Why do you want to learn to write great sales copy?

. . . So that your website can work much harder for you than it is now — which means YOU get to work (slightly) less hard?

. . . So that your “sales copy” starts feeling not so different from any other copy on your site, because it’s written in the same voice, tone, and style?

. . . So that you can stay humble, realistic, and centered even while standing confidently beside (or behind) what it is you’re offering?

If any or all of the above resonate, please keep reading.

Here’s your first copywriting lesson: ‘great’ sales copy is relative. Relative to you. Relative to your business and your goals for your business. Relative to your brand and how you want it to show up in the online conversation. Relative to your Right People — who they are, who they are trying to become, and how they want to feel and see themselves reflected back when they engage with your offer.

Greatness is relative because different people see ‘great’ differently.

This is why mimicking another writer’s voice or style when writing your sales copy isn’t going to work out so well. Speaking to your readership the same way someone else speaks to theirs doesn’t propel you in the direction of making your business work better for you and your Right People. (When taken to the extreme, mimicry can even slow you down quite a bit.)

But mimicry is a part of growth. We’ve all done it [watch out — ancient post alert] and at some level, we’re all doing it still. We learn from models and mentors.

The best question to ask yourself is: what works about that writer’s sales copy and why does it work? Seeing the WHY behind the technique or the choice is a higher level skill and one you can absolutely develop. (It’s one of the things I most LOVE to teach my clients inside my courses.)

Secret of Great Writing, No. 751:

Want to know how almost all great writers have become great?

At some point in their development, they began to read like a writer reads. When you read like a writer reads, you begin to notice what a writer notices. And when you notice what a writer notices, you can begin to write like a writer writes. Not just any writer — you, as the greatest writer you’ve been yet.

When writers read (and I mean read anything, from novels to magazine ad copy to Netflix’s description of a series), they analyze things like sentence structure, word placement, word choice, and yes, even the use of white space on the page. Writers are sensitive to how every choice made on the page affects the whole.

Learn to read sales copy like a copywriter reads sales copy. Look behind the magic, the spin, the schmaltz, and the rhythm of language to understand that great writing is putting word after word after word on the page, having a reason for each word to be there, and having the reason be connected to the big outcome you’d love to create.

What’s the big outcome you’d love to create with your next sales page?

Do you want to enroll seven women who have coached with you privately in the last year in a high level Mastermind, where they can be supported by other women you just know they’re going to dig so hard?

Do you want forty people at your next live event, people who are really ready to do the work you’ll facilitate?

Do you want to try out online teaching with a group of your favorite readers and a pet topic to see if it’s something you’d like to do more of?

Do you want to enroll as many of your Right People as possible in a tiny free offer that’ll provide you with the feedback you need to cultivate your future big offer?

Do you want to work on more custom commissioned pieces this year, so you can grow your portfolio and win a spot at the important tradeshow that could be your big break?

Do you want to sell enough e-courses to buy that emerald color midcentury sofa from Dot & Bo before your best friend from college travels across country to visit you?

Do you want to finally publish a sales page that actually does justice to the work that happens behind the scenes with your clients and customers?

All of these are valid reasons for wanting to write a great sales page for your Right People. And for you and your business.

Please don’t feel sheepish about wanting to learn to sell more effectively.

If you’re intent on having a business of your own that relies on the internet for most (or ALL) of your marketing, then you’ve got to learn to sell well with words. Selling with words requires you to master some very specific mindsets, skill sets, and insight sets. Chances are, these are mindset, skill set, and insight sets you may not yet have. And that’s okay.

I created Writing the Conversational Sales Page because my clients and readers are super interested in mastering the mindsets, skill sets, and insight sets needed for selling online.

There’s no other course out there that I’m aware of that equips values-based, solo and small business owners who want to sell e-courses and e-books; programs, workshops, and events, or creative and custom services, to their particular Right People — and to do so with elegance and integrity. Until now.

If you’re pretty sure that writing better sales pages is the next frontier in your own business, please have a look at Writing the Conversational Sales Page. Registration is on for the next 3-½weeks, but Priority Pricing (read: the best value) ends this Friday the 15th.

Who among my Right People are signing up? So far, we’ve got a career coach, an earth-centered spirituality mentor, a birth doula, multiple coaches of various stripes, several writers and editors, and others. To a one, they are smart, subtle, sensitive types who consider themselves good writers and are ready to learn a whole new approach to making high quality offers via writing.

What are YOUR Right People wanting and waiting to do with you?

Go here now to check it out, and to join us.

(Image credit.)

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Most of my clients, who are solo and small business owners, have a deep appreciation for what works.

They don’t have time or spare creative energy for anything else.

