I first encountered this incorrect spelling of “utter” in a student essay on the “udder destruction” of a character. For days, I was clutching my breasts and feeling pity for cows.
Some student typos are really amusing, and—unless you’ve got a dominatrix for an English professor—it’s unlikely that one of them will lead to an F.
But mistakes in your corporate communications—even just one or two of them—are an altogether different story. They’re no laughing matter. Mistakes destroy consumer confidence and cause you to lose sales.
Think you’re immune from such errors? Think again.
Lately, I’ve been exploring a lot of websites. I’m branching out beyond the ivory towers of academia in order to launch a series of online programs for college and high school students, and I want to see how other entrepreneurs are presenting themselves. So after reading posts on Laura’s blog and watching Marie Forleo’s Q & A Tuesday videos, I often check out people’s comments and their sites.
Guess what? Even though I’m not in official editing mode, I find a lot of mistakes.
3 Glaring Mistakes
“Start woking with an expert.”
“We promote heath and wellness.”
“I create professionally-written cover letters.”
No, the solopreneur in the first example isn’t selling innovative wok services. She’s presenting herself as an experienced administrative assistant. The company referenced in the second example offers diagnostic screening services—not a Heath bar fortified with blue-green algae. Now, the last mistake might not seem as obvious as the others, but it’s still a common blooper. Let me explain, so you don’t make the same kind of error.
Rule: Use a hyphen when joining 2 or more words that serve as an adjective before a noun, but don’t use one when joining –ly adverbs.
Examples: Laura Roeder is a well-respected expert on social media marketing. Michelle Vargas is the woman behind Marie’s professionally shot videos.
#1 Reason Mistakes Cost You Clients
Quite simply, they destroy the “Know, Like, and Trust” factor you’ve worked so hard to cultivate. . .even if your service or product seems to have nothing to do with writing.
Consider this. The authors of the mistakes are from diverse fields: corporate administration, medicine, and communications. Nevertheless, their clients are all looking for someone who’s capable of ensuring that nothing—not even the smallest detail—is overlooked. They need an assistant they can trust to correctly enter information into their systems, want to know the practice can properly label and screen the vials of blood they’ve drawn, and must feel confident that the writer can get rid of the mistakes they can’t catch themselves.
Underneath it all, the same thing is true of your clients. If they notice you don’t catch (or don’t hire someone to catch) seemingly small things like typos, how are they going to be able to trust you with bigger, more significant tasks?
4 Ways to Avoid Looking Utterly Ridiculous
1. Create a checklist. If you’re like most of my clients, you already know that you tend to mess up in certain areas, so create a separate document where you can jot down your trouble zones, write out the rule, and include both correct and incorrect examples from your own writing. Print out your checklist and refer back to it every time you write something.
2. Proofread! Print out your copy and get some distance from it. When proofreading, it’s vital to be in an alert state, so you might need several short sessions. Put the point of your pencil beneath each word and read your copy very s-l-o-w-l-y. If you read at your normal speed, your mind is apt to do things like insert words that aren’t actually on the page. Go the extra mile by double-checking words in the dictionary. (My favorite is www.merriam-webster.com.) Enter the necessary changes, print out the document, and read it once more.
3. Use the best free online resources. There’s no shortage of free online advice, but some of it is wrong! If you want trustworthy, easy-to-understand information about things like grammar and punctuation, I recommend The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL): http://owl.english.purdue.edu.
4. Invest in an online reference work. Right now, I’m loving the AP Stylebook Online, which I use when editing and writing for the BB&T Charleston Wine + Food Festival®. For $25 a year, you get this amazing resource, which is easy to search and includes comprehensive information on punctuation, grammar, and spelling as well as social media guidelines and more. Check it out at www.apstylebook.com.
Have any great tips or resources? Post them in the comments. I’m always curious!
Need some FREE advice? See below for details.
