Let’s face it: it’s hard to resist the offer for something free.

Instead of viewing this as an innate weakness of the modern human, you can use this natural law to help lure and win over perspective clients. But if you plan to use freebies as part of your marketing strategy , make sure you do it right—otherwise, it might backfire and end up hurting your business.

Make Free Offers Work for You

To ensure that your foray into the world of free offers eventually helps your bottom line, take the time to follow these guidelines.

• Give something valuable in your freebie. In many cases, the freebies you offer will be the thing that gets you in the door with potential clients—your chance to make a first impression. You want to demonstrate that you are someone worthy of their time and money by providing a freebie that has real value (in other words, something that people would pay for). Just how much value are we talking here? See below.

• Don’t give too much away. If you give clients everything they can expect to pay you for, they’ll have no reason to actually hire you. To prevent yourself from going overboard, try offering a freebie that focuses on a narrow, limited topic within your larger field.

• Know your goals. Ultimately, your goal with a freebie is to convince a client to hire you . You can accomplish that goal by thinking in terms of the sub-goals your freebies should help you accomplish: build your list of qualified potential clients, spread your name, establish yourself as an expert, and build the know / like / trust factor with prospectives. If your freebie is not achieving at least one of these sub-goals, it’s time to rethink what you’re offering.

• Get something in exchange. As far as potential clients are concerned, you offer is “free.” But you understand that you’re getting something valuable, too, even if it’s only an email address. That address represents an open, direct line of communication between you and prospective buyers.

• Work with future freebies in mind. As your business evolves, the freebies you offer clients will change, too. Work with this in mind. A series of blog posts, for example, can be tweaked and turned into an eBook or a free report. A (free) telecall or a webinar you host can be given away later on CDs or MP3s as free recordings. You might host an online class for free, then make the video available as a future freebie.

Keep The Long View in Mind

In order to use freebies effectively, it’s essential to think about the long term. Your free offer is just the first gesture in what can be a number of long, mutually satisfying relationships with excellent clients.

Have you used freebies to effectively draw in new clients? We’d love to hear

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. How to Get Prospects & Customers to Take Your Survey
2. Creative Ways to Mix Up Your Marketing Plan This New Year’s

Imagine yourself on a road trip, reaching a large desert. You’ve got choices about how to get past it: go around it to the left (mountains), to the right (a river), or straight through. Any way will get you where you want to go—as long as you prepare yourself correctly and stick with the path you choose.

Developing an online marketing strategy  is a little like choosing your path around the desert—and following through with that strategy is as important as sticking to your chosen path if you want to achieve your goals as quickly as possible. Here’s why.

Obstacles Happen

Whether you’re traveling across the country or expanding your business’s online presence  as part of your growth strategies, you’re bound to run into obstacles. If there were not obstacles, you wouldn’t have to make plans in the first place—things would just happen perfectly.

When you’re in the thick of those obstacles, though (e.g. your email list hasn’t grown at all or nobody has bought your newly priced packages or your interested prospects aren’t following through), it can be hard to get perspective. And it can be very tempting to blame your strategy, quit where you are, and start over.

If and when you get to such a place of frustration, take a time to remind yourself of the following.

You’ve Already Invested Your Resources

Your time and money are what have made your current marketing strategy possible. If you change gears in the middle, you’ll have to re-invest all that time and money. No shortcuts.

You Chose This Path for a Reason!

Do you trust yourself to make decisions in the best interest of your business? Then take a deep breath and do the following…

• Review the process you went through to develop your current marketing strategy. If the reasoning looks solid, take another deep breath and keep following through with your plans.

• Adjust your expectations. If you aren’t seeing results at the rate you projected, revisit your plan and tweak your expected outcomes. This will help keep you from feeling overwhelmed about under-performing.

• Evaluate the pieces. Do you have the right people on your email lists ? Are you optimizing and tagging blog posts correctly? Are you crystal clear about your target audience? Does your copy need work? It’s possible to have a stellar marketing plan that’s being held back by one piece of the puzzle. Look at the nitty-gritty to find out if and where you’re going wrong.

• Be patient. Marketing strategies don’t work overnight. That’s why they’re not called marketing miracles. Give results some time.

