Writing for leads: How professionals can market themselves online

Writing for leadsIan Lurie

Friday, February 17, 12

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I know what you’re thinking.


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Engage! Converse! Write gooder!

Oh, great. Here’s another jackass to tell me all the stuff I hear 30x a day, like “engage your audience”.








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Law School Writing & Marketing Parenting

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Ian’s Life, 1990-2011Not true! I’ve spent 16 years now testing, experimenting and learning what kind of writing works best online.

So we’re gonna get specific.

Hours








I’ve had to use this learning writing copy to sell, teach and promote stuff like the Tacoma Dome’s roof, the importance of colon cleansing, and rubber grommits.

Yeah. I’m livin’ the dream.




Writing for conversionBut I digress. I’m not going to give you platitudes. This is about writing for conversion. And make no mistake: Everyone coming to your blog post should somehow convert.

I’m not talking about deception, or selling, or anything else ‘cheesy’. I’m talking about making sure readers keep reading, or subscribe, or otherwise stick around. That’s the kind of conversion you want.








I !nd/read your post

I subscribe

You keep in touch

I hire you

You need to fill the top of the leads ‘funnel’. That’s what the blog is for. It’s not to get folks to hire you.

So your job is to get folks who read your stuff to this point.








Blog = Top of funnel








9 rulesI’ve got 9 basic rules I use whenever I write for online consumption. Follow them and you maximize the odds that you can get readers to convert.






No one cares.Write accordingly.

1Friday, February 17, 12



me. me.

me.mememe

you. no... me.

People are self-interested. On the web, they’re more distracted, less attentive and less willing to stop for a second than a preschooler who just ate a bag of M&Ms. Beg, plead, bribe. You’ll get nothing.




Tell people why they should read.

So, you need to put whatever you’re writing in their terms. Why would they want to read your post?








“Don’t let an uninsured loss devastate your project. Look out for these insurance policy gotchas.”

For example:

If I’m a general contractor, guess what? I worry about this all the time. So this first sentence tells me why I should read this post.








“Check your payables or you may end up with IRS penalties.”

Around tax time, this one will grab me, too:








Don’t write a white paper.Whatever you do, don’t write the staid, white paper. First, most of the readers aren’t lawyers, or accountants, or engineers, or whatever. Second, even the nerdiest of us will have a hard time not going into a coma when you start throwing white papers on a blog.








Answer this: Why should I care?a non-lawyer

Answer this question: Why should someone outside your profession care about this post?

a non-accountanta non-architect








Sell the page.Sell the page, not yourself.






Write for a blank sheet of paper.




Your headline must, when written on a blank sheet of paper, explain your post to a complete stranger.

‘nuff said.






Headlines get taken out of context, all over the place. Here’s the headline on a post I wrote a while back.


And here it is, in a search result.


Headlines show up in feed readers, too.

My point: Any headline you write - any title for any post - must be fully descriptive. It must stand on its own, because it’s going to have to.

Ignoring this rule leads to all sorts of tragedies...




Come on in, the water’s !ne.

This is from an Anderson Cooper article. What the heck was he writing about? I dunno.








Karzai pardons Taliban

This one probably touched off an international incident.








Royals Get a Taste of Angels’ Colon

Ewwwwwwww....

(it’s about baseball, by the way)








Supreme Court Tries Sodomy

And my personal favorite.






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Search Feeds Twitter E-mail

Clever Descriptive

Clickthru from headline/titles, by type

We’ve tested this over the years. Descriptive beats clever, every time.




Be fully descriptive.






Just say it.




Active voice should always be what you use.Er, yeah. Use active voice, not passive voice.Er, yeah. Use active voice, not passive voice.








Use active voice.

Ah. So much better.








“A study of properties”Lose the ‘of’.








“A properties study”








“Trend higher”Can you think of a better way to say this?








“grow”Yep.








“Skill at communicating”Again, lose the ‘at’.








“Communications skills”Much better.








“The manner in which”Can you think of a better way to say this?








“How”Uh-huh. Don’t use 4 words where 1 will do.






Know the no’s.




“This will be too hard to read”“I won’t understand it”“It’ll be the same stuff I read everywhere else”“It will be a waste of my time”

Know the reasons people give themselves for leaving your blog post. Most important: You have to constantly reinforce that this is a fantastic use of their time.






Don’t write like a lawyer.(until you’re billing someone)




“Don’t write like a #$#@!@ lawyer!!!!!!”-Steven Reinhardt, 1992Judge Reinhardt is brilliant, and super-liberal. He also called me a fascist, and told me the above. He got the latter right, at least.








