Everything I Needed to Learn About Getting Clients, I’ve Learned From Joseph Ratliff

A bit of bragging here: I really am a great writer.

However — and here’s a confession of sorts — I’m still learning the ins and outs of growing a business.

I can write a news release with my eyes closed. I can put together a great article in a handful of hours. I can whip out a boffo search engine-friendly, keyword-rich  web content piece in less than 60 minutes. Brochures, newsletters? Easy, peasy.

But if you need advice and techniques on how to grow your business, I’m not your woman.

 But I know people. In particular I know Joseph Ratliff.

Now, before I go further, know that I’ve hired Joseph to be my “build my writing business” mentor, so I’m a tad biased.

Joseph is the author of the Profitable Business Edge and you can learn more about his consulting services at his main website: http://www.profitpartnersconsulting.com/

(In fact, if you’re writer determined to get your freelance business writing career off the ground in a hurry, you can learn more about his mentoring program at that site.)

He also has a couple of blogs: http://profitablebusinessedge.blogspot.com/ and a new one: http://josephratliff.name/

Joseph is a copywriter, yes. But he’s also a consultant for business both online and off. In fact, his business is pretty much split 50/50 between brick-and-motor companies and those who exist only online.

He’s been a godsend to me. Check him out. You’ll sing his praises, as well.

Five Tips For a Meaty Newsletter

When you create a newsletter for your business, you want to make sure your publication is full of information your customers and prospects find interesting and of value. The biggest mistake business owners make when they publish their newsletter is forgetting this: It’s not about you, it’s about them. With that in mind, here are five tips to follow when you want to publish a newsletter your customers and prospects will read:

1) Keep the president’s or owner’s picture off the front page. Ditto with the “Note from the Owner” article. Instead, have articles and blurbs on the front page that supply useful information to your readers. For example, do you own a landscaping company? Then for your summer or June issue, have your main article be about tending to summer perennials or mulch, or keeping weeds at bay. Save the head shot of the big guy (or gal) for the second page. It’s certainly fine — and even dandy — to have a note from the owner; it personalizes the newsletter. But it should not be placed on the first page.

Your Customers Want to be a Part of Your Business Family

2) Speaking of personalizing your newsletter, each issue should have a bit of background about an employee. Consumers today want to feel they belong to a community. Your business can be a part of their local network and — really — they want to feel they’re a part of your success. So have a little bio about one of your employees (preferably not one of the big shots).

3) Another way to help your readers feel they are a part of your business is to feature a customer of your business — with his or her permission, of course. Tell a bit about why he uses your product or service and how it helped him. Leave a spot in your newsletter for your customers to contact you about being featured in your publication. As your customers and even your prospects begin to feel you are a part of their day-to-day life, you’ll be pleasantly surprised how many folks want to be featured in your newsletter.

4) Don’t be shy about putting your contact info in at least two spots in your newsletter. If you have a four-page publication, stick your ‘call us’ info on each page. Place your address, phone number, website URL and e-mail address prominently in a box on your second page. If possible, put a name behind that number. For example, “Need more information on our services? Call Jane at 111-555-1212 ext. 104.”

Ask and You’ll Probably Receive

5) Finally, don’t send that newsletter to your printer without an incentive for your readers. Having a sale this month? Let your readers know it — place that information where they’ll be sure to see it. Offering a free consultation for all new clients? Don’t let your printer print without it.

If You Think There’s Nothing Newsworthy About Your Business, You’re Wrong

Let’s say you’re the owner of a landscaping business. Or you’re a florist. Or the owner of a cleaning service. And you have dozens of landscapers, florists and cleaning services competing for customers. You think there’s nothing exceptional about you. After all, all landscapers landscape. All florists sell flowers. All cleaning services clean.

There’s nothing special about me, you think, certainly nothing a reporter would find interesting.

And that’s where you’re wrong. Because all you need is to think just a bit differently than your competitors.

For example, let’s say it’s summer. That means flea and tick season. As a professional housecleaner, you know how to keep fleas at bay indoors, but do your customers?

So you could write a release that goes something like this:

Have fleas jumped from Fluffy or Fido and infested your carpet? There’s a simple way to keep them at bay, says Jane Doe, owner of Jane’s Super Clean, a Your Town housecleaning service: vacuum regularly.