As you plan for the future, think of your marketing strategy like an exclusive relationship: you don’t want to enter it lightly, you need to work to maintain it, and you don’t want to throw it all away on a whim.

What marketing roadblocks make you want to throw in the towel?

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. 5 Essential Qualities for Your Professional Online Marketing Strategist
2. How to Maximize Online Marketing Efforts
3. The Importance of Human Interaction on Social Media

When you check your email, chances are there are plenty of messages you delete without ever opening. Why? Because you aren’t interested in what they contain. They’re junk mail or they’re trying to sell you something, or maybe you just know they’re going to be boring.

And then there are the ones you ALWAYS open—because you know they’ll either contain important information, they’ll give you instructions about something you need to take care of (online bill-pay, anyone?), or they’ll entertain you.

When you work on email campaigns for your business, one of your goals should be to compose emails that your list can’t wait to get—the ones that they open no matter what. Here are a few pointers for getting to that place with the emails you send.

Creating Killer Email Campaigns

• Let your personality show. Emails aren’t research papers—they shouldn’t bore your list. Let your voice come out, and you’ll be more likely to connect with your readers. If you aren’t inclined toward writing, open a blank document and just start typing your thoughts until you get into a rhythm that feels like comfortable speech. Once you hit that stride, start writing content that can be converted into an email. Remember that you can always edit—just let the juices flow on the first draft.

• Talk to your list. It’s human nature to be interested in yourself more than anyone else. Take advantage of this by speaking to your readers, about your readers in the mail you send them. Rather than focusing on how you fit into whatever you’re writing about, focus on how it affects them.

• Spend some time on your subject lines. Even if your email content is crisp, clear, and sparkling with wit, your list will never see it if they don’t open the message. Devote some time to developing subject lines that grab attention and communicate succinctly what you need to say. This takes some effort, but mastering it is well worth the investment.

• Entertain, inform, or inquire. Don’t feel like you have to send emails to your list just for the heck of it. If you send too many pointless messages, people will learn to discard your electronic letters without opening them. Each of your emails should achieve at least one of three things: entertain your readers, inform your readers (of something worth knowing), or inquire about something (that your readers would be eager to talk about). Ultimately, the goal of these emails will likely also be to sell something; doing at least one of the former will improve your odds of doing the latter.

• Be clear and direct. Respect your list by being as direct and informative as possible in as little space as possible. If you include links in your email, identify where those links will send readers and what they might see on that page.

Emails, of course, are one element of a larger marketing campaign , and as such should help establish and expand the know, like, and trust factor with your list.

Have you encountered any excellent (or sub-par) emails recently? Tell us about them!

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. How to Get Your Email Read by Your List
2. Mix Up Your Email Format To Get A Response
3. How to Segment Your List to Generate Desired Results

If you and your team are scratching your heads trying to come up with new marketing content each month, of if you feel as if you’ve about wrung dry the subjects you write about, chances are the people reading your marketing materials will notice.

But fear not, fair readers: there are plenty of ways to inject life into your online content so that you can keep your readers hooked.

Keep It Interesting by Switching Things Up

Variety is the spice of life. It’s also the lifeblood of compelling online content. As you compose online marketing materials, keep things interesting by including a mixture of formats, which might include any of these…

• Testimonials: In email campaigns, testimonials (video or written) can break up a series of missives that might begin to feel redundant to both your end and your readers’. Schedule a testimonial email near the middle of a campaign to breathe life into it.
• Case Studies: A great way to add variety to blog posts is with case studies  of people in your industry, clients, peers, or others you know whose experiences are relevant to what you do. You can present case studies a number of ways; casual interviews work well for many blogs.
• Analysis Ezines: Research universities are constantly conducting scientific studies and publishing their results. A quick Google search of terms relevant to your industry should uncover any recent findings, which you can then analyze and comment on in an ezine. Statistics and newly solidified findings make great source material, because they both qualify as “news” and relate to your business.
• Guest Blogs: Ask for guest blog posts from someone whose point of view will complement your blog’s. A peer who works with a slightly different set of clients, a satisfied client who’s succeeding with your help, or a person from a field that overlaps with your own can all provide intriguing additions to your blog. As a bonus, you’ll probably develop some nice links between your blog and your guest’s—especially if you’re asked to reciprocate.
• Industry-Specific Analysis: Scouring news sites is a great way to find fodder for online content. To avoid regurgitating stories that have already appeared in dozens of news outlets, try providing unconventional, industry-specific analysis—in other words, write about the news topic as it relates to your business. While it may be difficult at first to see links between what you do and what the stars are up to, providing compelling commentary will get easier as you practice.
• Use pictures: This may sound like silly advice, but online readers tend to be more initially intrigued when they have a relevant visual (or two) to accompany what they’re reading.

