Carol Bentley

I don’t normally get involved in ‘political discussions’ but sometimes a decision seems too outrageous for words! And I think that is the case where the Red Arrows are concerned. [Info update… see the comments added below this post]

I received an email from a business colleague about the decision the Department of Culture, Media and Sport have made regarding the appearance of the Red Arrows at the 2012 London Olympics. Here’s the email. If you feel as strongly as I do then follow the link to the petition and add your voice.

The world-famous Red Arrows have been banned from appearing at the 2012 London Olympics because they are deemed ‘too British’.

Organisers of the event say that the Arrows military background might be ‘offensive’ to other countries taking part in the Games. The display team have performed at more than 4000 events worldwide, but the Department of Culture, Media and Sport have deemed the display team ‘too militaristically British.’ Red Arrows pilots were said to be ‘outraged’, as they had hoped to put on a truly world class display for the Games, something which had never been seen before. Being axed from a British-based event for being ‘too British’ is an insult - the Arrows are a symbol of Britain.

The Red Arrows have been excellent ambassadors for British overseas trade, as they display their British-built Hawk aircraft all over the world.

The Arrows performed a short flypast in 2005 when the winning bid was announced, but their flypast at the Games was to have been truly spectacular.

It is to be hoped that common sense prevails.

If you disagree with this decision, sign the petition on the link http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/RedArrows2012/?ref=redArrows2012

And tell me what you think… click comments below

~ Carol Bentley

There’s been a few problems behind the scenes with the blog over the last few weeks, which hopefully can be sorted quite quickly. So this is just a courtesy post to let you know that the site is scheduled for maintenance tomorrow (Sunday 13th) and may not be available if you visit.

If you are subscribed, I’ll drop you a line to let you know when it is ‘open for reading’ again. If you are not subscribed then may I invite you to do so so you always know when a new post is made and, of course, you get the two free reports described in the previous post.

Otherwise (fingers crossed) all should be OK by Monday - thanks for your understanding.

~ Carol Bentley

If you are already subscribed to this blog you got an extra email today with information on how to get your subscriber gifts - check your Inbox or filtered email folder if you haven’t seen it.

And if you are not a subscriber yet you can get these gifts too, as I’ll explain in a moment.

Why am I giving these gifts?

Well, all is revealed in my original post on 1st April - ‘I had a Doh! moment’. You see, I decided to add to the value of this blog by giving these gifts to anyone who decided to keep up to date with my posts by subscribing for the email notices.

And I do try to be fair-minded, so I didn’t want people who are already subscribed to miss out. Hence the email that was sent separately.

Subscriber Gifts

So what do you get as a subscriber?

Two Great Reports

Report 1:

Profit Mastery Series - Marketing: Paul Stewart Interviews Carol Bentley

In this 16-page transcript of the interview I had with Paul you read about:

• Why targeting your market is crucial
• How marketing can give a return on investment
• Making your customer your best friend
• Breaking the £1m turnover barrier (or whatever level you are currently facing)
• Three copywriting mistakes you should avoid like the plague
• Using AIDA-A in your sales letter

And

Report 2:

How to Banish, Forever, The Hair-Tearing Frustrations of Microsoft® Word® When Writing Your Sales Letters!
31 tips make your writing a lot less stressful!

These quick tips get rid of the irritation you feel when Word suddenly ‘does its own thing’ - you can make it behave as you want. And they save you a great deal of time. Tips apply to all versions of MS Word since version 2002.

Claim Your Gifts Now

If you are a subscriber - check your email notices.

If you are not yet a subscriber simply pop your name and email address in the boxes in the panel on the right and click the Tell Me! button or you can use the pop-up invitation if you prefer.

BTW - once you are subscribed you won’t get the pop-up box appearing ever again. That’s good news isn’t it?

~ Carol Bentley

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In the post I made on 13th March ( 3 Time Management Tips ) I talked about how we can control what we do and perhaps regain some much needed time for ourselves.

Tim Ferris (author of The 4-hour Work Week) describes another time thief in his blog. And d’you know, this is one that might be more difficult for some to handle because of the associated guilt certain people are good at creating!

See what you think…
The danger of expectations and the beauty of duty

And here’s a few pertinent quotes on time management that a business colleague (Nigel Risner) sent to me in his last newsletter…

“Time has a way of getting away from us, because we never have a grip on it
during the day…” — Doug Firebaugh

“Learn to use ten minutes intelligently. It will pay you huge dividends.” –William A. Irwin

“Lost time is never found again.” — Benjamin Franklin

“Don’t mistake movement for achievement. It’s easy to get faked out by being busy. The questions is: Busy doing what?” — Jim Rohn

~ Carol Bentley

technorati tags: time management tim ferris

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If you haven’t already done so, don’t forget to claim your copy of Offline Marketing Strategies in exchange for answering just 7 questions. The survey is open until 12p.m. (GMT) today at copywriting4b2b survey

If you have already given me your answers - thank you. Your feedback is really appreciated and will help me to keep this blog vibrant, relevant and interesting.

If you’ve completed the survey and asked a question about web marketing, getting visitors to your blog etc. then please check the Q&A’s at this posting on Ed’s blog, which may give you your answer immediately.

I’ll be covering the questions that were specifically for marketing and copywriting in my future blog posts.

Have a good weekend - I’ll catch up with you next week.

~ Carol Bentley

No matter how well we plan ahead sometimes things just don’t go as we’d hoped.  And that’s what has happened which is why I’m sending an apology and asking for your patience and understanding.

Let me explain; when I started this blog I made a commitment to you, my reader, to make a daily (well, week-daily) post.  When I had days out of the office scheduled I simply wrote up the posts in advance and set a date and time for publishing.  That way I kept my promise and you got your daily dose of my thoughts.

If you are a regular reader you may have noticed I’ve missed a few days this week.  The reason for that is a completely unexpected absence from my office (actually I’m still away).  That is because my Father has had a sudden, serious stroke which the Doctors do not expect him to recover from.

I’m sure you appreciate my family must take precedence. So, please forgive the erratic posts that may happen over the next few weeks.  I promise my usual daily post will resume as soon as possible.

 Thank you for your understanding.

~ Carol Bentley

Sometimes stopping a subscription is the right thing to do. If the information offered is not useful to you, or it doesn’t supply valuable insights to what you need to know then making that decision should be your choice - and your choice alone.

Which is why you have complete control over the notification emails from this blog website. In every email notice you receive there is an unsubscribe option. If you use it you get a chance to say why you are leaving the group, which is good feedback for me as the host.

One gentleman did that when he dropped out last Friday. His reason? “Too many emails”

I wasn’t sure if he meant he was generally getting too many emails or if he was specifically referring to the emails about this blog.

Either way I totally understand how he feels and I’m sure you do too! Does cancelling his subscription mean he will miss out on the future posts? Maybe, but not necessarily.

Keeping in the loop without emails

So what do you do if you want to know about the posts made so you can choose what to read, but you don’t want the daily email?

You can use the RSS feed in the bottom right panel. If you are not familiar with RSS feeds you can read about them here. It can feed each new post through to your desktop without sending emails.

Disadvantages of Subscribing

In the early days of this blog I was undecided about how frequently I should post; daily, couple of times a week, weekly or even monthly. Although my subscriber numbers at that point were quite low - were you one of them? - I asked those readers what they would like to see. The feedback I had was very positive and the content of most of the messages was similar to Gail’s comment:

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong in blogging every day as long as the content is useful and informative to the readers! With your blog, every post so far has had something worthwhile in it!”

(Gail is still a subscriber, thanks for sticking with me Gail )

So I went with the majority opinion and I’ve continued the daily blog since - of course that means you get a daily email. Actually it’s only sent out on weekdays, I take the weekend off However, I appreciate for some it may be too much with all the other emails bombarding their inbox.

Disadvantages of RSS Only

On the surface there may not seem to be any real disadvantage to using an RSS feed to get your notifications. You can still see when a new post goes up and choose whether or not to read it.

Where you do lose out with an RSS feed is accessing any private posts I make. Why? Because these are password protected. And the password is only released to the email subscribers.

“So what? Will I really miss anything by not being able to read the private posts?” you might be thinking.

Well, actually, yes!

I’ve only used the private post once so far when I shared a birthday gift. But there are more in the pipeline. They will include more valuable information, sometimes in the form of a free report or audio or video and the only way you can get it is with the password supplied in the post notification email.

What do you do?

It’s a dilemma isn’t it?

If you don’t subscribe you don’t get the extra goodies I gift from time to time.

If you do subscribe you get a daily email when a post is published.

The good news is - it’s purely your choice. And it’s instantaneous - subscribe and you are immediately ‘in the loop’. Unsubscribe and you never get another email about posts on this blog again.

I hope you choose to stay subscribed, but I fully understand and respect your decision if you decide to use the RSS feed instead.

~ Carol Bentley

technorati tags: copywriting blog RSS feeds

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On Monday I invited you to ask your most burning question and said all questions sent by today (Friday) would be considered for the accolade of being chosen as the best question asked and would receive a gift.

And so far I’ve received some very interesting ones, a few of which I’ve already answered in this week’s posts.

Now is your last chance to send your questions in. Have you sent yours yet? What is puzzling you most? It can be a question on anything to do with marketing your business; writing sales letters; advert or other material. Marketing or sales techniques or anything else you’d like to throw into the pot.

Use the comment link below or - for a more private question - you can use the question contact form (let me know if you don’t want it to be answered publicly on this blog).

I look forward to helping you.

~ Carol Bentley

Have you got your birthday celebration gift I posted on Friday? Remember the gift expires today at 12p.m. GMT.

You’ll need the password that was in Friday’s notification email to open the gift post.

~ Carol Bentley

Just a quick reminder that the deadline for entries for the Cialdini book and Advertising Secrets audio CD competition closes tomorrow, 4th January.

Check the original post at my post How persuasive are you.

~ Carol Bentley

technorati tags: persuasion Cialdini copywriting

Many businesses are closing over the next week or two for the Christmas & New Year break. For me it’s an ideal opportunity to catch up on projects; catch up on reading and - surprise, surprise - do some writing. No, not marketing writing; writing the content for a product I’m crafting - all will be revealed in 2008.

In fact, I think I’ll announce what I’m developing on my birthday, which is 4th January - now that’s a nice way to celebrate isn’t it?

In the meantime I’d like to say a huge ‘Thank You’ for visiting this site. I’ve enjoyed sharing with you over the last few months and look forward to exploring more with you next year.

And to finish off - here’s a bit of Christmas fun for anyone who does email marketing…

If Santa was an email marketer…

My favourite…

In roughly 10% of houses, Santa would emerge from the chimney to find himself in the trash can and not the fireplace. This despite a squeaky-clean sender reputation.

~ Carol Bentley

P.S. I might not be able to keep away from you though… so I might slip in a post or two over the holiday period, when no-one’s looking!

Do you know of any business that is built and run purely on word-of-mouth marketing? Or any that regard ‘referrals’ as their prime business source?

There aren’t many.

Yet with today’s emphasis on taking more notice of what your friends and peers say, rather than the marketing message companies put out, it is something every business owner should seriously consider.

And that’s what an Australian Dentist, described in Martin Russell’s blog post, has done extremely successfully.

Now imagine the power of harnessing this outstanding and innovative service approach with the power of peer marketing on the internet - the possibilities are breath-taking!

How can you adopt these ideas in your business? Got thoughts you’d like to share? Pop them in a comment for others to see and, maybe, benefit from.

~ Carol Bentley

technorati tags: referral-marketing word-of-mouth networking

May I ask a favour?

Following the adage ‘Actions speak louder than words’ I’ve taken up Rich Shefren’s challenge to produce a 66 seconds video, whilst saying something worthwhile about his powerfully informative report The Attention Age Doctrine 2.

And it was a real challenge - especially as my normal mode of communication is long, explanatory and valuable information-packed letters, adverts or articles!!

But it was done - and within the designated time-scale. So here’s the favour I’m asking…

I need your support

Will you gift me 10 minutes of your valuable time to visit this video site, play the clip and then vote?

The clip is only 66 seconds long and voting is done through Digg and Sphinn (there are instructions on how to vote).  So, I think it may take you about 10 minutes. You have to play the clip for your vote to count.

Then - and this is where the power of what the report talks about comes into action - please ask your friends and business colleagues if they would do the same.

Now why should you or they bother, except as a favour to me and you? Because they too can download the free report I’m describing in the clip and gain valuable marketing insights. Plus - there are some brilliant prizes for voters to gain too.

Why do I want to get a good result? Because it will show the power of peer recommendation, which is something we all need to embrace more in business, and I can share the experience with you and explore how it fits with copywriting. And I’d quite like to walk away with the accolade of getting a hit!

Thank you for your support and for ’spreading the word’. I’ll let you know how it progresses in future postings on this blog.

~ Carol Bentley

Having a good headline is not enough. It has to be a compelling ‘grab-them-by-the-throat’ attention holding headline if you are going to get the undivided attention of your prospect.

