Articles, Tips, and Strategies for Copywriting and Communication

When working on your marketing, copywriting and communicating your message clearly and with ease is where almost every business owner hits a big speed bump!

What do you say? How do you say it? Who are you saying it to? Why should they care? What do they want to hear? What are they looking for? Does it resonate with your audience? What are you missing? Could you say it better or more effectively?

Below you’ll find a collection of articles with tips, tools, strategies, and ideas to help you not only communicate your message clearly and with ease, but to get your ideal clients and customers to say, “YES! That’s For Me!”

One Profound Question That Can Drastically Improve Your Marketing

May 1, 2013 | By Jennifer Bourn | 8 Comments

Improve Your Benefits-Based Marketing With This One Question I’ll bet you started your business to follow a passion, to do something you love, or to create your own future.

And yet, marketing is what you find yourself wrapped up in all the time.

After all, you need leads, clients, and customers, and no one can hire you, buy from you, or learn from you if they don’t know that you exist!

Why Marketing Is So Hard

You’re good at what you do. You know it. In fact, you’re brilliant at what you do. But unfortunately, for most of us marketing isn’t what you do best.

Learn the one question that will make marketing with benefits easy

Filed Under: Business & Entrepreneurship, Copywriting & Communication, Marketing Tips & Marketing Strategy | Tagged With: Content Marketing, Features vs Benefits, Ideal Clients, Marketing, Marketing Message, Marketing with Benefits

Branding Mistakes That Will Sabotage Your Small Business Success

February 16, 2013 | By Jennifer Bourn | 19 Comments

It takes an enormous amount of time, effort, perseverance, determination, consistency, and action to build a strong and powerful brand … But it only takes one negative brand experience to undermine your credibility and sabotage your success in the eyes of your ideal clients and customers.

Here are 8 branding tips to help you avoid the most common brand mistakes small business make:

Branding Tip 1: Stick to Your Brand Fonts

Don’t use gimmicky, cheesy fonts to be “different” and stand out from the crowd. Using fonts with “wow” and “pop” aren’t going help your brand, neither is changing your fonts in each piece of marketing material! Too many fonts, cheesy fonts, or constantly changing fonts will give your brand an amateur and unprofessional feel. Stick to your official brand fonts to build credibility and promote your professionalism, and maybe every once is a while add in one unique font for a special use case. (NOTE: The same rule applies to your brand colors!)

Learn 7 More Branding Tips

Filed Under: Brand Design & Brand Strategy, Copywriting & Communication, Marketing Tips & Marketing Strategy | Tagged With: Brand Strategy, Branding Mistakes, Branding Tip, Small Business Branding

How to Write Killer Headlines Easily and Quickly

September 26, 2012 | By Jennifer Bourn | 6 Comments

Get 200 Fill In The Blank Headline Formulas In The Resource Writing Killer Headlines If you’re a blogger, content marketer, website owner, or article marketer, you know that the headline is one of the absolute most important parts of a piece of content — if not THE most important part!

A headline will make or break your article or blog post’s success. It will persuade your friends and followers to click your link and consume your content, or it will bore them and get lost in social media’s constant churn of posts.

You need to focus on writing killer headlines and I want to help…

If you’ve ever struggled to write a killer headline…
If you’ve ever stressed out about your headline…
If you’ve ever hard a hard time figuring out what to write about…
If you’re in a blogging rut …

Learn How to Write Killer Headlines & New Articles Quickly and Easily

Filed Under: Copywriting & Communication | Tagged With: Blogging Tips, Content Marketing, Killer Headlines, Writing Headlines

Bait the Hook: Market with Benefits, not Features

February 10, 2012 | By Jennifer Bourn | 8 Comments

Bait the Hook - Market with Benefits not Features If you’ve ever been shopping for higher-end technology, you’ll resonate with the marketing ideas I’m going to share with you today, because part of shopping for technology involves reading about features, and today we’re going to learn why marketing with features isn’t enough to capture your customers.

To begin to understand what I’m talking about, just read (or try to read) this list of features posted on Amazon for a Nikon digital camera:

14.1-megapixel CCD sensor for superb image quality
21x Wide-Angle Optical Zoom-NIKKOR Glass Lens
5-way VR Image Stabilization System
EXPEED C2 for enhanced image quality and processing speed
3-inch Ultra-High Resolution (921,000-dot) Clear Color Display

Now, if you’re NOT a photographer versed in digital photography, the features listed above aren’t going to tell you much. But if you’re a savvy shopper, you would be asking, “Well, just what IS a 5-Way VR Image Stabilization System, and how can it help me?”

In other words, reading a list of features can only take you so far. What you really want to know are the benefits. Now, sure, a few of the items above state that with the given feature, “image quality” will improve, but none of them says exactly how or why.

And that’s exactly the problem with marketing with features instead of benefits.

Learn About Marketing With Benefits Instead of Features

Filed Under: Copywriting & Communication, Marketing Tips & Marketing Strategy | Tagged With: Features vs Benefits, Marketing, Marketing with Benefits

Simple Sales Copy Formula — Stop Freaking Out Over Sales Pages!

