Rock Solid Writing » professional development

Buzzwords and Zombie Copy

David Denis — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 13:00:34 +0000

“Copywriting is a job.
A skilled craft.
Verbal carpentry.
Words on paper.
Scripts to time.
And one more thing.
Salesmanship.”*

That’s about as good a definition of copywriting as you will find anywhere. We will come back to it in future posts.

A more pedestrian, but quite workable attempt might say that

Copywriting is the skillful and creative use of written language to promote a product, service, organization or concept.

Now, put the question, “What is copywriting?” to a typical business middle manager – probably an MBA – trained in B-school methods and thought patters. Here’s what you might get:

Copywriting is the synergistic utilization of impactful linguistic structures, leveraging outside of the box thinking to communicate maximum value solutions for customers in a relationship based business model.

I call this Zombie Copy. Ugly, isn’t it?

This is what happens when the writer mistakes writing for a pile of buzzwords. Left to run amok, buzzwords will rip the heart out of your copy. What could have been a vibrant piece of selling will turn into a pile of zombie words. It will look a lot like copy writing, but it will be unable to inject any life into your marketing. In the end it just stumbles around like a zombie, smelling bad, grunting inarticulately, and gnawing the life out of your business.

Buzzwords begin as useful shorthand terms that provide quick simple ways to convey complex meanings. Precisely because they are so useful, they tend to quickly spread like a virus from person to person and office to office and pretty soon the whole culture is infected by them.**

At a certain point, however, their use is so prevalent, and so dense that they begin to lose their power. They become cliché. In spite of this, business writers like to use them for two reasons:

They don’t require thinking.
They imply that you are knowledgeable of the latest trends in business.

It is easier to string together buzzword clichés than to actually think about how to craft a message properly so that it speaks in clear useful language. Unfortunately, only the gullible and thoughtless are actually impressed by such language.

The biggest problem is that clots of buzzwords pass through the brain without making any real impression. Since you want your copy to stick in the minds of the readers, you must put a stake through the heart of zombie copy. Use actual thoughtful, home made sentences and see what breathing a little life into your words can do.

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* Bruce Bendinger in his book The Copy Workshop Workbook
** or if your prefer the cliché term – “go viral.”

Write for the Occasion – Copy Writing that Fits

David Denis — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 01:09:35 +0000

A friend in his early 20’s was recently telling me his plans for the evening, which included attending an awards dinner for his girlfriend’s lacrosse team. The question on the table was “what to wear?” This dinner was to be an event – but apparently not too much of an event. So what kind of clothing was appropriate?

A Suit? If a suit, then tie or no tie? How about just a shirt and nice pants? Thankfully, sneakers, jeans and shorts were clearly a no go. Apparently a sense of propriety does still survive somewhere in the 21st century.

Choosing the right Outfit

If I had been in his place, I probably would have worn a sport jacket with a tie, minimum. It was an awards dinner, for goodness sake. A celebratory event. An event where you dress to honor those being awarded.

But I am an old man of 47. I generally favor dressing a little more up than down. I still wear a suit and tie to church even though it is considered odd by the majority of the sandal-footed Hawaiian shirt crowd that seems to dominate certain types of churches these days. But my tendency toward dressing better and not worse isn’t about showing off. It’s about respect.

Dressing properly is very much about respect for other people (the ones who have to look at you). A slovenly casual appearance, while fine for many things, is inappropriate for many public occasions. It displays a lack of respect for the moment or for the people, or for both.

Nevertheless, the rule for our current culture seems to be “How bad can I dress and not actually be mistaken for a homeless person? ”

I suggest that a better standard is “how can I dress to raise the level of the event just a bit without going so far that it seems that I am merely trying to attract attention?”

Tailoring your Copy

I look at writing in a similar way. I’m not a huge fan of the “write for the 4^th Grade Level” approach to writing. On the other hand, I have little patience for those who attempt to write everything on a post-doctorate level. Neither am I a stickler for correct grammar. I appreciate the skillfully bent rule — as long as it actually improves the message rather than detracting or distracting from it.

So what is the guide for writing? How can one decide on the best tone and style when writing? It’s just like dressing. One should write for the occasion.

If you are selling, write in a manner that will sell. If you are teaching, write in a manner that will teach. If you are telling a story, write in the way that best tells the story.