Jennifer B. Bernstein is a professional editor and writer, an award-winning literary scholar, and the creator of Get Yourself Into College™ and Create Your Amazingly Successful Life!™–a series of live and online programs for high school and college students as well as recent graduates. To book your FREE 10-minute review of one of your pages, sign up at http://jenniferbbernstein.com/editing-writing.
You probably hear my duck friends. Welcome to the Venice Canals!
Hey, I’m Laura Roeder. Okay, I got a little bit excited in the intro but I am indeed in the Venice Canals. This is where I live in Venice Beach, California in Los Angeles. I just wanted to show you a little bit of my beautiful home. In this video, I’m going to tell you about how I shifted from constantly chasing every client from that feast or famine cycle to now putting myself in a position where people come to me. It’s really cool and you can do it too. One of the ways you can do it is to create a demo reel for your business, and stick around till the end of the video because I’m going to tell you exactly how to do that.
You might have heard that before I had the business that I have now I used to have a web design business. I used to be a web designer in Chicago and the way I would get my clients is I would find someone through going to networking events every single night. I would finally find someone who might be interested, who showed a little bit of interest and I would put together a detailed proposal just for them. We would have a phone call and we would talk about what we wanted. I would put together a proposal and then I would ride the bus over to their office.
I lived in Chicago. It was really cold. I didn’t have a car and I remember I would spend so long just like sitting on the bus with my little proposal. Also keep in mind I was 22 and I looked about 16. So you can just picture me waiting for the bus in Chicago with my little proposal. Sometimes I would take an hour to get there and I would have my meeting which would take another hour and they would say they would think about it or sometimes they would buy or sometimes they wouldn’t. I felt like it was just this cycle that I couldn’t see my way out of. I spent so much time making the proposals and getting over there and having the meetings.
When I would finally get a client, when it actually paid off and I had a client, well, as soon as that project ended, I was back to square one. As soon as the client finished, now it’s time to ride the bus around the city for more proposals, right?
So I was trying so hard. I always felt like I was grasping, trying to get clients like “Please, please sign up with me. Please get in here.” It was so much work and I kept thinking there has to be some other way to do this.
So I went to Los Angeles to visit my friend, Brea, who is an actor. At the time I lived in Chicago. Now I live in L.A. So I was helping Brea with her acting business, with her acting career. I was helping her get on social media and learn about online marketing and blog, and in turn I was learning about how the acting business works which wasn’t something I knew anything about. Actually, that worked with Brea is what inspired the whole Creating Fame system. I used what we did with her, started using it for myself to create fame, to push. But I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
So one thing that I noticed that was really interesting about the acting business is how successful actors get work. This is not how all actors get work. A struggling actor is constantly doing what I was doing in Chicago. They’re chasing. They’re always going on auditions. They’re not getting anything. But successful actors do something different. What happens when you are a successful actor is people see you in one project and they want to book you for another.
Basically, people come asking for you instead of you having to go to them. You probably noticed this when you’ve watched TV. You’ll notice a girl in a commercial and all of a sudden she’s in four commercials, all of a sudden you see someone guest starring in a TV show, and then you notice them guest starring on another show. The reason that that happens is people see them. They see their work and they say, “I want that person for another project.”
So I was thinking, “That’s really interesting. That’s what I want to do for my business,” right? Instead of chasing all these clients, I want to be sitting pretty and having clients coming to me. That sounded much better. So I started using what we had done for Brea and trying it out on myself and on my business to see if I could create fame for myself and my business in becoming the known person getting clients to come to me. So that’s how I created fame for my business, sort of the two-second version, right? And I want you to do the same for your business, and I have a way that you can start doing that today and that is creating a business demo reel, a demo reel for your business. If you’ve never heard this term before, a demo reel is something that actors and producers and animators and directors and artists, any sort of visual artist I guess use this to showcase their work. So it’s just a little video that has clips of all their best work.