In the event that = “if”Not less than = “at least”Thereafter = “later” or “after”Subsequent to = “after”








http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/legalese.htm

A brilliant classmate of mine at UCLA is now a professor there. He wrote the above list. You should print it and tape it to your monitor. It’ll improve your writing in minutes.








Search engines don’t pay you.




Don’t sweat the keywords.

I won’t belabor this: Just don’t worry about search engines that much.








Do be fully descriptive.

If you’re fully descriptive in your headlines, you provide a good clue to search engines that lets them classify your post.








Do link like with like.

If you write 3 posts on a similar topic, link them together. That’s not just for search engines - it also helps your readers.








Do keep tags to a minimum.

If your blog or site uses tags, use no more than 3-4 tags per post. If you don’t know what tags are, don’t worry about it - you won’t have any issues, because you won’t add any tags.






Put on the breaks.

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You need to break up your writing. It’s hard to read online. People tend to scan the page, first. Make your pages scannable.




6-8 lines/paragraph.

Keep your paragraphs short.








3-4 paragraphs per ‘chunk’.And never have more than 3-4 paragraphs before you place a subheading or an image.








Subheadings.Speaking of subheads, use ‘em. Your blogging software lets you add a ‘level 2 heading’ or an ‘h2’. Use those as subheads.








Use bullets and lists.Use lists for three reasons: They help people scan the page. They make your points more obvious. And they help you organize your thoughts.

Use lists for three reasons:

1. They help people scan the page.

2. They make your points more obvious.

3. They help you organize your thoughts.

See the difference?








By grouping lists and subheadings, you can turn a massive post (this one was over 1000 words) into an easily readable page.








By grouping lists and subheadings, you can turn a massive post (this one was over 1000 words) into an easily readable page.








Images.








Images are a great way to break up the page, too. And they add detail your readers can take in at a glance.








Images are a great way to break up the page, too. And they add detail your readers can take in at a glance.






Use images wisely

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Images are great, but they can really screw up a blog post.


115 kb

First, they can be too large. This image is 115 kilobytes. In plain language, that means it’s going to take a really long time to download to your readers’ computers. Will they wait? I doubt it.


18 kb

Here’s the same image, compressed to 18kb. You can use any photo editing software to get the same results. If you don’t know how to do this, have someone else do it for you, or use a service like Picnik, which is owned by Google and won’t send you viruses.


oy. this is very

cramped.

Scale images using that same editing software. Don’t scale them using the height and width attributes.


Good ALT attribute: “Sheep say web 2.0”Bad ALT attribute: “What the heck?”

Write a fully descriptive ALT attribute for all images. Your blogging software lets you enter a photo description and, depending on how it’s set up, an ALT attribute. Fill out those two fields and you’ll be setting a good ALT attribute.


Have a call to action.

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Finally, have a call to action. Ask folks to do what you want them to do. And that call to action doesn’t have to be ‘hire me’. It should be an action that brings them into the funnel.




Invite subscriptions/followsHow about asking folks to follow you on Twitter, or subscribe to your blog using an RSS reader?








You should follow me on Twitter.

First, have a link that reads exactly like this:

This wording gets best results as far as building followers.








Get in touch on LinkedIn.

Maybe have this, too.








Social media = rankingsIf you’re wondering, ‘why bother’, well, there’s more to social media sharing than warm tingles. Social media shares help content rank higher in search results, too. And they build the kind of authority search engines and social media sites use to rank and filter content.








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SEO: B+

SEO: F

11SEO: C+

44SEO: D-

Look at these rankings. These guys have no business being #3 for ‘law firm’. They only rank there because they have far more followers on Facebook. Social shares matter, a lot.








Subscriptions = visibilityAnd, of course, every subscription you get builds visibility: It’s one more user who’ll remember you, and potentially come back.








Chain your content.Finally, use one piece of content - one blog post- to draw the reader into another.








For example, ask folks to register for a webinar, or sign up to download a related white paper.








For example, ask folks to register for a webinar, or sign up to download a related white paper.








blog post 1

blog post 2

blog post 3

e-book/whitepaper/seminar

By ‘chaining’ a series of posts together you can build your authority and trust, and then get more folks willing to provide their information to get a more in-depth piece. That gets folks deeper into the funnel.








I read your post

I subscribe

You keep in touch

I hire you

That’s how all of these tips work: They fill the top of the funnel. Then they help readers make a good decision about whether they should subscribe to your blog. If they keep in touch, they’re more likely to hire you.

There you have it: Inbound marketing, without a hard sell.








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Writing for leads: How professionals can market themselves online