I actually had a different post lined up for today, but I loved David Crandall’s post on LaVonne’s blog so much that I got inspired to make one of my own! So, without further ado, here are a few things that I don’t usually talk about, but are huge parts of who I am and what I am really like.

1) I am a gamer.

I’ve mentioned this once before here, but I’ve been into online games for a few years now. I started out with World of Warcraft, and I’ve progressed through several others. My current one is League of Legends. In the evenings, you can usually find me on skype playing a frost mage bird while hanging with a bunch of male gamers plotting how to kill other players. I also know at least two of them read this blog on a regular basis, so hi guys (Casey, you can stop laughing now).

2) I love dragons.

My first dragon experience was when my dad read The Hobbit to me when I was eight. I’m still a fan of dragon books as an adult, and I actually have a shelf in my office filled with various dragon figurines and finger puppets that I have collected over the years.

3) I am a serious introvert.

I love people, but people also exhaust me. I’m very good at socializing, but if I do too much of it at once I generally feel like I want to go hide out in some remote cave. My most exhausting work days are the ones where I have several phone meetings, even if I really like the people I’m meeting with.

4) My cultural references are completely inappropriate for my age.

I’m 24, and I don’t think I’ve seen many movies made past 1960. I blame my parents; they raised me on Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant movies and PBS, which isn’t entirely up to date either. I’ve never seen a zombie movie, a stoner comedy, or anything like that. My favorite movie is Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and I’ve always had a huge crush on Gregory Peck.

5) I didn’t like dogs until I met Didy.

I now pretty much love all dogs, but I was the biggest dog hater until Didy came into my life. I had several really bad experiences with dogs when I was a child; a rottweiler once jumped up to bite me and ripped the sleeve off my shirt when I was ten. I realize now that these experiences were not so much about dogs as badly trained dogs, but they made me think that all dogs were mean and aggressive. I’m now a huge dog advocate, and I wish I’d discovered that earlier on in life.

We’re starting to get hints of fall here, despite the continual heat. The evenings are getting colder, and the leaves are starting to turn. As a child, fall was my favorite time of year. It meant new school supplies (which were always far more exciting than the classes I had to use them for), sweaters, and most of all fresh new books.

So I suppose it isn’t surprising that when I saw Lavonne’s post about her Customer Love challenge this month, my first thoughts went to creating a shiny new book. Those of you who know me personally know that I think e-books are generally a sort of wasted opportunity in the current format. So many people download a strangely named pdf and either let it sit in a folder until their next hard drive cycle, or read it and forget it. My personal theory is that we don’t engage with e-books in the same way because they are by nature a static format, and many people don’t learn purely through reading. If you think back to the earliest reading experiences that make an impression on us, they’re all about more than reading. Some books for children use fur and fabric to reinforce the concepts that are being learned (think Pat The Bunny), and things like pop up books rely on that sense of happy surprise that occurs as you turn to the next page to see what information will stand out.

We know why these techniques work. Children see written information highlighted and reinforced in delightful and unexpected ways, and it causes them to engage with the book while retaining the information. So why the hell don’t we do this with e-books?

Well, because we’re adults for one, and there is a sad perception that we outgrow delightful books pretty quickly. Secondly, because e-books are generally a business resource, and business is well…even less fun and delightful.

Along with Lavonne’s challenge, we’re taking time this month here to declare that e-books, and running a business in general doesn’t mean that you have to lose that sense of fun and wonder that you approach learning with when you’re little. By the end of this month, we’re hoping to have a big copywriting e-book out that proves that you can produce something that is both a serious online resource and a delight to interact with, even if it’s a little unconventional in format.

In the meantime, go check out Lavonne’s blog post about the challenge, or even go ahead and enter on your own! It’s going to be crazy and fun; we can’t wait to see you there.

Copywriters don’t like to admit this, but there are some things that are really hard to sell. My billboard top five list of those things currently would include both life coaching and social media coaching. Now, this isn’t because these people are evil or anything. We work with a lot of people who do both of these things, and they are uniformly fantastic at their jobs, and are helping people do real things and make real changes in their lives and their businesses.

