Copywriting... on a business card?

Hey, Robert -

Hm. I obviously failed to get the idea across, which carries a lesson of its own: I'm not selling a $500 website. I'm selling Web *presence* to people who don't have any - and a quick look around plus a bit of Googling shows that there are quite a few businesses like that around here. Telling them how their current website is costing them money is going to shoot right past those folks.

Heh. Yeah, lots of cobwebs there; been busy with everybody else's sites and neglecting my own (cue the "cobbler's kids with no shoes" aphorism.) I guess that's another lesson for me, though: gotta do some house-cleaning. I really should take a couple of days and totally redo that site from scratch...

By the same token, even though that sample is neither pro nor con any given politician - it was a site for a PAC, which only care whose butt is in the seat rather than their political orientation - it's still going to create the same reaction. So, point taken. I need to update all of those anyway.

Thanks!

Thanks, all! I've thought about that - actually listing what they get for $500 on the back - and am on the fence about how effective that would be. (Also, it wouldn't let me adapt that list if it turns out the market demands something different.) I've also considered continuing the promotion on the back, but two questions come up:

1) I've tried to structure the message to be urgent and imperative, almost brusque; "hurry - seconds count!" Adding to the length is going to dilute that, it seems to me.

2) I'm thinking of the entire card as essentially a headline, maybe with a subhead. Trying to continue the selling process on it leaves me with either too little room to do any sort of a good job, or requiring my target market (Southern small business owner, rather conservative, older, eyesight likely to be less than perfect given the age) to peer at the tiny characters. I think we can all write the ending to that story. Or am I approaching this the wrong way?

I'm now thinking - thanks to Robert - that I should restructure the front page of my site as a funnel, email capture/autoresponder/etc., with a simple, clear, explicit message. Or - just thought of this - create a series of landing pages for the different services that I offer and have each one of those be a funnel for that service, with a series of b-cards to drive the traffic to each one. Of course, that would require adapting my personal logistics (carrying several sets of cards and not confusing them...)

Oh well; damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. I'll bash at my site for an hour or two, rough in the new approach, then go get the cards printed off. No one so far has said that they're totally awful, or that the message would not be effective, so I'm going to give it a shot and see what happens. Still open to suggestions, though!

Steve, that's a perfect step-by-step checklist for creating a great business card for the purpose I'm thinking of (essentially a mini-flyer.) Thanks - it's *SHINY!*

Thanks, Andy; I guess that'll be my split test in the near future, since the first run of cards has already been printed. Let's see how fast I can pitch those 500 darts into selected targets... actually, I think I'll get the new version printed up once half of these is gone, so only 200-some to go.

I'd been giving some thought to what to put on the back, and came up with this:


Again, I'm targeting people who don't even have a website - so I don't know that a report or a video would appeal to them. But I'm willing to bet that most of them have at least _thought_ about getting a site, and simply have no idea where to start.

Solid advice, that - thank you. It sounds dead on. Unfortunately, it also creates a major, essentially insuperable, problem: I'm not much of a face-to-face salesman. That's an utterly different skill from copywriting - and while I can't yet claim to be good at the latter either, I'm pretty certain of my limitations. And f2f sales is neither a skill nor a passion of mine.

I suspect there's _some_ percentage in the "traffic model" I came up with - and the "freebies" are essentially a zero-cost item to me, so I'm not concerned about that. But f2f sales are a no-go - as likely as they may be to increase that percentage.

Hmm. You're probably right... oh, hell, I'm sure you are.

Ugh, one bad (REALLY bad) experience with f2f sales 20+ years ago, and I'm scarred for life. I suppose I should rethink that. I mean, if I'm going to do marketing of whatever sort, having a poor attitude about sales is pretty seriously counter-productive.

(What's with you people, anyway? I'm only here a couple of days, and you've already read me like an open book, found my weak spots, and are hinting that I should fix them. Sheesh, I could just as easily have gotten the same thing by going to a psychologist and spending a couple of years and a tall stack of dollars... Whoever it was that said "copywriters are psychologists with street cred" got it right.)

Oh-oh - key moment! Steve, could you list those 5? I don't think I've run across that kind of thing before.

Thanks for the reminder! I'll join the 12.03% in doing the right thing, then.

[grumble]All right, all right, I'm on it, already.[/grumble]

Figuring out how to do that 30-sec spiel in my own words - and what else I should have ready if they actually ask me to explain (or for when they call.) Benefits, USP, and a CTA at least. NOT easy, this stuff. Especially since I've never done it before.


If you want to live in the light you have to call things out of the
darkness by their real name. Accountability is a mega-watt light that
burns away sickness, heals, and helps new things to grow.
-- Danielle LaPorte


We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do,
and not what they ought to do.
-- Francis Bacon