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SEO Tip #23 - SEO Content Writing and Copyrights
Ten Recipes for Persuasive Content :: UXmatters
Whose Story Are You Telling? | seth simonds
Seven deadly sins of web writing
Seven deadly sins of web writing: July 28, 2003 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern
A List Apart: A List Apart
Whose Story Are You Telling? | seth simonds
Buy Website Content, Order Articles
Writing Microcopy - Bokardo
Whose Story Are You Telling? | seth simonds
How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog)
What the Horizon Realty Fail Can Teach You About Social Media
How to Motivate People to Buy

SEO Tip #23 - SEO Content Writing and Copyrights

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:27 PM PDT

After all, as SEOs we are all creating content for the Web. Did you know when your create any originally written work, you automatically own the copyright?

In fact over 200 years ago, the courts recognized that authors of any originally written work for personal correspondence hold full property rights in their expression. So when you create something original, you own the copyright and it not only includes articles, but it is true for your Web content or even correspondence that is sent by e-mail too.

Under common-law copyright, authors hold a right to control whether their correspondence is published to third parties. This is a common-law protection of “private expression” and is nearly absolutely, immune from any defense of “fair use.”

Accordingly, the routine practice of email forwarding would violate principles of common-law copyright.”

Ten Recipes for Persuasive Content :: UXmatters

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 05:41 PM PDT

Whose Story Are You Telling? | seth simonds

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 02:44 PM PDT

Seven deadly sins of web writing

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 02:42 PM PDT

Seven deadly sins of web writing: July 28, 2003 issue of New Thinking by Gerry McGovern

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 02:18 PM PDT

A List Apart: A List Apart

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 02:04 PM PDT

Whose Story Are You Telling? | seth simonds

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:38 AM PDT

Buy Website Content, Order Articles

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 10:06 AM PDT

Writing Microcopy - Bokardo

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 09:54 AM PDT

Whose Story Are You Telling? | seth simonds

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 05:59 AM PDT

How to Build a High-Traffic Web Site (or Blog)

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 05:52 AM PDT

What the Horizon Realty Fail Can Teach You About Social Media

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 08:32 PM PDT

FAIL

If you haven't heard the story yet, a Chicago real estate company called Horizon Realty Group filed a lawsuit against one of its tenants on Monday. She apparently made a snarky remark on Twitter, claiming that the company "didn't care" about mold in her apartment.

Horizon is suing her for libel, looking for $50,000 in damages to their reputation.

She only had about 20 followers, so this looked like a pretty harsh David and Goliath story. Unfortunately, Horizon's legal and PR teams forgot what happened to Goliath.

By Tuesday afternoon, the story of Horizon's lawsuit had hit trending topics on Twitter. Which means that a peevish remark made in front of 20 people has now found its way to hundreds of thousands.

That megaphone is a lot more powerful than you think it is

Think you just have 20 followers? Think again. Your tweets are findable both on Twitter search and Google. And it's a routine practice for any smart company to look for its name regularly using both services.

Think the customer who just infuriated you has just 20 followers? Think again. Angry tenant Amanda Bonnen's megaphone was tiny, but the social web can't resist a juicy story. And the social web really can't resist a juicy Twitter story.

It's not about what you think is fair

Horizon Realty might be the most loveable, fair, decent and true company in the world. Right now, their name recognition has about as much appeal as Saddam Hussein. With mold.

Whether fair or not, Horizon has made a worldwide name for itself virtually instantly, connecting its brand with callous disregard for its tenants, or worse.

(Yes, there is such a thing as bad publicity. This is what it looks like.)

Do social media users read all the facts carefully before flaming? Of course they don't. Are there dozens of inaccurate accusations about Horizon flying around Twitter at the moment?

Absolutely.

Is that fair? No. Then again, filing a $50,000 lawsuit against a customer for a snarky remark made to a friend isn't going to strike many as entirely reasonable either.

The Meatball Sundae has no mercy

Horizon's Jeffrey Michael, trying to explain his position to the Sun-Times, said that Horizon has a good reputation to protect. His company says they can prove there wasn't any mold in Bonnen's apartment, and they couldn't let Bonnen bad-mouth them. So they took a traditional route. (Although it would have been somewhat more traditional to ask her to remove the remark before filing the lawsuit.)

A year and a half ago, in a post about Seth Godin's book Meatball Sundae, I wrote about my take on a nice little company called Kryptonite Locks.

Kryptonite got knocked down hard when they tried to play by old communication rules in a new communication environment. They hadn't actually done anything wrong, but they looked clueless, unfeeling, and arrogant.

You don't get to play by the old rules any more, and it doesn't matter what business you're in. You don't get the old privilege of anonymity. You don't get to bury your story on page 47.

There is no more page 47. Every story is somebody's page 1.

As a matter of fact, it isn't your story any more. It belongs to everyone, and they'll do what they please with it.