What strategies have you used to grab the attention of your online audience, and what results did you see?

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. What Poetry Can Teach Us about Writing Marketing Content
2. To Syndicate Your Unique Content Or Not?
3. The Importance of Sticking with Your Online Marketing Strategy

It’s not exactly news that the first of the year is a great time to make some changes. In fact, we at Copy Doodle are planning some tweaks for 2012. In addition to updating our blog’s header, we’re going to streamline the sidebars and start including different angles in our copy (stay tuned to see all these exciting changes in action!).

If you’re also ready to mark the New Year with changes to your marketing plan, read on for some of our top suggestions.

Refreshers for Your Marketing Plan

Whether you need to see a jump in sales or you’re just tired of the same old thing, try some of these switcheroos…

·      Rebranding: Sometimes, it’s all in the name. Even if the handles you chose seemed exactly right when you first christened your products, it may be time for an overhaul now. Bonus: rebranding can include changing the look and exact contents of a service or product package you offer. Consider shuffling things around or highlighting different aspects of your offering. One word of caution about rebranding, though: do it too often, and you’ll confuse your target audience. Talk with your team or your mentor before taking any major rebranding steps.

·      Promoting: How’s your advertising campaign doing? If you’re ready to see better conversion rates, try revamping where and how you advertise your product. This might include buying banner ads online, starting a blog or e-newsletter, becoming more active on Twitter or Facebook, or hiring a new copywriter or marketing professional. Unless you’re bowled over by the astounding success of your current advertising efforts, you probably have room to grow. The New Year is a great time to start.

·      Repackaging: Reconsider the products or services you offer. Would it make sense to add more post-purchase support to some of them? Remove it from others? Take into account client feedback you’ve gotten and shuffle your offerings around. Then adjust prices accordingly.

·      Relocating: Is it time to start putting your offerings in front of different audiences? Do you need to start traveling to groups of your ideal clients to hawk your services in person? If you’re looking for ways to change things up, don’t forget to take location into account—your location, the location of your ads, and the location of your potential clients.

·      Offering freebies: If you’re not currently offering freebies (such as audio downloads, newsletters, reports, e-zines, initial consultations, etc.), 2012 might be the time to start. Free offers get clients in the door and give them a chance to know, like, and trust you so they feel more comfortable buying.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure to go in with a plan! Haphazard marketing adjustments will likely create more problems than they will solve!

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. 7 Ways to Generate More Creative Web Copy to Ignite Interest in Prospects
2. Are You a Hobbyist or Business Owner? The Answer Will Direct Your Marketing Plan
3. The Essential Components of Any Successful Marketing Campaign

We all want roughly the same thing from our marketing campaigns: tangible evidence that the money and time we invested earned us some returns. While individual marketing campaign goals vary widely, most fit under that broad umbrella.

So the question is: how can you develop a marketing campaign that pays off? Any successful marketing venture includes three basic elements. Tweak and apply these to your next campaign and watch the profits roll in.

Researching Your Target Audience

The target market for your products or services is the target audience for your marketing campaign. To sell to this group of people, you need to know them inside and out by understanding their hopes, desires, fears, and needs. Audience research should include…

• Surveys, which you can give through emails, on social media, or as part of your sales process. Be sure to up the odds that clients will complete your surveys!
• Direct questions, which you can ask in person (at events or places your audience frequents), on social media, on blogs, or through email. Spend time making sure your questions are clear and will elicit useful answers.
• Conversations. In person, through social media, or otherwise, take time to interact with your audience. Listen what they have to say. Get off topic. You’ll discover valuable information you may never have thought to look for.