You can call it a portfolio or a showcase or whatever. And what happens is an actor shows someone their demo reel then they can watch it in the comfort of their own home, right? The actor doesn’t have to show up and do a little song and dance. People can check out your demo real from afar and then they can decide to hire you. So what I want you to do is create a video that showcases what you do in your business, and you can actually do this for any type of business. So let me explain. If you’re a life coach, you can record a video of you working with a client. Or if there’s privacy issues, I know some of us can’t really do that, just record a video of you doing sort of your initial spiel that you do when you work with a client. I’m sure when you first start talking to someone you tell them your philosophy, how it’s going to work, maybe how many sessions they have, is it by phone or in person. That whole thing is actually really, really useful for people who want to hire you.
So you can film that with a real client or for whatever you can’t do that, just pretend you’re talking a client, right? You can have your friends in there, you can talk to a wall, whatever it is, just say whatever you say when people first start working with you. The same thing if you’re a lawyer. If you can’t have footage of you actually working with a client, just record a little bit of what you say when people first come to your office, right? “This is my philosophy. This is how it works. These are the outcomes you can expect.”
If you are a fitness instructor, like pilates teacher, record a little video of you teaching pilates. It sounds funny but we really want to see you, like, is she a scary teacher? Is she a nice teacher? What’s her style? People really want to know that before they hire you. Or if you’re a healer, if you’re an acupuncturist or an esthetician or anything like that, you can record a video of you doing your work or again, if for privacy reasons that won’t really work out, just record a video of you explaining how your work works. But don’t do it like a little advertisement. Pretend that you’re really talking to a client or really do talk to a client again and have someone record it.
So you might tell them “It will take about this long. This is how the process goes. This is what you can expect.” That type of video is super, super valuable for people who want to work with you. It’s a way for them to get that experience. This is what video is so great for. On video they get that experience of working with you without you having to ride the bus around in cold Chicago to go give them the pitch in person. And you will be really, really surprised by how many people will pick up the phone and hire you based off just what they’ve seen in the video and not having any conversation with you. This works really well.
So what I want you to do, if you don’t have a video camera, if you’re like “Where do I start?” I’m going to tell you exactly what to do. Don’t worry. Get a Flip Video camera. That’s what we’re recording this on right now. You can probably see there’s no fancy equipment. I don’t even have a microphone. They work great. It’s called F-L-I-P. You can get them on Amazon, get them anywhere. Just get the cheapest Flip. Record your video on the Flip. You can have your friend do it; you can have somebody you work with to do it, whatever. Record your video and then post it on YouTube. I even have instructions for that. I’ll put the link below this video on how to upload your video from Flip to YouTube and then put it on YouTube, send people the link, and embed it on your own website.
That’s a sort of bonus points because on YouTube people are going to find it googling. So somebody searches for pilates teacher in Toledo, your video is going to come up, they’re going to watch it and fall in love with you, and then call you and book with you, and you won’t have to do anything. It will be awesome. So that’s how you record your business demo reel. The last step is post it below this video. I want to see your demo reels and I would be happy to give you feedback if you can post them in the next few days, right? A little challenge for you.
So get out there. Get a Flip. Don’t make this complicated. Don’t try to make it perfect. You don’t have to do any video editing. Just have someone record your process, whatever you do with your clients. Post it on YouTube, put it on your website, and then link it below this video, and we’ll all check it out and I’ll tell you what I think.
Do you have a co-worker or colleague who may have the best intentions, but can’t find their way out of the stacks of papers on their desk? Or perhaps you find that you just don’t enjoy being in your office for some reason. Your office is an outward manifestation of what’s really going on with you and your business. And with a few simple steps that don’t cost a dime, you can turn your office into your business’ best asset.
Step 1: Identify Your Office
Where is your office? This may seem like a no-brainer, but in today’s mobile world it’s not always so clear cut. When I was transitioning from law to the holistic arts, there was about a year in which I felt like I was floating around with no identity. It is no coincidence that I had no designated office outside or inside my home. If you are a floater, it is important to still designate a space for your office – even if it is the kitchen table or Starbucks. This will help ground you and set a foundation for your business.
