Social media isn’t just a hook for your website.

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Social media hookHere we are, several years into the rise of social media, and companies still have no clue about what the social web is about.

When I scan through a company’s Facebook page, for example, what I see for the most part are links to its website.

Someone at the company wants to drive traffic to a particular page. So they send out a tweet, or create a Facebook update, or a Google+ post. The social media content is often automatically created, drawing the title and a photo from the site’s web page.

In other words, the social media update is simply a link back to the site, with no intrinsic value of its own.

That’s not social media content. That’s just a hook.

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Fire your two worst clients, twice a year.

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Fire your freelance clients.I spent some time with a fellow freelancer recently, and he showed me a spreadsheet of his recent and current clients.

Better still, he showed me how profitable each of those clients were.

I have created spreadsheets like these myself, and was fascinated to see how similar his was in terms of the spread of profitability.

Let me explain.

On his spreadsheet he had a couple of really profitable clients, several middle-range clients, and a couple of clients that were barely profitable at all. His mix of clients was very similar to what I have seen in my own career as a freelancer.

So I asked him the obvious question, “The two least profitable clients take up way too much of your time for too little reward. So why not fire them?”

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Power up your copywriting with causality, a strong narrative and a healthy respect for cognitive dissonance.

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Snack bars for copywriters.In my last post I wrote about the human obsession with causality, and how copywriters can use this weakness to their advantage.

Today we’ll move to the next stage and consider how causality is a building block of narrative.

I know…it all sounds weird. But keep reading and all will be explained. (And if you didn’t read the last post, you may want to read it now, before you continue with this one.)

Let’s work with an example.

Imagine you decide to invest in gold bullion.

Naturally, you are going to read all about the yellow metal, its ups and downs and the various forces at play that influence its price.

Then one day you read an article about price fixing, and about how gold prices are actually under the control of a shadowy force, comprised of international bankers and billionaire oligarchs.

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On judgment, causality and copywriting.

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bike and copywritingDuring the summer months, after work, I either take my kayak out on the river, or cycle for an hour along the local bike paths.

When I’m cycling I always stop at the same park bench for a rest at the half-way mark, exactly 10 kilometers from my home.

A couple of weeks ago a gentleman sat down on the bench next to mine and starting talking to me. He seemed to have an axe to grind about the number of Muslims living in Montreal.

To support his opinion, he told me a story about how he had seen a couple of Muslims sitting at one of the park’s few picnic tables that are specially designed and designated for people in wheelchairs. But when a man in a wheelchair approached the table, the two Muslims waved him away and carried on with their conversation.

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Introducing Author Platform 2.0 – A better website for your books and ebooks.

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Author Platform 2.0 for writersIf you’re an author, you probably have a website.

And if it’s like the typical author website, it’s what I call Author Platform 1.0.

In other words, it’s old-school, with 20 pages of content or less. Or to put it another way, it’s a brochure for your books.

And if you’re not sure what I mean by the word “platform”, it’s the word publishers use when asking you if you have an audience…a large group of people you can reach out to when it comes time to sell your books.

Back when I had my first book published in 2002, by McGraw-Hill, they were very keen to ask about my platform. They wanted to know I had an audience ready and waiting for publication day.

And back then it worked fine to create a ten-page author brochure online…Author Platform 1.0.

It worked.

But it doesn’t work anymore. For two reasons.

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Being “on-message” is the worst thing you can do.

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rob ford on messageIf you want to engage your readers, earn their trust and turn them into customers, the worst thing you can do is write content and sales copy that is “on-message”.

Online content and copy that is on-message has about as much power as a politician who has been overly trained by his or her media trainers and speech writers.

The outcome lacks all authenticity. It’s BS, and we know it.

I recently returned from a trip to the UK where the country had just voted to choose their representatives for the European parliament.

What usually happens is a win by the Conservatives or the Labour Party, with the Lib Dems taking third place.

This time, the winner was a new, upstart party called Ukip.

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