Web Copy Writer

I’ve heard this question from several small business owners lately: “Why have a Facebook page for my business?” As I re-evaluate what I do as a professional copywriter in the age of social media, i.e. the age of user generated content, where the customers create the copy, not the copywriter, I see my role shifting from Copy Writer to Copy Coach. So I take this social media marketing stuff very seriously!

To answer the question of “why,” I made some notes which you’ll find below. If you have anything to add, definitely post a comment! That is social media!

It’s Web 2.0, user generated content (UGC)…people want to talk back to you, and they want to talk to each other about you. Now that is their expectation, that they will be able to. And Facebook enables that.

It’s free.

It works for B2C companies with loyal customers who want to be engaged by the brands they believe in. If you have a ho hum product or service no one gets excited about, a Facebook page is likely a waste of time.

Facebook pages show up in search results, so it can help with your SEO and getting found when people search online.

You can have a vanity URL that’s easy to share and direct people too, like www.facebook.com/yourcompanyname.

Facebook (and Twitter) icons are now commonplace on websites and in emails, encouraging people to fan (or follow) your company. This is still new enough that people will.

For a small business, a Facebook page can replace a website. You can do all the marketing you want via your Facebook page, even solicit email signups. The only thing it can’t do is online transactions (i.e. letting customers buy from you).

If you go this route, your Facebook page is far easier to maintain and update than a website, and you don’t need to pay for hosting.

You can engage prospects and customers in a way you simply can’t with a website or even a blog.

It’s automatically viral. When someone becomes a fan, that shows up on their profile page. And they can easily invite others to be fans. Imagine someone doing anything like that with your website! It’s inconceivable.

Facebook integrates seamlessly with Twitter and blogging. I don’t want to turn this into a “why use Twitter,” but there is an SEO benefit to using Twitter, and when you have your tweets integrated with your Facebook page, you are updating your Facebook page without effort.

I also don’t want to turn this into a “why use blogs for Internet marketing,” but there are several benefits to blogging, among them SEO and credibility. And, like tweeting, your blog can be automatically posted to your Facebook page, keeping content fresh.

Maybe Facebook is going to become a bigger and more important marketing tool than websites. Facebook can be where you engage, build relationships with customers, and market. Your website might only be where business done, downloaded, bought and sold.

Your customers are on Facebook. It’s the third largest “country” in the world in “population.” That’s how many people use Facebook. In the age of social media marketing, guess what? You follow them. You go where the customers are. And the customers are on Facebook.

Still not convinced? Watch this short video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFYPQjYhv8.

And by then I hope the question is: “Why not have a Facebook page for my business?”

Need a Copy Coach to help you get started? Sharon@weknowwords.com standing by…

Sigh...

Why is it people think anyone can be a copywriter? I just did a rush job as a website copywriter trying to save a project for a poor soul with hardly any budget or time. She had been sucked into what I think sounds like a shifty web designer deal. He hired some friend of his to write her website. She didn't like the copy. She turned to me in desperation, with little money and a hard due date of today.

I deleted 90% of the crap I was given that the supposed freelance "copywriter" had done. It wasn't poorly written. It wasn't wrong. But it wasn't doing its job. This guy had gone off on some tangents that while potentially helpful information to a prospect later in the sales cycle were totally irrelevant and useless as far as the website's job: marketing this person.

Not only did I delete most of the thousands of words, I completely redid the sitemap. None of the copy made sense, none of it, not even the structure.

In only seven hours, I did the best I could and the client now thinks I'm a goddess. (I even did some basic SEO, but very little.) But it's not going in my freelance copywriter portfolio because I know how much better it would be if I'd had the time. And this woman has to move forward with a "good enough" website, having wasted money on the schlep.

Too many freelance writers pass themselves off as freelance copy writers. They think because they can write, they can write copy. And people seem too accepting of whatever their writer gives them. So we get literally millions of bad websites, poorly written direct mail, spam instead of email copywriting, ads that do nothing but take up space in a magazine...I could go on and on.

The best copywriter is the copywriter who knows marketing as well as she knows words. And she knows her strengths. I am strong as a:
 

• Website copywriter
• Email copywriter
• Whitepaper writer
• Case study writer
• Newslettter writer

I do not do, because I don't know how to do:
 

• Script writing
• Speech writing
• Presentations (OK, I can do these, I just don't want to)
• True journalism
• Catalog copywriting
• Those convoluted direct mail pieces that have letters and postcards and...

