Copywriter on Content. Part 5. Selling Happiness.

What do people really want? In his excellent book, 2,239 Tested Secrets for Direct Marketing Success, Denny Hatch writes about motivators and lists two pages of them. Two of the most important are happiness and ease. Hatch breaks these down into 100 motivators and I won't go into all of them here and there's no need for most businesses to worry about precise motivators--leave this up to us direct response copywriters.

However, if you make a big effort to base your content on happiness and ease, you'll be way ahead of most of the competition.

Six steps to selling happiness through content.

1. Find out what makes your clients and customers really happy. Then show how you deliver.
2. Ease is always huge. Make everyone's life a lot easier.
3. Tell stories about just how happy clients and customers have become since making the decision to do business with you.
4. Show happy people in photos and videos (this may seem obvious but there's a lot of morosity on websites).
5. Make sure testimonials are teeming with happiness.
6. Your special report and free content should be organized around making people so happy they have to buy what you have to offer.

Also...try to organize your content so the happiness is digestible.

• Captions under photos.
• Pull quotes.
• Subheads.
• Bullets.
• Copy doodles.

Let's take a look at some websites and pages that really sell happiness with their content.

I'm not a huge flash fan and there's a lot of flash on this site but it's selling happiness throughout. Think it's hard for a dentist to sell happiness? Think again by clicking here. And I think Jim McLean, the golf instructor, is really good at showing results on his site.

Take a look at your site and your content. If you think you're selling happiness really well, leave a comment with a link.

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I'm a direct response copywriter based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I specialize in providing copy and content for the direct marketing environment for clients around the world. Enter your info to the right for my free series: Seven Steps to High Converting Copy. Or contact me here for a direct response copywriting quote.

Copywriter on Content. Part 3. Problem Solving? Or Entertainment?

Or both?

I often hear from potential clients: "Can you write B2B copy?" The answer is "Yes. I write B2B copy." The answer is also, "In direct response, there's not much difference between B2B and B2C." However, there can be a slight difference when it comes to content.

• In B2B, companies are often solving a problem. "My air conditioning costs have skyrocketed."
• In B2C, the product might be a luxury--providing fun. A cruise ship vacation.

Content comes in two flavors:

1. Entertainment.
2. Problem solving.

Content for problem solving companies needs to be educational and informational. Case studies work especially well. If you want to see a website with superb case studies, go here. Testimonials are fine, but case studies are exponentially better. If you're in a problem solving business, crank up your case studies immediately.

I like to ski and I used to climb mountains. Aspen Skiing Company has four blogs and they're all good but one is particularly excellent. A local skier writes it and it's superbly entertaining. Take a look here. This blog alone makes me want to visit Aspen for skiing. The author has an attitude and the attitude is "I'm here and you're not. You SHOULD be here." The content makes me want to get in my car and drive the 1700 miles from my front door to the gondola at the base of Aspen Mountain.

Part of me would like to spend every day in the mountains. Ted Mahon, one of America's most accomplished mountaineers, writes a blog and while Ted isn't trying to sell anything, it's another great example of excellent content. Ted takes the trip of a lifetime every weekend and I'm always along for the ride.

If you're selling entertainment or a luxury, organize your content around selling happiness.

If you're in the problem solving business, organize your content around how you solve problems and how good you are at solving the problems you solve--using proof in the form of case studies.

In the next content blog, I'm going to detail how to put together case studies and in part 5 of this blog series, I'll show you how to sell happiness through content.

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I'm a direct response copywriter based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I specialize in providing copy and content for the direct marketing environment for clients around the world. Enter your info to the right for my free series: Seven Steps to High Converting Copy. Or contact me here for a direct response copywriting quote.

An interesting and powerful page on Google's site (part 4)

In this series of five blogs, I'm going through the excellent content advice on this page on Google's site. Today I'm looking at the paragraph that begins...

Increase your visibility.

Here's an excerpt.

To a search engine, the best sites consist of many HTML files, each one text rich...Even more important, you'll find that other sites like to link to pages with useful information. Having lots of sites pointing to your articles...can improve your natural (unpaid) search engine rankings.

Q: How do you get people pointing to your site?

A: The content must be really, really compelling. And that's where serious writing comes into play. Technically, anyone with a computer can be a writer. But a big reason to hire a seasoned and experienced writer is to generate compelling content.

A lot of people ask me, "What does a copywriter do?" The short answer is "type a lot." But my two goals are to:

1. Sell
2. Get someone to hand over their information

To achieve these goals, the copy and content has to be compelling, interesting, salient, and persuasive. There's a simple test...response. Ask to see actual conversion rates when you ask to see a portfolio. A web page I wrote is currently converting at over 30%...which is off the charts. The copy and content are compelling.

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I'm a direct response copywriter based in Charlotte, North Carolina. I specialize in providing copy and content for the direct marketing environment. Enter your info to the right for my free series: Seven Steps to High Converting Copy. Or contact me here.