May 4, 2011 | By Jennifer Bourn | Leave a Comment

Simple sales page copywriting formula If you are selling ANYTHING online, or even offline, you know how important your marketing copy is. The words you use to describe your product or service and how you communicate the benefits of it are critical to making the sale.

Lot’s of marketers and copywriters will talk to you about including the right call to action, writing benefit statements, and using action verbs. If you want a great resource for that (and a monster list of action verbs) you can download the Ultimate Action Verbs Resource List on our site — NO OPT-IN REQUIRED.

But, what many marketers won’t give you is their secret formula to writing a simple sales page that actually converts. Here’s the basic formula you need to use:

Problem —> Agitate —> Solution

But… I know you’re reading that thinking, “Great. But what does that mean?!”

Learn The Secret Simple Sales Copy Formula

Filed Under: Copywriting & Communication, Marketing Tips & Marketing Strategy | Tagged With: Sales Copy Formula, Sales Page Copywriting, Website Content

Your Contact Page Isn’t Just For Your Contact Information

March 3, 2011 | By Jennifer Bourn | Leave a Comment

What to Include on a Contact Page The only reason a Contact page exists on your website is to provide a quick and easy way for your website visitors to access your contact information so they can contact you.

Sounds pretty obvious, right?

I guess it’s not, because for some entrepreneurs, the Contact page has morphed into a necessary evil, not a way to help their website visitors. For these people, there is no contact information or personal message on their Contact page. Instead, there is merely a cold, unfriendly form, which for your visitors is irritating and frustrating.

Just like when creating your website sidebar and your website footer, when it comes to creating a successful Contact page for your website, you need to put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. When you visit the Contact page on a website what are you looking for?

Here is a list of things you should consider including on your small business website Contact page:

Tips, Tricks, and Insights from WishList Member in Las Vegas

December 5, 2010 | By Jennifer Bourn | 1 Comment

build a community and engage a community with WishList Member This past weekend I went to Las Vegas for the two-day WishList Member event. It was impressive to experience first-hand the obvious passion and love that Stu McLaren and Tracy Childers have for their business, their customers, and their own team.

While it seems that more and more marketers are “in it for the cash” and not their clients best interests, witnessing their strong desire and motivation to deliver immense value in an ethical, honest, and personal way, I’ll admit, was really nice to see.

I was really looking forward to spending two full days diving into WordPress and WishList Member… but day one of the event barely touched on either. It was instead spent talking about marketing and frankly, there was a lot of time spent talking about themes.

Yes, there was the same old “your email list is golden” talk, there was the “money’s great but I just care about living life” lifestyle business talk, and we even covered the “your ideal client” talk… But overall the focus was on building a community and engaging a community of people who care about the same thing and listen to not just what you have to say, but what each other have to say.

Day one wasn’t at all what I was expecting, but I met some amazing people and I still walked away from the day with valuable highlights, tips, insights, and nuggets of information that I’d love to share with you:

How to Get Website Traffic With Ceasar Salad

September 21, 2010 | By Brian Bourn | 9 Comments

Holy Time Warp Batman… 11 Years Already!

Jennifer and I recently made the short drive to Napa Valley to celebrate our 11 year anniversary and her birthday, with no kids attached. We stayed at the Silverado Resort in Napa and had dinner overlooking the golf course at The Royal Oak restaurant inside the 19th century main building.

We had agreed to just enjoy the scenery and leave work at the office, but something occurred during our dinner that inspired this article.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Copywriting & Communication, Marketing Tips & Marketing Strategy, Website Design Tips & Strategy | Tagged With: Compelling Content, Copywriting & Communication, Website Traffic, Writing Headlines

How to Market with Benefits Instead of Features

June 21, 2010 | By Jennifer Bourn | Leave a Comment

Add This Step To Your Marketing Process and See An Immediate Increase in Results

In my last two blog posts on this topic, I talked about Marketing Features vs. Benefits for Small Business and Whether Your Marketing Should Get an F Grade.

Today I’m going to show you the exercise I use to quickly get past the features of your offer, and get right to the benefits and results.

For each product, service, or program we offer at Bourn Creative, I first make a list outlining all of the features for the item. I then give each feature a main benefit.

After I have the features and benefits written out, I add the result the client or customer will feel or experience after using the product or working with us. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Client Attraction, Copywriting & Communication, Marketing Tips & Marketing Strategy | Tagged With: Features vs Benefits, Marketing Tips, Marketing with Benefits

Marketing Features vs. Benefits for Small Business

June 18, 2010 | By Jennifer Bourn | Leave a Comment

Marketing with Features gets a Marketing Grade of F If you are marketing with features, facts, and figures, you get an “F” and your sales probably reflect that. If you are marketing with benefits, results, and stories, you get a “B” and are probably doing fairly well.

But, if you are marketing with benefits, results, and stories, and you bring your audience to that do anything, pay anything point, you get an “A+” and you’re probably nodding your head because your sales reflect that and you’re kicking butt.