Books, billboards, news

 

releases, website content,

 

 

 

magazines and magazine

  

articles, posters and

 

displays, newspaper

 

 

columns, surveys, signs,

 

 postcards, brochures, 

 

commercials, promotional

 emails, direct mail, photo

 

captions, jingles, branding

 

themelines, package labels,

  

training curricula, promo

 

literature and exhibit

 materials, webinars, sales

 

presentations, seminars 

  

lyrics, booklets, speeches,

 

 ebooks, blog posts, scripts

 

  business plans, marketing 

 

 strategies, love letters,  

 

manuals, greeting cards,

 

and matchbook covers

  

Ever write any of these yourself? How’d it come out? Did you get the results you wanted? What happened? Are you a skilled writer? An experienced wordsmith? Probably not. If you’re reading posts on this blog site, it’s because you’re an entrepreneur, a small business or professional practice owner, manager, or principal, a student, or a leader.

If you fit any of those kinds of career descriptions, odds are that you are marketing a product, service, or idea (or some combination) and the daily challenges of keeping your business or organization moving forward leaves little room for you to indulge in fantasy of seeing yourself as a talented writer. And you’re smart enough to know when to get help.

One telling characteristic of successful entrepreneurs, in fact, is that they know how to pull their ideas forward while leaving necessary professional services up to professionals they engage — CPA, attorney, management consultant, and more often than not: creative services, especially writers and designers.

Entrepreneurs, after all, are the catalysts of business and the economy. They are agents of change. They serve as mirrors of society wants and needs. They alone are responsible for new job growth (not corporations, and certainly not government). As a result, entrepreneurs are also the most sensitive of business people, and the quickest to recruit outside expertise when they see the need.

Small business owners are far more in touch with reality than their big business counterparts who are obsessed with analyzing what message content and structure communicates best, and sells.

They recognize that one dot or small sweep of a design line, or one word can make the difference between sale and no sale. (And remember, with online content: WORDS are still King!)

Entrepreneurs respect and appreciate the value of expertise.

 

So the list above is not just a teaser or composite of writing applications. It is a list of real business-related (yes, even love letters!) writing needs that most entrepreneurs are confronted with at one time or another. It is also a list of writing applications that anyone you hire to write for you should have experience with, at least most of them.

I know. I’ve written all of the above many times over. And I can tell you that a marketing writer who hasn’t written a book doesn’t know how to tell a story, and stories sell. A website content writer who hasn’t written radio and TV commercials has no sense of writing concise, punchy stuff that’s short, sweet, and memorable . . . and “short, sweet, and memorable” sells!

Someone who’s never written a billboard hasn’t even a clue about how to write branding lines because the discipline is the same:  Aim for 7 words or less and tell a story in those 7 words or less that has a beginning, middle, and ending . . . and is persuasive. Ah, then comes the opposite: Direct mail. In direct mail, the more you tell, the more you sell — that means, literally, a blanket of billboards.

Writing emphasis must always be “you” focused (not “we”). It must attract attention, create interest, stimulate desire, bring about action, and deliver satisfaction. It MUST ALWAYS answer the question: “What’s in it for ME?” All writing –even an instruction manual– represents an opportunity to make a sale and/or create a favorable impression.

The writing you have now?

Does it work as hard as you do?

 

# # #

Hal@Businessworks.US  931.854.0474

Open Minds Open Doors

Many thanks for your visit and God Bless You.

Make today a GREAT day for someone!

BOOK SMARTS!

                                                             

     Business people who read books are smarter by far than those who don’t. Any businesspeople. Any business. Any books. (Source: opinion, based on many years’ experience in the role of a  businessperson, as well as in the roles of author, editor, and publisher.)

     If we are to believe the technologically-heralding reports from popular and questionably-prominent online publishing industry sources that are marching (stampeding?) shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the Internet’s more narcissistic literary agents, paper books are on a suicide mission.

     It is, if you’re listening to their breathless banter, only a matter of time before libraries become mausoleums or are emptied for fireplace kindling (uh, no, wait, that would be too much air pollution, right?). 

     Has hi-tech trespassed on sacred ground? Are books as we know them truly doomed? Will  school and campus backpack industries fold? Without backpacks, will chiropractors go out of business? Will the control of human life by basic plastics industry businesses like American Express, MasterCard and Visa come to an end?

     Will the basic plasticpeople collapse in the face of the all powerful Oz … only to relinquish their control of humanity to more sophisticated plasticpeople? We shall depart from the influences of mere plastic cards to instead be controlled by a consortium of tech babies cranking out the likes of Amazon Kindles, Hearst Skiffs, and Apple iPads?

     First of all, except for the POD (Print On Demand) entrepreneurial upstarts, the  industry— not terribly unlike banking and healthcare — is at least a thousand years behind times. Publishers, editors, agents, literature professors and many writers continue to re-arrange their blankets and umbrellas as the tsunami heads for the beach.

     Many continue to sit on their hands, rocking back and forth, waiting for the new tech revolution to lift them out of their arcane library stacks and into cyberspace where they can look back over their shoulders and count the dead and dying works of fiction and nonfiction that have cornerstoned our planet since the beginning of time.

     But here’s a hefty sprinkling of reality: Paper books will not die in our lifetimes. (Source: opinion, based on many years’ experience in the role of a  businessperson, as well as … uh, did I say that before?) Books as we have always known them , may in fact increase in number and value as tech advances continue to astound even those computer gurus of the 90s.

     Because? Because with even all the books in the world catalogued into a single, lightweight, bendable, rechargeable pad you can carry inside your jacket … there is nothing like a book! And there is especially nothing like a shelf or room full of books to coax first your eyes, then your fingers, into submission. Computerized page-turning replication is not page-turning.

     And nostalgia aside, there is still nothing like being able to open two or six or ten volumes for side-by-side study … to be able to go back and forth to compare and contrast the creations and opinions and research findings in side-by-side reviews of author fantasies and expertise. And can you imagine curling up in front of a warm fire with your dog and a good electronic pad?

     Yes, there are some things, important and dramatic things, like humanness, that technology will never be able to recreate. Books can be accessed via tech readers and go into computerized reading devices. They can be formatted for online reading and downloaded on your printer as ebooks, but the humanness of books can never be replaced. I mean, imagine no “thunk” when you drop one.

Comment below or direct to Hal@BUSINESSWORKS.US Thanks for visiting. Go for your goals! God Bless You! Make it a GREAT Day! Get blog emails FREE via RSS feed OR $1 mo Amazon Kindle. Gr8 Gift 4 GRANDPARENTS: http://bit.ly/3nDlGF