I know my strengths, I know my limitations, and I'm honest about both. Every professional copywriter should be.

People, if you are hiring a freelance copywriter, be picky! Don't assume simply because they say they are a copywriter that they are. Ask for proof. Don't be afraid to question the samples you're given. Expect more.

This is your marketing, your branding, your voice, your reputation. Do you want the best copywriter for the job? Or any ol' freelancer with a laptop?

 

Web writing can be a tricky business for a professional copywriter: You're never quite sure what you're going to be working with for a design, sitemap, clarity of message...I wrote my first website in 1997, if you can believe it, way before I even knew what a professional copywriter was! And in the 13 (gulp) years since then, I don't think I've done two website copywriting projects that were the same.

I really like what we were just able to do for Contract Controllers, a CPA firm, and this was a first for me: They had a set template and sitemap for me to work with, because of the company doing their site. But they were smart enough to know that even with a design that wasn't one-of-a-kind, their message better be! 

So they called me in as their professional copywriter. (Am I being self serving here? Probably, but this blog really is about them!)

They were great to work with, and the project went smoothly for this website copywriter. But I give them kudos for recognizing the need to stand out, to have a unique message.

I was a little frustrated with the company putting together the site because they wouldn't let us use unique Title tags (critical for SEO!). And certain elements couldn't be changed. But for the most part as the freelance website copywriter, I'm a happy camper because Contract Controllers got a decent looking site that tells their story.

See the site at http://www.contractcontrollers.com.

As a freelance copywriter who helps out clients with small business marketing, I am constantly on the lookout for new information to pass along to copywriting clients, especially as social media takes center stage.

I'm already pushing blogs as marketing tools, but these days I'm looking out for nuggets on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, trying to wrap my head around how these tools can be put to use for small business marketing.

So this article of using Facebook for your small business caught my eye when someone retweeted it, but it's more of the same: talking about the how, but not the why, and definitely not about the "how to make money" part of the how.

I'm a copywriter, yes. Words are my business. Web writing is my business. Email copywriting is my business. But I also owe it to my copywriting clients to be up to speed on other marketing channels, so I can make sure my work as freelance copywriter fits with their other marketing efforts.

What small business folks lack more than anything are time and money. What they need more than anything is sound advice.

And that doesn't mean telling them how to set up a Facebook page, and to make sure they have lots of friends and family to get to follow them. That means telling them how to make money, how to market their business and convert prospects to customers using Facebook.

But sadly that means looking beneath the surface of the shiny new thing that is Facebook. And articles like this only encourage more small business folks to jump on the Facebook bandwagon, wasting precious time on a tool they don't know how to use let alone necessarily need.

Am I simply grumpy because I didn't get to ride my horse today? Or am I grumpy because I too am a small business owner and I wants facts, not Facebook.
 

I just got off a conference call for a new website copywriter project. I call these kickoff calls, and I warn my new copywriting clients that they will be answering a lot of questions during such a call. That's because of my mantra about talking to customers, not at them. The only way I as the freelance copywriter can truly write to the customer is by understanding where the customer is coming from, his pain points and challenges, her worldview.

During the past hour, I didn't ask a single question about the services provided by my web writing client. I only asked about their customers. And in doing so, I learned about the services offered...from the customer's point of view. That's exactly what I want, as the copywriter, to tell my client's story from the point of the customer.

And it was a great call because more than once I'd ask a question and the client would pause, say, "That's a great question!" then give me a very thoughtful and insightful answer...because they had to think about it! That tells me it's good info for me, as the copywriter!

Talking to your customers, not at them. It's not hard. It's just different. And effective.

Here’s another analogy for proving marketing is like dating: Think of personal ads. Why? Because words can woo.

Even with online dating sites like Match.com, you don’t rely solely on the photos. Heck, plenty of people (mostly men for some reason) don’t even put up photos. The words still matter. You read someone’s profile and decide if it resonates with you or not.

Let’s take search engines and search results as an example…

Like your personal ad, you can write these to say anything you want, as long as they also have the search terms you want to get found for. The goal of this search result is first, to get found, and second, to get someone to click through and go to your site, for this copy to resonate with the prospect. You don’t get to use any pictures, so it’s like the personal ads of old, when people put their ads in newspapers.

