Faking It

 

To fake it is to stand guard over emptiness.

— Arthur Herzog

Fraudsters know it's easy to make a fast buck from a phony "news" website.

To prove how easy it is, journalist Megan Graham conducted an experiment a couple of years ago.

She built her own website and filled it with stories she stole from CNBC.

"Within days, I had the ability to monetize my site with legitimate advertisers," she reported. 

"It was shockingly easy."

Graham's success was no doubt due to advertisers' shoddy ad-buying systems, which funnel ad money through third parties.

Those companies take their fees off the top and buy ads with the money left over.

But in their haste to earn fees, the companies lose track of where that money is spent.

"Half a brand’s digital marketing spend is absorbed by middlemen," Graham says. "It’s impossible for advertisers to know exactly where their money is going."

But suckering advertisers and their agents isn't the real crime here. (It's perfectly legal to create a website filled with gobbledygook.)

Plagiarism is.

To sustain the illusion that they're legitimate publishers, fraudsters rip off stories from legitimate publishers like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.  

Fraudsters can even automate plagiarism by using website plug-ins known as "scrapers," which swipe articles from legitimate publishers hourly.

To cover their crime, before posting the stolen stories, the more artful fraudsters run them through a paraphrasing app.

These apps thinly disguise the plagiarism—but only thinly.

They also provide inadvertent chuckles.

Consider, for example, how one fraudster mangled parts of a story about a Congressional hearing on stock-trading:

Original 

Some legislators called for more transparency. Rep. Nydia Velázquez asked about the lack of requirements for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

Fraudster

Some legislators necessitated additional transparency. Rep. Nydia old master asked regarding the shortage of needs for hedge funds to disclose short positions.

In this case, the fraudster simply published the paraphrasing app's results verbatim:

• Called for more was replaced by necessitated additional
   
• Velázquez was replaced by old master
  
  
• Asked about the lack of requirements was replaced by asked regarding the shortage of needs

How do the fraudsters get away with this?

As Graham showed, they count on advertisers' inability to detect original from plagiarized stories.

"It’s easy to make money from advertisers just by setting up a web page," she said, "That means there’s significant incentive to create sites filled with outright plagiarized content."

But fraudsters also count on visitors' shabby reading habits.

As studies have shown, digital readers are evincing ever-greater degrees of "cognitive impatience," robbing them of the ability to "deep-read."

To put it succinctly, digital readers lack discernment: we'll accept any crap that's dished out, no matter the source or the quality.

In a real sense, we're complicit in the fraudsters' crime.

Is Your Copy Ducky?

There once was an ugly duckling.

And if you read to the end, you'll learn how he dealt with his handicap.

But first, let me ask: Do you know how to guarantee readers won't abandon your copy?

Copywriter Joe Sugarman has two rules:

• Start with a story. It creates an emotional bond with readers.

• Seed your copy with hooks. Sugarman calls them seeds of curiosity.

Sugarman also urges you to start your story with a short sentence.

Short spurs curiosity.

Short openers are the novelist's trick, as Anthony Doerr demonstrates in the first sentence of All the Light We Cannot See:

At dusk they pour from the sky.

And a short opener can be even stronger, Sugarman says, if it jibes with readers' feelings:

There once was an ugly duckling. 

Poor guy. Would you like to be called ugly?

Once you've started your story, to urge readers on, you must continue to play to their curiosity.

You do so with hooks, like this one:

Now here comes the good part.

Hooks work because the human mind doesn't like unfinished business.

That's why TV series like Stranger Things exploit cliffhangers. They prompt viewers to binge.

You want readers to binge on your copy.

Otherwise, they'll never buy a thing.

And things could get ugly for you. 

Fast.

But, you say, B2B doesn't work like that! B2B is boring.

Baloney.

Tell it to Farmers Insurance. 

Here's the opener of an email I just received from the company:

I'm a small business owner, and I visit my clients' offices often.
I pretty much live on the road. Here's my challenge.

Hooked yet?

You'd laugh, if I told you the email promotes a Certificate of Insurance.

How boring is that?

Now back to our duck...

Content for All Seasons

Learning never exhausts the mind. 

— Leonardo da Vinci

In terms of traffic, evergreen content pays like an annuity. Smart marketers know that instinctively.

