good thoughts in hard times

Yes, I’m about to get all kinds of philosophical on you right now.

As the economy crashes, wars are waged, and there is still a possibility that Sarah Palin could become a world leader, it would be so very easy for me to slide into a deep, dark depression. To envision my world, my freelance business and my family crumbling into nothing.

But, I’m not like that. I refuse to be. I don’t think there’s anything more important right now than having a positive attitude. Seriously, how would my misery contribute to the world’s desperate need for support, positivity and goodness? HOW?

So, I’ve made a commitment to stay positive. This is a very difficult task. I realize that I can’t possibly keep any negative thoughts from entering my brain, I mean really. But what I can do, is this: every time I feel negative or sound negative, I can think of something that always, eternally, unequivocally makes me feel good. But what, who?

It’s George Clooney. He’s my happy button.

He’s beautiful, he’s charitable, he’s rich, he’s funny, when he looks at me (albeit from the movie screen) I turn to mush, I hear he’s a good person.

I’ve asked my family and friends to keep me in check (support is good, do not attempt this alone). So if they see me looking gloomy or hear me being negative, they have full permission to ‘George Clooney’ me.

It’s working. I’m feeling good, things are going well. Didn’t someone famous say, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” Oh, right, it was Ghandi. That’s what I’m doing…with George Clooney.

How are you surviving? Do you have a happy button (and let’s keep it clean people)? I can’t wait to hear what or who, how and why…

referrals: are they your responsibility?

Where do we draw the line on referral responsibility? If I make a recommendation to a client for a graphic designer, a web coder, a videographer…at what point does the client take ownership for working with that referral?

I’m not sure there’s a clear line.

If you think about it from the perspective of a successful referral, there’s no problem - it’s essentially the gift that keeps on giving. A client will forever hail you as the one that found them the web designer of all web designers who captured and created their look and launched them into the webosphere and ultimate success.

But if it goes wrong,  you get emails complaining about the bad work that was done or the unreturned phone calls or the cost or the…

I’ve created some guidelines to handle the unpleasant side of this referral world:

1. Know your referrals. Feel really good about the people you refer and that’s half the battle right there.

2. Be honest in your referral. You don’t have to say, ‘they are the absolute best’ - you can say, “I love his work, but he’s really busy, so he isn’t always easy to get in touch with.” This way, you have presented the facts and the client is left to make a good decision.

3. A variation on #2 is to offer a few referrals, such as 2-3 designers, saying this is what I like about each person - and then encourage your client to make the choice.

4. Encourage your client to do their own homework. Ask them to call your referrals, look at their websites, request additional references. Let them know that you are making suggestions, but they need to make sure it will be a good fit.

5. Make sure that you say things such as, “This was my experience.” You would never want to present something as universal.

This issue is rife with pitfalls…I’d love to hear from your brilliant minds.

politics on a copywriting blog

Last night, an internet/social networking colleague asked me the following question:

“Are you at all concerned that your political views may cost you business opportunities? That is a concern of mine. I’m totally in your corner, but I stay in the political closet professionally.”

This was my answer:

“I thought about it a lot, and, in the end, I decided that this election (and its outcome) is way too important to my family for me to worry about that. I certainly haven’t lost any clients. And while it’s quite possible that I’ve lost some blog readers, my traffic has actually risen quite sharply - and I’ve made some amazing connections because of my rhetoric.

To be honest, I don’t want the business of someone who doesn’t believe in women’s rights, choice, gay rights, peace and the environment enough to vote for a Democrat (or for a black man).

I live in a very blue state and on a very blue island, I feel like it’s my civic duty to do whatever I can to spread the word….
Great question - I’m so glad you asked.”

And, I am glad she asked, glad that she got me to think about my reasons again - because I feel so good about them.

You know what else this made me think about? Copywriting and marketing are also topics rife with debate and conflict. Not everyone is going to agree with my thoughts on why blogging is essential to business or the top marketing collateral items you must have. I may have lost some business opportunities when I wrote about using a blog for a portfolio/website, but I know that I gained some business from that post. This industry has fierce competition. It has good guys and it has bad guys. My blog is my space to voice my opinions.

It’s like my dad (and Abe Lincoln) always says, you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time. But, no matter what, you’ve got to please yourself. Feel good about what you’re doing and stand strong.

if your alexa rank falls in a forest and no one’s around, does it make a sound?

The proverbial forest with no one around, in this situation, is simply my little corner of the internet. And, my Alexa rank is falling (which is a good thing). But can anyone else hear it besides me? Did it, in fact, make a sound?

Alexa 101. At its most basic, Alexa, the Web Information Company, ranks most of the websites that exist in the world (specifically the sites that are part of the Alexa community - which includes a very large number). You want your rank to get lower and lower, as close to #1 as possible. Yahoo! holds that precious spot, Google is #2. Alexa’s ranking algorithm is based on the usual suspects: users’ interests and surfing habits, links, traffic, etc

According to their blog: When Alexa began displaying rankings in 1998 it was with the goal of showing Alexa Toolbar users how popular any given site was within the Alexa community. We generated the rankings through an analysis of Internet usage by people who use the Alexa Toolbar. Since that time we’ve been delighted to see that the Alexa Rankings have become a yardstick by which website popularity is measured.