Now think of the search result someone gets when searching on Google, using the We Know Words copywriting Website as our example. Type Seattle copywriter into Google and sure enough, We Know Words is on the first page (under that horrid local search map, gads I hate those things!).

What people get for a search result is the title tag and description I’ve written for a particular page on the We Know Words Website. In my case, this is really bad, I don’t know that it would resonate with anyone, honestly…  

Marketing writer - Seattle copywriter portfolio of web writing and ...

Copywriting portfolio of ads, brochures, case studies, datasheets, emails, Web content and more showcases the singular talents of the marketing writers at ...

But besides the fact that this Seattle copywriter is maybe acting like the cobbler whose children have no shoes, my advice is still sound. J Have your copywriter, whether freelance or in-house, write your website copy, brochure copy, email copywriting, whatever it is, as if she were copywriting a personal ad.

If I were to rewrite my title tag and description as a personal ad, keeping in mind that I have to achieve both search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion (getting people to click on the link and go to my site), I could do it as:

Marketing writer - Seattle copywriter portfolio of web writing and ...

Searching for a stellar freelance Seattle copywriter? See complete portfolio of print copywriting, email copywriting, Web copywriting and more.

I want to keep marketing writer in the Title tag, because it ranks well in Google, but I’m pushing Seattle copywriter as a keyword a bit more so it’s in there twice now. That’s my SEO. But I also made it more action oriented.

OK, maybe not the best example of having your copywriter write marketing ads, but like the cobbler, this copywriter has to get some client work done! No more indulging in blogging for now!

My friend Mavis is a freelance copywriter like me. But she calls herself a story teller. And it's true. Copywriters are story tellers. Companies hire us copywriters to tell their stories on their Websites, in their email marketing, in their blogs...at least the smart companies do.  

People love stories. Maybe it’s because for most of human existence, we’ve relied on oral traditions to pass along information, lore and lessons. Whatever the reason, watch a room full of children enraptured by a story teller, and you’ll see that same attention given to a compelling speaker standing before a room full of adults…if he or she is telling a story.

Here’s a recent example that makes my copywriter point so well, I will simply…tell the story!

Last month I went with a friend to visit his friends, a family of four in Idaho. It was a nine-hour drive from Seattle to their little town of 1,500 residents, and their impressive 32-acre spread. Among the two kids, four dogs, 13 horses and more cats than I could count were 300 chickens being raised for eggs and meat. Matt, the patriarch of this affair, works 50 miles away in the city of Boise. He trucks in cartons of eggs when he heads to the city for people to buy, but people also come to their place to buy the fryers.

When he first started this little side business, he was shocked not only to find out that people would pay $20 for a chicken, but that they’d drive 50 miles from the city to do so. In his mind, the economics just didn’t work out as far as the real cost of that little fryer.

As he told me, the Seattle copywriter, this story, I wasn't surprised at all. I was rather envious that I didn't have more copywriting clients like Matt, with stories that just tell themselves...

That's because those customers are buying so much more than that fryer! They are buying the whole experience of driving out to the country. They are buying the chance to interact with a real country boy (because even at 46, Matt is still very much a country boy!). They are buying a chicken that lived a healthy, wholesome, natural life…as opposed to a factory raised one.

The first time a customer asked if the chicken she was buying had lived a good life, Matt thought she was kidding. She wasn’t. And I’m not surprised. It’s all part of the story.

The story. It’s all about the story. Whether you’re talking about chickens or Hummers, it’s all about the story. The one we tell ourselves as part of the buying process. The one we experience as we buy. The one we tell others about our purchase. We humans love stories.

We copywriters love stories too. Wheter it's Web writing or brochure copywriting, story telling makes our work more fun and more effective.

So go forth, copywriters and marketers, and tell those stories! We're listening!
 

Note: This Seattle copywriter has been cleaning up a very cluttered We Know Words copywriting Web site. I’ve deleted a ton of files and pages and consolidated and made it much more manageable. I see now what Gerry McGovern means by being a “putter upper.” If blogs had been as easy (and if I’d understood them as well) back in 2002, I would have built a blog to market my copywriter services, not a Web site! Anyway, as I streamline the We Know Words Web site, I find stuff I don’t want to get rid of, so I’m moving it here to this copywriting blog instead. Plus I came across this little plug, and realized I might not have ever plugged my marketing tips ebook in this copywriting blog, oops! OK, enough preface…

Most small business owners can't afford professional marketing help. Nor do they know enough about marketing to do it well. That's why I compiled this ebook, "Marketing in a Minute."