Step 2: Objectively Look at Your Office
Take a look at your office through a stranger’s eyes for a moment. What impression would you get? What does it say about you and your business? Unorganized? Professional? Successful? Peaceful? Organized? Hectic? Overwhelmed? Uncommitted?
I was recently doing a feng shui consultation with a solo entrepreneur who worked out of her home office. It was apparent to me that she was either uncommitted or confused about her current business. She was using a spare guest room as her home office, which is a common and functional setup. However, the room was taken up with personal décor items that looked more like a bed-and-breakfast than a meeting place for business coaching clients. She realized that she was unsure as to the direction of her business. I advised her that if she wanted to build her business and work from home, then that room would need to be primarily an office.
Notice what takes priority in your office. Another example is a client who had run a multi-million dollar employment company until the economy crashed. Numbers were down and she was confused as to the direction of her company. I walked into her executive, corner office and immediately saw that it was inundated by kid photos and drawings. There were adorable pictures of her children taped all along her computer monitor and photo frames of their smiling faces on every square foot of console and desk space. It was clear where her priority was and where she really wanted to be spending her time.
Step 3: What Message Do You Want Your Office to Communicate?
After you have determined what message your office is currently communicating, consider what you want your office to communicate. This is important whether you have clients, co-workers, your dog, or no one enter your office. What your office is communicating is in effect the energy that you put out into the world. So consider what message you want your office to communicate, i.e., professional, zen, organized, creative, fun, successful, etc.?
Step 4: Make Changes to Accomplish Step 3
This step almost always involves getting rid of stuff. I had one client who couldn’t figure out why she kept getting passed up for promotions. I looked around her office and saw relics sitting all over her office. For example, there was a golf ball from the company’s 1989 golf tournament, a plaque for the good Samaritan award from 1992, and so on. I asked her why she was keeping all these nic-nacs. She said that people referred to her as The Historian of the office. Ah ha! No wonder she was not getting promoted. She represented the past for the company – not its future. Clutter can be so well disguised!
What do you need to get rid of that no longer resonates with your current business?
Our offices can sometimes become the dumping ground for stuff that we don’t know what to do with, such as a painting from mom-in-law. Make sure you love everything in your office and aesthetically enjoy being in the space. It will make coming to your office so much more enjoyable and therefore help take your business in a positive direction.
LinkedIn is the ONLY major social network devoted solely to business use.
Then how come so many entrepreneurs have LinkedIn profiles that are doing ZILCH for their business??
I think it’s because so few people have learned how to properly use LinkedIn to bring in leads. I know I’ve been guilty of passing over LinkedIn to spend time on “more exciting” tools like Twitter and Facebook.
That’s why I asked my good friend Lewis Howes to come in and school us all on how to use LinkedIn!
Lewis literally wrote the book on LinkedIn (two of them in fact) and he gives smart, real-world advice on how a small business can leverage LinkedIn to succeed.
We’re covering how to:
Generate more Leads for Free on LinkedIn
Build a targeted community of potential customers
Increase your Connections by 3X over night!
Drive traffic to your website and sales pages
And more…
Sign up below, if you want to get access to the video seminar hosted by Lewis and Laura.
Watch Derek Halpern of Social Triggers give me the low down on my site. Derek is genius at “knowing what makes people tick online”. Here he gives me the skinny on things I can do better on my site to capture more leads, more sales and make the experience for you, the reader, just plain out better.
Most everything Derek shares with me, YOU can do too. So listen and then get to implementing!
When getting ready to launch a new product or service, you’re probably falling off your chair with anticipation to share all of its goodness with the world.
The problem?
You’d rather watch paint dry than sit and write about features, benefits, or any other marketing gobbledygook the experts claim you need to share.
