What I’m reading: Strip Jack by Ian Rankin
What’s on the iPod: Conductor by We Were Promised Jetpacks
It was nice to get away. It wasn’t a long break — 4 days — but it was welcome. Saturday afternoon, we started the 7 1/2 hour ride. It’s always made longer because we stop at our favorite place — Strong Hearts Cafe — in Syracuse. But so worth the added time.
I enjoyed spending time with my parents in one of my favorite places on the planet. I fished, but it wasn’t the focus of the trip. The focus was spending time, unwinding, feeding the resident chipmunk, and just enjoying the outdoors. We slept in the one-room cottage with the windows wide open, and luckily only one night was too cold for that. In the main cottage, Dad got the wood stove going on Wednesday night and we played card games and laughed into the night. A perfect way to detach from electronics.
I was back on Thursday night, but I left the Away message up until today. I needed the time to wake up (that’s one long drive) and catch up on emails. Wisely, I’d unsubscribed from quite a few emails over the last few weeks, so I had less to weed through.
I love the discussion that cropped up while I was away on last Wednesday’s post. I knew when I posted my rant about long sales pages that it would get some dissenting opinion, especially from Jenn and Eileen, who were seeing reasons for the success of the long sales page technique. As I said then, I don’t like it. Despite the arguments for it (and Eileen made a strong case for it because of the tests that have proven it effective), it’s not something I feel comfortable using.
Either way, the post wasn’t about the validity of the methods or people who use them, but rather about people who are out there giving bad advice or just mimicking the advice of others (and charging you for it). The message of this post is when you should follow writer advice and when you should go your own direction. And guess what? It’s going to be totally up to you to try what works and forget what you don’t want to follow. No one here can say what’s going to work for you. You say what will. That’s as it should be.
Here are some guidelines for vetting advice:
Does it come with products attached? Even if it does, that’s not cause for automatically dismissing it. Look closely at the advice. Do you like what you hear already? If so, maybe sample the product, if possible, before committing your money to learning more.
Does it sound sensible to you? While people may use various methods of winning clients or negotiating or whatever the topic at hand, you may not find it sensible. That’s where the next new method gets its start, if you ask me. For example, since we’re talking about it, the long sales page may be the method that nets the most return today. But what about tomorrow? True, it’s effective today, but what’s the shelf life of something being used/abused too much? When it comes to advice, ask yourself: is the advice something you can apply to your own personality and business that won’t come across stilted or forced?
Does it fit with what you do? Are you really trying to attract book publishers, or is your market more for the technology realm? Specific advice isn’t one-size-fits-all. Look for unique differences and how they would translate to your business before accepting the advice verbatim.
Is the person giving advice trustworthy? I don’t think I need to tell you there are people out there whose main objective is to earn money from you. There are people who slap together webinars, e-books, and other products with little thought toward the content and more thought to how to repackage and resell. Do you trust that the person advising you has your interests ahead of their own? What background does the person have? How involved are they in the very thing they’re attempting to advise you on?
Is it something you can see yourself doing? If you can imagine that advice fitting into your life and you being able to replicate it with success, then it’s for you. If you see any reason why it may not work — you’d have to put too much money or effort into it, for example — look for ways to amend the advice, or forget it.
Writers, how do you vet writing advice?
14 responses to “When to Follow Writer Advice (and When to Go Your Own Way)”
I'm glad you got to enjoy some downtime. But I'm equally glad you're back. 🙂
And just for the record, I don't personally use long sales pages. The longest one (I believe) is less than 400 words. They just don't make sense for my audience because those buyers understand long sales letters enough to see through the hype most of them contain. I try to get to the point with this basic approach: here's what you'll get out of this, here's who this is for — and who it's not for, here's a sample so you can make an informed decision, and here's how you can buy it if you're interested. It suits the personality my readers are used to, and I think that's a big reason why it works well for me. I do plan on releasing products to another market soon through another site of mine, and those will be marketed differently. But long, rambling sales pages aren't the right way to go there either. I also plan to do some testing with the long page, but short copy blurb, style. It'll still involve scrolling. But the sales copy should still be shorter than a typical article on the sites.
I do, however occasionally write them for clients (though I prefer not to take on those gigs anymore). So I've seen them work very well when they're used properly to reach certain types of buyers.
This is it in a nutshell: When it comes to advice, ask yourself: is the advice something you can apply to your own personality and business that won't come across stilted or forced?
If you use that as your litmus test, I don't think you can go wrong.
Got it, Jenn. I didn't think I'd ever seen a long sales page from you.
Thanks, Eileen. That's where I was coming from in Wednesday's post. Those things just don't fit me.
I like to make sure the "experts" actually have the experience or backgrounds they claim. I realized how important that is after being approached a few years ago by a couple who'd attended some fly-by-night "how to make money online with affiliate marketing" seminar.
When I told them my rates it was clear their objective wasn't to build an informative, reliable site, but to make quick, easy cash by creating multiple websites filled with content mill type copy and SEO words designed solely to make money via click throughs to their affiliates. How did I know that? They said they were told articles costs $2-$5 each.
They said one of their websites was going to specialize in small appliances. But sites like those could be about any topic – even writing.
It's really important to check out the credits of self-professed writing gurus. That will help you see if they practice what they preach or just preach about things that will generate more traffic to their site or blog.
There was one "guru" in particular who claimed to have written for a household name publication I've regularly contributed to for over 12 years. It has a decades deep, searchable archive of every article and issue it's ever published…but I've never been able to find her name there. I'm not saying she's lying. I'm sure there are places I wrote one or two things for several years ago that haven't stored my old articles online – but I don't pretend those markets represent more than one- or two-shot sales.
The other telling thing about that "guru"? Her bio page was filled with multiple errors. Not mere typos. It was so poorly written that one sentence was written in first person, the in third person. It went back and forth like that several times. There were several subject-verb disagreements. It was clearly not the work of an experience writer.
And before anyone rakes me over the coals… yes, I realized my comment had a couple typos in it. But comments are far different from a webpage that should have been carefully edited before going up.
Paula, that sounds like a nightmare client situation. I don't know if the low pay was worse than the guy who's out there telling people to just scrape content and "attribute" loosely.
Ugh. Nothing worse than bad writing on a writer's site. What does that say to the clients? "I'm too lazy to proof my own stuff."
That's weird…looks like my first comment disappeared. It was just there, I swear.
Shoot. It did. Let me go look.
Okay, THAT was strange. Your published comment? I found it in the Spam folder! Blogger is trying to give me a migraine, I swear.
I knew I hadn't accidentally not sent it, since you'd already replied. Ain't technology fun?
I like your style, Eileen. 😉 Make it real.
Because I'm old, ;-)I've run across old style marketing several times. And because I'm a kid in freelancing years, I've also run across a lot that is new to me.
That combination has me constantly asking myself if it works for me and my business. I like finding what works for me.
And then there is my stubborn middle child of seven that has me resisting anything that I am told I MUST do or that everyone else is doing. 😉
Cathy, same here. We who are middle kids just don't like following, I guess.
Definitely a middle child here. "You're not the boss of me" is why I freelance. I don't think I'm employable at this point.
LOL! Oh Eileen, we have much in common. 🙂