Here’s the problem: when both of these things came about, they were new and exciting and lots of people jumped on the bandwagon. Like any popular industry, people got burned. I’ve seen some posts on Twitter where people talk about social media coaches like they’re a bunch of witches from Salem, which is unfair. Like any industry, you have to do your research and separate the good from the bad. The awful economy has done a lot of this for us, and the people leftover are generally a good bunch who are struggling to sell a product that is perceived as both expensive and slightly sleazy. It’s also useful for a hell of a lot of people and responsible for changing lives.

Sorry guys, I love you, but that’s the marketing reality.

However, that doesn’t mean all is lost; the trick is marketing things the right way. If you’re in an industry that is a hard sell, you need to figure out your emotional benefits. Truthfully, everyone needs to do this, but entrepreneurs in more crowded industries live or die by this rule. So today, I’m giving out some pretty specific tips for life coaches, since I’ve been consulting and writing for lots of them lately and I’ve come up with some theories.

First, another reality check: writing an honest sales page full of truthful emotional benefits is both a difficult and potentially painful experience. If you’re a life coach, you probably became one for a reason. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you had some kind of negative experience that changed you profoundly. Everyone has something in their past that put them on their professional path, and for many of us it isn’t a neat and pretty experience. The advantage that most of us have is that we don’t have to talk about it if we don’t want to. If you’re running a life coaching business, you do.

Imagine the kind of person who googles your website, or stumbles across you and stays. What kind of emotional state are they in? I’ll give you a hint. If your copy is full of your professional credentials, your shining success stories, and your perfectly designed coaching packages, that’s not what will sell your services. The people who are finding your website are there for a reason; in many cases, that reason seems so catastrophic and overwhelming that they can’t read your shiny professional credentials through their tears. Perhaps they feel so engulfed by the problems in their life that they can’t imagine how the people in your success stories could possibly ever relate to them. They could be so scared of the idea of asking for help that the more professional you seem, the further away you seem to be.

Your access point for these people is the part of your life that you don’t want to talk about. At some point or another, you knew exactly what they were feeling and you felt like that too. To get them to read all of the stuff that convinces them that you are professional and affordable and helpful, you need to make them feel safe.

Safety, when it comes to life coaching, is the reigning value in copy. Understanding is pretty damn close to it. Convince people that they are safe with you, and the sale is yours every time.

We have a guest post today from Cristina Fugaru, a fellow copywriter and crazy Facebook fanatic! We met because I somehow ran across her website, fell in love with the design, and poked her gushing about it. We’ve been friends since. And she’s here today to give us the skinny on being a ghost(writer).

I love what I do. And what I do is I write and occasionally ghostwrite. When I decided to start my career as a freelance writer/copywriter, I wasn’t very much aware of how ghostwriting works, what are the advantages and disadvantages of being a ghostwriter, how much does it pay or where do you find ghostwriting jobs. It sort of just happened.

When you are a ghostwriter, you agree/contract to write someone else’s story in a book, article, newsletter, blog posts or any other relevant media you can think of and most important, all credit is given to your client. After being the “voice” behind someone else’s story for quite a while, I’ve come to the conclusion that both individuals and companies hire ghostwriters for the following reasons: lack of time and lack of writing and organizing information skills.

As a ghostwriter, it’s your job to make the final product look like it has been written by your client and that’s why you need a set of skills in order to be able to tell the story right:

• be creative and flexible enough to adapt your unique style to what your client asks for;
• be discreet and act like a “ghost”; as a ghostwriter you are trading your writing skills and agree on receiving no recognition for your work;
• be able to work on your client’s outline;
• Most important, know how to listen, know what questions to ask and when to ask them because it is your job to understand the client’s story and then successfully recreate it.

Advantages of ghostwriting

Ghostwriting is a simple and easy way to make money.
I speak from experience when I say that at the beginning of a freelance writing career it’s easier to get ghostwriting projects and from my point of view this can be helpful for a beginner because it allows you to develop your skills and keep focus on writing. Plus, you may not yet have what it takes to come up with something that’s worth publishing so ghostwriting is the simpler way to get started.

You have complete access to the main (re)source of your project: the client itself.
You can easily obtain all the information you need by interviewing your client and listening to the complete story at once, but you’re also allowed to ask questions every time something crosses you mind. What I’m trying to say is that when you’re ghostwriting you benefit from not having to spend lots of time researching. This means more time for you to write and take on other freelance writing jobs.