So, you slap something together in the hopes that people will just “get it,” only to end up with a big stinker of a sales page, and big snores from your clients.
Crud.
Don’t fret. Keep reading to learn how to inject a splash of adrenaline into your sales copy that will have people drooling to buy your goods.
The Habit That’ll Have You Churning Out Killer Headlines
You probably already know that you have just a few seconds to captivate a reader. And, you also know that your headline is the ultimate first impression.
However, unless you’re an award-winning copywriter you’re probably sweating bullets trying to craft the perfect headline that will impress the pants off your customers.
I have a solution – and it’s super fun.
Get your behind into the grocery store and make a beeline right for the check out line. Do you see all of those racks stacked with trashy tabloids and other glossy treasures? Grab a copy of at least three of these publications and then take note of all the headlines. How can you re-work these for your own business so customers will buy your stuff just as easily as a random grocery shopper shells out $3.50 for a magazine?
Let’s pretend you’re a health coach launching a new program to help people beat sugar addiction.
National Enquirer Headline: Stars’ Ex Lovers Tell All: The Heartbreak that Changed Her Forever
Your headline: Ex-Sugar Addict Reveals: How to Cut Sweets Out of your Life Forever
This will take some practice, but following the basic make-up of these headlines to craft your own will have your customers itching to learn more.
The Simple Copy Trick to Make an Instant Connection with Customers
If you’re using the Internet to communicate with customers (and I suspect you are if you’re a Laura Roeder fan), you have to find some way to make your words jump off the page and help people feel like you’re right in the room with them.
The best way to do this is to infuse words and phrases that will have them clinging fiercely to each word.
Here’s a neat little trick to try.
Pretend your ideal customer is plopping down on a lazy Sunday afternoon with a cup of coffee and his/her favorite magazine. Which magazine are they reading?
Once you identify what this magazine is (if there are 2 or 3, that’s fine too) head out and pick it up. Comb through the headlines, advertisements, and articles to find words and phrases that will get your customers buzzing. Keep these in a file and work them into your sales copy, blog posts, etc.
For example, if my customer liked SELF magazine, I might pull out from an issue: so-simple plan, radiant, go crazy, less stress, exhale, sunny side up, celebrate, yours truly, ready-set-slow.
Why does this work? Because national magazines spend thousands of dollars on market research to learn what customers want to read. If you don’t have that kind of budget for market research, this is a sweet little shortcut.
Stop Faking It
Last, but certainly not least, don’t try to be something you’re not.
In business, we often think we have to fit some kind of mold.
Often times that mold is B-O-R-I-N-G.
Read every piece of copy you write OUT LOUD. Are you tripping over your words? Is this something you would actually say to someone in person?
If not, ditch it and swap in something more authentic.
Oh, and pepper in some of those fun words and phrases from #2.
Copywriting doesn’t have to be the bane of your existence. In fact, it can be quite fun. Plus it gives you an excuse to check out all of those trashy magazines you were always too ashamed to read.
Now that sounds like a good time to me.
Melissa Cassera helps business owners score millions of dollars in free advertising using the power of publicity. Download her free eBook on how to pitch the media like a pro at www.casseracommunications.com
Are you ready to tap into an unending stream of creativity for your business, blog, or third thing that also begins with a ‘B’? The same skills improv comedians use onstage can help.
“Seriously?”
Seriously.
Unlike stand-up comedy that’s written, rehearsed and performed by a solo comedian – improv comedy is created by an ensemble, entirely on the spot, right in front of the audience. You may not have your own ensemble (or the same massive need for strangers’ approval that I do), but here are three improv performance techniques you can use on your own to squeeze out more creative juice.
1. SAY ‘YES!’ TO YOURSELF!
Agreement is king in improvisation. Multiple actors = Multiple ideas driven by multiple egos. Even if the characters argue, the actors must agree. Are we brothers in a coffee shop? Fancy ladies in a park? The audience doesn’t want to watch actors negotiate – they just want us to be Fancy Ladies!