“Your first line of attack is to use a flea bomb. Then you should vacuum all the rugs and carpets in your house several times a week,” Doe said.

Doe’s company has been offering cleaning services since 1999 and knows a thing or 10 about keeping homes clean and pest free during the summer.

Then add a list of 10 summer (or anytime) cleaning tips to the release. Finally, if you’re offering a special flea-ridding service (you’ll come in and vaccum a homeowner’s house or apartment three times a week at a reduce/volume rate), be sure to mention it in the release.

By writing a release that gives a helpful hint, strategy or fact that is of use to an editor’s or reporter’s readers, you’ve just made your business newsworthy.

Let Me Blog For You

If you’re the owner of a business – large, small, mid-size, online or brick-and-motor only – you need a blog.

Why? It’s simple, really:

Blogs drive traffic to your website.

More traffic to your website means more business for you.

More customers for you – whether to your website or to your downtown storefront – translates to more sales for you.

 And blogs do so very inexpensively. In fact, if you do the blogging yourself, your blog need not cost you a thing.

Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Not one penny comes out of your pocket. So if your blog brings you more income with no outgo, what are you waiting for? Start blogging!!!And if you don’t want to blog yourself, hire me to write your blog for you.So, just what is a blog? Wikipedia.com defines a blog as:

….a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics or local news, some function as more personal diaries.

But there’s more to blogging than talking about your personal life. More and more businesses are finding blogs to be a terrific tool to generate traffic. In addition, business’ customers feel they are part of the family — that they are a true part of a business. Talk about generating customer loyalty!

As you can see, I’m a huge fan of blogs. This website for my marketing communications company Harvest Sage Communications actually is a blog. It costs me nothing, since I signed up for a free blog at WordPress.com. Another great free blogging site is Blogger.com.

For more proof about how a blog can change your business for the better, check out these links:

A blog can be a great way to drive free traffic to your website.

A blog can bring a highly desirable clientele to your business.

Now, a blog can take a lot of your time. At least half an hour per post, and if you post to your blog everyday (which is highly recommended for best results because search engine “spiders” find new web pages more quickly than older pages), that can take a ton of time away from things that you, as the business owner, could be better off doing – such as making sales. So let me blog for you. Drop me a note today and let’s get blogging!

Virtual Water Cooler for Great Business Ideas

Many folks looking for good writing look for great business ideas, too. Well, perhaps they look for the good business ideas and THEN look for good writing when they’re at the point they need to promote their business.

So if you’re an entrepreneur at heart with ideas busting out all over — or if you’re still searching for that “just right” idea — to get you going, check out the Seeds of Wisdom Publishing website, particularly its forum. Many of today’s greatest entrepreneurial minds post ideas there — and give feedback and advice for other ideas.

Or, as the website’s home page itself says:

Ever hear of Gary Halbert? Harvey Brody? J.F. (Jim) Straw? Yanik Silver? Kirt Christensen? Gordon Jay Alexander? All these high-profile entrepreneurs and marketers – and more – have posted to the Seeds of Wisdom Forum at one time or another.)

Read their wisdom and ask your own questions! The first secret of profitable success is to not be afraid to ASK… Then, put their advice into action! You can also share your own advice too.

I check this site daily. They’re a great bunch, very friendly and supportive with a strict policy about nasty comments/posts.

The Maid Man GETS Blogging

If you’re the owner of a small business, you should have a blog. Especially if you’re the owner of service business — you’re a plumber, doctor, facialist, writer, and so on — you need a blog.

Ron Holt, owner of Two Maids and a Mop in Florida, gets blogging. He’s been blogging about his three-branch maid service since May 2005 and, while I don’t know how many blog readers he has, I do know his blog is  informative and highly entertaining.

His cleaning business is doing very well. In November 2003, his company had three employees; a bit more than three years later Two Maids and a Mop has 50 folks cleaning 45-55 homes a day. Of course, Holt will tell you the reasons his business is successful are many — his “pay for performance” policy and his company’s detailed attention to customer service, among others.

 Yet his blog is a real interest grabber. I live in Pennsylvania and I enjoy reading his blog every time he posts. I’m now a huge fan of his cleaning service and I’m not a customer.