Ghostwriting done right can be steady work and it’s easier to find.
Once you find a reliable client, all you have to do is concentrate on delivering accurate, original and quality content.

Of course, ghostwriting has its disadvantages as well.

Disadvantages of ghostwriting

Lack of attribution
For most writers (including me) attribution is extremely important. It’s natural to want official recognition for your writing and it’s also natural to feel a bit sad when someone else gets credit for your work.

Unable to use as portfolio samples
Once you’ve given up the copyright, you are not allowed to use the project as a sample of your work. This means no chance of enhancing your portfolio with a book or article you’ve ghost written.

Limited expression
There are times when ghostwriting does not allow you to express yourself and write as you’d naturally do; instead, you have to transform yourself into a different person;  be able to mimic someone else’s style.

Possibly sacrificing personal principles
In order to be a successful ghostwriter, you may have to sacrifice personal creative principles in favor of the work. There will be times when the client will present you with nothing more than a title or topic idea and you’ll have to work from scratch. Or, in case of book ghostwriting, he may come to you with one or two chapter outlines and request that you mimic the writing style of another author. And you may not agree with all those requests because you might feel that they’re compromising your principles. So my advice is that if you don’t feel comfortable with taking on a ghostwriting project, simply say “no” and try to find one that’s suited for you.

In case your goal is to become a successful and well paid ghostwriter you have to try and balance things. Always sticking to your principles may get you to lose ghostwriting projects, much needed income and contacts. Think about what you are willing to do and what not, and carefully accept or reject ghostwriting offers.

A very important piece of advice, and something that’s true for freelance writers in general not just for ghostwriters, is choose your clients carefully, be professional, write creatively, pay attention to your client’s demands and under no circumstances work for free-you’re talented and your talent should be awarded!

I choose to end this guest post with a very important piece of advice given by veteran ghostwriter Clifford Thurlow during an interview:

Negotiate your name on to the cover. Some of my books have “with Clifford Thurlow” slipped inside on the verso page and it just doesn’t have the same thrill as seeing your by-line on the front of the book. On a practical level, I’d say make sure you have lots of spare batteries for your tape, write notes as well as taping, and don’t be afraid to ask awkward questions – questions, that is, about sex, money, business, drugs, alcohol and all those things that – whether we like it or not – fill the pages of best-sellers.

Now that I have expressed my likes and dislikes, I would like to ask you: do you think that the benefits outweigh the disadvantages or is it the other way around? Also, since I am aware that we all have different thoughts and opinions, I’m curious to know what other ghostwriters consider to be the advantages and disadvantages of ghostwriting.

Cristina Fugaru is a freelance copywriter, blogger, and occasionally ghostwriter living in Timisoara, Romania. She spends most of her time at her laptop writing, networking or developing marketing strategies. You can contact her via Facebook or simply visit her blog where you should leave a message petitioning her to join twitter.

Awhile back, Matt Mansfield emailed me about looking over his new program, “Earn More By Finding Freelance Jobs Online”. I was kind of skeptical, because as I’ve written about here before, some of the options for earning money online have lots of ethical/financial issues, and I have a pretty strong opinion about them. By the time I was done going through the course, I told Matt to raise the price and asked him if I could review it here, because it’s a very solid toolbox for writers, and has a ton of value built into it.

Put simply, if you’re just getting started writing online, you need this program.

It’s common internet wisdom that there are millions of writing jobs all over the internet. The problem comes when you start looking, and all you can find are jobs that A) require you write on spec, and B) aren’t in an area where you can convincingly position yourself as an expert.

As ambivalent as I am about some of the writing job sites online, I’m definitely of the opinion that writing on spec is pretty much always something that you should say no to. There are too many writing jobs out there that pay (even if it’s not much) for you to be giving someone your talent for free. Matt’s course gives you a pretty much endless number of places to find paying jobs, and he breaks them down neatly into different categories. If you don’t want to deal with the job sites, you’ve got lots of other options. If you don’t like the content sites like Demand Studio, you’ve still got lots of places to pick from.

What’s even better is that Matt goes through all this information(in both written and video form), and tells you what makes all of these sites different from each other from the user’s perspective. He explains how to sign up, how to easily use them to find the jobs that you want, and the positives and negatives of each.

I’ve done a fair amount of research into freelance writing online, and Matt had job sources in this course that I had never found or heard of. They were also job sources that looked really incredible (there’s a whole site for just awesome blogging jobs?!).