Top 100K. Because there is so much movement on the web - especially when you think of the millions of websites on different topics and at so many varying levels - Alexa maintains that they can only be sure of the rankings for the top 100,000 sites.

This makes the rest of us eager to break into the top 100,000. I’m not going for #1, that makes no sense for me whatsoever - I’m not Yahoo! and don’t really strive to be. But, I can look at my rank compared to that of the other people in my niche, and this gives me a gauge. I use the Alexa Toolbar on every website I visit as a valuable glimpse at where the site lands and how it compares. Of course it doesn’t give me traffic stats - but the difference between a site at 500,000 and 5,500,000 is palpable and informative.

My rank. I certainly watch my own rank, and I love to watch it fall. It provides me with feedback on my own progress. And, it brings me back to my original query: There are only so many people in this world that care about my Alexa rank (and none of them live in my house). Where do I go for that victory lap, when (like yesterday) I broke into the 300,000’s?

I decided to come here because my Alexa rank fell and no one was around, but I heard it and I thought I’d go ahead and make my own sound. So…BOOM.

 Update: Well, backdate really. A ‘friend’ encouraged me to add a little note to this post which is that my rank started at 6.5 million…in January. So in 8 months, I went from 6.5 million to 391,063. Not bad people, not bad. I guess this goes to show that when you do things the genuine way - posting, participating, commenting, linking out, NOT spamming, providing good (according to all of you) content - you reap the rewards. Thanks to all of my readers, commenters and linkers.

great, you’ll learn it again tomorrow.

As a writer, I spend, well - let’s see -I’m going to guess 99% of my time in my head. That would be as opposed to the 65% I used to spend in my body before I had children, when I was young and free, and a diehard yoga practitioner and teacher at Kripalu Center.

And, I’ve got to say, I don’t think it’s particularly healthy to spend this amount of time in one’s head. Which was part of my reason for my barter arrangement with Mr. Pilates.

So, we’re on one of the machines, practicing a skill (that involves my lower abdomen burning in time to my rhythmic breath), and suddenly I feel myself click down into my body. The skill and movement I’m doing suddenly feel natural. I’m there. I get it. And I say so.

Mr. Pilates replies, “Great. You’ll learn it again tomorrow.”

I love this. Whether it’s body or mind, work or life, I find this to be true. How many times have I learned the same lesson, over and over and over again. Every day is different, every client is different, every situation is different, every day my body is different.  And so, those aha moments keep coming.

There is no end to the learning…thank goodness.

Gloria Steinem on Sarah Palin

I met Gloria Steinem in a book when I was 17. I met her in person, and heard her speak, when I was 28. Both of these experiences were life-changing to me both as a woman and as a writer. She is my heroine, my role model. As the foremost leader of the U.S. women’s movement, her educated, experienced and brilliant voice is prized here on this blog. So, take it away, Gloria…(I’m sorry it took me so long to get you up here.)

Palin: Wrong Woman, Wrong Message

By Gloria Steinem, originally posted in the LA Times, September 4, 2008

Here’s the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing — the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party — are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women — and to many men too — who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the “white-male-only” sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won’t work. This isn’t the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for — and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, “Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.”

This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can’t do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn’t say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden’s 37 years’ experience.
Palin has been honest about what she doesn’t know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, “I still can’t answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?” When asked about Iraq, she said, “I haven’t really focused much on the war in Iraq.”

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she’s won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain’s campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn’t know it’s about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate’s views on “God, guns and gays” ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let’s be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can’t tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin’s value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women’s wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves “abstinence-only” programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers’ millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn’t spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don’t doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn’t just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn’t just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town.

She doesn’t just echo McCain’s pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, “women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,” so he may be voting for Palin’s husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.

Republicans may learn they can’t appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can’t be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

now that’s green copy

As many of you know, I’m rather green. I live in a house with composting toilets, after all.

I found this good bit of copy on a bottle of All Purpose Cleaner from an uber-green company called, biokleen.

In their environmental statement, they don’t say something like, ‘We care about the environment.” They dive much deeper than that. Their bottle says,

We are the environment

They’re saying that there is no separation. They are so committed, not to a cause, but to themselves, yourselves, the planet - and, to them, it’s all the same thing.

Superb copy:

• Message accomplished
• Short, pithy, to the point
• Made me think
• I actually spent some time pondering the message, considering them and their product
• I like their sentiment and their product
• I’m going to buy it

advertising that sticks it to the man

Yes, sports fans. That is an advertisement you see over there on the left. But it’s not what you think.

I’ve thought about putting ads on my site for a long time but have resisted because, well, I don’t like ads. They don’t ask my permission and they have nothing to do with me - but there they are, in my face. And I didn’t want to do that to you every time you came to see me.

But I recently discovered an interesting twist to the ad tale from Jessica Smith of Wishpot (and of many other cool places.) It’s a new revolutionary ad application called the MeFile from YouData.