How many of your ideas never flourish because they don’t make it out of your head? That voice inside that says “NO”, “HARD”, or “DUMB” – that is your internal editor. Turn them off. Better yet, slit their throat and silence them forever. (Too graphic? Apologies. My internal editor’s been dead a long time.) With that nagging voice shut down, now you can get to work.
Write out all of your ideas. Not just the reasonable ideas – ALL of them. Even the dumb ones. No, ESPECIALLY THE DUMB ONES! There’s a reason you’re an entrepreneur and not wasting your genius in a boardroom. Dream up a thing or two that’s too unwieldy to implement. We aren’t making decisions yet – we’re creating. SAY ‘YES’ TO YOUR OWN IDEAS!
2. TAKE IT FURTHER!
In improvisation, the companion to ‘Yes!’ is always ‘And…’. ‘Yes!’ gets us on the same page, but ‘And…’ gets us to the end of the chapter. When I bring my dumb idea to the stage, I rely on my performance partners to agree (Yes!) and then add something (And…) to make me seem brilliant.
To harness this for yourself, simply look at all of the ideas to which you have already said Yes in Step 1, and then make them work. (I know, “is that all?” Stick with me…) There are a million reasons why they won’t work. So? Focus on a million (I will settle for one) ways in which they can work. Say “What if…?” a lot. Be open to new avenues and different arenas. Velcro, Superglue and even pacemakers were all invented by frustrated scientists who were trying to create something else entirely. This essay began as a recipe for Chicken ala King. Your idea is often merely a starting point.
“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” – Thomas Alva Edison
3. KEEP IT SIMPLE.
Improv comedians strive for an honest emotional core in our comedy – characters and ideas that resonate and draw the audience in. I don’t have to travel to Mars in a unicorn-drawn carriage to entertain someone. The audience will not care about my comedy if they cannot relate in some way.
Who cares if your idea has been done before? I’ll pay cash money for your take on it. Chickens were around a long time before Colonel Sanders gave us his delicious version. Keep it simple and tell your truth. Especially if that truth is Original Recipe™ with a side of slaw…Yum!
“The merit of originality is not novelty; it is sincerity.” – Thomas Carlyle
BONUS STEP!!!
Improv innovator Del Close admonished improv comedians to exalt each other and their choices on stage. Start doing the same for yourself. Don’t think you’re creative? You are. Start thinking that you are. Then know that you are. Then just…BE.
“If we treat each other as if we are geniuses, poets, and artists, we have a better chance of becoming that onstage.” – Del Close
You won’t implement most ideas. Ideas you do implement won’t always succeed. (Be thankful it isn’t happening in front of a demanding, semi-drunk audience.) But ideas you dismiss before they wriggle out of your brain have no chance whatsoever. Don’t say ‘NO’ until you’ve said ‘YES’. Further your own ideas. Keep it simple.
Jay Olson brings improv-based training and creative energy to entrepreneurs, universities and corporations. He performs and coaches at the iO and ComedySportz theaters in Chicago, IL. Visit Jay at jayolsonimprov.com and connect on Twitter and Facebook.
Watch this video to see what past Creating Famers are up to and how have their businesses changed. You’ll also hear the story of how I went from a struggling web designer to the business that I have today.
Want to write a rockin’ guest post about running a small business, entrepreneurship, personal branding or online marketing? Review our requirements and submit your proposed article along with your details and we’ll get back to you on whether it’s a fit!
Products and services that I mention or link to on this blog may be products that I have a financial interest in promoting or have received some other non-financial compensation for.
Jennifer B. Bernstein is a professional editor and writer, an award-winning literary scholar, and the creator of Get Yourself Into College™ and Create Your Amazingly Successful Life!™–a series of live and online programs for high school and college students as well as recent graduates. To book your FREE 10-minute review of one of your pages, sign up at http://jenniferbbernstein.com/editing-writing.
