The YOU Filter: How starting an email newsletter helped me refine my brand

By Natalia Sylvester on August 30, 2010

Two months ago, starting an email newsletter had, quite frankly, not even entered my mind. I know how ridiculous that sounds considering I write email newsletters for my clients, but for me it was always one of those things I’d decided I’d do…eventually.

So you can imagine my surprise when I signed up for a Personalized Twitter Strategy session with Marian Schembari and she basically said: You really should start a newsletter. I’m not one to argue with Marian (the girl knows her stuff), so I agreed to start a newsletter…eventually. I procrastinated by implementing every other suggestion she’d made about how I could engage more people on Twitter until finally the inevitable was staring me in the face. I’d resisted because I’d thought starting a newsletter would be a huge time-suck. There was the question of what to focus it on, what to call it, how often to send it out, what software to manage it with.

The not-so-simple process of getting started

When I finally got around to the newsletter, I took what I thought would be baby steps. I signed up for MailChimp and started poking my nose around. Then I dove (or maybe fell) head-first into what became quite the branding endeavor.

When MailChimp said, “Hey! You can create your own header for your newsletter” I went and got my logo and the newsletter name (Wordy Goodness) and meshed them into a pretty little graphic that would be on top of each newsletter.

When they said, “Here’s the link to your signup form!” I rewrote the copy they’d provided in each template. I could have just stuck with “To confirm your subscription, please click the link we just sent to your email” but that just didn’t sound like me. I rewrote (as much as they’d let me) of the copy on the unsubscribe form, even though I’m hoping not many people will click on that. I made sure the fonts and colors on each form matched the ones I’d been using on my site.

The YOU Filter

I was feeling pretty happy with myself. Getting started with my email newsletter even gave me an idea for a blog post about how we should seize every little opportunity to brand our business. If the signup form for your email newsletter supplies you with some generic copy, don’t settle for it. If you have to write a “Please do not disturb” sign outside your office, who says you have to use those words? And if someone stumbles upon a page that no longer exists on your site, why not find a way to tell them that other than “This page no longer exists”?

Let your voice pop up and charm customers with your unique personality in the most unexpected places—they’ll remember you for it. Before you do or say anything, pass it through the “You Filter.” Let your brand filter out all the generic gunk that’s floating about. Serve up a cup full of freshly brewed, customized goodness that says you know who you are and can’t help but show it.

So that’s what this blog post was supposed to be about. Until I pulled up my blog on my browser to start writing it.

Every last drop counts

You see, if you’ve ever been to the Inky Clean website, you’ll realize it doesn’t even look like a distant relative of this blog. That’s because at the time I designed my website, I didn’t know enough about WordPress to make this blog match. So I picked the most unoffensive-looking free template I could find and left it at that. The result is that when you go from my site to this blog there is no brand continuity whatsoever. It basically goes from bubbly and fun to blah. Meh. Eh.

Not very memorable at all.

So there I was with this newsletter coming up in September, ready to send writing tips, special offers, links to this blog and Inky Clean’s latest news to subscribers. And I thought, if I worked so hard to brand the newsletter, why would I send people to this blog where the branding falls flat?

It was clearly time to keep filtering until every last drop had passed through my “You Filter” (or my Me Filter, or my Inky Clean filter, or…you get the point). So I went and hired someone to create a custom WordPress template for this blog that’ll match the Inky Clean site. I couldn’t be more excited about it, and I’m hoping that in the next few days the makeover will be complete.

I’ll make sure to let you know when it is (though hopefully, it’ll be pretty obvious). In the meantime, you can always sign up for my newsletter. Let me know what you think about the forms ;)

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Fun With Words Friday: He’s a ghost, and he writes to us

By Natalia Sylvester on August 27, 2010

It’s been a while since I’ve done Fun With Words Friday. Today’s FWWF was inspired by a recent Twitter conversation I had with PS Jones about Trapper Keepers and Lisa Frank stickers that got me all nostalgic about the early 90s.

You know what I really miss? My favorite television show as a kid. It was SO fun with words. Anyone here remember Ghostwriter?

I’m not talking about the recent Ewan McGregor movie.

I’m not talking about its homophone, Ghost Rider (although when I first met my husband and told him how much I loved Ghostwriter growing up, he thought he’d hit the jackpot with a fellow comic book geek).

I’m talking about the early 90s PBS show about a ghost that helps a group of kid detectives by writing to them. Anybody remember this?

Ah, the side ponytails and scrunchies. The dancing with thumbs up and finger snapping. Don’t you just love how it oozes the 90s?

