When it is an advert! By all means create a press release to signal the launch of a new website, product or service but the key is to make it newsworthy – that way, your release will be accepted, published and widely distributed.

By following these simple steps, your press releases will be powerful, professional and successful:

Check it!

Once you have written your release, proofread it! Take your time. The more you invest in your company’s first impression the stronger it will be. A poorly structured, badly spelt release will not lead to an avalanche of enquiries.

Flex your muscles

Start off with a strong message. Your headline, summary and first paragraph should clarify your news. Use the rest of the release to provide the detail. Include your keywords in the headline, summary and first paragraph. Add your web address too and tell them who you are, it will add to your credibility.

Be professional

A few lines are all it takes to see if something has been written professionally or not. If you write with hype, slang, direct address or excessive exclamation the chances are that it will be viewed as an advertisement rather than a news article.

Am I bothered?

To coin my son’s favourite catchphrase, put yourself in your customers’ shoes and ask exactly that. Remember, this is your business so you are going to get excited about little things – but are your customers? If you are opening a new shop for example, is that newsworthy? What will make it so unique? Avoid clichés and focus on the elements that set you apart from everyone else. Try tying it in with current news issues, social issues etc.

Illustrate

I’m not suggesting that you turn in to Rolf Harris and ask everyone “can you tell what it is yet?” By illustrate I mean use real life studies to show how you help problem solve or how your product helps your customers. Everyone can associate with real life examples – they are a powerful tool so use them.

Blow your own trumpet

Forget the good old British reserve – your company is a success, you have reached a milestone, you have identified and solved a problem, you’ve hired a new MD. Whatever it is, shout about it. Issuing press releases (for online or print) is a superb way of creating expert status for you and your company. How about writing a tip sheet (a bit like this one) in your field of expertise?

Tease don’t tell

Although you want to use the press release as a vehicle for getting your news out there, if you need to, hold back. If you are launching a new service or product or have a new promotion provide your reader with a link that will take them to your website so they can learn more. If you give them all the information they need in the release why will they want to go to your website? By using this method your call to action will pull them away from reading and push them to take action by clicking onto your site.

Words and voice

Keep your press release voice active, use strong verbs and economise – be clear and concise, make every word count. Also keep away from jargon, I know you all love it but your audience doesn’t!

There you go – follow these simple pointers and you will be producing compelling, informative and above all, readable press releases.

Sally Ormond

Freelance Copywriter

Let me take your business to new heights by making every word count.

I have enjoyed writing ever since I can remember. My mother still has exercise books full of stories that I wrote in my youth – many of them should really have been consigned to the bin but, thanks to her, shall remain in all their juvenile glory to haunt me for ever more.

Throughout my school years, I covered countless rain forests in ink with essays on all manner of academic subjects. Stories would flow freely from my aching hand (yes you spotted it, I was at school pre-computers) – they may not have been Booker Prize Winners but they were coherent, flowing and above all written in grammatically correct English.

I count myself among those fortunate few who have turned their hobby into their profession. I now spend my days writing and creating. There is nothing more relaxing or satisfying than carefully crafting a small army of words into an absorbing article, successful sales letter or piece of web copy.

Much of my work comes from a regular bank of clients; however I occasionally look at websites that post requests for work. You can imagine my horror and despair as I noticed a worrying trend beginning to emerge. It would appear that some of today’s University students are incapable of producing an essay.

For example, I received these requests a few days ago:

“I need an essay on modernism (using no more than two artworks and one theoretical text, give an account of one post-war artist who refutes Greenberg’s theory of modernist ‘flat’ painting).”

This one on Ophelia’s death takes the biscuit; I quote “Hey I need a paper about Ophelia’s death, what drove her mad and who caused it before Thursday. If you can do it, it needs to include the nunnery scene and closet scene show Ophelia’s negative qualities”

One may be forgiven for feeling an amount of sympathy for today’s students who are forced to work all hours to pay their way through University so that they are not saddled by huge debts when they graduate. However it is not just confined to Universities. This one was the most worrying that I came across.  It was posted by a GCSE student who says:

 “I’ve  got an American West essay to do, i’m at GCSE level. About 2000 words for the essay.Looking for a essay writer do this for me and tell me the price i would have to pay i haven’t got that much money because im only a school student so im looking for a decent price. Can you message me back as soon as possible please.”

(Please note I have not corrected the punctuation or format of the posting.)

What is the world coming too? Is the art of good writing being lost forever? I hope not. But then again, it will at least ensure that I shall be kept very busy for a very long time.

Sally Ormond

Freelance Business Copywriter

Helping SME’s cast off their marketing frustrations

It is a well known fact (apparently) that men think about sex every six seconds. So next time the guy next to you on the train, plane, tube or bus has a misty look in his eyes you can be pretty sure what he is thinking about.

From a copywriter’s point of view this is a bit of a pain because if you write a sales letter that takes 5 minutes to read, your carefully crafted sales pitch is interrupted 50 times. To be honest, whether the statistic is true or not is neither here nor there – the point is that when someone picks up your sales letter your reader is more than likely focusing on something else other than your sales message.

A good sales writer will know their product intimately and will be able to write about it convincingly. Fantastic, but how does that help with the wondering mind problem? It doesn’t, but it does highlight that to be a great sales writer you have to know your reader intimately too. No, I am not saying that you should dash out and romance every member of your target audience. You’d be far too knackered to write anything but you should be able to understand their idiosyncrasies, their motivations, their innermost fears and desires.

