When it comes to writing persuasive copy, set aside your ego and focus on the customer. They don’t care about your experience, your awards, your family or your plans for the future. They just want to know how you are going to meet their needs, satisfy their wants and solve their problems.

Persuasive copy gets inside the head of your specific audience and anticipates their questions, their doubts and their concerns. Persuasive copy deals with those issues by focusing on the customer.

If you were selling a health insurance plan to small business owners, which opening do you think would attract more attention: “Let me explain the Smith-Johnson Employee Health Benefits Plan” or “Are you tired of getting inferior health coverage for outrageous premiums that threaten to put you out of business?”

Obviously the second approach is far more attention grabbing. The first approach is focused on the seller; the second touches on an important issue that affects hundreds of thousands of potential customers.

A great way to ensure you are focusing on the customer and not yourself is to count the number of time you use “you” vs. “us” or “we” in the copy. Two “yous” for every “us” or “we” sounds about right.

In writing persuasive copy that focuses on the customer, it’s essential to understand their point of view. Conduct focus groups, attend trade shows and talk to your current customers to get to know the way they think, what’s important to them, and what motivates their decisions. Speak to those points in your copy and you’ll push the buttons that trigger them to do what you want.

(Next: Stress Benefits)

Imagine the power of the written word. Simply be arranging nouns and verbs, with a few adjectives and adverbs judiciously sprinkled in, you can get people you’ve never met to do things you want them to do.

Pretty awesome tool, huh?

The problem is that most people don’t – or don’t know how to — make full use of this amazing power. Their marketing communications are a mish-mash of convoluted ideas, poorly constructed sentences, vague promises, and ill-conceived offers thrown together in a sales letter, web page or email. The unfortunate result is an well-intentioned campaign that falls flat.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll examine some of the key concepts that can quickly and easily turn your boring, ineffective copy into a money-making machine.

Step 1: Gain Attention

If you can’t gain attention in your marketing communications, the battle is lost before it even starts. With so many forms of media competing for your prospects’ attention, it’s easy to get lost in the shuffle. If people don’t notice you, they won’t ready your copy. If they don’t ready your copy, you don’t get a chance to mold their perceptions. If you don’t get a chance to mold their perceptions, you’ll never make the sale.

Being as specific as possible is a great place to start. Copywriter extraordinare Bob Bly uses a sales pitch promoting collection services to dental practices as a example of how being specific can help:

How we collected over $20 million in unpaid bills over the past two years for thousands of dentists nationwide

Note the specific items: $20, two years, dentists. They help create a credible, memorable message.

Ypu can also gain attention by making an offer that is free, low in price or unusually attractive. I’m sure you’ve noticed how some life insurance companies frame their offer: “Now…$1 week buys Guaranteed Term Life Insurance for Pennsylvanians 50 and older.” The $1 a week offer seems reasonable and the rest of the pitch is specific (Pennsylvanians over age 50).

Asking a provocative question is another effective way of gaining attention. “Do you want to lose 20 pounds WITHOUT going on a diet?” is sure to grab someone’s attention, in part because it seems so outlandish.

Creating a sense of urgency and exclusivity works, too. Giving your offer a defined time period and limited availability can make people take notice. “This offer expires in 10 days. Act Now!” or “This offer is limited to the first 10 people who call.”

Be careful about trying to be funny or topical. People may not get the pun or the cultural reference may be quickly outdated.

Next: Make sure your copy focuses on the customer

Today, the little book authored by William Strunk Jr., and updated E.B. White occupies a prominent spot on my desk and is consulted often to answer tricky questions of word usage, punctuation, form and composition, even moreso than my trusty AP stylebook. It feels good just to have it next to my computer, as if its contents will clear up confusing sentences and stubborn subclauses by osmosis. I should know the rules by now, but every once in a while it helps to open the book at any page and read for five minutes. Inevitably, I’ll learn something new (or at least refresh my memory).

Brian Scott has an interesting post about the upcoming 50th anniversary of the first publication of “The Elements of Style” over at Write Better, the official blog of LousyWriter.com.An event in New York City on April 16 will mark the momentous occasion.

Now, the folks at RainToday.com have come up with some answers, any or all of which may apply to your business. In a new report “How Clients Buy,” the most commonly experienced problems clients have with their service providers is that the vendor:

1. Did not listen to them – 38%.
2. Did not understand their needs – 30%.
3. Did not respond to requests and correspondence in a timely manner – 30%.

