My Web Notes

from copyblogger: http://www.copyblogger.com/ernest-hemingway-top-5-tips-for-writing-well/

Want to learn how to write better?
From Drayton Bird’s newsletter:

Read any popular novel, newspaper or magazine. They are written for people who are not clever, or not concentrating. Words, sentences and paragraphs are very short. And here are some other suggestions.

1. A heading must make the reader want to find out more, and not reveal so much they might not feel they need to read it.

2. Try to avoid ‘we’ instead of ‘I’ – the writing most likely to be read is me to you. People don’t relate to organisations.

3. Count the number of “you” words – yours and your – versus “me” words – I, us, our, ours and we. The ratio should be at least 2:1, preferably 3:1.

4. Use “carrier” words and phrases at the beginnings of sentences to keep people reading. Such as Moreover, That is why, In addition, What’s more, On top of that, Also and And. These tell your reader there is more to come. And forget what your teacher told you: “And” is often used to start sentences in The Bible.

5. You can also use questions at the ends of sentences or paragraphs. Why is this?

6. Because which you have to read on to get the answers (and if you notice, the end of point 5 and start of this point demonstrate what I mean).

George Orwell’s “1984″ and “Animal Farm” were gripping parables about the nightmare of totalitarianism. In an essay he gave six rules for better writing.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

People get used to them and they fail to take them in. Say something fresh or different. Don’t say “at the end of the day” – say “in the end”; don’t say “put it to the acid test” – say “test thoroughly”. “Cutting edge” or “state of the art” mean “newest”

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Complimentary – Free
Anticipate – Expect
Expectation – Hope
Authored – Wrote
Transportation – Car
Purchase – Buy
Ameliorate – Improve
Lifestyle – Life
Marketplace – Market

3. If you can cut a word out, always do so.

“Miss out on” should be “miss”
“Male personnel” is “men”
“For free” is “free”
“Crisis situation” is “crisis”
“Meal solution” is “meal” or “recipe”
“Research process” is usually “research”
“Station stop” is “station” or “stop”

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

Active is always shorter. A biblical example is “Esau was slain by Jacob” – better as “Jacob slew Esau”.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

“Interface” works better as “talk with”
“Core competencies” means “what we do best”
“Easy to use” beats “user-friendly”
“Mission statement” is “our aim”
“This is a non-smoking environment” is “No smoking”

6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I have two suggestions besides making sure you write as simply as possible.

Before you start, write a simple, logical structure for what you want to say. Then draft – and revise until you’re 100% sure anyone can understand it.

A friend once gave me a recipe for this which delighted me. “Show it to an idiot,” he instructed, “Get them to read it, and ask if they understand”.

I don’t show my writing to an idiot. I show it to someone with common sense, but not as interested in the subject as I am. This is often my PA., but could be anyone who happens to be around.

I always say, “Can you read this, please? What do you think? Is it clear?”

Just remember – as Dr. Johnson remarked over 200 years ago – “That which is written to please the writer rarely pleases the reader.” You’re not writing for yourself but for others. Make it easy for them!

And if you want to make it easy for yourself get an excellent and mercifully short book written by two of my former colleagues called “Writing that Works – How to Improve Your Memos, Letters, Reports, Speeches, Resumes, Plans, and Other Business Papers By Kenneth Roman and Joel Raphaelson”

Best,

Drayton

PS Don’t forget – if you have a friend or colleague who you think would like to hear from me, please sign them up at www.draytonbird.co.uk. They’ll get a polite invitation – which they can decline – and I never share my email lists.

Why direct marketing is a better brand building tool than conventional brand image advertising

by Bill Fryer MA Oxon – bill@billfryer.com

A whole industry has grown up around the need to promote and build brands, but Bill Fryer argues that brand image is no substitute for brand reality.

No one can dispute the power of a brand; the effect is very plain in direct marketing. Almost without exception a mailing by a big brand will significantly outpull one by a lesser known or unknown brand. Brands give you and me something to trust, reassurance of quality and increasingly, status.

What is frequently debated is how to make one with the power to increase sales. I won’t make any friends for saying it but there are any number of people who will tell you that what you need to do is spend £5,000,000 a year on prime time TV advertising for about 20 years – not a prospect I would relish.

People have difficulty understanding how to create powerful brands because it is very difficult to work out the personality of something completely intangible. In my opinion the best way to look at brands is to think of them as people. Allow me to explain…

If you were getting to know me you might read something about me, you might talk to some of my friends, you might pick up some juicy gossip about me or you might have seen some of my work. With all this information from all these different sources you form an opinion about me. If all of this information consistently says “Bill Fryer is a great guy” you might approach me and strike up a conversation or start working with me on some project.

When you start talking to me and being with me however you start to discover the reality of me – a great guy but, bad breath, arrogant and at times highly obnoxious. (Actually I’m really not that bad I just said it like that for effect). The point is that when you actually interact with me you get the information you need to form your own opinions about me, and that is much more powerful than the reported information you based your initial conclusions on.

Brands are the same. You can spend all the money you like buying chunks of airtime in which to compose messages saying how great you are, paying celebrities and beautiful people to espouse your charms, and using PR to manipulate the media to say great things about you. But if the time comes when the customer tries your product and finds it sucks or rings up to complain and gets a “nothing to do with us” attitude or gets a series of overly heavy correspondence about some trivial matter – then they start to get a real picture of your brand; the brand reality.