Before you even start writing you should build a psychological profile of your reader, for example:

• What sex are they?
• How old are they?
• What do they want more of in their lives?
• How do others see them?
• Are they head or heart people?

By doing this you will find it easier to write copy that speaks directly to them in a way they’ll find difficult to ignore. Admittedly in some cases their own inner thoughts will still be more appealing but hopefully it will grab the attention of most and get your message across.

In a nut shell, if you do the leg work you’ll reap the rewards with a masterly piece of sales writing that will grab hold of your prospects by the collar and shake them – figuratively speaking of course.

Sally Ormond

Freelance Copywriter

Let me take your business to new heights by making every word count.

This article will hopefully clear up some misconceptions about copywriting. Basically it is sales writing – that’s it in a nut shell. It is primarily about selling, the actual writing is almost secondary. Below are some key ideas that you should always keep in mind when writing.

It’s not about you 

Sorry, but as a writer you come at the back of the queue. You must focus on the reader; it is them that will be doing the buying. What are they like? Are they male or female? What is their age group? What are their likes and dislikes? These are the questions you need to think about. Take an interest in them, find out what makes them tick.

All good things come in small packages 

That’s what my mum always told me and she wasn’t wrong. Many people seem to be under the misconception that sales writing, in any form, has to be impressively high-brow, be full of ridiculously long and complicated words and sentences. Well it doesn’t and in fact, shouldn’t.  Keep it simple. It doesn’t matter who you are writing for or how educated they may be; your audience will be turned off if they are faced with unfathomable words and rambling sentences. The best writing is clear, simple and concise - and don’t use jargon!

B2B or B2C? 

Whether your audience is Joe Public or another company your style should be the same. Many people think that selling to another business requires a different approach. But at the end of the day it is still a person who will be reading your sales letter or brochure.

Forget the F-word

No I haven’t gone barking mad. By the F-word I am referring to features. Your audience aren’t going to be impressed if you write about a list of features. By doing that the only reaction you will get is ‘so what?’ You must show your audience why the product is for them.

You have to sell them the benefits. If a guy wants to be a better football player, and you sell him your latest top of the range football boots on the basis that they’ll make that happen, he’ll buy them. OK, daft example, but you get the idea. It is all about tapping into the buyer’s emotional need.

Whatever you write you must grab the readers attention (a killer headline), get their interest in what you are selling (that’s where the benefits come in), create a desire (if they want something they’ll convince themselves they need it) and finally get them to act (buy, sign up etc).

Sally Ormond

Freelance Copywriter 

Let me take your business to new heights by making every word count.

Microsoft have relaunched windowslive as a social networking platform. For some time they seemed to be desperately trying to buy Yahoo!, then [allegedly] tried AOL, they’ve got nowhere with Facebook, Bebo and the likes and seem to have given up hitting an existing, popular market. Even their most popular platform;  Hotmail has been falling behind as other webmail systems moved into the realms of AJAX programming (the ability to load web content without reloading the entire page), their Spam filter also leaves much to be desired, certainly compared to Gmail who’s spam filter is virtually flawless!

Microsoft have tried giving away free templated websites with Office Live (which they are still doing) but the uptake seems slow and promotion scarce (for which I’m certainly thankful for), the software itself is flexible but a little over-complicated. The bonus is that they provide the hosting and domain name for free which you can take with you if and when you upgrade. For small websites with few followers, this is an excellent solution.

So what are Microsoft doing now? They seem to have gone back to their corner muttering insanities under their breaths and started work on their own products again. I fear this is too little too late as they attempt to copy the best bits from other sites rather than being inspired and moving the web forward.

Microsoft should ideally stick to offline software and continue developing it’s own products rather than trying to hit the online market. As their web efforts increase, their software side seems to be diminishing, allowing open source equivilents and indeed Apple to take the limelight. Windows is, and always has been a great product, most complainers are complaining using this platform so they must be doing something right even though it’s not quite perfect for everyone. The online side of Microsoft, that is their email exchange software and various others should be opened up to avoid the need for specific Microsoft exchange servers. This way they can compete with Google documents (which is not 100% Word compatible, and certainly far from perfect) then they will continue to dominate the office and avoid loss of marketshare to these free services. Unfortunately as more and more people are storing documents online and slowly coming to terms with editing them online, Microsoft are losing out to online office solutions.

The moral of this story is really to stick to what you’re good at. In a previous employment, I worked initially on design, development, hosting, web, print, seo, stationary, and promotional products. Between two people it became impossible to do anything with 100% quality. We attempted to project manage printers etc. but this too impacted on what we were best at. Only when we removed these ’sidelines’ were we able to concentrate entirely on web design and development and spend time making things run efficiently with the quality we, and the clients were happy with. External products we could work with but were not seen as supplied by us, so once we sent clients out to a printer, we didn’t have to worry about how things were moving. This is a lesson I’ve brought into Zako Media and until we have the skillset and staff to offer a particular product or service, we won’t offer it. I only want Zako Media to give out work which we and the client are happy with, we will not dilute our efforts, attention, knowledge, time, or profits on external activities just to try and help make a sale.