If you want to influence the conversation, you've actually got to get into the conversation. Respectfully. Meaningfully. Just because that's a social media cliché doesn't mean you get to ignore it and hope it goes away.

The one-to-a-jillion aspect of social media means that any of us can hit the equivalent of the front page of the New York Times at any time. All that has to happen is that we find ourselves in the middle of a really interesting story.

So what's the story about you going to be?

(And if you work for a company, be sure and warn your legal team about Twitter users. You don’t want to mess with those people… we're crazy.)

About the Author: Sonia Simone is Senior Editor of Copyblogger and the founder of Remarkable Communication. She also offers a pretty darned good free class on email marketing.

How to Motivate People to Buy

Posted: 28 Jul 2009 08:54 AM PDT

Better Writing

If you're in business, someone's got to buy something for you to make money.

At least last time I checked.

(Twitter, call me).

For the rest of you, this article should help you get more people to buy something.

Sick of Hearing that People Buy Because of Emotion?

Well then… that would be a strong emotional response to a logical assertion, no?

But I hear you. Over and over you're told that people buy according to emotion, and it seems not to make sense when it comes down to selling your stuff.

Maybe that's because you're thinking about emotion in the context of feelings rather than motivation.

And that would definitely be confusing, because it's not feelings you're after. In fact, provoking feelings can kill the sale instead of prompting it.

Nothing More Than Feelings… (Fail)

Feelings are magnified, messy, and often misunderstood forms of emotion, and that makes playing with them potentially dangerous. What we're trying to do is motivate people to do something very specific (buy)… not get them to weep, fly into a rage, or jump for joy.

This may be why so many people doubt that we make purchase decisions via emotion. We don't always detect a strong feeling when we reach for our wallets, so we must be acting from a purely logical standpoint, right?

Not likely. You simply justify your existing desire to purchase with logic. You've already decided you want it. It's still possible to talk yourself out of it, but the motivation to buy was put in place while your logical brain was making other plans.

In fact, any time we are motivated to do anything, emotion is pulling the strings. It's just usually an emotional response lower than what we think of as a feeling, so we experience our motivations as mostly rational.

But it's emotion that moves us to act. In fact, the Latin root for the word emotion mean "to move," because emotions motivate what we do. Psychologists will tell you that motivations are fairly simple and straightforward, while feelings can be quite complicated (we even lie to ourselves about them).

So, when it comes to getting someone to buy, you're definitely invoking emotion. But by understanding emotional response in terms of motivation rather than feelings, you'll have a better idea on how to craft your copy.

More Than a Feeling: Motivation

So, again… the goal is not to get someone to necessarily feel. Your goal is to get someone to want, and to act on that want. If that seems like a subtle difference (since desire can often be a very tangible emotion), well at least now you accept that emotion is driving the train.

In terms of motivation, psychologists know that emotions result in one of three basic categories of responsive motivation:

Approach

When approach motivation kicks in, you want to experience or discover more of something. Approach motivation involves positive desire, and the perceived value of what you move toward always increases.

Approach motivation makes selling high quality desirable products easy, whether it be an iPhone or black granite kitchen countertops. But it can also be used to sell desirable outcomes, ranging from the Obama campaign for empowered change, to get rich quick and get skinny now products of dubious effectiveness.

Avoid

You want to play upon avoid motivation when your prospect wants to get away from something of low value. Avoid motivation deems something unworthy of attention, and an inconvenience or annoyance that should be ignored or eliminated.

People want to avoid paying too much on their electric bill more than any desire for features of the juice coming through the wires, unless you're using alternative energy sources, in which case many will do business with you to avoid adverse environmental impact. Most charities play on avoidance emotions to lessen the impact of poverty, disease, and natural disasters. Rather than taking a beauty approach, Clearasil plays on motivations to avoid the stigma of acne.

Attack

With attack motivation, people want to devalue, insult, criticize, or destroy something. When someone is emotionally motivated to eliminate something (rather than simply avoid it), attack motivation is the way to go.

Think about ad campaigns for weed killer and bug spray (Raid kills bugs dead!). Likewise, we've seen more than our share of large-scale campaigns designed to eradicate various complicated problems by waging war against them – the war on crime, drugs, terror, etc.

What's My Motivation?

Using the three basic categories of emotional motivation, you should be able to craft the right kind of story to get people to take action. The problem comes when you're not clear which motivations you're actually playing to.

For example, it's rare that an attack against your competitor will work on the basis of attack motivation, but comparative advertising (Pepsi challenge, Mac Guy and PC guy) can work if you invoke enough approach motivation due to the expressed benefits and differentiation. On the other hand, negative political ads work on independents not by triggering attack motivation, but instead by prompting avoidance… the undecided voter doesn't want to make the wrong choice.

Thinking in terms of motivation makes selling with emotion a little less mysterious. And spending the time to truly know who your prospects are makes motivation crystal clear.