Small business owners want to grow their companies. But growth requires sales, and sales require marketing, and many small business owners struggle with marketing... and time. So they don't necessarily have the skills, nor do they have the time to learn how to do the marketing.

That's where these marketing tips come in. They are short, easy to digest and easy to apply. Without investing in any expensive marketing program. "Marketing in a Minute" offers 104 such marketing tips, written for the realities of small business budget and time constraints.

So where does a marketing ebook crammed full of 104 marketing tips come from? Does one just sit down and write it? Not in this case. It took years to create this book...

In 2002, I took my copywriting prowess and started writing weekly tips and dispensing them via email to small business owners who desperately needed marketing help but couldn't afford to hire a marketing agency like We Know Words. The marketing tips were deliberately short and basic, but offered new ideas for those too focused on running a business to be a real marketer. The tips were nothing fancy, just text and just enough to fit in one's Preview screen. They covered print, Web writing, email marketing and more. I dubbed them "Sharon's Marketing Minutes" and made sure each one could be read in a minute or less. (Hence the title, "Marketing in a Minute.")

I wrote the weekly tips for almost 2 1/2 years until I ran out of time, but not out of ideas. The feedback was always so positive, and more than one subscriber confessed to archiving the marketing tips for future reference. When I announced that I was going to stop writing the marketing tips due to lack of time, many subscribers emailed to say, "Put the tips together in a book."

It took years, but most of the marketing tips are now gathered together into one extremely useful resource for small business owners and those in charge of marketing for a small business.

When I first fell for a cowboy, a friend teasingly sent me a link to a Garth Brooks song about whatcha going to do with a cowboy. And it’s has been stuck in my mind the past few days but with “website” instead of cowboy. Here’s why…

Sunday night at a wedding reception, I fell into a conversation with the owner of a medical billing company. Although she and her partner have a successful and growing small business, they do not have a website. Usually I avoid talking about work at social events, but small business marketing is a subject near and dear to my heart so I couldn’t help myself. I talked shop…

Because they’ve grown without one, they haven’t felt a website was necessary, and I explained that maybe they don’t need one but suggested reasons why they might.

For example, all their business comes from referrals and word of mouth. A website can be a great first introduction. I know people looking for a Seattle copywriter almost always look at the We Know Words website before they contact me for copywriting. And that works well for both me as copywriter and them as prospect: My website is a pre-qualifier. If you don’t like the attitude all over it, you probably won’t like my customer-centric approach to copywriting (as opposed to generic, me too copywriting and web writing).

with a website, this company could give a sales pitch to potential customers by having a website these prospects could go to after getting a referral.

And that can save time. Instead of prospects calling the small business to ask questions about their services and rates, they could get the answers themselves by going to the website.

In talking to the small business owner further about the idea of a site, it turns out there’s a lot of information they need to update clients with on a regular basis, and she realized the website could work for that. Plus I pointed out they could use an RSS feed to push the updates out or at least to let clients know there’s new information.

Small business marketing doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. But it doesn’t have to be copycat either. Maybe the smart approach is to first figure out what you want to do, then look at how a website could help you do it. A website just for the sake of a website is silly. But a website that helps you sell and saves you time and lets you do a better job of serving clients makes a lot of sense.

Is it time to revisit your small business website and make sure it’s pulling its weight? Is there some function you could have your website do to save you or staff the time of doing it?

Whatcha gonna do with that website?

And I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with that cowboy!

If you already know how to harness the technology, this program will teach you how to choose one marketing tool over another based on sound business principles. If you're still completely oblivious about how best to put email marketing, blogging, SEO, web analytics and more to work, then here's your chance for an overview that won't help you master all these online marketing tools, but will help you know enough to make sound marketing decisions.

A program like this is great for people already working in marketing, and I'm so glad they started it! But we still need to be teaching interactive marketing at the college level too. I wonder how long until that happens?

It’s often my job as copywriter to figure out what the benefits are; clients are too close to their products and services to see clearly.

This week I’ve been working on an email marketing campaign for a series of whitepapers. It’s much easier for me to play the role of customer and distill what the benefits of each whitepaper are. The existing messaging emphasizes the so-called features, what the whitepaper “is.” The outsider (i.e. copywriter or marketing writer) can much more easily figure out the benefits, what I call the “so you can” parts: “Read this whitepaper so you can…” What is the end result of downloading and reading a whitepaper? That’s what the customer wants to know, not the content of the whitepaper, but what she’ll be able to do if she reads it.

And it makes me laugh how often I walk into a situation where the marketing team is just scratching their heads, trying to come up with the real benefit, and I can sum it up right away. That’s because I have the outsider’s view.

Too many companies pay too little attention to their copy. They keep it in-house, they trust the marketing people to do the copywriting. They end up with me-too Web sites and ineffective marketing campaigns. Then they wonder why their marketing does such a poor job of generating leads! Hint: It’s probably talking at customers, not to them, because it’s too subjective.

Maybe that’s why I’m becoming such an advocate for blogging as a marketing tool? Blogging by its very nature is more focused (or should be) on information that’s useful to the customer. It can unintentionally sell just by being real and authentic and objective.

This morning as I put on my copywriter hat and started on a project for a new client, I first reviewed their brand guidelines…and have been itching to blog about it ever since. In my opinion, your brand is more than your logo. Your brand--your marketing--is everything you say, do, wear. It’s how your employees act, how well your product delivers on your marketing promise…everything.

And as a copywriter, I firmly believe that your words are part of your brand, in all your marketing communications: your email marketing, your web writing, your print collateral. Yet in all the brand guidelines I’ve reviewed in my eight years as a copywriter, only once was voice addressed.

This particular brand guideline even says in there “Our Brand, Our Voice” yet there’s no mention of voice. It offers up 9 pages on the logo, typeface and colors, showing exactly how to use, not to use, going into details of file formats and more. But no examples of messaging or voice other than describing the brand personality with words like “agile” and “synergy” but without any examples of how to do copywriting that fits the brand. Which is akin to telling someone how to bake a cake and telling them to use eggs, flour and sugar…with no more direction than that.

Your logo alone won’t tell your story. You need words that work.

My corporate and personal taxes are finally done, yay! Thanks, Rick!! And I now have two bills to pay, one for each. Rick is a doll and keeps his costs down for me, but still his rate is $200/hour and he’s worth every penny because I know my taxes will be done right. I’m paying for his time and knowledge, but also his experience…which is hard to price at all!

As I work through my divorce, I am paying my lawyer $175/hour. (Don’t tell the lawyer what the accountant is charging or else his rate will go up to match it!) As my “ex” and I navigate the complications of a “dissolution of marriage” in the county we live in, where people with kids jump through lots of hoops to get divorced, I know my lawyer’s also worth his hourly rate. He knows the system, and he knows how to work with couples who have lots of difficult discussions to work through. Again, I’m paying for time and knowledge, but also 20+ years of experience as a family law attorney.

And that’s what copywriters sell: their time and their knowledge, but ultimately their experience. In a word, their expertise. And the more experienced and knowledgeable the copywriter, the higher the hourly rate should be, whether you’re paying her for email marketing or Web writing, a case study or an online press release.

About half the time we are asked for a copywriting estimate, we don’t get the job because the prospect doesn’t want to pay the price. (Note: We’d prefer to know the budget upfront so we can just tell the prospect what we can do within that budget, but somewhere it is written that budgets are to be guessed at, not disclosed! Silly people.) For me, it’s a filter. If someone doesn’t recognize the value in what we’re selling, I don’t want to do business with them anyway. Every freelance copywriter I’ve ever talked to agrees it’s the clients spending the least money who take up the most time!!

For those businesses who choose to scrimp on the copywriter, and plenty do, the results are typically less than stellar: email newsletters that don’t deliver, Web sites that don’t convert, direct mail goes directly into the recycle bin. That’s because you get what you pay for.

Just like my accountant, lawyer and saddle are all worth the money they cost, so is a great copywriter.

Thanks to my annoying friend Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware, I finally saw the light about blogging back in July. He had been after me for two years to blog, but it wasn’t until I got the whole search engine optimization part of it that it made sense to me to do so. I stopped writing my email newsletter and started blogging instead. (Side note: I have recently decided to do both because they are different mediums and I like delivery my copywriting message both ways. Email me at sharon@weknowwords.com if you want to get the newsletter, I’m aiming for a June start.)