If you don’t feel like watching the whole opening, at least stick around for the first two seconds when the theme song kicks in: Ghostwriter--WORD!

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The Beauty of Getting Your Message Right

By Natalia Sylvester on August 19, 2010

Last week, it took me two hours to find the right facial sunblock online. A year ago, it would’ve taken me ten minutes—just a quick drive to my neighborhood pharmacy, picking up the same brand I’d used for years.

Why the big change?

About a year ago, I started copywriting for a new skin care line as they prepared to launch. I’ve written their web copy, bottle labels, product descriptions, brochures. Their goal was to make people rethink how they shop for beauty products and take a closer look at the ingredients. There are all sorts of potentially harmful chemicals in skin care products we see on shelves every day, in brands that many people trust (this video sums it up beautifully). Recently I also started writing for another beauty line that has a similar mission and because of this, sticks to natural ingredients.

There’s a point to all this, I swear.

Just yesterday, as I was explaining to my sister that many popular fragrances contain potentially harmful chemicals that are not listed on the label, I realized that I was the perfect example of a marketer’s dream consumer. I heard their message. I believed in it and made it part of my life. What’s more, I even passed the message on to others.

Clients often come to me with the concern that they don’t want to sound too pushy in their marketing copy (or sales-y, which has become a common term). When I initially sat down with the first skin care client, listening to how her products were different and how she was trying to improve her customers’ lives, it was enlightening. She didn’t need to be pushy because she knew exactly what problem she was solving for people. She had a genuine concern for their well-being and wanted to help.

The word “sales-y” has gotten a bad rap. We assume that to sell someone, we have to convince them, possibly even trick them, into thinking that they need what we’re offering. There’s a connotation of deception there, of sleaziness, of having to keep a person’s attention because they’d rather be doing something else. Those are clear signs of two things:

1) you’re targeting the wrong audience

2) you’re focusing on how they can help you instead of how you can help them

When people are truly loyal to a brand, it’s because they consider them a friend. That brand looks out for them, that brand helps them out every time. Instead of being pushy, the best thing we can do is listen to our audience’s needs and be that friend. Only then will they listen to your message and look for more of it. And, when they realize it’s not just talk, that your product can really follow through on the promise you’ve made, they’ll take it in and pass it on to their friends.

As I got my new sunblock in the mail today, I was actually grateful that there are companies out there looking out for their customers’ well-being. I changed my shopping habits and switched brands because I wanted a healthier alternative. Nobody had to convince me to make that decision. It was a matter of me wanting something, and of someone else having exactly what I was looking for.

How about you? What brands are you most loyal to, and why?

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Why brands need character to tell a story

By Natalia Sylvester on August 4, 2010

I’ve never mentioned this before, but I’ve been writing a novel for a few years now and am finally at the final draft stage. It’s been a crazy ride (I’ve changed characters, entire plot points, and settings, so much that it’s almost as if I’ve written three books) and as overwhelming and close to me as this book is, I never mentioned it on this blog because I thought I had to keep my copywriting and my fiction separate.

And then it dawned on me: that’s just silly. Good copy tells a story, just like a great book does. Why should I keep my copywriting and fiction separate when the skills I use for both are so closely related?

In fiction, one of the most important skills a writer has to develop is that of building believable characters. Readers need to feel like they know these people, they need to believe that they’re real, that they have motivations, virtues, vices, issues, opinions and hot buttons just like any other person. Most of all, the writer needs to create a character that readers care about. Why else would a reader follow someone’s journey for 300 pages if they’re not loyal to them?

It’s the same in copywriting. A company’s brand is like the characters in a book. If it’s bland, forgettable, doesn’t feel genuine, or fails to set itself apart from the thousands of other brands/characters in the marketplace, then people aren’t going to connect with it enough to go on a journey with them. Just like in creative writing, your character needs to be fleshed out. It needs to come alive. To do this through copywriting, it’s all about the voice and the word choice and the messages you put out there.

So…quick question for all of you. If your brand were a character in a book, who would it be, and why?

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How Not to Shoot Yourself in the Foot When You’re New to Twitter

By Natalia Sylvester on July 20, 2010

In case I haven’t made this clear before, I’m a huge Twitter fan. Yes, I’m that annoying person who’s always suggesting that my job-seeking friends and entrepreneur friends get on Twitter. Right. Now.

Problem is, they’ll often come back after a few months and say it hasn’t really worked for them. It seemed too time consuming, and they weren’t getting any followers.

But this post isn’t about how to get followers (this one is). It’s about how to make Twitter work for you when you’re a newbie. It’s about how not to mess it up your first 20 Tweets in. Because while it’s true that Twitter doesn’t work for all types of businesses, more often than not it’s because a person isn’t using it right.

So if you’re new to Twitter, or thinking about creating an account, here are some tips to make sure you’re not doing it wrong.

1. Get a Twitter Client, like, yesterday. I know it sounds contradictory, but you won’t be using Twitter to its fullest potential if you’re using it on the website itself. A client like TweetDeck or HootSuite will keep you updated on your replies (so you don’t accidentally ignore  people trying to chat with you). You can create tabs where you can monitor certain keywords, like industry terms, or chats (as indicated by a # sign before a term, like in #brandchat). Because the whole point of Twitter is that there are several conversations being updated in real time—wouldn’t it be best if you sifted through the noise to get to what you want to hear?

2. Don’t make your followers do all the work. If you want to share a link to a blog post you wrote, or a product special on your site, please, please, PLEASE don’t just tweet the link. Give people a reason to click on it. Tell them what’s in it for them; if you ask them to figure it out on their own, they simply won’t. Continue reading “How Not to Shoot Yourself in the Foot When You’re New to Twitter”

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WTH?! aka Where’s the How?!

By Natalia Sylvester on July 12, 2010

You can’t take the journalist out of the copywriter—at least not this one, anyways. You could say my journalism background extends as far back as that time I was eight and checked out a “So You Want to Be a Journalist?” book. But for the purposes of this blog, I guess I’ll stick mainly to college and beyond.

In Journalism 101, we all learn the importance of the 5 Ws and one H: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. These are the key components of a story, the main elements that will give us the overall picture. Recently, I was writing web copy for a client when I realized that these factors apply equally well in copywriting.

As I was looking through their original drafts of copy, the one thing that kept tipping me off was that there was no H. There was lots of talk about what the product did, but not how it would do it. There was a good emphasis on benefits rather than features, but not a whole lot of context as to how those benefits would come about. Without the “How”, the copy lacked a complete picture. It wasn’t doing a good job of conveying the user experience. And if it wasn’t selling an experience, how would people be sold?

I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised that the “How” gets left out so often. When you’ve got 5 Ws that fit so nicely together, the lonely H might wander off occasionally. So maybe the 5 Ws and One H should be rewritten and adapted to copywriting. Rather than applying them to a particular incident, as in journalism, these would apply to a product or service:

Who is this product helping?

What problem is it solving for them?

Where will they be using it?

When will they need or want it?

Why should they choose this one over another one?

and of course, don’t forget:

How will it do this?

What about you? In what ways do parts of your background inform what you’re doing now?

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The Invisibility of Great Copywriting

By Natalia Sylvester on June 24, 2010

Great copy can be a lot like air: it’s everywhere, but not everyone notices it unless it’s missing. Think of all the billboard ads you see on your daily commute, the brochure you take with you as you leave the bank, or the product descriptions you read as you browse through your favorite online store. These are all examples of a copywriter’s work, and if they did their job right, you’d never even know it.

Similar to the mark of a great editor, a good copywriter is often invisible. She’s more concerned with her writing doing its job than she is with getting recognition for it. When the copy’s written effectively, the first thing that pops into a reader’s mind shouldn’t be “Wow, what great writing.”

The first thing that pops into the reader’s head should be the message.

Whatever point the writing is supposed to make should take center stage. Writing that’s effectively communicating the benefits of a product will make a person think of all the ways the product will make their life easier. Writing that’s aligned with a company’s brand will leave the reader feeling like they understand what that company’s about and what makes them unique. Writing that’s witty and clever will make someone laugh and remember you. And writing that succinctly explains complex topics—whether in an instruction manual or on a website’s FAQ page—will inform readers by simplifying.

So why hire a copywriter, if people might not notice you hired one in the first place?

Continue reading “The Invisibility of Great Copywriting”

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Break these writing rules (if you must)

By Natalia Sylvester on June 21, 2010

Feeling rebellious? It’s okay to break the rules when you know what you’re doing (or writing). Here are three writing rules that you don’t always have to follow. Breaking them might even make for better writing, as long as you know how and when to do it.

1. Starting sentences with a conjunction. Whenever I start a sentence with and, but, or or, I think of my seventh grade writing teacher who taught me never, ever, to do this. But when you’re writing a blog post, or email, or anything else that’s rather informal, it’s best to mimic the way we talk. And we talk a lot like this.

2. Ending a sentence with a preposition. Winston Churchill said it best when an editor rearranged his words so they wouldn’t break this rule. Churchill responded with a note that said “This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.” His point was that the rules don’t always work, like in this case, where following them actually made the sentence clumsy, difficult to read and just plain ugly to look at.

3. Don’t use fragments. I’m actually a fan of fragments when they’re short, punchy and used for emphasis. They have to be intentional, because long fragments tend to sound like the author just forgot his way around a sentence. Think of a fragment as a puppy in a squirrel-filled park. You gotta keep it on a short leash or else you don’t know where it’ll end up. Maybe on another thought completely. Or at another park. Or something like that, anyways.

See? Breaking those rules wasn’t so bad after all. But I should add one rule to make this list of breakable rules work:

Know your audience. All three of these rules can be broken when the tone of the writing is meant to be informal and conversational. But that cover letter for the job you’ve been eyeing? Best to stick with formalities. You never know when the person in charge of hiring really took those seventh-grade English lessons to heart.

What about you? Can you think of any other writing rules you occasionally throw out the window?

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Lessons in Business & Copywriting from “Keep Austin Weird”

By Natalia Sylvester on June 11, 2010

When I moved my copywriting business from Miami to Austin, I decided it was time to rebrand. I didn’t think my current brand showed enough personality. I thought, if I’m not clear about my business identity, how am I going to attract clients who are a good fit?

Less than a month after I arrived in Austin I relaunched as Inky Clean. I didn’t worry about the fact that my brand was kinda quirky, nerdy and even a bit cute. I enjoy writing for businesses that can appreciate these qualities, in their copywriting or in general. Shouldn’t my brand speak to this audience instead of trying to reach out to a faceless mass?

Turns out, I’d landed in just the kind of town that could appreciate quirky. In case you haven’t heard it before, “Keep Austin Weird” is the slogan adapted by the Austin Independent Business Alliance to promote small businesses. It was coined as the result of an offhand remark by a librarian calling a local radio station, then caused some controversy once it was trademarked by a company that printed shirts with the phrase.

The slogan is all over the Austin area: t-shirts, bumper stickers…and probably tattooed on a die-hard Austinite or two.

But in the short few months I’ve lived here, it’s become apparent that “Keep Austin Weird” is much more than a slogan. It’s a way of life around here, and a great way to do business and approach copywriting.

Austinites protect their mom and pop shops and their trailer eateries and independent bookstores because they know that this “weirdness” is what gives the city its character and charm. (Not to mention that keeping it weird stimulates the local economy). They don’t want Austin to turn into just another city, where all the coffeeshops are Starbucks and all the bookstores are a Barnes & Noble.

You could say they’re trying to preserve who they are. What they stand for. Their uniqueness. Their brand.

Shouldn’t all businesses, large or small, be doing the same?

That’s why copywriting is so important. The words on a business’s marketing materials make up their voice; they determine how readers will hear them in their minds. What you say and how you say it is just as important as how you look. If you’re going to make an impression, shouldn’t you make one that’s a real reflection of you, what you stand for, and what makes you different?

Shouldn’t you build your true brand?

Maybe your brand isn’t weird, like Austin’s is. That’s okay. “Weird” isn’t so much about being weird as it is about embracing what makes us all different. And when a business does that, they stand a much better chance of attracting the right people.

That must be how I ended up in Austin. The weirdness was calling to me.

What about you? In what ways are you keeping your business “weird” and embracing its unique qualities?

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How & when to play with words when you mean business

By Natalia Sylvester on May 25, 2010

Ah, word play. For many copywriters it’s one of the funnest parts of the job. Combining words, making puns or innuendos, misspelling words on purpose–it takes creativity to do it right. But there’s also something really dangerous about word play:

It’s easy to fall into the trap of “it’s so creative, it must be good writing.”

Now, I’m not trying to say that it doesn’t take creativity to be a good writer. Quite the contrary. It takes creativity to take very technical instructions and rewrite them in a way that a specific audience will understand them. It takes creativity to capture a company’s purpose, persona, and/or benefits into a six-word slogan. It takes creativity to simplify a long, drawn-out product description into a few sentences that are not only informative but will spark interest.

But to write these things well it doesn’t always take word play. Not every bit of copy needs to have poetry in it, or a joke, or a double meaning. It can, and it’s always fun when it does. But a good copywriter knows that the message comes first, and that sometimes, the best way to say something is also the simplest way to say it. (Notice I said simplest, not easiest. Two very different things.)

Wordplay works when it’s helping clarify a message, not when it’s hiding it.

Wordplay works when it’s helping show a company’s voice and personality, not when it’s being cute just for the sake of it.

Wordplay works when it’s catchy at the same time that it’s informative, not when it’s only trying to draw someone in.

The writing needs to deliver a message first; wordplay should serve as a mode of delivering it.

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