They’re busy people, usually with partners and families and homes and pets and other big life interests they’re pursuing. Their  business is not everything to them, but it is a huge part of how they’re showing up in the world, one of the primary ways they’re contributing and making a difference. And — huge bonus for ME as their creative provider — they enjoy their work a whole lot.

When they come to The Voice Bureau for copywriting or content creation support, they’re not looking for short-term tactics or to get in on a hot marketing trend. They’re looking not only for a clear and discernible result but also a deep conviction that this is the best way to direct their business’s energy in this season. They’re looking to position their business in a certain way. And they’re looking for a path and an outcome that feels right through and through.

So when I encounter a new client who doesn’t have an e-newsletter, or who has one but doesn’t ever use it, the first thing I ask (gently and encouragingly) is why not???

I’d never give up my e-letter for anything.

Of all the things the different marketing activities I’ve done in my time as a solo business owners, writing and sending a consistently high quality e-newsletter is by far the one with the highest ROI (return on investment). Let me tell you why.

As a solo business owner, you deserve to know that —

1) Your Right People want to hear from you.

They really do. Nobody really wants more email, so consider this: if someone has willingly given their email address to you, it’s because they really, really WANT to stay connected. Somewhere in their mind, they have the intention to become your customer one day. They’re curious and intrigued by how you do what you do. They like watching you work. They’re attracted to your voice, and to the value you promise to share. Give the people what they want.

2) Good solid content trumps gorgeous design.

I know and preach the value of great design all day long, but when it comes to a business e-newsletter, simple old line of type can be just as effective as a chic, sleek HTML template. The nice thing is, email service providers like Aweber and MailChimp make it SO easy to get a great-looking e-letter these days. Yet four years in, my own e-letter is still nothing fancier than a logo header, Helvetica paragraph text (with short, web-friendly paragraphs), and font colors that reflect my brand’s color palette. Visual branding goes hand in hand with great content, but without great content, visual branding goes poof. So develop your sense of what great content is for YOUR people, and come out with that.

3) You don’t owe anyone total transparency about your decision-making process or your business strategy.

I often see solo business owners treating their e-newsletter like a page out of their business owner diary. And for some Voice Values — especially Transparency and Intimacy — this isn’t necessarily a bad choice.  But not every small business e-newsletter needs to be a reckoning of the creator’s personal travails, experiments, and innermost feelings about being an entrepreneur. If you want to be intensely personal in your e-newsletter and can see a way to tie this to your Right People’s needs and desires, then so be it. But know that there’s NO pressure on you to self-disclose anything you don’t see a use for just because people have given you their email address. Not every business e-letter needs to go behind the scenes of the business. I’ll repeat. Not every business e-letter needs to go behind the scenes of the business. Consider that based on what your business offers, your Right People may be even more interested in what they are hoping to GET from your brand than they are in your personal story. As human beings, we do care about others’ stories, but not more than we care about what’s in it for us.

To quote Marketing Profs’ Ann Handley, there’s a marked difference between personal and personable, and either approach is A-OK.

4) A small but engaged list is better than a bigger but zoned-out list.

Yes, there are mathematical realities about how many people you can “convert” from an offer made to a list of X number or Y number of people. If you want to sell more stuff, you do need to grow your list over time. But in the here and now, are you selling what you could be to the people you actually have? Aren’t some sales better than no sales? Some sales can teach you a lot about your subscribers’ desire, about effective (and less effective) copywriting, and about an effective rhythm for connection. No sales can teach you a lot, too.  But you can’t learn whether people will buy or not if you’re not making the offer.

Segue: The E-Letter Atelier is the seventh course I’ve launched under The Voice Bureau in the past couple of years. But in the first week of enrollment, sales were sluggish. I asked myself why and saw a number of possible factors: the price was significantly higher than the price of many of my previous courses; I (like usual, to be honest) did little to no lead-up before the launch [the advice to do a pre-launch, warm-up campaign is wonderful and I’m sure effective, but I very rarely do it]; and it seems like an unusually heavy “launch season” out there in the values-based B2B online realm. I knew that the problem was not my list size, but rather, with the sales page itself, since I wasn’t “converting” at my usual rate.

So I sought feedback from a source I trust implicitly (The Voice Bureau’s very own Project Curator Katie Mehas) and radically reworked the sales page, including a swap-out of all photos on the page to evoke a different feel. And voilà!, sales picked up and have been steadier since. I’m so excited about the group of solo and small business owners coming together for this first-ever experience and I look forward to getting started in June.

5) You don’t NEED a free opt-in gift, but if you have one, make it worth their while.