While I'm often psyched about my voguish ramblings, my all-time five most popular posts are anything but:

• Teardrops over Tarawa (May 2016)
• How to Get More from Marketing Automation (May 2011)
• You Ain't No Forrest Gump (April 2017)
• What Makes a Good Slogan? (May 2011)
• Purposeful Storytelling (March 2011)

Three are going on seven years old. None is newer than eight months old.

Besides staying power, what's nice about imperishable content? It generally takes no more effort to write than topical.

Blogger Aaron Orendorff says there are 20 kinds of evergreen content:

Original research. "Primary research is unique, exclusive, and—therefore—powerful," Orendorff says. He's right.

Stat pack. A collection of others' research. Adding commentary increases value.

Case study. A story, plain and simple. And proof of expertise.

Failure. A case study of a train wreck.

Shocking stat. The backstory behind a single statistic.

Beginners' how-to. "True beginner guides are few and far between," Orendorff says. That's why prospects like them.

Advanced how-to. High-level insights from thought leaders.

Checklist. Ideal for non-readers.

Long-term how-to. Strategic advice.

Product guide. Lessons in product selection. "Make your product tutorial about teaching: provide definitions, collect advice from industry experts, and present impartial reviews from third-party sites," Orendorff says.

Resources. A collection of how-to tips.

Best tools. A compendium of free and paid productivity tools for a niche. Including pros and cons and hacks increases value to readers.

Top influencers. A Who's Who in a niche.

Best books. A recommended reading list. Summaries add value. Asking influencers to name their picks adds even more.

Common mistakes. "Every industry has its seven deadly sins," Orendorff says. "Some have more like 10 or 20. Outlining these common mistakes—and providing tips on avoiding and overcoming them—is evergreen pay-dirt."

History of a topic. A timeline that answers, "How did we get here?" A great way to dispel myths.

Tip roundup. A collection of thought leaders' single-greatest tips.

Best—or worst—practices. A variation of the how-to guide: a procedural, but backed by examples. Worst practices can also grab readers' attention. "While best-practice lists are low-hanging evergreen fruit, worst-practice lists give you the opportunity to be just as valuable—and have a lot more fun," Orendorff says.

Glossary. A niche dictionary.

Everything you need to know. The “definitive” or “ultimate” guide to a topic. The encyclopedia entry.

The Five Pillars of Lead Followup

Lead gen is only half the marketing battle. Marketers must enable salespeople to follow up.

But a lot of them don't know how, perhaps because business owners have conditioned them to turn all leads over to sales, as soon as they materialize.

Those marketers need to master the five pillars of lead followup:

Website. Your website needs to be lucid and mobile. Your About page must be clear, concise and compelling, because it's the only one most prospects will read. And you need to make it easy to contact your organization—in person.

Content. You need a world-class piece of "cornerstone content," such as a white paper, e-book, or cheat sheet you can share with prospects. It must be authoritative and educational, or prospects will conclude "they have nothing to teach me." Case studies also motivate prospects, because they provide "social proof."

Sales deck.Your sales deck arms your people with a structure for pitching prospects. It should be a scaffold, not an edifice. Avoid a lot of background and blue-sky baloney; lean on images to tell your story; and don't cram the deck with copy, or treat is like a script or book: it's an aid for online and face-to-face presentations, not an encyclopedia.

Playbook. Your in-house how-to sales manual should give salespeople enough guidance that they can close any deal that comes down the pike. Include talking points, target persona cheat sheets, industry data sheets, product data sheets, competitive analyses, a glossary of terms, and an inventory of current collateral.

Email. You need an outbound email drip-campaign that runs at a cadence that makes sense both to you and to prospects. Newsletters are a good place to start. Direct-marketing appeals can be sent in between your monthly newsletters. Each email should offer value and foster interest in talking to your salespeople.

Things Worth Reading

The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening. 

— Douglas Coupland

Andy Crestodina's annual survey of bloggers is out. It shows 2 of 3 bloggers focus on SEO, up from 1 of 2 three years ago.

Given people's content shock, why bother?

Why write for robots, when you could write things worth reading?

The Hidden Presuaders

Vance Packard's 1957 best-seller The Hidden Persuaders convinced Americans that midcentury admen were gobbling up CIA-sponsored research studies and using the results to prey on consumers' frail and listless minds.