Once I started blogging though, I found myself going back and forth between blogging for SEO and blogging as a means of putting useful, relevant information out into the world. The latter is always my primary goal, to further my cause of convincing marketers to talk to customers not at them, but then I want people to find the blog too, so they get the message which leads me back to keywords and SEO and…can you see where I’m going with this?

It has been like a flip flop, until I finally realized that it was no different than writing Web copy for a client. When the copywriters at We Know Words take on a Web writing project, we first write the copy regardless of the keywords so we can master the tone, message, voice, length, etc. Then after the client and the copywriter are both happy, we go back and optimize the text using keywords. (We also get more natural sounding Web writing that way. I can usually tell when a Web page was written with keywords and SEO top of mind.

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve definitely seen how it can help one win search wars. (See other blog posts on “soap is dumb.”) But to really create a win win for all, the blogger’s challenge is to find the balance between the search and the reader.

A common problem I’ve seen ever since I started Web writing is people getting stuck on keywords. That’s because clients have a hard time thinking of the keywords in terms of the words their prospects use when searching online.

Clients want to use descriptive words, words drawn from their marketing collateral. They lean towards the words they use when thinking and talking about their product or service. Either that or they want to use really big, broad keywords that won’t get them anywhere in Google.

Here’s an easy way to change your frame of reference when beginning to brainstorm keywords: Think pain points and problem solving.

Consider your prospects’ mindset when they are searching. Your prospects are online using Google or Yahoo or some other search engine because they have a problem. It might be that they want Indian food for dinner. The pain is lack of knowledge because they want samosas and abu gobi, but they don’t know where to find a local Indian restaurant. They can solve the problem if they can find a restaurant close by. Your site will get found if you use keywords like Indian restaurant, Kent, WA 98032 or East Hill Indian food, etc. (the idea is to be geographical because that’s how they’re thinking).

It might be that they are troubleshooting their business intelligence (BI) software. The pain is the software isn’t working the way they want, and they are trying to solve the problem by looking for technical answers online. You can get found if you use keywords around troubleshooting, maybe mention specific problems…and when they land at your site, you can start selling them on YOUR BI software as better than the one they’re having problems with.

I have found lately that I spend so much time thinking about SEO and keywords and Web writing that I’m losing touch with how most marketers think about search engine optimization but I hope this brief blog helps!

Christmas cards have lost their meaning. In fact, I dread them because I have to figure out which ones can be recycled and which are all metallic and can’t. Oh, and I can’t recycle those photo cards either, nor do I keep them. It’s not that I’m Ebenezer, I love Christmas! But not the meaningless cards that add to the clutter of my life without adding to the spirit of the season. Really, how many cards did you receive this year from people you really wanted to hear from and otherwise wouldn’t? Here are my favorites useless cards from this past month:

• A photo card from a family I don’t know or even recognize in the photo (cute picture though!)
• A card from a former client who chose not to work with our copywriting agency any longer…and he didn’t sign the card, some assistant did
• A card from someone I have met briefly at a three chamber events and never said more than 10 words to
• The usual card from my cousin in Ohio who won’t respond to any emails asking what’s up, how’s life, but sends a card each year…without any note or anything

Let’s face it: Christmas cards have become obligatory and automatic. They are no longer the thoughtful communication of holidays past.

And you know where I’m going with this, right? Yep. Marketing. In many ways, marketing has lost its meaning too. It’s done on automatic pilot without much thought (sometimes without any thought at all).

Is your company marketing to people who don’t even want to hear from you? Are you assuming more of a relationship than really exists? Are you marketing AARP memberships to people in their 30s? In short, are you wasting money on pointless marketing?

This year, resolve to be relevant. Practice meaningful marketing.

• Send email newsletters only to people who’ve said “yes” and opted in
• Make sure your newsletter copywriter gives people useful information
• Target your marketing—Know thy audience
• Clean your lists
• Only market to prospects that make sense (Hint: the fact that someone is human does not automatically make them a prospect)
• Blog—If people like what you have to say, they’ll come back. Even small businesses can reap huge rewards from blogging (more on this in later marketing blogs)
• Make sure your Web writing meets your Web site visitors’ needs

Etc., etc., etc. Before your next direct mail project, before your freelance copywriter starts typing, before you lay out that email marketing campaign, ask yourself if you can make your marketing more meaningful.

Oh, and maybe do the same before sending out cards next Christmas too.