Just like nobody really wants more email to process, nobody really wants another digital file sitting around on their hard drive. So if you go the route of creating a “free gift” for your e-newsletter subscribers, make sure it’s worth their while. Your e-letter opt-in gift should (1) loop your Right People into your brand conversation via a tiny slice of the whole thing, (2) help them solve a pressing problem or address a critical concern, and (3) be consumbable in about 10 minutes.

My own subscriber gift is my Discover Your Voice Values brand voice self-assessment. It meets the criteria for a viable opt-in gift because it (1) immediately loops my Right People in to my conversation about brand voice for small, values-based businesses, (2) offers them a way to gain quick self-understanding of a topic that can seem rather complicated, and (3) takes most people about 10 minutes to do.

Not a subscriber yet? Sign up below to discover your Top 3-5 Voice Values.

6) Top quality over laser consistency, every time.

This one turns the usual advice on its head. You know how “be consistent” is the battle cry of branding specialists and marketers everywhere? While I wholeheartedly believe there’s GREAT value (and rewards) to be found in showing up consistently, I also believe that some of the best marketing content we see out there today is a pattern interrupt. It snaps our brain out of its usual open-mouthed stare into the digital netherlands. It tell us, “Hey! Wake up! You don’t get an email from [insert your business name here] every day but today you ARE. And you enjoy getting his/her emails. So this must be significant .”

There’s all kinds of research out there about the best times to send email. For months (years), I held myself to an every-Tuesday-morning-at-3-AM-EST sending schedule, aiming to land in people’s inboxes first thing on the first day of the week that wasn’t Monday. But the more consistently I kept up this rhythm, the more my open rate declined, and then settled in at a consistent 50% lower than when I used to send sporadically! I’ve personally found that varying the days and times I send yields the best open rates. In short, my people are MORE apt to open my emails and click the links inside them when I’m less predictable. I’m still consistently, but now I’m sending consistently inconsistently. Open rates are up and more of my Right People are reading my e-letters more often.

In the comments, I’d love to hear:

Do you have an e-newsletter you consistently write and send? If so, what “best practices” have you discovered hold true for you? If you don’t yet have an e-newsletter, what holds you back?

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Doesn’t it feel like there’s some kind of magic in a great e-letter*?

*Credit is due to Kate Swoboda of Your Courageous Life and The Coaching Blueprint, who is the first person I noticed online (some years back) referring to her e-newsletter as an ‘e-letter,’ which sounds much more elegant and approachable, doesn’t it?

The truth is, I’ve started writing this particular article three different times from three totally different angles, with the intention to tell you more about The E-Letter Atelier, my latest online course. Each time I would begin, I’d try to write my way into why an e-newsletter is an important asset to your business.

But you know why it’s important. You’ve wandered around these online entrepreneurial parts a bit, you’ve gotten the lay of the land. You know that you “should” have an e-newsletter, an ever-growing list of people who have ‘opted-in’ [industry parlance] to hear from you in their inbox.

You know that ideally, you should be “sharing valuable content” with your “list” 80% of the time, and 20% of the time, you should be making them an offer: buy my e-book, sign up for my new coaching program, check out this affiliate offer.

You’re subscribed to several other business’s e-newsletters and you’ve seen other people do their newsletters both well and badly. You’ve unsubscribed from more lists than you are currently subscribed to. You’ve gotten more choosy about what you’ll allow into your inbox.

And yet, knowing all this, seeing all this, doesn’t necessarily make it easier for you to see the possibilities for your own e-letter.

At least not a possibility that feels wholly worth it — from a time investment standpoint and from the perspective of your Right People, the people you feel drawn to serve.

You may have started and stopped your e-letter at some point in the past, or perhaps you have one but only get to it intermittently.

And yet you still have a desire to have a really great e-letter, one that serves your business, inspires your Right People, and feels worth it to you. You want it to be a working asset or nothing at all. I get that. Because: me, too.

Here’s what I typically hear from The Voice Bureau’s clients when it comes to concepting and creating a great, ongoing e-newsletter:

• “What I want to write is neither a diary entry not a straight sales pitch, but something in between. What does THAT look like?”
• “I want to be consistent and I’d rather not send anything at all, ever, than be inconsistent.”
• “What the hell do I write? Why is this so hard?”
• “I love it when other business owners curate links from around the web for their e-letters, but I’m not sure if this is the right choice for my business. How do I know?”
• “I’m so afraid of offending my readers by sending them more email that I just freeze and do nothing.”

And so back to my angle for this writing this article today.

I think what we REALLY want and need to talk about, when it comes to our e-letter, is how to make this little piece of email feel like an experience, not just a piece of digital detritus.

Delivering an experience to someone’s inbox doesn’t have to mean that it’s long. It doesn’t have to mean that it’s heavily designed. (Heck, my own Insider Stuff e-letters are just line of type with a logo header and a photo I took.) And it doesn’t have to mean that you open a vein and leave your blood on the screen. Nope. None of those.

Let’s have a conversation about approaching your e-letter with two goals in mind:

1) To make it feel worth it to you, as a creator and as a business owner, and

2) To make it a worthwhile, looked-forward-to read for your Right People.

I believe that the magic in a great e-letter is found at the intersection of these two possibilities. Let’s talk about it.

And let’s do it voice-to-voice, why don’t we?

Sign up BELOW to join in on a complimentary call, Writing an E-Letter Your Right People Want to Read, or to receive the recording. If you’re there live, you’re welcome to ask questions, or just to listen in quietly. There’s no special offer attached to this call, it’s just part of spreading the word about The E-Letter Atelier, and giving everyone (whether you become an Atelier member or not) something to think about and work toward in their business.

CALL DATE: Thursday, May 22nd, 2014

TIME: 8 AM PST/11 AM EST — here’s a world time zone converter so you can see what time it’ll be for you

SIGN UP BELOW TO RECEIVE CALL-IN DETAILS . . .

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To me, there’s only one sexier phrase in all of business-speak than ‘brand identity.’

That phrase is ‘brand voice.’

When I was in my mentorship semester for my (now defunct) English teaching career, my amazing mentor teacher Mark Jamison allowed me to create and teach a themed unit of my own from scratch. The theme I chose: Identity & Finding Your Voice. When I left teaching to open a brick-and-mortar lifestyle retail boutique, I was inspired not by the prospect of hawking wares or working the sales floor, but by the prospect of conceptualizing and creating a 3D world that didn’t previously exist: breathing tangible, visceral life into a brand identity, giving the merchandise a cohesive voice and story.

Clearly, brand voice is one of our primary obsesions around here.

But many idealistic business owners — including some in The Voice Bureau‘s own readership and clientele — have some discomfort with thinking of themselves as a brand, and with thinking of their ‘brand voice’ as anything but the pure, unadulterated them putting fingers to keyboard and letting it fly.

I’d like to introduce a slightly different perspective — yes, even for solo businesses with a personal feel.

There’s your brand. And there’s you.

The two are not one.

One popular teaching about branding these days is that you and your brand are one and the same. By extension, people say that if you know yourself, you’ll know your brand.

To that I say . . . yes and no.

In the sense that as a solo or small business owner doing values-based work in the world (this is you, right?), it’s easy to feel that our brand is something we walk around inside of. Some people even go so far as to think that in their business, they’re really marketing themselves. I personally don’t ascribe to this point of view, though it’s a popular one. So I understand where the habit of overidentifying with one’s brand gets started.

But in my world, a brand is something we get to create and curate. A brand is never quite ‘complete,’ in the sense that it’s always active and re-engaging with its Right People and responding to trends and other factors inside and outside of its control.

But a brand — unlike a person — should always be ready to face the world and  always be ‘on.’

You see why it’s helpful to think of your brand as a creation apart from your self?

Your brand has the capacity (and, some would say, the responsibility) to always be ‘on.’

You, the business owner, don’t have that capacity. And shouldn’t try to. The very best brands have REAL people leading them, not coldhearted robots or glossily coiffed personas. Real people get to have off days, quiet seasons, and resting phases.

Brands and businesses can be built to function much more consistently than the typical values-based business owner can function. You get to be fluid while your brand provides the flexible architecture needed to support an important conversation over time with the people you want to serve.

Let’s get back to the YES for a moment.

As a business brand with a personal feel, there’s a lot of YOU in your brand. And you need to know where YOU come in, and where the brand can take over.

I’ve developed and methodologized a way for you as a business owner to understand your own brand voice — originating out of your natural communication strengths, but to be beheld as an entity separate, complete, and organic unto itself.

It’s called the Voice Values Paradigm for Branding. The Voice Values are the centerpiece of how we work with clients, and we want YOU to have access to it.

Enter your email below and click GO to get access to your complimentary brand voice self-assessment, Discover Your Voice Values.

You’ll be subscribed to our weekly-ish Insider Stuff e-letter when you do, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

For those who have taken this assessment before, we’re proud to introduce our new scoring system. It should lead to more honed results (fewer ties) than you may have had in the past. NOTE: If you’re already an Insider Stuff subscriber, you’re receiving a link to access the NEW self-assessment in your inbox today, April 30th, 2014.

I look forward to hearing your Top 3-5 Voice Values — what we call your Signature Mix — in the comments of this post, or on Twitter or Facebook.

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