Developing Your Message

Once you understand the very soul of your target audience, you need to develop a marketing message that speaks to its hopes, desires, fears, and needs—or some combination of these. This process may take a little time, but nailing your message is worth the effort—your audience will respond when you hit the right nerves.

Once you decide what you want to say about your products or services and how you want to say it, it’s time to get the message out there. Depending on how you can best reach your target audience, you may want to consider…

• Pitching story ideas (related to your offerings) to various publications that your target audience reads.
• Buying ad space (online, on the radio, in the newspaper—wherever your research points you).
• Designing emails and newsletters that get the word out.
• Setting up a booth at an event where members of your target audience will be present.
• Spreading the word through affiliate marketing.

The right message in the right place will connect with members of your target audience—getting to this point, though, will take some time!

Mastering the Art of Timing

You don’t want to launch your perfect wrapping paper campaign the day after Christmas. Timing, of course, plays a major role in whether or not your message and location are appropriate.

The good news is that if you’ve done your target audience research well, you should be in touch with seasonal fluctuations on your target audience’s wants and needs. And in the 24-hour marketing world of the Internet, you can even tap into the subtle ways time of day might impacts them!

Putting It All Together

Hitting these three notes just right takes more time and energy than substituting some guesswork. But if your goal is a bigger return on your marketing dollars, precision is the way to go.

Looking for even more successful marketing campaign tips? Follow us on Twitter!

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. 7 Essential Components of a Rocking Sales Page
2. 5 Essential Qualities for Your Professional Online Marketing Strategist
3. Writing Easily Digestible Marketing Copy

We all know it’s faster and easier to get across the country in a jet than a bus, and faster in a bus than on a bicycle. In marketing copy, verbs (action words) are the modes of transportation that transfer your ideas into your clients’ and potential clients’ minds. Depending on which ones you use, that process can be painstaking and inefficient or exciting and fun.

Here are some tips on composing turbo-charged prose that will leave your readers dazzled and itching to buy.

Avoid “To Be” Verbs When Possible

One of the weakest (and most common) verbs in English is “to be”—as in be, am, is, are, was, were, being, and been. If any of these verbs appear in a sentence, there’s a good chance you could make it stronger. For example:

Weak: This product is helpful for people who are too busy to cook for themselves.

Stronger: This product helps people who work through dinner and beyond.

By eliminating the “to be” verbs, you let the product and the people assume active roles in the sentence. Active, interesting verbs paint a more vivid mental picture than passive ones do.

Use Creative Verbs and Cut Adverbs

If you use the right verb, you won’t need adverbs to modify it. Watch this:

Weak: This product will completely change the way you do business.

Stronger: This product will transform the way you do business.

“Change” could mean a number of things, but “transform” implies complete change. The leaner your marketing copy, the more efficiently readers can absorb it.

Use the Thesaurus…Sparingly

When you first begin adding more interesting verbs to your web copy, don’t be shy about using a thesaurus. But remember to use it wisely: select only words that mean exactly what you want them to—otherwise, your writing will confuse your readers.

For example, watch what synonyms can do for this sentence.

He ate his dinner.

Thesaurus.com lists these synonyms for “eat:” attack, devour, feast upon, gobble up, inhale, nibble, pick at, scarf, and swallow. Depending on how this dinner went down, each of these verbs can tell a lot more about the scene. For example: “He devoured his dinner” communicates a very different situation than “He picked at his dinner,” which differs in tone from “He gobbled up his dinner.”

Aim for Clarity in Marketing Copy

Like anything else, building sentences with strong verbs takes practice. To avoid overkill, start small and find a proofreader to make sure you aren’t going overboard. Ultimately, your goal with any marketing copy is to communicate clearly—and sometimes that requires using a weak verb or an adverb.

And remember: if you really can’t stomach the thought of spending more time on compiling your marketing copy, you can always hire a professional.

What challenges have you faced in creating interest-piquing marketing copy?

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. Writing Easily Digestible Marketing Copy
2. Make Your Marketing Copy More Personal
3. How to Make Sure Your Marketing Copy Passes Legal Muster

Referrals are like gold bullion to a small-business owner—they save you time and money, and provide you a direct line to a pre-qualified client. If generating referrals isn’t already a part of your marketing strategy, or if you’d like to make it a bigger part, it’s time to get your referral engine buzzing with these handy tips.