 But I could be someday, for Holt plans to expand and”dominate the housecleaning industry. Soon as he opens a branch near my home in Pennsylvania (Note to Ron: Come on up to Reading, PA!), Two Maids and a Mop will be MY cleaning service.

And all because he posts to a blog.

You should, too.

Writing Press Releases for the Web

Joan Stewart of The Publicity Hound writes at her blog that the traditional journalism style of writing a press release — inverted pryramid (most important/newsworthy aspect of the release first), the who what, where, when and how, etc. — doesn’t work for the Internet.

In fact, Stewart states that there’s a new way to write and distribute press releases — methods that will get journalists AND “the people who are in a position to buy your products and services” to read your release.

Publicity is great no matter how you get it. Leaving out the middle man — in this case, a journalist — to let your potential customers know of your products is a savvy way to go.

Stewart is offering a new, free tutorial e-course on writing press releases. I’ve signed up for it and today’s lesson — the first in a series of 89 — has me wishing tomorrow were already here.

Be Careful Where You Put that Content — You Don’t Know Where It’s Been

A few years ago a young colleague of mine wrote a column for the weekly paper at which we worked that just flowed. Her words sang. She was funny. She was clever. She wrote an AWESOME piece.

I was exceedingly jealous. And in awe. I knew she wrote well. But THAT well? Wow! 

And then it hit me. That column looked very familiar. Like something I’d just read in our small office’s copy of Cosmpolitan magazine. I grabbed Cosmo, checked the column and there it was — my colleague’s column and the one in Cosmo was almost word-for-word the same. Not exactly. But enough that I knew she’d tweaked it just a tad and then passed it off as her own.

And this was from a sweet young woman. Someone who would never think of stealing anything from anybody. Someone I knew I could trust with my darkets secrets.

I gently asked her about it. She started crying and told me she felt so inadaquate at the paper. She had no talent. She couldn’t possibly ever be a writer. She felt such pressure.  She told me she knew she shouldn’t have done it and she was sorry she did. It would never happen again.

I knew it wouldn’t. I knew this was a freak incident on her part and I told her so. I also told her I would never tell our boss — and I never did.

And I’m happy to say my colleague never plagarized again (as far as I know). And she has gone on to a very successful career as a public relations professional.

Of course, our relationship was never the same. Her shame was too great — she could barely look me in the eye. .Oddly enough, she never felt she could trust me — after all, I knew her secret.

And, I must admit, I have always wondered if she truly could be trusted again. There was always some doubt in my mind about her.

Which brings me to plagarizm on the Web. It happens. A lot. Too much, does it happen. And if you use someone else’s content without his or her permission and without giving the writer the credit that is the author’s due, you are a thief.

Rewrite someone else’s article, changing a word here and there, omitting a paragraph or sentence or two. You’re still a thief.

And should you be found out, your site’s readers will always doubt you. Always.

Don’t let that happen to you. Either write the content yourself or hire me do to it for you.

Losing your site’s visitors’ trust is not worth it.

The Never-ending SEO Learning Curve

If you feel keeping your website a search engine darling takes a huge amount of work, you’re right — getting to and maintaining a high SE ranking requires, as the site Bruce Clay, Inc. says, a “constant keywords monitoring and information rework. Search Engine Optimization never rests, much like your competition.”

So how can you get the attention of the search engines? One way is by blogging, and by blogging often. A client of mine, MyHealthMyWorld.com hired me last year to blog at HealthRecordNews.com, and within three months that blog went from a Google Page Rank of 0 to a Page Rank of 3 (the highest ranking is a 5) — all with blogs written and posted about three times a week.

There’s a nifty SEO guru discussion featured in the blog post “Got 100 Dollars? 7 Experts share budget website marketing tips.”  Of particular note — to me — is this, written by Todd Malicoat of the site Stuntdbl.com. Here’s an excerpt of portion of the $100 dollar blog discussion:

I don’t think there is one sure fire plan based on the amount of money you have, but the point is, that it shouldn’t take MUCH money to make more if you do so strategically using the tools that are available to you. The power of e-mail alone is amazing. The power of a great article and web publishing is astounding. The power of good links and great rankings
is mind boggling.