Let’s face it - whether we are talking letter, advert or presentation headlines - your reader is unlikely to be concentrating absolutely 100% on what he (or she) is reading - unless it strikes a resounding chord with him. Unless you get him to say “How the heck did you know that?” when you ask the question that’s been bugging him for ages. Or “This solution is so what I want - it’s almost uncanny!” then your chances of keeping his interest may slip away.

It’s a challenge we all have no matter what our line of business or how we go about our marketing.

Is there an easy way to come up with the most effective headline? Not really - there are techniques; there are attention words that help to make your headline stand out; but it still takes practice, experience and skill to find the one that pulls no punches, hits the mark dead on and delivers the best measurable results.

Having said that, let me give you a few pointers to get you started…

Get Your Creative Juices Flowing

One of the biggest mistakes I see people making is writing one or two headlines and thinking “That’s it!”

It rarely is.

When you start crafting your headlines you are only just getting warmed up - your creative performance is still in first gear. As you write more - allowing each headline to act as a catalyst for the next - they begin to flow, like sliding into the higher gears in a performance car.

That’s why I encourage people to write as many headlines as possible before deciding which ones to test. Personally I aim to write at least 100, if not more.

Study Successful Headlines

Find successful headlines. How can you recognise a successful headline? Look for these attributes:

1. It’s a headline for a direct response advert or sales letter. You can tell if it’s a direct response marketing campaign because there is a reference code. You are asked to quote it or it is printed on the response form or in the advert.
2. You see the same headline frequently. If it is used in a direct response campaign, which means it is measurable and is being monitored, it is unlikely to be continually used if it isn’t proving to be successful.

Study the headline.

Is it specific? (Being specific makes your headline more believable)

Does it contain the promise of a result or benefit that appeals? (People are only interested in results; ‘What’s In It For Me?’)
Does it intrigue without being obscure? (Curiosity can hold your reader’s attention provided your first paragraph is strong).

What is it appealing to; envy; greed; pride or status; generosity; well-being or health; peace of mind or something else? (You need to know what appeals to your target market - and you may have to test different appeals to see which is the stronger motivator).

Is it short or long? (Your headline should be long enough to put your message across).

Is it using any of the attention words that magnetically draw your eye and catch your attention? (See the list of words following the headline examples below).

Example Headlines

How many of these common gardening mistakes are causing you to work harder than you really have to?

Introducing the plain paper copier that’s so low in price you can’t afford not to own it

Here are 9 reasons why you should claim your ‘The Dangers of Handling Asbestos’ report today

Now You Can Get a Business Loan - Even if Your Bank Has Turned You Down

Who Else Wants To Lose 10lbs In 28 Days?

Your Investment in Pinesuites Development Could Be Worth Up To £12,960 per Year in Income

Five Familiar Skin Troubles - Which Do You Want to Overcome?

Vinegar… Nature’s Secret Weapon

I’ve shown the attention words used in these headlines in bold.

Attention Words

Using specifics, identifying a benefit or result your reader can expect or a problem they have that you can solve makes your headline more attractive. Include one or more attention words increases the attraction because certain words are proven to draw the eye - just like a magnet.

Here’s 15 you can use:

You / Your
Amazing
These
Proof
How / How to
Here’s
Find Out
Announcing
Breakthrough
Free
Who Else?
Last Chance
Advice
Easy
Secret

The Secret of How To Make Writing 30 Headlines Easy

When I said to aim at writing 100 headlines to give you the best chance of finding the winner, did you think “No Way!” or something similar? It seems like an insurmountable task - doesn’t it?

Try this:

Grab a pen and paper

Look at the first word/phrase in the list above

Write a descriptive headline about your product or service; the result you can deliver or the problem you can solve, using that word. Follow the headline advice I’ve given you earlier in this post.

Now write a second one, using the same attention word.

Move onto the second word and do the same again; two sentences using the attention word.

Continue down the list - by the time you’ve used each word you have 30 headlines. They won’t all be fantastic - some may even be ridiculous, but the point is your creative juices are starting to flow and…

You’ve written almost 1 third of 100 headlines.

Think you could repeat the exercise another 2 times? Do it and you’ve written 90 headlines! Not bad going eh?

Now you’ve got your headlines start working on your letter or advert. And remember the advice I gave you on 7 November in the post Here’s 8 elements for a powerful sales letter (did you notice the attention words and specifics in that post headline?)

~Carol Bentley

P.S.   You’ll get an opportunity to put some of this advice I’ve been sharing into effect tomorrow.  Keep a look out for the post entitled How persuasive are you?

technorati tags: headlines sales letters copywriting