Doesn’t sound like a major challenge to keep your customers. Just spend a little more time listening and understanding how you can solve your clients’ problems. Take a few extra minutes to respond personally to an email or phone call from a customer.

Those little things can go a long way in keeping your customers from leaving. In fact, the survey indicates that 96% of them will be “much more likely” or “somewhat more likely” to consider continuing to work with you. And we all know its much easier to get more profit from an existing customer than it is to cultivate a new one.

I’ve been trying to convince myself to learn the ins and out of Twitter. To be honest,
I just don’t get it yet. 140-character Tweets? How much can you accomplish with that? I know a lot of people swear by Twitter as a social marketing tool and it has a huge following. If you’re like me and want to know more about this fascinating phenomenon, chekc out “Why I Like Twitter and Others Don’t” over at Internet Marketing with Josh Spaulding.

If you blog, finding the right look can be an ongoing challenge. Fortunately, WordPress has a huge inventory of themes to choose from. In case nothing there appeals to you, the folks at Listropolis have put together “35 Free Premium Wordpress Themes You Probably Missed.”And if they don’t do it for you, visit Smashing Magazine’s 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

Although it might be a bit on the technical side, SEO Hosting’s “50 Simple Tips for Improving Your Website” provides some discussion points with your IT professional. If nothing else, it can make you sound like an expert when you ask questions.

Where do you start in designing or re-designing your logo? So many factors have to be taken into consideration, since it will become a huge part of your identity. Graphic designer Tanner Christiansen offers “45 Rules for Creating a Great Logo Design.”

Imagine boiling down a company or product brand into three or four memorable words. That’s exactly what slogan writers do for a living, and their hard work is often overlooked. Not at Ad Slogans, where the staff has put together a Hall of Fame for slogans.

Back when I was a fulltime journalist, a writing coach once said you should use “golden coins” as strategically placed nuggets – an anecdote, a statistic, a vivid image – to keep readers walking along the story path. Rather than putting all your good stuff in the beginning, a strategy many writers use, he suggested spacing the golden coins throughout the narrative to maintain interest.

While the golden coins theory is useful, it’s also helpful to remember the things that cause readers’ eyes to gloss over to the point of boredom. Here are eight guaranteed ways to lose your reader’s attention in a hurry:

Take Forever to Get to the Point. Don’t hem and haw in your writing. Say what you have to say and get out of the way. Too may propositions are killers: “In an effort to provide employees with more time for their families, I would like to suggest that we try a four-day work week.” ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

Telling Readers What They Already Know. Here’s an annoying way to begin a business letter, for example: “You wrote to us on June 4 asking for…”

Length. Closely related to the first point. No one wants to read more than they have to. Taking five paragraphs when three would do is a great way to lose interest.

Using technical terms. Imagine your reader having to stop every other sentence to figure out what your important-sounding acronym means or trying to decipher industry jargon.

Be Mysterious. Piquing interest is one thing. Being deliberately obscure is another. Make it clear from the start what you are writing about.

Using “I” A Lot. When you use the first person, it shows a sense of self-importance. Writing should be about the reader, not the writer.

Using “ing” Words. In addition to being generally wordy, using terms that end in “ing” frequently convey a feeling of uncertainty. “According to our phone conversation the other day, we are thinking about beginning…”

Saving the Best for Last. I’m all for concluding on a high note, but burying the lead is inexcusable.

Avoid these eight writing blunders, and your readers will make the journey from beginning to end with no interruptions.

Is this even physically possible? I’m not sure I can even type 400-500 words in 20 minutes. At least not without having to go back and spend 30 minutes fixing my typos.

Anyway, Jim offers eight tips for becoming a faster writer. His second tip suggests letting the idea incubate for a few days. I presume this also means doing a little research? Aren’t they both legitimate parts of the writing process?

Later on, Jim recommends getting away from writing by taking “a walk, cycle or run.” As every writer knows, this kind of procrastination is a critical part of the job. So is organizing your books by height, solving the cryptogram and contemplating how the Phillies lost a 6.5-game lead with 10 to play in 1964.

I subscribe to the Red Smith theory: “Writing is easy,” he once said. “You just open a vein and bleed.”