The converse is also true. If your advertising and PR isn’t particularly hot but ‘wow’ are you nice, pleasant people to deal with and ‘hey’ does your product work well, that kind of brand message gets passed around. True it takes a little more time if you don’t advertise it but it is most certainly the approach that works best in the long term.

Now direct marketing by definition involves a company interacting with its customers. And that is why I say that direct marketing is a far more powerful brand building tool than conventional broad brush approaches. Evidence for this is plain to see: Reader’s Digest, American Express and Tango are all examples of powerful brands built on direct marketing. Recently Viking office supplies was sold for over £1 billion. We’ve all seen their catalogues – not the most attractive in the world, but have you ever dealt with them? They really deliver. And the power of their brand is reflected in the sale price of the company.

Also I have to say that for many products, especially those that are low cost everyday items, like most foods for example, this broadcast approach is often enough – but not always.

That is why Tango is such an interesting example. As a soft drink brand you might have thought they don’t need to interact with their customers – my point above – and the product is too cheap to merit conventional direct marketing methods. But they were languishing on the sidelines until their famous orange man campaign. Some of their campaigns have generated over 100,000 responses. The point here is that by choosing to follow a strategy of interacting with their customers they have successfully differentiated themselves from the competition with prodigious results. Why aren’t their competitors doing anything similar?

In my ever so humble, albeit at times outspoken, opinion any marketer’s focus should always be primarily on how they can improve the reality of their brand and then how they can communicate that to the widest possible audience.

Then there is the vexed question of brand equity. I am often horrified to read of companies that make a financial calculation of their brand worth – which then appears on the balance sheet – based on how much they have spent on advertising. Mainly because I know of several companies that have launched multi-million pound advertising campaigns only to see sales drop as a result. Dr Andrew Ehrenberg states that the value of your brand is how many customers you have. What else could it logically be?

The value of your brand is defined as the added value in sales generated by the brand’s goodwill compared to a baseline of an unknown brand. If an unknown brand has zero customers and your well-known brand has 100,000 good customers then that surely is the basis for working out the value of your brand on the balance sheet. But without a corporate database of customers how can you tell how many you have or who they are? And how can you communicate directly with them when you need to?

Using the human analogy again if I have 100 good friends in my address book and you have 50 in yours is not my brand twice the value of yours?

I’m not knocking the power of conventional brand image advertising, I fully acknowledge the power of campaigns like Marlboro, BMW and those for Apple Macintosh. I just believe that if you want to create a really valuable brand, focus on the reality first and the image second. And direct marketing is all about brand reality.

Bill Fryer is Creative Director of Bill Fryer Direct, a direct marketing agency in Warminster, Wiltshire. Why don’t you talk to Bill Fryer Direct about how you can work together to increase your sales and boost the value of your brand. Send mail to bill@billfryer.com or visit www.billfryer.com.

Start here when writing a sales letter:

• Here is what I’ve got
• Here is what it does
• Here is why I’m the best guy to work with
• Here is the full story of the thing
• Here are the details
• Here is how to get it

From this interview: http://www.michelfortin.com/john-carlton-and-michel-fortin-interview/

What are the things that you do to suck in the money? Are you doing those things exclusively? Are you working on IT?

Are you unclogging the toilet?

Focus on the money sucking.

A thought from this interview: http://www.michelfortin.com/john-carlton-and-michel-fortin-interview/

Looking for a hook? Consider the types of quiet desperation that your clients deal with.

Selling food? Most people eat mediocre food and want to have something wonderful and fulfilling.

Selling service? Most people are accustomed to poor uninterested service. Offer exceptional, world class service.

A thought pulled from this interview: http://www.michelfortin.com/john-carlton-and-michel-fortin-interview/

Michael Fortin, copywriter and marketer writes an excellent post about the different stages your prospect can approach your advertising from.

You can find the article here: http://www.michelfortin.com/can-your-prospects-take-an-oath/

Great article from Steve Sue at Sticky Pitch.

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Good work.

Just Salesmanship. Every time I think too much about a website, copy, the use of graphics, I forget that marketing is just salesmanship. Hopkins says:

The only purpose of advertising is to make sales. It is profitable or unprofitable according to its actual sales.

Advertising is multiplied salesmanship.

A mediocre salesman may affect a small part of your trade. Mediocre advertising affects all of your trade.

One must be able to express himself briefly, clearly and convincingly, just as a salesman must.

Many of the ablest men in advertising are graduate salesmen.

The only readers we get are people whom our subject interests. No one reads ads for amusements, long or short. Consider them as prospects standing before you, seeking for information. Give them enough to get action.

When you plan or prepare an advertisement, keep before you a typical buyer. Your subject, your headline has gained his or her attention. Then in everything be guided by what you would do if you met the buyer face-to-face.

The advertising man studies the consumer. He tries to place himself in the position of the buyer. His success largely depends on doing that to the exclusion of everything else.

This book will contain no more important chapter than this one on salesmanship. The reason for most of the non-successes in advertising is trying to sell people what they do not want. But next to that comes lack of true salesmanship.

I have read this book three times now and this chapter continues to have the most impact on my thinking. This chapter informs everything else to come.