If your audience is 4^th graders, by all means, write on a 4^th Grade level (although I think stretching up to a 5^th grade level wouldn’t hurt anything). Whether your audience is gray haired ladies, long haired PhDs, the crew cut or the carefully coiffed, write in whatever style is right for the audience.

Good writing is neither about being showy, nor about dumbing down. By writing at the appropriate level and tone you treat your audience with respect. Every person and group is different. To treat them all to the same lowest common denominator will ultimately do your message more harm than good. So take the time to do the alterations your specific audience requires, and if you don’t know your audience well enough, you had better get out your measuring tape and figure it out.

Good content makes sure all the pieces coordinate perfectly. Good content lets it out where it’s too tight, and takes it in where it sags. Most of all, good content suits the occasion. Write content that really fits, and just like when you dress right, you will always come out looking great.

Copy Writing and Monkey Business

David Denis — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:22:12 +0000

Perhaps you have heard of the Infinite Monkey Theorem.

It goes like this. If a monkey were to type for an infinite amount of time, eventually he would produce Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

The truth of the theory can be mathematically demonstrated. The key concept here, of course being “eventually.” If that monkey could keep going long enough, “eventually” he would strike the correct keys in the correct order to produce Hamlet. Presumably, not only hamlet, but virtually every other work of fiction and non-fiction ever written, or that ever will be written.

Including the copy for your website. Or your blog post. Or your status update. Or your brochure, fund raising letter, postcard or sales letter.

The Monkey with Infinite Time could do it all.

So, do you have one of those? I didn’t think so. That leaves the responsibility for getting the writing done up to you.

Is Writing it Yourself the Highest ROI?

You, however, do not have the luxury of infinite anything. You enjoy the use of a rather limited slice of the time-space continuum, and you have much to accomplish within that span. The most important skill that you can develop as a business person is the capacity to identify and focus on the highest payoff activities. For many of you, that absolutely does NOT mean writing copy.

Understand what I am saying. You may be good at lots of things, but nobody is good at EVERYTHING. You have certain skills. Only when you leverage your best skills to the maximum degree can you obtain the greatest payoff for your effort. These skills may involve selling, or managing, or calculating, or planning. Whatever those skills are, those are the activities that you should focus on.

You should write for your marketing program ONLY if by writing it yourself you will receive the greatest possible payback. Chances are, if you are in position to make decisions about such things, you are much better off getting someone else to do the writing. You should focus on making good decisions. It’s simply a matter of getting the best return on the investment of your limited time.

The same calculation is true for your staff. Before you hand the writing off to them, be sure that writing is the highest value activity for their skills and talents. If not, you should hire it out to someone who will give you the biggest bang for your buck. Make ROI a key factor in your decision making.

Freelance writers are not monkeys. Find a good dependable writer who will deliver well within the agreed upon deadline. That will save you time, save you money and remove much of the stress that comes from worrying about your project. You focus on what you do best, and let the writer focus on what he does best.

We haven’t even mentioned that well-crafted content actually gets better results.

Stop dreaming about the monkey. You really don’t have time for that.

What’s more important — The Cup or the Content?

David Denis — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 01:54:15 +0000

Which would you rather drink:

Fine wine from a plastic cup?
Used bathwater from a crystal goblet?

Many businesses will spend oodles of noodles doing the keyword research and search engine optimization for their websites. They will dump a pile of dough on graphic design with slick flash animation and eye catching layouts. They will dish out the bread when it comes to analyzing their menu structure and site navigation. And they are not wrong for doing so. These elements are critical to making your website a success.

Effective optimization for search engines means your customers will find you. Great graphic design instantly conveys important information about the kind of company you are. Clear site navigation removes obstacles that may hinder your visitor from contacting you or buying from you.

But that’s just the cup. Nobody buys a drink just for the glass. They want the drink.

When it comes to your website, the drink is The Content.

Quality Content – the Magic Elixir

Your visitor has a problem. They come to your site hoping to find that magical cordial that, when swallowed, will solve that problem. The keywords, the graphics and the menus are only the vessels that delivers the magic liquid. The solution to their problem will always lie in the content – and the quality of your content can make or break the site. One taste will tell them whether your site contains Aqua Vitae or dirty water.

This is why it may be a mistake to skimp on your content. Trying to get off cheap may actually be the most expensive solution.

Home Brewed or Made by Masters?

Think twice before delegating the content creation onto members of your staff who already have too much to do. Consider carefully whether your own skills and talents really lie in the area of selling with words. Be very cautious about simply copying all your old marketing material and dumping it into a file you send to your web designer. While you may actually have the in house talent to pull this off, home brew may not be the most efficient and effective option.

Hire a professional to write your web content – but only if your most important criteria is results.

Your writer doesn’t have to be an expert in your industry. He knows how to obtain background information from reading and interviews with subject matter experts. He knows how to listen and consult with your team to deliver the message the way it needs to be delivered.

Hire a writer because your writer will have one goal: to craft the content that will get results for your website. No office politics. No overtime. No distraction from your business. Hiring a writer lets you and your staff do your business while she does hers.

If your writer is any good, his services won’t come cheap, but nobody ever went blind from drinking real champagne. Your customers deserve the best you can give them. Skip the rotgut content and break out the stuff that’s made from the finest words, by the best writers. Your business will thank you.

Do Your Words Sell?

David Denis — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 16:11:44 +0000

Selling is the root of all business. To paraphrase one of the first lessons of my first sales training experience – without selling there is no business.

And, are we not in business?

Therefore let us not be squeamish. Let us talk directly about selling, because the fact is that we want to sell and we want to sell lots and lots of whatever it is we have to sell. We want sales up to the eyeballs and sales coming out the wazoo.

Of course salespeople sell face to face and eyeball to eyeball. But what about all the other stuff that goes in the name of selling? Does your website sell? How about your printed material: brochures, postcards, sales letters, ad copy, product sheets and catalogs? Do you make your words work for you, or are you just spending money and wasting perfectly good paper and bandwidth?

Shouting is not Selling

Simply making loud noises does not by itself constitute selling activity. Flashy websites with clever animation do not create customers. Bright lights and dancing girls are not what lands the account. If the sounds you are making do not express benefits and value, your sounds are not selling. They are merely noise.

Advertising is not Selling

Advertising only helps if it makes selling its first priority. It’s not about hours of air time or acreage on the printed page. It’s about copy and images that communicate value and benefits. Good advertising starts your sale off right, but poor advertising, even in huge volumes, won’t move a stick of inventory off your shelves.

Promoting is not Selling

Printing your name on a pen or a coffee mug is not selling. It is good to remind your prospects that you exist. It is good to give them something useful and to make sure they have your phone number handy. But that is not selling. That is called giving stuff away and waiting quietly by the phone.

Communicating Benefits is Selling

Your prospect is only interested in what you can do for them. Can you save money? Save time? Increase profit? Reduce pain? Simplify their life? Increase enjoyment? Good selling is learning your prospects needs and then demonstrating with clarity and accuracy how your product or service will meet those needs.

Persuading is Selling

Your prospect is not convinced. When you convince them that your product is what they need and that it is worth way more than what they must pay, you have sold them.

Solving Problems is Selling

We all have problems. We will pay good money to make them go away. When you listen to your prospects and provide solutions to their problems, you have sold them.

Look at your written marketing materials. Do they communicate benefits? Are the persuasive? Do they present solutions with clarity and conviction?

If you are not getting sales results from your media they are investment you are probably missing one or more of these features. Do yourself a favor and save the company money by scrapping them and getting material that actually sells. Remember, nothing else happens in your business until you make that sale.

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This article is available for reprint only if the following bio is included intact.
This article is written by David Denis owner of http://www.rocksolidwriting.com
David is a freelance writer for hire offering article writing, sales letters, training manuals, speech writing, seo content, sales writing, blog articles, copywriting service, sales scripts and business name ideas.
To learn more, or request a quote visit http://www.rocksolidwriting.com/freelance-writer-quote/

Copywriting Example – Interim Management Solutions

David Denis — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:31:17 +0000

Interim Management Solutions provides consulting for businesses in transition. As a business grows, it passes through stages where their old ways of doing things no longer serve them well. IMS can step in with solid advice that comes from years of experience to help guide businesses through the choppy waters of change.

IMS is itself going through some change. They want to upgrade and improve their website so that it does more than passively profile their business. It should give a visitor valuable information, promote IMS as the best solution, and sell their business.

IMS is working with Neil Burtt over at You Promote LLC on their website upgrade. Neil specializes in creating promotional websites for small and medium sized businesses – websites that get results without breaking the bank.

The first step in the transformation of the IMS site is rebuilding the home page, starting with the copy. Neil called me to see if I would work on it.

The original copy was descriptive, but unfocused and a little bogged down with management book jargon. After a half hour interview with Ed Jaferian, one of the owners, I crafted some strong copy that is much more accessible so that the reader will quickly grasp what IMS does. These descriptions will ultimately be linked to other pages where the visitor can get more detail and see and offer for consultation.

As I told Ed, when I write copy for business sites like his, I target three major areas:

Eliminating jargon and using plain English
Using direct, strong, simple language in the active voice.
Writing with short well-structured paragraphs that can be easily scanned and understood.
Promoting and selling your business with benefits and regular calls to action.

Ed was so happy with the result that he wrote me an email, saying, “You have done a great job in capturing the essence of what I have been struggling to say.”

We are exploring improvements to the rest of the website as well, including fresher graphic design, stronger copy for the other pages, and search engine optimization. In particular, we are suggesting an email capture feature, where IMS will offer a useful report or “white paper” in exchange for the email of the visitor. This is the beginning of Relationship Marketing, a model that I think has huge potential for IMS down the road.

Be sure to click on the Link to view the current home page of IMS.

Using Technology Effectively in your Business

David Denis — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 15:00:36 +0000

Is technology a blessing or a curse for your business?

Neither. It’s a tool. Like a screwdriver. Try driving a nail with a screwdriver. Not much good is it? But it sure is good for putting in screws. Using technology in your business is about using the right tool for the right job.

Technology has only 2 functions in your business.

Increased efficiency.
Increased effectiveness.

Using technology properly increases your efficiency by making a wide range of repetitive and complicated tasks simpler and faster and cheaper. If you haven’t realized this yet, you will soon when your faster more profitable competitor eats your lunch. But efficiency is NOT where the real value of technology lies. Increased efficiency only SAVES you money, which is good, but it can only get you just so far. It cannot MAKE money.

3 Ways Technology Makes you more Effective

Effectiveness in business means making a profit. Before profits come sales and sales come from customers. So using technology to make your business more effective means creating customers and making good decisions about your revenues and expenses.

Using Technology Find Customers

Use technology to find your customers. E-bay is such a powerful business model because it makes it super easy for buyer and sellers of just about anything to find one another just about anywhere. I know of a commercial lender who is using the internet to create a network of people who funnel him business. This is high touch because he is now able to reach out and touch a hundred, a thousand percent more prospects than without technology. What would a similar system do for your business?

Using Technology to Communicate with Customers

Second, use technology to communicate with your customers, more often, more quickly and with better information. Do you think voice mail stinks? I recently read about real estate agents out there who have set up systems to respond to a request for information within 15 minutes of receiving a message? That’s high touch because studies show that the first agent to respond is usually the one who gets the listing.

Using Technology to Manage Information

Third, use technology to manage information for better decision-making. Business isn’t only about numbers (see point number two), but if you aren’t paying the right kind of attention to the right numbers, the numbers will trip you up. So learn to use technology to gather information and look at it in ways that will help you decide how to invest your three most important assets as an entrepreneur: time, money and energy.

Stop thinking its high tech vs. high touch. It is true that it’s never been about gadgets. It has always been about people. But the smart businesspeople understand that using high-tech properly makes you MORE high touch. Be aggressive about figuring out how, and YOU will be the one eating lunch.

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This article is available for reprint only if the following bio is included intact.
This article is written by David Denis owner of http://www.rocksolidwriting.com
David is a freelance writer for hire offering article writing, sales letters, training manuals, speech writing, seo content, sales writing, blog articles, copywriting service, sales scripts and business name ideas.
To learn more, or request a quote visit http://www.rocksolidwriting.com/freelance-writer-quote/

Sample Article – Your Business Disaster Survival Kit

David Denis — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 16:00:32 +0000

It’s only a matter of time. Eventually it happens to every businessperson, striking catastrophically like lightning, or creeping up imperceptibly until it swamps you. There may be warning signs, but you may not see them. You may even take precautions, but then you are disarmed by the ferocity of its arrival.

It’s the business disaster.

A business disaster is not fire, flood, or vandalism. It is the economic disaster that burns your bank account, submerges your spreadsheets, or pillages your paycheck. Your job is cut, or your sales evaporate. Your key employees leave — or maybe even worse…they stay and REALLY screw things ups. No matter what the cause is, survival is YOUR problem. FEMA ain’t coming to rescue you — ever. The only ones calling are creditors, and they aren’t bringing your bottled water.

If you, your business and your family are to survive, you need to hitch up your shorts. If you are to overcome adversity, you need to roll up your sleeves and get to work on your own disaster relief efforts.

Your personal disaster survival kit could contain all manner of tools and resources. To overcome these kinds of problems, there are a few basics tools that you cannot do without.

Business Disaster Survival Tool 1 – Your Reality Checklist

To overcome a business disaster, begin with a complete assessment of all your assets and liabilities. Include not just money, but skills, resources and personality traits. Make sure you know both the brutal facts and the signs of hope in your situation. The key is to see the whole truth about your life as it is now so that you are moving forward on solid factual ground. You will almost always find that your situation is not completely hopeless, and that you have more assets than you realized. Your reality checklist helps you find options that you didn’t see before.

Business Survival Tool 2 — Your Anti-Panic Pill

When balanced on the brink of financial disaster, it is natural, normal and understandable to feel panic. It’s just not helpful. The only way to prevent panic from taking over is to take action.

Several years ago, I lost my job. I had a family, a mortgage and no contingency plans. The panic quickly set in, bolting me awake in the middle of the night, taking my appetite and filling my gut with feelings of fear, dread and anger that I could not control. I found, however, that that I could take action. I threw myself into the work of finding work. This allowed me a sense of real progress, and my positive focus helped prevent me from being paralyzed by the panic I felt.

Business Survival Tool 3 – Your Emergency Beacon

Call for help. Besides the support of my friends and my family, the most valuable help I received was from a local outplacement counselor named Stacy. She helped me channel my fear and anger into a powerful, practical plan of action.

I might have figured it out eventually on my own, but it would have taken me much longer — probably too long. The plan she helped me develop involved literally calling everyone I could think of for ideas, advice and assistance. By not going it alone, I leveraged my own skills and maintained external accountability to make sure I was making progress with my plan.

Business Survival Tool 4 – Your Mental Meal Bars

It’s easy in the middle of failure to let your personal discipline fall apart. Again, it is natural and understandable. It’s just not helpful. In the midst of the mess, take time to practice the small disciplines that will feed your heart, your mind and your body.

Get up at the same time each morning.
Go to bed in time every night to get a good night’s sleep.
Set aside at least some time each day to read and/or listen to positive useful ideas.
Set aside time each day to exercise.
Make sure at least 2 meals each day are low fat, high fiber, and heavy on veggies.
Set aside 1-2 hours each week to plan out for the next 2 weeks.
Schedule other things that are important to you and keep your appointments.

These healthy positive rituals have a direct and profound effect on your ability to recover from disaster. Your mindset can make or break you. Your health affects your energy and your emotional state.

In addition, these simple disciplines are almost always things that you have control over. In a disaster situation, you have lost control of many things, but you can control what you eat, what you hear and see, and how much you move your body. If you can’t do anything else, start there.

Business Survival Tool 5 – Your Road Map

Know where you are, and know where you are going. Spell out your goals with brilliant clarity. Break down your journey into small sections. Keep your focus on the destination, even if it seems really far away. Keep checking your progress and make regular corrections to stay on course. If you are not clear on what it means to be recovered from your disaster, you will delay your recovery and increase your frustration with your progress.

You may have noticed that these principles are principles that we should all be engaged in every day, even when we are not in disaster recovery mode. In fact, if you find yourself dealing with a disaster, the cause may well be related to the fact that you failed to practice one or more of these principles in ordinary times.

Don’t let the smoothness of your current path lull you into carelessness. Start now to incrementally build these tools into your everyday life. You will reduce the likelihood of disaster overtaking you, and you will be better prepared when it does.

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This article is available for reprint only if the following bio is included intact.

This article is written by David Denis owner of http://www.rocksolidwriting.com
David is a freelance writer for hire offering article writing, sales letters, training manuals, speech writing, seo content, sales writing, blog articles, copywriting service, sales scripts and business name ideas.
To learn more, or request a quote visit http://www.rocksolidwriting.com/freelance-writer-quote/

Blog Article – Create Buy-In for your CRM System

David Denis — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:59:27 +0000

This is a sample article for a blog on CRM (Customer Relations Managment), Sales Force Automation or Knowledge Management. This particular article is not technical, but deals with some of the human aspects of introducing a new CRM system to your sales team.

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Create Buy In for your CRM System

There are lots of reasons why your sales team will resist sales force automation. Mostly, they all boil down to one thing:

Change is hard.

The good people on your sales team have been working hard using their current tool for years. They may kvetch, they may moan, they may carry on about the shortcomings of the system, but in the years that they have been using it, they have figured out how to make it work. They have worn grooves in all the right places, and created calluses where they need them. They may not like the old system, but they have grown comfortable with it.

Now you are asking them to change. Now they need to enter information differently, enter different information and enter it more often. This change messes with the mojo and gums up the gears of their finely tuned psychological machinery. They fear productivity dipping and they don’t like it. Frankly, neither do you, but you know that this new system is way better than the old system if they would just give it a chance.

To reduce their resistance you must get out in front of it. At the earliest stages of talking about converting to an enterprise management system, you need to start earning your team’s buy in. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

Your salespeople are your clients.
Your CRM system is your product
You are the salesperson.

The only reason people ever buy anything – ever – is that they see the benefit in it for themselves. To insure that your team buys your new CRM system, you need to build the sale from the ground up, just like you expect them to do with their prospects. Here are a few suggestions that might help you.

Communicate Aggressively
Involve Widely
Train Deeply

Communicate Aggressively

At the very earliest stages of considering changing systems, start communicating what is going on.

Ask for feedback.
Hold discussions.
Explain the reasons.
Disclose the data driving the decisions.

Communication is a two way street. Tell your team what is going on, but listen to their concerns and their ideas. Don’t fear their reactions. By starting early, you give them time to adjust to the coming new realities. If you give them the data, they will come to the right conclusions (or maybe even better ones).

Use all the available technology to communicate in ways that are subject appropriate, time-efficient, and budget conserving. You don’t need to fly everyone from all over the country when an hour-long conference call can get the job done. Use survey monkey to conduct surveys on key questions. Use email. Even Twitter and Facebook can contribute to the discussion.

Involve Widely

You will reduce resistance to your sales force automation project if you get your people involved in the process across the board and at every level.

Advocate for your team and get them a place at the table for the software selection process. Have other members take part in the process of designing the conversion. Have these team members communicate what they are learning to the rest of the team. Aggressive communication has to keep on through the entire process. Early information reduces the surprise factor, and therefore reduces resistance.

Part of involvement means beta testing. You would not roll out a new product without market testing. Don’t roll out a new CRM without letting real salespeople (the customers of your new system) test it first. The feedback they provide will be invaluable. Take that feedback and use it to tune up your customization and training processes.

Train exhaustively

Reading a manual is not training. Attending a class or webinar is not training. Your people have been trained only when they can actually perform the desired behavior consistently. Training is not about knowing. It is about doing.

Therefore, make sure that you invest in real, sophisticated, hard-edged training design. Create a clear and specific set of learning objectives, and a series of exercises and feedback points that will insure that your people can actually execute the objectives.

All of this is expensive in terms of time and money, but it is an investment in your investment. If you fail to set things up properly on the front end, you will experience all kinds of delays and obstacles on the back end. It’s a “you can pay me now, or you can pay me later” kind of proposition.

Funny how “pay me now” almost always works out cheaper in the long run.

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This article is available for reprint only if the following bio is included intact.

Sample Article – Do You have Gas?

David Denis — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:13:09 +0000

The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 may be the most powerful, most expensive, and fastest street-legal production car in the world. Its 1000 horsepower engine boasts a narrow angle double V8 configuration for a total of 16 cylinders and four turbos, with 8.0-litres of displacement per cylinder. Step hard on the gas and it will rocket you to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds thanks to four-wheel-drive traction. You’ll make 125mph in 7.3 seconds and 200mph in less than 20 seconds. Whew!

Yet, if you fail to put gas in the tank, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 will take you exactly nowhere.

We’ve all been told that goals are the vehicle that will propel you to your destiny. And so we expend extraordinary amounts of energy crafting high-powered goals built for maximum thrust. We write our goals down. We carefully select a target date. We create detailed step-by-step plans. We evaluate our time, our resources, identify skills that we need to obtain and obstacles we need to overcome. We create pictures and visualizations and we even review our goals. We do all the things the motivational experts tell us to do because we are told that by building a turbocharged goal we are assured of success.

Yet too often we find that the goals we built to rocket us to victory just sit there in the drawer where we put them. Like the Bugatti with the empty tank, they take us nowhere because they lack the proper fuel. They simply are not meaningful enough. They fail to arouse our deepest and most powerful emotions, and so they end up sitting in the garage like an enormously powerful car with no gas.

Finding goals that are meaningful to you is not about logic. You can come up with a long list of logical reasons why a goal is good for you, and yet not really care about that goal deep down inside. Your most effective goals make your heart blaze like burning magnesium. It makes your eyes light up and lightning shoot out your ears. Effective goals are the ones you want so bad that you will crawl 50 miles over broken glass to achieve them. Effective goals get you so fired up inside just thinking about them that you feel as if you could leap tall buildings in a single bound. Walking on fire, crossing oceans, climbing the highest mountains are nothing to you if your goals tap into your emotional core, because your desire to achieve them will empower you to do whatever it takes.

Effective goals are the ones that you don’t have to make yourself do. They are the ones that you want to do, no matter what. Your emotions are the fuel that powers your goals. If your fuel — the emotional meaning of your goal — is weak, then your motivation to achieve the goal will also be weak.

So if you are wondering why you have been setting goals but not accomplishing them, then you may want to check the fuel gauge on those goals. Here are a couple of tips to help you design goals that are already loaded with a full tank.

Stop Using Other People’s Fuel for your Goal

Figure out what YOU really really want. Sometimes we choose goals because we think we SHOULD choose them, or perhaps we are imitating someone we admire. In fact, what we really want is entirely different. For instance, I find it annoying that so many motivational speakers love to talk about their mansions and private jets and limousines. There is nothing wrong with these things, but I get way more excited about a cabin in the mountains, a new Subaru (with a really nice stereo), and the chance to go skiing every day. By building my goals around those things that specifically excite ME, they add gas to MY fuel tank.

Tune Your Mental GPS to the Destination Goal

Mentally put yourself in the place of already having accomplished your goal. Ignore all the road inbetween and just focus on what it would be like to actually be there. All that stuff inbetween is about HOW, and it belongs to the logic side of the equation. There’s a time to take care of that later. Right now, you just need to check the fuel tank to see if this baby has enough go-juice to get you there. To do that, you need to program the end coordinates into emotional GPS.

Monitor the Feedback on progress to your Goal

This feedback will come from your body. Listen to what your body tells you. Does thinking about this goal make you feel like you just want to jump out of your skin? Does it send electric shockwaves up and down your spine? Does it make your respiration increase and make your heart race? If so, then that’s a good sign that this goal contains the fuel you need. If you don’t really feel much, then keep searching for the goal that will get you going.

Suspend Judgment on your Goal

When going through this process, suspend all judgment about whether this goal is realistic or attainable. The fact is, if you feel strongly enough about it, the concept of realistic is mostly meaningless. If you really get excited about the goal, but it also scares the goobers out of you, then you may have to play with the time frame or the size of your goal to get the right emotional feedback, but that’s just fine tuning. When you feel strongly enough about a goal, your mind and heart will find a way to overcome almost any obstacle to achieve it.

Consider the Negative Fuel to power your Goal

Finally, it is always best to fuel your goals with positive pictures and desires. Sometimes, however, you can use a matter-antimatter reaction to get extra mileage. This means that you can picture the pain that will come from NOT achieving your goal. If the idea of failure discourages you, then don’t use this technique. On the other hand, if it fires you up, and makes you feel more resolute and determined to overcome all odds, then dump that into your fuel tank. It can significantly increase the octane of your motivational fuel.

The bottom line is that the best goals come pre-loaded with a full tank of fuel that contains a million times the energy of liquid oxygen rocket fuel. Find a way to connect your goal to something that carries that kind of meaning for you, and you will be amazed at how far you can go. Just be sure to wear your seat belt. It’s gonna be one heckuva ride!

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This article is was previously published on the internet by Freedom Personal Development, a company that specializes in personal development workshops and resources. Workshops are offered nationwide. To learn more, visit www.deliverfreedom.com, call 888-233-0407, or e-mail info@deliverfreedom.com