September 2012 - Otis Regrets... or not

Guest Post: Five Tips for Young Writers

This post was contributed by LOVEREADING.CO.UK

Pursuing writing as a successful means of making ends meet is not an easy task, but it can be among the most rewarding of careers once you have overcome the initial hurdles. The following five tips should help you develop your skills and make you a better writer:

1. Read widely

To become a good writer, you need to become an avid and vociferous reader; if you aren’t already! Seek out and read as wide a range of books and articles as you can. Don’t restrict yourself merely to reading the books that you instinctively like. Expose yourself to as many authors and different writing genres as possible. Some books you will love, others you will hate, but you will learn from all of them – and it will all help you develop your own unique style.

2. Live your life

The most successful writers use their words as a mirror of their experiences in everyday life, and in this sense all writing is autobiographical. Leading a full life gives you inspiration and fires the imagination, as well as giving you first- hand experience of the deep and varied richness of human emotions. Take on a variety of jobs, travel the world, try new activities, have your heart broken – and if possible, keep a journal of your thoughts, ambitions and experiences along the way.

3. Write regularly

It is a cliché that ‘practice makes perfect’, but with writing this is very close to the truth. To develop your skills as writer you need to write regularly. This is an especially important habit to cultivate, because ‘writer’s block’ is a demon that affects even the best writers. Writing regularly – about everything and nothing, even if it is only a few hundred words a day, will train you to hone your style and give you the confidence to plough through the hard times when they arrive.

4. Don’t Pigeonhole yourself

As your style develops you will find a favourite genre in which you excel. This may be through accident or by design. For instance, much of my work is marketing literature, and I have become very good at it through years of practice. However, don’t pigeonhole yourself by being afraid to stray out of your comfort zone. The hallmark of a good wordsmith is their ability to be able to write convincingly on any subject, from romantic fiction to academic reports!

5. Don’t Give Up

There is a lot of competition in the world of writing and success will not necessarily come overnight. Writing is as much a vocation and a way of life as it is a ‘job’ or a ‘career’. Follow your passion, keep believing in yourself; and never, ever give up

For young writers the biggest challenge is often to know where to start; what to write about, where to seek publication, how to stand out from the competition. The answer is to take your writing career one step at a time; to take the long term view and aim for your words to reflect an interesting an enjoyable life. Most importantly, remember that nothing you write is ever a waste of time, and that the process of reaching to your goal is as important – and can be as much fun – as the end result itself!

Survey worst practices from American Express

Landing page of the Amex survey — Landing page of my American Express survey

I got a survey invitation the other day from American Express that exhibited a number of worst practices. I’ll share highlights so we can hopefully learn from it.

1. The survey arrived too late. The email started, “Our records indicate you logged on to americanexpress.com on September 19, 2012, and we would like feedback about your on-line experience.” Problem: the email didn’t reach me till September 24. How am I supposed to remember something I did online 5 days ago?

2. The survey offered no incentive. It’s a sad but true fact that you have to give people a reward to participate in these days, simply because everybody else is doing it. It doesn’t have to be much … how about just a chance to win a $100 American Express Gift Card?

3. The survey is poorly written. The landing page starts, “As a valued American Express® customer, your views on how we can improve our service are extremely important. “ My views aren’t the customer, I am. That’s a dangling prepositional phrase and it’s distracting.

4. The survey doesn’t promise that it will be a quick and easy experience. The landing page simply states, in bold type, “The survey takes a few minutes to complete.” In context, that feels like a very long time.

5. The survey demands an explanation on each question of why I answered the way I did, written in free text. Eg, “What could have been done to make you more likely to recommend American Express to a friend or colleague?” (More bad or awkward writing.) Nothing really… I was just paying my bill! And it won’t let me leave the field blank. I have to type something, even if it’s nonsense, otherwise the page reloads.

6. The survey asks questions it already knows the answer to, in this case why I was on the website and what I did there. (It could have ben spun into a “do you recall what actions you performed while on the website” question which would have had more apparent validity since it appears to be testing the intensity of my recollection.)

7. The survey asks a question I can’t answer: “Please rate your satisfaction with the ease of navigating the American Express website, americanexpress.com.” Yo! The site I go to is called “Open Savings”. It does resolve (I just checked) to americanexpress.com but a consumer I shouldn’t be expected to know that. Why mention the URL at all?

8. The survey communication wasn’t sufficiently personalized. After I abandoned the survey for all the irritations described above I got an email “reminder” which was the same as the first email with this additional superscript: If you have already completed the survey, thank you and please accept our apology for the additional e-mail. But when I returned to the survey I was deposited where I left off.

What’s happening here is that they are automatically sending a follow up email to EVERYBODY who received the first email, and not removing or acknowledging the completions or people who started and then abandoned it. How irritating is that?

The “independent research company” that provides this survey is researchhq.com. Autofills on the search panel suggest they’ve also done surveys for Wells Fargo and Allstate. Good luck with that.

For all you long-copy haters out there…

Screen grab from Stansberry's 77 minute online ad — *Screen grab from Stansberry’s 77 minute online ad*

Direct marketing watchdog Denny Hatch had his knickers in a twist about the online ad shown here. And with good reason. It’s simply a long copy direct mail letter turned into a PowerPoint video and it runs 77 minutes (I am taking that part on faith since I lasted about 4 minutes) with no pause button and no call to action until the very end. The sell is for an investment newsletter which allegedly has 241,700 active subscribers, which I presume are the same as the 241,700 people currently viewing Otisregrets.

Stansberry's "don't leave" interrupter screen — *Stansberry’s “don’t leave” interrupter screen*

Hatch waited all the way to the end; I didn’t and clicked the close button, bringing up the frantic “WAIT!” alert usually reserved for adult content sites. I clicked the “stay on page” button … and was rewarded with the opportunity to read the same copy, but in its original mega-letter format. (And badly reproduced, too. Hope that Stansberry picks up a few subscribers so he can afford a new imaging drum for his scanner.) Even so there is no call to action until the very, very end of the letter where we find a single “subscribe” button.

Stansberry's letter — *Stansberry’s letter*

Of course this is NOT evidence that long copy is a bad idea. Rather, it’s a great way to experience good direct marketing by its absence. When asked how long a man’s legs should be, Lincoln allegedly replied “long enough to reach the ground.” It’s the same with sales letters. They can be one page, or 32 pages (my personal record), or hundreds of pages like the Stansberry effort… just as long as the copy is permeated with calls to action so the reader can stop reading and give you the order as soon as they are convinced.

Hatch’s article had a great quote from old school copywriter Claude Hopkins, which talks about “print” but applies equally well to electronic media:

“People are hurried. The average person worth cultivating has too much to read. They skip three-fourths of the reading matter, which they pay to get. They are not going to read your business talk unless you make it worth their while and let the headline show it.

People will not be bored in print. They may listen politely at a dinner table to boasts and personalities, life history etc. But in print they choose their own companions, their own subjects. They want to be amused or benefited. They want economy, beauty, labor savings, good things to eat and wear.”

Getting back to the format of Stansberry’s online ad, Hatch closes (as will I) with this zinger from “Visual Display of Quantitative Information” author Edward Tufte: “Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”