While this course has something for everyone, I suspect that people who are just starting out online would benefit hugely from it. Matt’s course takes the scary out of finding the work, and allows you to spend more time actually writing. If this had been around when I started I would have been all over it.

I wasn’t planning to blog today, but I had such a profoundly interesting small business related morning that I felt compelled to share some of it. I normally run in the evenings, but lately I’ve been getting up early when it’s cooler to run the trail. Today I decided to start at the opposite end of the trail from the one near my house, because I wanted to see how the routes connected up. My start point today began in the middle of town, and was surprisingly quite gorgeous. Now, my normal routine is to run and then head straight back home. In fact, because of my job, the only place I really frequent in town other than the running trail is the grocery store. Today, however, by the time I was done running I was starving, so I decided to head to a cafe that my friend Meghan had recommended the other day that was close by. It’s one of those little local places that I had always passed by for a couple reasons. It has a horrible location; it’s stuck in a weirdly shaped corner of the messiest intersection in that section of town, and there’s pretty much zero parking. It also had a lot of that Americana kitsch out front that as a an east coast native makes me feel a little uncomfortable. We all have politics where I grew up; you just don’t put them in your windows. But I went anyway, because it was close and I figured it would have coffee and a place to sit down.

The place is called Pete’s Corner Cafe, and it gets fabulous reviews on Yelp. The inside was beautifully decorated with cute tables and real dishes with palm trees on them. They brought me my coffee in a matching cup. They had real butter for the pancakes. All of these things made me think I might have found the perfect cafe. I ordered pretty conservatively because I didn’t know how good it would be, but I’m now determined to go back and try something more interesting. Their pancakes were the best I’ve had in years; almost like my grandmother’s recipe.

As I was finishing up, the chef/owner came out to ask how my food was. We ended up sitting and talking for ages, since I mentioned that I ran a small business too. He said that he’d been there a year and three months, and was proud of that, but that money was tight for him. He needs to make $500 a day to make the diner run smoothly, and he normally made half of that. He didn’t say it to get sympathy; he was clearly proud of making ends meet and dealing with things like they were. He also fed meals to two homeless people who he spotted out on the street as we talked. I asked him why he did it, and he said that he believed that if you did good things you got good things back.  I asked him if he had a website, and he looked confused and told me that he might have a Myspace page for the business. On the way out, he shook my hand and handed me a small package of homemade buckeye candy from his fridge. I told him that I did advertising, and that if his wife (who handled that side of it) could come meet me tomorrow around ten am I’d come back down for breakfast and try and give them some ideas for free things they could do.

I then wandered over to a dog grooming place that I had driven by previously. Didy currently gets groomed at a place with at least ten other dogs, and it freaks him out. I came in and asked about grooming services, and the woman who did the grooming came out. Her name was Judy, and she was holding her granddaughter. She not only gave me a quote, but took me through all the grooming facilities and asked about Didy’s background and temperament and took notes. She only grooms one dog at a time, and she says that she frequently grooms dogs that other grooming places won’t take, and that they’re wonderful for her. I told her that I would bring him in tomorrow except for the fact that they didn’t open until noon, and she told me that she’d happily show up at ten so I could drop him off after my run.

There was a homemade dog treat display there full of treats that she baked herself, and I looked at them and hesitated. I told her that Didy probably wouldn’t eat wheat germ treats, but that I thought they looked great. She handed me two small packs of them and told me to take them for free and try them, and if I liked them I could buy him some when I brought him back for grooming. When I got them back home, Didy amazingly wolfed them right down. Maybe it was the carob coating or the sprinkles, but something about them worked for him.

We internet based entrepreneurs (myself included) spend hours each week arguing about social media strategies, styles of advertising, and stressing over all the ways that the internet allows us to use it to make money. What amazed me the most about these places was not just the owners or their generosity, but the fact that these people have no web presence, and probably have no idea that social media marketing exists. They’re brick and mortar businesses, they’re struggling, they’re dealing with it gracefully, and the idea that you can go out and do all this scary advertising stuff on the internet is a totally alien idea to them. They’re sticking to the basics: quality products, amazing customer service, and a passion for what they do.