The title's "hidden persuaders" referred to subliminal messages, which Packard insisted made midcentury ads irresistible.

Cynical admen were embedding lurid words and racy images in ads for things like laundry detergents, cars, whiskies and cigarettes, in order to trigger customers' Freudian desires for pleasure, he claimed.

Ad agencies, Congress and the FCC scoffed at the idea, but the reading public embraced it.

Everybody loves a conspiracy, as Freud would say.

Flash forward 70 years and Robert Cialdini's best-seller Pre-Suasion provides a new generation of marketers the ammo they need to prey on customers.

Pre-suasion is a technique for gaining agreement with a message before it’s sent. 

Drawing on hundreds of social science studies, Cialdini makes two principal arguments:

1. To persuade a customer to make a certain choice, the marketer must first trigger a mental association that implies "change is good;" and


2. The factor most likely to determine the customer's choice is the one a marketer elevates in attention moments before the decision.

According to Cialdini:

• To get a customer to like you, first hand her a warm drink.


• To get a customer to help you, first ask her if she considers herself a helpful person.


• To get a customer to try your untested product, first ask if she loves adventure.


• To get a customer to buy a popular product, first show her a scary movie.


• To get a customer to buy an expensive product, first ask her to write down a number higher than the product's price.


• To get a customer to think about your proposal, first show her a photo of Rodin's The Thinker.


• To get a customer to buy French wine, play French music as she enters the store.

"The key moment is the one that allows a communicator to create a state of mind in recipients that is consistent with the forthcoming message," Cialdini says. It’s the moment in which we can arrange for others to be attuned to our message before they encounter it."

DO YOU KNOW? Movie-goers were traumatized when The Exorcist premiered in 1973. Many fainted, vomited, and fled from theaters in the middle of the picture. That's because William Friedkin laced the film with horrific subliminal images.

How to Measure Content Marketing Success

Measuring your content marketing success is easy, digital marketer Barry Feldman says. Just apply these 10 metrics:

Website traffic. Use Google Analytics to determine how many people visited your site, where they came from, and which pages they went to.

Subscriber growth. Monitor your headcount, because email is "your most important play for staying top-of mind with prospects," Feldman says.

Search rankings. Gauge your rankings with Google Analytics, with the goal of reaching Page 1 for any relevant search.

Time. Digital channels are unique, because they allow you to monitor "engagement" without fancy studies. You want visitors to dwell on a page for as long as it takes the average person to read the content there.

Social media followers. Far from being a “vanity metric,” audience size indicates whether the content you publish has appeal.

Social media shares. Social sharing is often automated, and people routinely share content without reading it, so shares don't mean much. But they do loosely correlate to website traffic and search rankings, so are worth your attention.

Links. "Measuring links will help you to gauge the traction your content is gaining," Feldman says. Inbound links indicate your content's cool. To measure them, set up a Talkwalker Alert.

Click-through rate. Click-through rate (CRT) is the be-all, end-all, because "marketers who earn high CTR will win regardless of the channel." CTR proves you've won the competition for people's attention.

Leads. Leads are paramount; but, remember, a lead's more than a subscriber. A lead has to "raise her hand" by registering for an event, requesting a demo, downloading a brochure, or taking some similar step.

Feedback. Comments come in many forms: social media updates, shares and direct messages; blog comments; emails and phone calls; form submissions; and reviews. Taking comments into account helps you improve your content.

Blogs Top Choice for Lead Generation

Search Engine Journal asked 230 marketers which content attracted the most leads.

Their top choice: blogs.

Four in 10 marketers (41%) named blogs the best content for lead generation (their second choice was white papers (14%)).

If blogs are indeed the best content for lead generation, shouldn't you learn how to blog effectively?

I'd suggest you begin by choosing a form. Two schools of thought prevail:

Long form. Andy Crestodina recommends 1,200 to 1,800 word posts. Google likes long posts, and readers are more apt to share them than they are their short cousins.

Short form. Seth Godin recommends "microcopy," because we live in "the age of the glance."

The choice between the two comes down to your goal:

• Are you aiming to be perceived as an authority? Then long is your best bet.

• Are you aiming to bolster awareness? Then short's your best bet.

Whichever form you choose, I'd suggest you next decide on your beat. What subjects should you cover? 

The choice is obviously most influenced by whatever you sell, but should also take into account competitors' and trade publishers' blogs (you want to be distinctive). And you should be able to crystallize your beat readily:

• We simplify fire-science breakthroughs

• We go inside SaaS marketing

• We promote faster LMS adoption

Lastly—whatever beat you choose—learn how to write readable posts.

Every post you write should be succinct, useful, insightful, startling, newsworthy, and entertaining. Every post should aim to change readers' lives; or their preconceptions, anyway. And every post should omit puffery. Save that for sales calls.

If you want to improve your blogging skills in a single day, sit down and read Bill Blunder's The Art and Craft of Feature Writing.

Braggin' (or How to Blow Up Sales)

Folks got no use for braggin'.

— Jimmy Shirl

Playing with adjectives is like playing with dynamite.

You can blow up potential sales.

The copy pitching National Retail Federation's annual convention ("Retail's Big Show") illustrates the hazard:

The three day event offers unparalleled education, collegial networking with 34,500 of your newest friends, and an enormous Expo Hall full of technologies and solutions.

Do the adjectives make the nouns that describe the event more vivid?

You decide. In my view:

• I understand the unparalleled education isn't a geometry lesson; but—besides being without peer—what is the attraction? Is the education useful? Practical? Advanced? Intensive? Digestible?
  
  
• Collegial networking sure sounds more attractive than its opposite (adversarial networking). But, practically speaking, how do you network with 34,500 people in three days? That would require—provided you never slept, ate, or took potty breaks—speaking with each attendee no more than 7.5 seconds. That's a tough way to make newest friends.
  
  
• An enormous Expo Hall also sounds more attractive than it opposite (a puny one). But how enormous is it? Bigger than Dallas? Than Ben Hur? Than a breadbox? And does every attendee equate vastness with productivity and time well spent?

It's safe to say the adjective-slinging copywriter strove, not to sell, but to please her client. Whatever happened to modesty, restraint, sincerity, dignity and good taste?

Here's the same copy adjective-free:

The event offers education, networking, and an Expo Hall full of technologies and solutions.

That's certainly clear, more sincere, and less preposterous. But does it sell?

The answer: it doesn't unsell.

Adjectives like unparalled, collegial, newest and enormous unsell, because they lack credence.

Nixing the adjectives and substituting stronger nouns and verbs would improve the copy's salesmanship:

Retail's Big Show arms you with insights, enriches your relationships, and introduces you to hundreds of technologies and solutions.

If that's not to your liking, substituting specifics instead would strengthen the copy's salesmanship:

Retail's Big Show equips you with a choice of over 125 educational sessions, countless opportunities to network with colleagues, and access to technologies and solutions from 490 providers.

And if that's too dry for you, using emotionally laden adjectives, instead of bombastic ones, would work:

Retail's Big Show outfits you for survival, delivering three full days of trend- and strategy-sessions designed for tomorrow's retail winners... countless opportunities to widen and renew your professional network... and nearly 500 chances to test-drive the tech innovations your competitors are considering—this very moment.

Content is Everything (or Why CMOs Fail)

Content is king.

— Bill Gates

CMOs tend to survive only a tad over two years.

There's a reason. While they're supposed to be leaders, most are overpaid closet organizers.

Instead of generating demand, they busy themselves with rearranging the company's "digital assets," so salespeople and customers can find them.

Big Data is their latest space-saving gadget. With it, they can go to town again rearranging the assets, this time in hyper-segmented, algorithm-based bins.

Meanwhile, salespeople still spend 40% of their time compiling their own deal-closing content, and 60% of customers think Marketing's content is crap.

CMOs, I have news for you: Marketing isn't logistics, or distribution, or document management. Marketing is content. And content is everything.

If you want to succeed, focus on quality content:

1. Know the buyers
2. Understand Sales' pipeline
3. Create content aligned with both

What are you waiting for? Your next pink slip?

Superman was a Content Creator

We often forget a significant fact.

When disguised as mild-mannered Clark Kent, the Man of Steel worked as a reporter for the Daily Planet.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to content creator Matthew Grocki for reminding me Superman was a content creator.

Hard and Sticky

But easy's like, who cares? Easy's like, how much is easy going to get you?

― Anne Lamott

How often have you been told to make your content easy?

Easy to skim, scan, and swallow.

Easy's best.

Not always, say two Princeton neuroscientists.

They've shown disfluency―the processing by the brain of hard-to-read content―increases the content's impact.

Adam Alter and Daniel Oppenheimer asked 3,400 subjects to take problem-solving tests and found the subjects repeatedly scored higher when the tests were disfluent (i.e., printed in hard-to-read typefaces).

"Disfluency led participants to adopt a more systematic processing strategy," the researchers concluded.

Additional neuroscientific evidence indicates hard-to-read content triggers an alarm in the brain that activates the prefrontal cortex responsible for careful thought.

The harder we have to work to understand a piece of content, the stickier it becomes.

Content Marketers, You are Not a Committee

Why are most corporate blogs mind numbing?

They're the products of committees.

Every post is the same. Safe. Sanctioned. Sanitized.

No one owns the content, so it's uninspired and impassionate.

If you want to improve your corporate blog, find employees who love their work and ask them to contribute (if you can't, you have a bigger problem than a boring blog).

Give them one, simple instruction: You are not a committee.

Then get out of their way and watch what they do. You'll soon have a much better blog.

As Mark Hamill recently told the audience of Content Marketing World, "Follow your own inspiration. If you find something engaging, find a way to repurpose it through your own prism. Believe in yourself and trust your instincts."

 You are not a committee.

When Robbing You Blind, Priceline Perfers Passive

When I arrived at the airport yesterday, the airline's agent informed me my ticket had been cancelled and no seats were available on the flight.

I called Priceline, which sold me the ticket. Two agents spoke to me (after putting me on hold for 40 minutes) and told me the ticket had been cancelled and no refund would be issued.

They relied throughout the conversations on the passive voice, never admitting Priceline cancelled my ticket and Priceline is keeping my money.

It's ironic the two people have the title "agent."

Writing coach Sherry Roberts could well have had Priceline in mind when she described the passive voice:

"A sentence written in the active voice is the straight-shooting sheriff who faces the gunslinger proudly and fearlessly. It is honest, straightforward; you know where you stand.

"A sentence written in passive voice is the shifty desperado who tries to win the gunfight by shooting the sheriff in the back, stealing his horse, and sneaking out of town."

Bloggers' Work Habits

Orbit Media asked 1,055 bloggers how they work. It found:

• Bloggers spend on average 3 hours to write a post (26% more time than a year earlier); only 1 in 3 spends less than 2 hours per post.

• 1 in 4 bloggers rely on an editor to improve their posts.

• The average post is 1,050 words long (19% longer than a year earlier).

• Nearly 50% of bloggers include lists in their posts; 15%, video.

• Most bloggers publish weekly; the number who publish daily is down by more than 50% from a year earlier.

• Over 95% of bloggers promote their posts on social media; a majority use email.

• 56% of bloggers routinely check their posts' traffic; 20% never do.

My work habits? Yours truly:

• Spends about 1.5 hours per post.

• Works without the benefit of an editor.

• Writes brief posts, 350 words or so.

• Loves to include lists and videos.

• Publishes 7 days a week.

• Uses social media to promote every post.

• Checks traffic, but not obsessively.

What are your work habits?

Should a B2B Copywriter Have a Voice?

Tell the truth but make truth fascinating.

— David Ogilvy

Except for Theresa McCulla, B2B copywriters have the best job ever.

They spend their days making machine tools, office furniture and cloud services fascinating.

The best ones know that craft, as well as truth, can lure buyers into buying.

They delight in discovering phrases that makes convoluted concepts seem clear and parity products, powerful.

They wouldn’t do the job if they didn’t harbor a love for language's capacity to transform truth.

But should a B2B copywriter have a voice?

I'd argue: yes. Without a voice, though it might be factual, the writer's copy is flat. 

And, as David Ogilvy said, "you can't bore people into buying."

Others would argue voice is a distraction and should "disappear into the house style." Voice can in fact be a hindrance to a writer: in-house reviewers don't welcome it and clients won't pay for it.

I'd argue that's old-school. Just as it favors generosity and art, our connection economy favors voice.

In Bright Book of Life, critic Alfred Kazin describes the late John Updike's visibility in his voice:

Updike writes as if there were no greater pleasure than reconstituting the world by writing—writing is mind exercising itself, rejoicing in its gifts. Reading him one is always conscious of Updike the Gifted, Updike the Stylist, Updike the Concerned Roguish Novelist. Updike is always so much Updike that the omnipresence of Updike in all his writing finally seems not a hindrance but a trademark.

A B2B copywriter's voice isn't a hindrance

It's a trademark.

Content Precedes Connection

Before the web, organizing a successful B2B event was child's play, as easy as saying, "Hey, kids, let's put on a show!"

But content shock has made event organizing hard. 

Really hard.

If you want to attract a content-shocked audience today, you'd better get your own content right, says Ricardo Molina, cofounder of Bright Bull. 

"Marketing B2B brand events is basically impossible to do successfully unless you have this step done right," Molina says.

Your ability to identify content that connects can only come from one place, as Warwick Davies, owner of The Event Mechanic!, says: "Knowing what’s going on in your market from a DNA level."

"Imported" knowledge of your market won't cut it.

Scratch any failed B2B event and, under the skin, you'll likely find the organizer got the content wrong.

"Get your event content straight," Molina says. "Make sure it's the kind of stuff people want to hear about. Make sure you're offering something that's definitely going to drag them away from their desks and into a room with you."

The Storytelling Trifecta

How often do you encounter content posing an idea, but nothing else?

An idea for a story isn't a story, says writing coach Larry Brooks, "unless you juice it with some combination of the Trifecta elements."

Each single element of the Trifecta "stands alone as a potential windfall;" all three combined are "pure gold."

Intrigue. "A story is often a proposition, a puzzle, a problem and a paradox," Brooks says. Intrigue arises "when you (the reader) find yourself hooked because you have to know what happens… or whodunnit… or what the underlying answers are." But intrigue need not depend on drama or mystery. "Sometimes intrigue is delivered by the writing itself. A story without all that much depth or challenge can be a lot of fun, simply because the writer is funny. Or scary. Or poetic. Or brilliant on some level that lends the otherwise mundane a certain relevance and resonance."

Emotional resonance. A story provokes a feeling, Brooks says. "It makes us cry. Laugh. It makes us angry. It frightens, it seduces, it confounds and compels. Every love story, every story about injustice and pain and children and reuniting with families and forgiveness—name your theme—is dipping into the well of emotional resonance for its power."

Vicarious experience. A story takes for a ride we'll remember. The juice of a story "isn’t so much the dramatic question or the plucking of your heart strings as much as the ride itself," Brooks says. "The places you’ll go, the things you’ll see, the characters you’ll encounter, the things you’ll experience." A story gives you "an E-ticket on the Slice of Life attraction."

Microcontent Do's and Don'ts

Web guru Jakob Nielsen doesn't push ideas he hasn't lab-tested.

So you'd do well to heed his advice on microcontent, those phrases and fragments that mean so much to sales.

"Microcontent should be an ultrashort abstract of its associated content, written in plain language, with no puns, and no 'cute' or 'clever' wordings," Nielsen says.

"Although it can be punchy, most importantly it must deliver good content, keep people’s interest alive, and provide value."

Page titles help search engines index your web pages. They're also what customers read in search results. When you write them, be sure to:

• Put keywords up front to catch customers' attention
• Include keywords that boost the content’s ranking
• Omit unnecessary words to improve scalability

Headlines are "pick-up lines," in two senses. They create a first impression; and they're often picked up and displayed in news feeds, social media streams, and blog posts. So be sure yours make sense out of context. Be sure also to:

• Tell customers something useful
• Tell customers something specific
• Avoid teasers and click bait

Taglines communicate the value you provide, the problem you solve, or the mission you fulfill. Taglines assure customers know what you do. Be sure to:

• Be brief
• Be simple
• Be specific

Subject lines, to resonate with customers, must address a need or be phrased as a benefit. In addition, they must grab customers' eyeballs. So write short, put keywords up front, and be sure you explain what your emails are about.

Cards provide customers "shortcuts" and present chunks of copy they might not otherwise read. When well written, they can also prompt customers to read and comprehend long pieces.

Hints and tips can function as live customer-service agents who anticipate customers' questions and addresses them in context. Web usability tests prove they increase conversions. Keep them short and sweet.