Copywriting & Content Tips

Create An Effective Content Marketing Plan At Content Camp

March 29, 2021 Jennifer Bourn

What do blogging, podcasting, attracting clients, acquiring customers, growing a YouTube channel, building an email list, and establishing a social following have in common?

Content.

No matter what your goal is, if you want to grow your business, gain visibility, and expand your brand:

You need to create high-quality, strategic content on a regular basis. Year-over-year growth in unique site traffic is 7.8x higher for content marketing leaders compared to followers (19.7% vs 2.5%) according to Aberdeen.
You need to market that content to gain as much visibility and website traffic as possible. Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads according to DemandMetric.
You need people who engage and interact with your content to take action. Conversion rates are nearly 6x higher for content marketing adopters than non-adopters (2.9% vs 0.5%) shares Aberdeen.

Content Camp: A Content Marketing Workshop For Small Business

July 2, 2019 Jennifer Bourn

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of content marketing and how it can bring a flood of new clients to your business and new customers in the door. You’ve probably also heard that blogging is the fastest way to improve your search rankings and attract new clients. You may have even thought, “I really need to be doing that and leverage the free and low cost tools available to grow my business.”

So you decided to look into it — you did online research, read blog posts, watched YouTube videos, and downloaded a white paper or ebook. But there is so much information out there, so much to learn, so many people with opinions, and so many different options, it’s hard to know what is right for your business and where to start to get the most bang for your buck.

You might have also invested in attending networking events and conferences (or sending your staff to these events) to learn about blogging, content marketing, and the tools available. Unfortunately, all you walked away with is a few tips and a giant to do list of things you should be doing. The problem is that you still haven’t made progress.

I get it. I’ve been there.

I see it happening to small business owners time and time again, and it needs to stop.

How To Achieve Higher Profits While Working Less And Enjoying More Freedom

August 9, 2017 Jennifer Bourn

“I want to work less and make more money,” is a common desire among internet business owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs, but often with so much work to do, it seems next to impossible.

If you focus on sales and marketing, you end up falling behind on client work, and if you focus on client work, you risk losing potential new business. Sometimes it’s a struggle just to get ahead of the work you have so you can take the evenings or weekend off… and maybe you’re even so busy that things are starting to slip through the cracks? I have been there, and almost 10 years ago, it all came to a head one night when I realized that I had a big problem in a very embarrassing and public way, and that it needed to be fixed as soon as possible or my business would begin to suffer greatly.

After celebrating Bourn Creative’s twelve year anniversary this July, I decided to share my story, the lessons, learned, and how I overcame exhaustion and stress to run the streamlined, freedom-based business Bourn Creative is today.

Selling A Million Dollars In Design Side Projects

May 18, 2017 Jennifer Bourn

Development is clear cut. It works or it doesn’t. The code is well-written or it’s a mess. Design on the other hand, is subjective, with the success of a project often based on the client’s ideas, perceptions, opinions, and personal experiences of what good design is.

Jennifer Bourn (that’s me) is founding partner and lead designer of Bourn Creative. While she spends her days designing high-end, complex, custom WordPress sites and brand suites, she has also sold well over a million dollars in just side projects and add-ons ranging from in price from $75-$3,000 — and the journey has been good, bad, and at times, down right ugly.

Jennifer recently teamed up with iThemes Training to deliver a free webinar called Selling a Million Dollars In Design about selling design services that skips the hype and sugar-coating, and gets right to the mistakes made, lessons learned, and business practices implemented over the 12 years Bourn Creative has been in business.

A WordPress Blog Is A Filing Cabinet For Your Website

March 28, 2016 Jennifer Bourn

I’m guilty of it. Almost every blogger I know is guilty of it —, well, at least the bloggers who have been blogging for years. It’s a problem we caused that has haunted us for the life of our blog and now is either a huge task we know we need to tackle, or a huge task we’re just going to ignore and push to the side.

Category and Tag Abuse

WordPress category and tag abuse is a real struggle. It’s how this blog at one point, ballooned to more than 30 categories and 800 tags that I then had to clean up.

Now you may be thinking, “So what? What’s the big deal”

The big deal is that not only does category and tag abuse split and fracture your content, it creates a poor experience for your website visitors, making it harder to find similar or related content about the topic they are interested in on your website.

Categories and Tags Used As Keywords

The problem of category and tag abuse stems from the belief that categories and tags are similar to keywords, and that when assigned a category or tag to a blog post, it is the same as assigning a keyword to the post. This action is further perpetuated by the belief that assigning a post to a specific category or tag like a keyword somehow will help their search engine optimization (SEO) efforts.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

Free Tool to Discover Plagarism And Content Theft

March 23, 2015 Jennifer Bourn

Recently a friend reached out with some disconcerting information — Another web design company was using our content and images. At first she didn’t notice, but when she saw my photo on their website, she looked a little closer and sent me a link to check it out.

Unfortunately today owning a website and doing business online also means that if you’re any good or if your site ranks well with search engines, others will steal, rip off, and copy what you do, that you write, what you say, and even how you look. If you’ve never done the research, the blatant thievery and lack of integrity among content thieves online can be shocking and disheartening.

But how do you know if someone is stealing you hard work?

Simple But Effective Copywriting Tips For Email Marketing

March 28, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

Like the email subject line, the copywriting in your email is also an important part of the your email marketing success — and the approach needs to be personal.

When you’re writing for email (and most types of marketing for that matter), you’re not writing to a general audience, to a big group, to just anyone — you’re writing to one person, to one subscriber that has a connection to you. You must think of your email marketing copywriting as the art of creating a conversation between you and a single subscriber.

You want them to read your email and feel like you are speaking right to them. Like they matter. Like they know you and you know them.

Are Your Marketing Materials Drivel or Driven?

May 23, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

Whether you are a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or a service professional, I bet that when it comes to marketing, you’re feeling more than a bit overwhelmed. I’ll also bet that even though you may be an expert in your niche, you probably don’t feel like an expert in keeping your marketing pipeline full of new customers.

Being overwhelmed and insecure about your marketing can be dangerous if you don’t learn and plan.

I have seen it over an over. One person or business devises a marketing piece, such as an advertisement, that breaks new ground. People are going, “Wow,” that ad or strategy is converting leads into sales like gangbusters, and everyone else in that market is scrambling to catch up.

Unfortunately, the next thing that usually happens is that others try to copy the successful ad for their businesses, but they don’t adjust the ad to fit their marketing or their focus. Naturally, placed in the wrong context, the ad or strategy fails.

How to Create an Endless Supply of Content

May 8, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

Entrepreneurs of the Information Age have had to adapt their marketing strategies to suit the times. It used to be that advertising was the bulwark of marketing, but that has changed with the lightning fast development of the king of all Information Age technologies, the internet. Now, one of the staples of your marketing strategy is the development, sharing, and selling of content.

You may have heard or experienced firsthand that generating quality content in blog posts, articles, videos, reports, ebooks, audio files, DVDs, teleseminars, webinars, and so on can revitalize your marketing by helping you:

Expand brand visibility
Establish expert status
Build backlinks
Increase website traffic

And if you’ve been doing any of that for any length of time, you may have run into a common problem of content marketing — the problem of supply.

Bait the Hook: Market with Benefits, not Features

February 10, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

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.

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

Writing Your Mission Statement (And Using It!)

July 19, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

Do you really need a mission statement in your business?

YES! Your mission statement isn’t just part of a business plan, in reality, your mission statement, like your core values, is a critical part in defining a successful brand and building a solid foundation for business growth and marketing.

It must convey your core values, your beliefs, and what you stand for, and it needs to communicate why your business exists and what you hope to achieve. If your mission statement has meaning to you, it can be a powerful tool in guiding your company’s forward movement and your decisions. The key is infusing your mission statement into the everyday operations of your business and every aspect of your brand.

The problem is that most mission statements tend to be all statement (boring) and no mission (motivating).

What Makes Marketing Materials Compelling?

May 6, 2010 Jennifer Bourn

Face it. Your audience is already bombarded with and overloaded by marketing message after marketing message, day in and day out. There is such a huge amount of constant marketing noise, that many people are beginning to simply tune it out. Your audience is becoming more and more desensitized to marketing and advertising everyday.

Imagine a room full of people all trying to market their products and services and sell to the same person at the same time. The room is packed with people talking at the prospect. The prospect is looking out into the crowd and he is getting frustrated because everyone is talking at the same time and he really can’t hear anything.

Get Me All Hot And Bothered And Leave Me Wanting More: Three Steps to More Sales

January 18, 2010 Jennifer Bourn

If you trim out all the fat, filler, and fluff that beef up a lot of marketing websites, you’ll see very clearly that there are really only three things that you need to do to make more sales and boost your bottom line.

STEP 1: Capture My Attention

Start with a captivating, powerful, direct headline that draws me in. Don’t beat around the bush or use cute-sy catch-phrases and don’t speak in jargon I don’t understand. Keep the headlines and the sub headlines strong, clear, and helpful. The easiest way to do this is to write one short sentence that communicates the benefits the article, web page, or blog post, etc. I will get out of the content.

Another great way to grab my attention is with a great photo, graphic or image. You have only a couple seconds to entice me to stay on your web page and read your content and sometimes a killer photo can do that even faster and more effectively than a headline.

Write Better, More Compelling Copy

April 22, 2009 Jennifer Bourn

Writing for the web is different than writing for print. In print materials such as newspapers, magazines and newsletters there is a place for long articles that span multiple pages because they are usually purchased with the intent on grabbing something to read. On the other hand, when you surf the Internet and information is gathered very differently. When searching for information online, users not only want it quickly and easily, they want to be able to find the information without reading it. Online, readers just want to scan the content for the information they want.

Why? Part of it is the wide-spread urgency for information and lack of patience, and the other part is that it requires more effort to read text online than on paper.

With this in mind, today I am sharing with you some tips of writing better copy for your website, blog, ezine, or other online medium.