As I got home, I wondered how much better our businesses could be if we took a little bit of time off from the internet and put it into the things that Pete and Judy value. In a vast and impersonal network, how can we make our businesses as wonderful and personal as possible?

P. S. Speaking of dog things, Didy’s birthday sale is going on through the end of the week, so get in on it if you can!

Here at the Cottage this week, we’re celebrating a very cool event. Sir Didymus, the copy spaniel, will turn three years old on Wednesday. In honor of his birthday (and his first year out of the shelter and in a forever home) we’re having a sale to both bring the celebration to you, and to help out some other dogs in the process. Since the beginning of the business, Didy has been a integral part of both the branding and my life, and he shows up on the blog frequently. More recently he’s even been helping with some product reviews.

Anyone who has done a skype consult with me knows that Didy is a very real presence in my house. I once did a two hour consulting session where he slept in my lap the entire time, and he spends most of my meetings showing off for the camera or trying to talk into the phone. As silly as it sounds, he’s a huge part of the business in terms of moral support and keeping me sane, and I’m so thankful to have found him and to have gotten to see him grow this past year.

So, in honor of Didy, here is the sale offer. It will run until Sunday the 22nd, at midnight.

• Any and all work for pet businesses or businesses with pet mascots is 18% off, since Didy’s birthday is technically the 18th.
• This offer includes anything (excluding Kaffeeklatsch memberships). Consulting, writing, copyediting, branding, marketing; the world is your oyster. Or, at least my inbox is.
• 10% of the proceeds from the sale will go to the English Springer Spaniel rescue, to help other ESS dogs spend their next birthday in a home with their forever family.

I’ll be monitoring my email pretty closely this week, so if you email about work you should get a response back very quickly. If you want to see what we offer, you can check out the list here. If you want something that isn’t on the list, email me (holly [at]cottagecopy [dot] com) and we can work it out.

I can’t wait to hear from all of you, and to work with you!

P.S. If you want to give Didy his very own birthday gift, email me for his mailing address (I know several of you have already asked). I promise to take pictures of him enjoying it, or write a testimonial if that would help you out!

One of the strangest and most unexpected aspects of running Cottage Copy has been the rise in popularity of Didy as a mascot. People mention him in emails, he gets frequent Twitter shoutouts, and occasionally gets little packages of presents from the internet.

He got a package Saturday from the lovely Claire Staffa of Sammy’s Gourmet. So FTC disclosure and all, these were from Claire, and they were free. What is also true is that even if I’d bought this stuff, I’d probably be writing about it anyway because Claire is doing some stuff that is A) incredibly cool B) probably not possible without the internet and C) is in a hard business and sticking to some business parameters that are really admirable.

There are tons of organic dog treat bakeries that run brick and mortar stores and exist online, but Claire is doing something particularly interesting. She sources treats and other dog items that are organic, made from human grade ingredients, and all local. This means that in terms of cash flow, she’s using the internet at large to help fund her local economy. That’s a huge commitment, and probably makes her life a lot harder in terms of sourcing products that already have to meet some pretty high standards. I’m impressed.

Despite all that though, I was sort of worried about this package. I’m always looking for new treats for Didy, and so I immediately said yes when Claire asked if I wanted to try some of her new products. What I didn’t think through was the fact that I’m always searching for new treats for Didy because he won’t eat anything that doesn’t have the nutritional content of a twinkie. As someone who eats very healthy food, I find this kind of appalling and gross, and I’ve been struggling to find something that satisfies his wish for junk food and doesn’t make me feel like a horrible dog parent. I was seriously concerned that Claire would go to all of the trouble of sending the samples, and that he wouldn’t eat any of them. And then, being me, I would feel like an idiot.

Claire sent along four types of treats, all of which can be found at her website if you want more information. There was a chicken treat, a pumpkin treat, a bacon snap biscuit, and a peanut butter and carrot biscuit. What first struck me was that all of the ingredients were stuff that I would happily eat. Hell, if you relabeled them and cut them into fancy shapes, I’d eat them. This both reassured me and worried me more; my normal method of buying treats for Didy is picking whatever looks the most disgusting to me personally, so it was hard to envision our tastes matching up.

So being the child of two research scientists (No, I can’t explain it either), I decided to do this taste testing in as scientific a way as possible. I put all four on a plate, and let Didy pick the order he ate them in. Since I am a total dork, I actually did this four times to see if the order remained the same or if he was just lazy and picking the one closest to him. In my defense, I live in Indiana and was Saturday, so there are only so many ways to amuse yourself.