You can go to their site and check it out for yourself (and try not to get distracted by the fact that the voice in the live demos sounds a little bit like George W. Bush - it isn’t him) - please do, though they don’t have all of the video demos up. But, I’ll also try to explain it in my own words here because it took a few explanations for me to really get it myself.

At its most basic - you are presented with targeted ads, if you choose to be, and you get paid by the advertisers to view the ad. In that sense it isn’t so far away from pay per click…ish. If you come to my blog, and you’ve created your own MeFile by giving your male or female status and your birthdate at least, and answered about 12 other totally benign questions at best, then you can view text ads or watch video ads from the adget (think widget) on my blog (again see top left sidebar) and get paid to do so…via paypal. The more questions you answer in the MeFile, the more relevant the ads will be.

If you would be so kind - you can split those proceeds anyway you’d like - with me (the owner of the blog) and/or you can set up an instant donation to the charity of your choice. They liken the ‘giving some to the blog writer’ to a tip jar. As an artist, I like to imagine that you’d all be throwing coins and bills into the open cavity of my typewriter.

So, what about privacy? The MeFile is totally private - not bought or sold, your personal info (social security number, address, phone #, etc.) is in total lockdown…the advertisers just get your demographic so they can match the ads to your dubious place in life, that’s it.

Only thing is that MeFile only works with visitors who also have a MeFile…We can only hope that they fill up, that soon everyone has a MeFile. But right now? It’s just taking off. Though they were at BlogHer ‘08 and got a number of high-powered (is there another kind?) female bloggers pretty stoked (and I’m sure they’re at all the other conferences as well). It may just be a matter of time.

Check it out. I’m really interested to hear what you think. Sign up and let’s get paid for our time by advertisers, not just bombarded intrusively.

Talk about Permission Marketing, eh?

Also, Trae, from the YouData Team, is about the nicest guy around - he actually responds to emails and talks to you on the phone! Amazing. So don’t feel shy about contacting him and asking him questions and receiving high quality support.

choosing a business name? try it out LOUD

I’m working with a wonderful new client named Julie Biondi - we’re building her blog as we speak, so I can’t post a link just yet, but I will. Julie helps people get dressed…hmmm, how can I best explain what she does? Oh, yeah, I wrote a blurb for her for a mini-mag…

Is there anything worse than that dress (that you spent so much money on and have never worn) mocking you from its hanger? Perhaps the shouts of ‘I have nothing to wear!’ as you shove the doors closed on your overstuffed closet? Sometimes things just aren’t right - the style, the fit, the way the clothes make you feel - no matter how great they looked on the hanger. Julie Biondi empowers you to get rid of what doesn’t work and helps you build your own look - the one that fits.

Starting with a full closet edit and your personal budget, Julie teaches you how to identify and create the image that you want the world to see. Wardrobes are tremendously personal; you wouldn’t let just anyone into your closet or into the dressing room…and Julie’s your go-to girl. If you’re successful everywhere in your life, but your wardrobe is the one place that feels unfinished, she’s the one that can take the weight off your shoulders (and replace it with the perfect sweater). Ideal for every day, special occasions, men and women. For more information, contact Julie Biondi, 917.620.2760

But this post isn’t really just an ad for Julie, even though she is fabulous. She also reminded me this morning of a tried and true copywriting tool.

We were working on business names for her company, and she said, ‘I was lying in bed last night with the list of possible names and I imagined telling an interested stranger the name of my business. I was testing out how each of them felt to me as I said it out loud.’

Brilliant! You know that I believe in reading copy out loud as an editing tool, but this takes it to another level. When you’re choosing the name of your business, you must love it, it must work for you and you have to feel great about saying it. If you mumble and dribble your name all over your shirt with the cheese dip, it’s not a good sign.

What are your testing techniques???

bartering for services: should you?

This week, I’ve decided to barter services with a client in lieu of money. The pros and cons surrounding this issue are rife with judgment, fear, uncertainty, loopholes and very passionate arguments. Let’s see if we can break it down with some awfully important things to consider:

1. Ask yourself which would serve you more: the money or the trade service or items?
2. The trade has to be even and both sides must feel that they are being compensated equally.
3. Work out an agreement so that both sides understand what is included in the trade. For instance, I may barter my consulting, but I expect to get paid to write your site.
4. Create check-in points so that you can both evaluate time spent, how the arrangement is working and the future.
5. Be prepared to field this request from other clients who may have heard about the arrangement. You can’t always barter…because massages and personal cheffing do not pay the mortgage.

In my case, this is all working out perfectly. In exchange for my consulting services, I’m being rolfed and receiving a full series of personal Pilates sessions both with a master teacher and healer.

Why is this worth it to me, when I could be paying off my car? Because, if you’ve been following this blog with any regularity, you’ll know that I work way too much and never take time for myself. This barter arrangement is forcing me to take time out and take care of myself…and for me? This is invaluable.

Every situation is unique - to the person, the work, the terms. I know you people have some strong opinions (about everything)- lob ‘em at me.