1. Master the referral mindset. The key here is to do your best to serve every client you get. In other words, you want to deserve a referral from every client you serve. When you’re in the referral mindset, you see every client interaction as part of a chain: what you do now affects your likelihood of getting new business. Another part of the referral mindset? Referring clients to others when appropriate.
2. Ask for referrals and say thank you. If your clients aren’t business owners, they may never have thought about the power of referrals, but if they’re happy with your work, they’ll probably be happy to help you succeed. Ask clients directly if they can give you names of others who might benefit from your services. To make that easier…
3. Educate your clients. When you request referrals, give them a brief synopsis of what your company does, who your ideal clients are, and what you’ll do with any referrals you get (e.g. not call them during dinner to give a sales pitch). If a client refers someone who isn’t quite right for you, thank the client anyway and educate him or her some more.
4. Reward referrals. There are dozens of creative (and familiar) ways to reward clients for referring other clients. You can offer cash incentives, discount services, gifts, free products, and so on. When deciding on your reward, be sure to tap into your research on your target audience so you hit just the right note.
5. Build relationships. Find out who serves your target audience in other areas of their lives. Build relationships with those individuals or groups through free seminars or events, mutual referrals, or targeted advertising to expand your pool of potential clients.

Once You Have Referrals…

Follow through—quickly. This falls under the category of “striking while the iron’s hot,” and sets the tone right away that you’ll be on top of your game throughout your relationship with a client.

Want a chance to be featured on our blog? Answer our survey question on How will you invest in yourself and / or your business differently in 2012 than you did in 2011?

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. Are Your Referring Clients Feeling Unappreciated?
2. 7 Ways to Generate More Creative Web Copy to Ignite Interest in Prospects
3. The Best Way to Get People to Notice You

It’s no secret that coaching with Income Acceleration Mentor David Neagle has helped me triple revenue in 2011, and set Sumèr on a path to enter 2012 well on our way to having a multimillion dollar business.

David has helped me (and many of my colleagues) get crystal clear on what I want my life and business to look like and coached me on how to clear up the stories that prevent me from success and being my best self.

It’s fitting that the LAST Copy Doodle blog contest in our 2011 Holiday Giveaway series be a FREE ticket to David’s Break Free Live Experience—happening February 8 – 11, 2012, in Salt Lake City! (A $297 value—see below for contest details)

I attended this event last year and the transformation and breakthroughs I had during the event catapulted me to the next level.

Over the course of 3.5 days, David is going to show you how to break free from…

• A poverty consciousness, with the exact STEPS you need to ditch the fear, worry, and anxiety of money and step into massive cash injection mode.
• Lack of sales and HOW to let go of current belief systems keeping you from being marketable.
• Living a life of refusal to step into your own power and HOW to summit any mountain in your life and your business.
• Your need to always be right and WHY this behavior is holding you back from financial freedom and fulfilling relationships.
• Stories around money that prevent you from financial freedom and HOW to create massive cash injections in your business.

DETAILS BELOW ON HOW TO ENTER TO WIN A TICKET TO DAVID NEAGLE’S BREAK FREE LIVE EXPERIENCE:

Prize

There will be one winner in total for this contest. The winner will receive a free ticket to David Neagle’s Break Free Live Experience event, happening February 8 – 11, 2012, in Salt Lake City (excluding all additional costs of the trip such as the flight, accommodation, transfers, food and beverages, etc.).

To enter for your chance to win, you may choose to follow Package One Entry Details or Package Two Entry Details. You only have to choose ONE entry package to enter for your chance to win:

Package One Entry Details: All you have to do is follow one quick and easy step. See below:

Comment on this blog post telling us why you would love to go to David’s Break Free Live Experience.

OR

Package Two Entry Details: If you would prefer to enter our contest using Twitter, then all you have to do is follow one quick and easy step:

Copy and paste the following tweet into your Twitter post field and submit: “Just entered to win a ticket to David Neagle’s Break Free Live Experience w/ @writtenbysumer. Enter here: http://tinyurl.com/8yppmup”

Additional ways to enter (you may choose ONE additional way to enter the contest from the list below):

1. Sign up for our newsletter, OR subscribe to this blog (via RSS feed or email, which can be found on the sidebar of the blog).

2. Blog about this contest with a link to this post.

3. Like us on Facebook. (If you already Like us on Facebook, then great! You’re one-step closer to winning our webinar series.)

4. Mention the contest on your personal Facebook page or your company Facebook page with a link to this post.

*****Comment on this blog post each time you do one of the above additional steps to notify us of your additional entry. Your name can be entered up to two times in total.

Dates:

The contest begins today, Monday, December 26, 2011 and ends next Tuesday, January 3, 2012, at midnight (Eastern). The winner will be chosen via Random.org on Wednesday, January 4, 2012, and will be notified via email or Twitter direct message (depending on how the participant entered the contest).

Terms & Conditions:

No compensation for commenting, tweeting, or promoting this contest will be given in either cash or products unless you are a chosen winner. Sumèr, LLC, will not be held liable for any participant’s comments or tweets, and the participant states that by commenting and / or tweeting, and associating himself / herself with a specific business that he / she has the right to publish a comment on behalf of that business without compensation of any kind. All comments submitted become a part of Sumèr and can be published in the comments section of the Sumèr blog. The winner also agrees that the mention of his or her name on the Sumèr blog as the winner is acceptable.

****The winner of the contest understands that by winning this contest, he or she will only receive one free ticket to the event. All additional costs associated with attending the Break Free Live Experience event, including airfare, transfers, accommodation, food and beverage, etc. are the responsibility of the winner. The winner of the contest understands that Sumèr, LLC, will not pay any additional costs associated with attending the Break Free Live Experience event.

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. The First Step to Increasing Business? Get Specific on Your Target Market.
2. Global Telesummit Provides Free Business-Building Resources for Entrepreneurs
3. Book Contest: The Go-Giver by Bob Burg

So you’ve decided to use a survey to get a pulse on your target audience. Excellent. To make sure that your survey doesn’t get lost in the online clutter or get ignored by busy prospects and clients, try one or more of these tricks to maximize the chances that your questions will be answered.

• Keep it quick (and let them know). A request to take a survey is vague. A request to take a three-minute survey is much better. No matter where you present your survey to clients, be clear about what you want from them—and let them know that you won’t waste their valuable time. (Hint: don’t just guess at how long your survey takes. Ask a couple friends to fill it out and time them!)
• Keep it simple. As with any kind of copywriting, easy-to-complete surveys may be hard to develop. But asking the right questions is worth the effort: your audience won’t feel confused or frustrated, and you’ll get valuable information about your current and potential clients. Put effort into making sure your questions are clear, to the point, and easy to process. Friends, colleagues, or professional editors can help you streamline your language.
• Keep it neat. Grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors slash your credibility. Read, reread, and have fresh eyes review your copy before you send it out.
• Offer an incentive or reward. Make your clients an offer they can’t refuse—or that they can’t refuse as easily as no offer at all. Consider rewarding survey takers with a discount on your services, a freebie, or a chance to win a prize. Be sure you have a system in place to follow through on this offer, or else you risk alienating a lot of potential customers.
• Include a survey in your sales process. Online purchases are often accompanied by (short) surveys given directly before a purchase is completed. Keep in mind the rule of brevity here: the last thing you want to do is bog down a potential buyer with lengthy questions.
• Tell them why they matter. Explain (as briefly as possible) why you’re conducting a survey in the first place. If you’re trying to improve the customer experience or looking to broaden your offerings to meet client needs, it’s important to communicate that so your audience knows that participating in the survey will ultimately benefit them.
• Show them why they matter. Once you’ve completed the survey, follow up with a thank you and an explanation or demonstration of how you’ll be applying the results.

Do you have any pet peeves when taking surveys online? Blow off some steam in the comments section!

If you like this post, you might also like:

1. Why You Need to Start Taking Advantage of the Power of a Survey
2. Make it Simple for Customers and Prospects to Read Your Web Copy
3. The Essential Components of Any Successful Marketing Campaign