Rock Solid Writing » professional development

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

SEO Marketing – Recognizing Strong Web Content

David Denis — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:00:07 +0000

It’s never just one thing.

When your website is successfully driving traffic to your business, it’s not because you did just one thing right. It’s because you did many things right. Your website has to be structured properly and optimized behind the scenes for search engines to find you. Your front end — the content that visitors read — must also be done right. The right keywords is a huge part of the mix, but if you want people coming back to your site again and again, you need content that is compelling and fresh on many fronts.

Stoney Degeyter, over at the Search Engine Guide has a great article on the Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for Website Content. It lists 23 factors that affect the quality of your content. Many of them have nothing to do with keywords, but everything to do with giving visitors a reason to trust and love your website.

Published Writing Samples – Blog

David Denis — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:01:45 +0000

I have written and published more than 30 articles on the blog of Freedom Personal Development since it began. Some of these articles cover topics such as

To see all of the posts I have written, search for Dave Denis in the search box at the upper right corner. While you are at it, feel free to hang out and read some of the other blog posts by other members of the Freedom Team. It’s a terrific site and lots of exciting and useful ideas.

SEO Article – Keyword Giving Presentations

David Denis — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:00:06 +0000

This is an example of an SEO article for the keyword “Giving Presentations”. This kind of article is perfect for web pages, blogs, newsletters, e zines or any other web page focusing on professional development and self improvement. This article targets the keyword phrase “giving presentations” so that anyone searching for that keyword will find your website with this article. If you would like quality SEO content generated for your online media click Request a Quote at the top of this page.

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5 Tips for Giving Presentations

Most business people need to deliver a presentation to a group at some point. The ability to perform effectively in these situations is a huge asset that will help propel you to the forefront of any field.

Here are 5 tips for giving presentations that will win the day.

Commit your presentation to memory.

This frees up your hands, your eyes, and your whole body to send out your message to your audience. If you feel this is too hard, you will benefit from the memory training workshop offered by Freedom Personal Development. Memorizing your presentation is easy with the right training and it will supercharge your credibility and communicating power.

Practice giving your presentation

Practice giving your presentation until you feel completely confident with it. Here are some tips about how to practice.

Practice a lot. 20 hours of rehearsal for each hour of presentation – at a minimum. More if you can swing it.
Practice giving your presentation out loud. This sounds silly, but many people think that reading a presentation or thinking about it is sufficient. It is not. Practice giving your presentation out loud. There is no substitute.
Practice giving your presentation with all the equipment and visual aids you will use in the real situation. If you can manage it, practice in a room as much like your real venue as possible.
Record yourself when you practice. Use either audio or video.
Have someone listen to you give your presentation. Have them especially listen for verbal tics or bad habits that will hinder your communication.

The time you invest in effective rehearsal will definitely improve your delivery many fold.

Speak to individuals in the audience when giving a presentation.

Don’t just “make eye contact.” Actually engage people for a few seconds at a time throughout your presentation. Give them reason to pay attention by talking to each person in the room, and you will draw them into your program and keep their attention.

Project your voice to the back of the room when giving a presentation.

You don’t have to shout, but you do need to make yourself heard. Open your mouth. Breathe. Talk slowly enough to be understood, but not so slow you seem sleepy or confused. Take pauses to let your audience catch up to the last point of your presentation. Speak to the back row as much as to the front row and you will give a presentation that everyone will be able to hear.

Just be yourself when giving your presentation

If you aren’t the kind of person to clown around and act goofy, then don’t clown around when you give a presentation. Forced humor seldom works. All you have to do is deliver your presentation with confidence, conviction and clarity. People will get your message, and they will respond appreciatively.

On the other hand, if you are the kind of person who clown around, that can be great too. Just make sure you stay appropriate to the situation and the audience when you give your presentation.

You can do it! You know your subject or you wouldn’t have been asked to speak. Follow these 5 simple tips and you will give a presentation that will absolutely positively win the day.

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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