The reasonably scientific results? Didy loved the chicken jerky (which was more like a chicken chip), and went for it first every time. The bacon snap was a bit of a harder sell, but the bacon part finally seemed to win out over the rolled oats part, and he liked them each time a little more. Unfortunately at that point we hit the usual dividing line: vegetables were just not happening, not even in peanut butter biscuit form.

I ended up feeding the vegetable based ones to the backup ghost-tester dog, who couldn’t get enough of them. The treats were clearly great; I just happen to have the dog who requires his low fat dog food to be topped with bacon.

The Kaffeeklatsch program is now one month old, and it’s the first big launch of anything that I’ve ever done. There was such a fantastic response to it, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of the launch process (Well, except the paperwork part that required lots of beer, but we’ll get to that later). I thought I’d pass on some of the unexpected things that I learned over the past month or so to you guys in a friendly and honest way so that you could at least avoid making the same mistakes that I did. So, without further ado:

1. Say Thank You.
I’m constantly amazed at the generosity of the small business community, but I’ve never felt happier about it than this month. As soon as I launched, I was getting emails from people I’d never spoken to offering to help, to do infoproducts, and to help me promote it. It wasn’t because these people knew me personally either: they just thought that the program addressed a need and was genuinely a cool thing. Despite the fact that I’ve spent lots of time running around like a chicken with my head cut off, I’ve also spent a huge chunk of it saying thank you over and over to the people who helped out.

2. Check Your Systems.
This launch really scared me because I’m a technophobe, and it required integrating a forum, e-junkie, and the website here. We triple checked that all before launch, and it went smoothly. What we didn’t think about was having a way to auto-record how many months people had bought in for. It ended up being done by hand, and it turned out that all of the systems we had integrated to allow people to buy didn’t work together to make the follow up process automatic. When you launch, you’ve got to think beyond the system that allows people to buy; you’ve got to come up with a system to organize things when they do.

3. Be Specific.
I launched with a very specific idea of the program offerings: the forum, the two group calls, and one infoproduct. I was operating on the assumption that everyone defined an infoproduct the same way (specifically, that it could be a written product or a recorded one). It turned out that there are several different definitions out there, and that some people thought that it would specifically be a written product. As the first month’s infoproduct was an interview, this caused some confusion.

4. Know What Your Expectations Are.
This program has been a long time in the making, and I always knew that I wasn’t going to get rich off it. I’m pretty zen about that. It’s also the most fun thing I’ve ever done here, so I feel pretty great about things all around. I also didn’t expect huge subscription numbers the first month. I’m not an internet superstar, and a lot of these things grow gradually through word of mouth and reviews from people inside the program. The fact that I exceeded my expected subscribers was huge, and certainly good enough for me. I was glad that I did the math (and the research) beforehand, so I knew what was reasonable as well as what was possible.

If you want to get in on it, there is still space, so come join us. We’ve got a full re-subscribe rate so far, and we’re quickly forming a fun and supportive community. I’m toying with the idea of doing a Twitter chat that would be open to anyone as a program teaser bi-monthly as well, so let me know if that idea sounds like a good one.

Have you guys launched anything? Do you have any tips to add that I’ve missed? Leave them in the comments!

I’ve been thinking a lot about the process and craft of writing recently, mostly because I’ve started drafting lots of non-work writing and I’ve been reading tons of memoirs in my free time. It turns out that other people have been thinking about this too, because when I put out the call on Twitter for blog post subjects yesterday, the first suggestion I got was for a post about how to keep your writing simple and sweet.

1. Cut out the Middleman.
We all write with authority figures in our heads. For some of this, this is our mother. For others, our boss. Frequently when I’m doing client work, the voice of the client takes on this role. Even if you’re writing in a journal, you’re still writing for some weird authoritative version of you that is way more judgmental than you actually are in real life.

To write well (especially if you want to keep it simple), you need to gather all these scary authority figures up and get them out of your head somehow. If you’re Havi, you do this by talking to them and recording silly little conversations. Some people gather them up and then kick them out entirely. Some people just put enough mental duct tape over their mouths to get through the task at hand without stressing out too much (this is my method of choice). Figure out a method that works for you, and practice it.