Sidebar: I had to Google Red Smith to get his exact quote. My search took me to Amazon.com, and a review of the book “Red Smith on Baseball.” I not only got the quote I was looking for, I bought the book.

Now that’s writing!

The point is writing is much more than what happens when fingers meet keyboard. Writing is an ongoing process, a lifestyle, a mindset. To boil it down to the 20 minutes spent in front of a computer screen is to demean the process.

What especially caught my attention was a quote from Rick Sherman, an Austin, Texas marketing consultant who defended his authorship of this description of his company: “[We’re] a market-leading provider of technology-enabled process-optimization tools to reduce and right-size inventory, improve forecast accuracy and service, optimize production resources, and reduce cycle time across the supply chain.”

Boiled down to its essence, the company makes money for its clients by making them more efficient. Of course, that’s not sexy enough for upper management, so Sherman penned his wordy, obtuse, self-important sounding passage. And, as Burling reported, he was more than happy to stand behind his work by arguing his target readers were supply-chain managers and trade-press writers, not reporters for daily newspapers. As if that audience is somehow genetically predisposed to prefer vague, unnecessarily complicated writing.

“It is not our strategic intent for you to understand,” he told Burling.

Sherman also defended the passage by saying it was purposely wordy to allow for as many key Internet search words as possible.

Kudos to Sherman for at least grasping the concept of writing for your audience and his rudimentary knowledge of Search Engine Optimization. But major jeers for thinking that you can sacrifice clarity in favor of keywords.

When that happens, a little bit of my credibility dies. My excuse is that I never learned how to touch type. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

But there are people out there who really don’t know the difference between “your” and “you’re” or “their” and “there” and “they’re.” In an effort to sound conversational, they write “I should of…” Worse, they leave their modifiers dangling. In public, no less.

In an earlier post, I suggested that writers should not be afraid to break the sometimes antiquated rules of grammar in favor of clear communication. I still believe that. What I’m talking about here are sloppy, careless, silly mistakes that strike a blow against your expertise.

Here are six common mistakes to look for before someone else sees your copy. The first four are homophones (words that sound the same but have different meanings).

Your vs. You’re

I’d like to think people know the difference between the possessive pronoun (your) and the contraction for you are (you’re).

Its vs It’s

Again, it’s the difference between a possessive pronoun (its) and a contraction (it is).

There vs. Their vs. They’re

“There” can be used to reference a physical place, or as a pronoun. “Their” is another possessive pronoun. “They’re” is a contraction for “they are.”

Affect vs. Effect

This is a tough one that catches many people. “Affect” is a verb, as in “Your ability to write clearly will affect your income.” “Effect” is a noun, as in “The effect of not writing clearly will be a reduction in income.”

Should of, Could of, Would of

The loser’s lament: “coulda, woulda, shoulda.” Classic example of people writing the way they talk. In all three cases, “of” should be replaced by “have.”

The Dangling Participle

These are usually pretty funny. The juxtaposition of phrases can make for some hilarious scenarios. Here are a couple examples; the mistake should be obvious:

1. After rotting in the cellar for weeks, my brother brought up some oranges.
2. Featuring plug-in circuit boards, we can strongly endorse this server’s flexibility and growth potential.
3. Relieved of responsibilities at work, your home should be a place to relax.

The best way to avoid these embarrassing errors and keep your credibility intact is take a few moments to proofread your work carefully before exposing it to the world.

As a newspaper editor, I used to remind my reporters that there was a finite amount of space for their stories. If they could save one or two words per paragraph in a 20-inc story, it might mean the difference between having their work run intact or having vital information clipped out by a ruthless copy editor under deadline pressure.

Most reporters seemed to grasp the concept, especially as news holes began to shrink. They made a concerted effort to trim the fat out of every phrase.

Unfortunately, the message never made it to the world of business writing, where long, rambling reports seem to be a badge of honor for many middle managers. Why say it in three words when you can stretch it to five or six?

A word of advice to these budding scribes: be concise. Unnecessary words waste your reader’s time, can obscure your message and gobble up space that could be put to better use. Excess words are bumps and obstacles that block the smooth slide through a piece of writing.

Avoid redundancies, run-on sentences, wordy phrases, passive voice and unnecessary adjectives. These sloppy stylistic habits add little meaning to or clarify your message.

Take a look at a few phrases commonly found in business writing and how they can be tightened up: