Marketing Writing Resources for Creative Copywriters

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"You can't sit around and wait for inspiration," said Jack London. "You have to go after it with a club." Pick up your club (your pencil, your laptop, your sketchbook) and let's go. Whatever your particular challenge, these 10 strategies can help you innovate—on a deadline.

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Blogging is a phenomenon that can no longer be ignored by today's competitive companies. So how does your company best harness the power of blogs? Here are common-use cases for any organization.

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Without working too hard, company management can cultivate a cadre of enemies within the press. To do the task well, however, you should follow a set of 13 simple guidelines that will ensure that you alienate many, or most, of the Fourth Estate.

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If you've ever heard George Carlin's famous "Seven Dirty Words" you can't say on TV, you can safely avoid using all seven in your subject lines. They will definitely get you blocked. Here are 100 more you should avoid using as well.

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You're rolling out a marketing campaign. Launching a product. Revitalizing your brand. What's the big idea? Not to sound flippant, but you need one. Because without it, it's likely your campaign, product launch, or brand repositioning won't be memorable—or particularly effective. Here's where to start.

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PowerPoint recently (and quietly) celebrated its 20th birthday. Why do some people love it while others passionately hate it? And how can we learn from its strength and its limitations, to be better and more effective communicators?

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The Search Engine Optimization market is over $10 billion in North America alone. The biggest question isn't whether you should utilize Search, but rather who will manage your campaigns. What should your organization do? It depends. When you review your options for in-house or outsourced Search or pay-per-click bid management, consider the following.

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There are two of the things you need to do with an effective sales page: You need to write a strong sales message, and you need to minimize the perception of risk. In other words, you need to write compelling sales copy, at the same time keeping anxiety levels at a minimum. Here's how.

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There is a healthy respect and fear-factor surrounding the blogosphere, een for those of us with some background in online community building. So let's start with some baby steps. Step one: Listen first, and then join the conversation.

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If you want to be cutting edge, the way to do it is with audio and video.

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Whether you're attempting to position a company or product as a category leader, gain permission from a community to make changes, or push a law through the legislature, PR needs to tell interesting yet believable stories that make the target audience consider a new perspective or see the sponsor in a new light.

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If you practice Internet marketing, you know the importance of a high-converting "landing page"—also called a promotional page, jump page, or squeeze page. Regardless of the specific purpose, one fact remains the same—you want the user to take some type of action. Here are seven landing-page best practices for increasing conversion rates and getting users to take the action you're hoping for.

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The sales playbook captures your company's knowledge about its markets, value propositions, offers, competitors, and best practices. These are the very elements that fall within the marketing organization's domain, which is why marketing plays a strategic role in developing the playbook.

CONTENT TYPE: Article | TOPIC: Writing

Recently, we have been seeing more and more emails that take the "instant best buddy" approach: You sign up for some information on a site, and minutes later you receive a breathless email and hear how the author has just taken his kids to the beach, but simply had to rush home and share some terribly important news about an upcoming product launch. It's tempting to dismiss these emails. But here's the thing: They work.

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The social media landscape over the last year or so has changed dramatically. Companies that were once skeptical about tools such as blogs are now blogging or considering starting one. Unfortunately, many companies that do so still have little idea of how to grow their blog into an integral part of their marketing efforts. Here are eight easy steps you can take to grow your blog's readership.

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UCLA Professor Albert Mehrabian is best known for his 7%-38%-55% Rule. It states that 55% of communication is attributable to non-verbal behaviors like body language and facial expressions; 38% of communication is attributable to voice, including volume, tone, pitch, cadence, and quality; and only 7% of communication is attributable to the words used. Yet companies continue to pile on the Web text in the hope that search engines will index it and someone might actually read it... even though many Web site visitors merely scan for headlines, bulleted points, and captions.

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Over one-third of employers have eliminated a candidate because of "digital dirt"—information about you online that is either unflattering or inconsistent with the image you would like to portray. Digital dirt could be preventing you from getting interviews and ultimately landing your ideal job. So if you have digital dirt, it's time to clean up your act. Here's the three-step process.

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Landing pages have become the Omega-3s of Web marketing: if you're not using them and optimizing them ad infinitum, you're squandering your online ad dollars. Or so the landing page optimization crowd would have you believe. In the spirit of probing the pros and cons of this popular post-click marketing format—and, okay, doing a little tongue-in-cheek myth busting—we offer our take of the top 5 best and worst things about landing pages, in contrast to multi-page landing paths.

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An effective online content strategy, artfully executed, drives action. Organizations that use online content well have a clearly defined goal—to sell products, generate leads, or get people to join a community, vote, or donate money—and they deploy a content strategy that directly contributes to reaching that goal.

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A use case, often created for product development, is commonly used to capture functional requirements. A use case provides one or more scenarios for how a solution/system/product/service achieves a specific business goal. From this perspective, then, another way to think about a use case is as a usage scenario. With a little modification, a use case can be transformed into an extraordinary sales-enablement tool.