as smoothly as possible over time.

Finally, there’s the Third Law, which in natural scientific language is: “As temperature approaches absolute zero, the entropy of a system approaches a constant.” And quite honestly, I can’t think of an apt marketing metaphor to apply to this one. (If you’ve got one, leave it in a comment!)

Even bad examples are good examples, as the old saw goes, and this is an example of how trying to shoehorn a common concept into a metaphoric context doesn’t always work as smoothly as you’d hope. But the effort - ahh, making the effort - is better than not making one at all.

The poet Allen Ginsburg (or the British scientist C.P. Snow, depending on  your Internet source) summarized the Third Law as “You can’t quit.” So if you can’t quit, you might as well make a play, right?

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and get creative AND effective with your own marketing efforts), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 26th, 2007 at 7:06 am and is filed under All About Content, Fun With Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Though I’m not sure we’ll be whistling after the nearly-all-nighter we’re pulling to wrap up the last loose ends before we head off to this second annual bash in Myrtle Beach, SC.

The dealio: “Achieve the right marketing mix in today’s competitive global environment.” That’s the mission behind the Global Marketing Summit, and confirmed speakers include marketing execs from Google, Visa, the International Olympic Committee, MySpace, Cirque du Soliel, and a bunch of other senior marketing executives.

We’ll be there with our strategic partner Kevin Skarritt of Acorn Creative, and we’ll also be taking half-hour meetings with execs from Vh1, Microsoft Games, Walgreens, TBS, and more (apparently, the schedule changes up to the last minute, so we’ll keep you posted when they finally happen).

The opportunity to meet and build relationships with these folks is pretty darned exciting, and as a result, here’s my sleep-deprived challenge to you - who’s the biggest name in your field, or the most influential company in your industry? Who can you reach out to today? Send an email, make a call, do something nice for no reason whatsoever. That’s how relationships get started - so take that first step!

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business (and delight you with some copywriting zing), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

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