So why does writing with an authority figure in our head mess us up? Well, we talk to authority figures differently than we do to friends. We use bigger words. We start composing endless compound sentences. We start worrying about being professional.

Most of the time when you’re writing, the urge to be professional will screw you up faster than just about anything else out there. And it’s hard to get rid of that urge with some mental authority figure standing over you all the time.

Get rid of your mental authority figure, and kick the professional image. Once you do that, you’re ready to start writing.

2. Banish Your Adjective Demons.
When we write, we have a tendency to add adjectives to things to give them extra meaning, instead of actually trying to think through what we want to say at a deeper level. It’s really easy, even for professional writers, to end up with a string of meaningless adjectives that are really just idea placeholders. If you find yourself describing the something in overly flowerly terms, you’ve got two problems. One, you don’t need all the words you’re using. Two, you’re probably coming up with weird adjectives because you either don’t know how you got to that sentence or why it’s there, or you don’t know where you’re going and you’re buying time for your brain to catch up.

If you find yourself falling into this trap, sit back and try and really think about what you’re writing. Is there something that you’re trying to say that is getting lost when it comes out on paper? Put simply, try and get back to the ‘why’ of the writing, not just the process of writing.

3. Think About Who You’re Writing For.
If you’re writing marketing copy, this is your ideal customer. If you’re reading this blog, I suspect that your ideal customer is not someone who will spend their whole day picking through your writing and thinking about how it could be better. I personally find this concept to be very reassuring when I get stressed out about writing, because it’s easy to feel like writing something good involves measuring up to this impossibly high standard of writing set by Shakespeare.

Honestly, if you’re writing marketing stuff, or even just website content, no one expects you to reinvent the wheel. People want to know what is in it for them, what you’re like, and how much it costs. Occasionally, they want to be reassured that buying from you is a decent decision so they can justify it to their spouse/parent/friends if it ever comes while money is tight.

If you’re stuck on how to do this and sound natural, try this exercise. Drag your best friend/significant other/dog outside somewhere, and record yourself talking about your thing that you’d like to write about. Let them ask you questions (unless it’s the dog, then you’re on your own), and just talk until you’ve said everything you have to say. When you come back to your computer, you’ve then got a draft that sounds natural, stress free, and can be used to work on your final version.

4. Keep the Concepts Simple.
The more technical your subject is, the more this applies. This rule applies to everything to from art to air compressors.

Most of the time, the people buying your thing won’t be experts in it. After all, part of what people pay for is your unique expertise. This is great news for you, but can translate badly when you have to write about it. It’s easy to assume that people want you to demonstrate your expertise, but you can’t do that if you alienate them completely. Highly technical copy will send people running the other direction.

If you’re struggling with this, try and break it down to the simplest possible benefits that your product or service has. Will it make people happier? More productive? More comfortable? These are things that absolutely anyone can relate to, whether they understand the tech behind it or not.

Now, notice that when I say keep things simple, I’m not telling you to write for a five year old or that everyone on the internet is an idiot. Most people shopping on the internet are highly educated consumers, and expect to be treated that way. However, even a highly educated consumer might not understand the technicalities behind what you do; in most types of businesses, they don’t have to. Try and break things down to the point where you can explain why this matters to them, and you’ll have your sale.

5. Find a Different Angle.
Sometimes you start writing about your business, and you realize that your features and benefits are really the same as everyone else in your area. We work with a lot of coaches and consultants who run into this issue. Artists also run into this issue, surprisingly.

If you do run into this issue, it doesn’t mean that you’re an uncreative person with no business value. It just means that you’re in a big industry, and that there will naturally be some overlap. When you’re in this situation, it’s tempting to try and make your marketing writing epic and complex to disguise the fact that you’re really in the same situation as everyone else.

Instead of making it more complicated, try and break it down to the most simple terms, and then find a different angle to approach it from. For instance, a few weeks ago I had a client who had a set of features and benefits that were much like everyone else in her industry (and it was a big industry). Instead of making up something fancy, I worked a low-key but fairly natural sailing metaphor into the copy, which suggested that she could be a lifesaver for her clients in a natural way, and made the copy stand out.

If you’re struggling with writing in general, simple and sweet is generally the way to go. Cut out the grandiose ideas, the big words, and try and get to the heart of what you’re trying to say.