Sonia Simone

The Transcript

Choose the Right Frame to Boost the Power of Your Content

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by the all-new StudioPress Sites. A turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those of you who are selling physical products, digital downloads, or membership programs. If you re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. You can check it out by going to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra resources and links, as well as the complete show archive, by visiting Copyblogger.FM.

Today is a little bit early for another book club, but I really want to talk to you guys about a book that was recently released by George Lakoff. It’s called, Don’t Think of an Elephant. Just a word of warning, it is political, in that it is a book about political strategy and persuasion strategy. If you totally hate politics, then you probably should not pick it up, because you will probably not like it.

Now, Lakoff is not neutral, he has a point of view politically, and as a matter of fact, he makes a good case that no one’s really neutral, that we all subscribe to what he calls frames, which are sometimes, but not always associated with a political side. Given that both political sides have used his work, have benefited from his work, and in fact, I think you could argue that the side he doesn’t agree with has benefited more from his work, which is interesting. It’s not particularly a book for one side or the other of the political spectrum.

It is a really fascinating book if you are interested in the psychology of persuasion and how that works its way out in the real world. Lakoff is a linguist, I believe his cognitive linguist is his particular specialty over at UC Berkeley, which is my alma mater, so I think that’s cool. The ideas that he talks about are actually quite simple. They’re also quite deep in the sense of being very much underlying so much of what we do, so much of what we think about, and since all of us have situations where it would be useful to persuade other people, I thought that these ideas would be interesting and fun to kind of explore and maybe even play around with.

What a Frame is, and How it Shapes the Information We Take in

The first idea is the idea of a frame and this is what I would call a fairly common sense idea. This is something that every one of us sees every day and we tend to think when we see it, Why is the other side so weird? This is not just about politics, this is about, really any aspect of human life. You see it with nutrition, with parenting, exercise, art, entertainment, work. It doesn’t matter what it is, you see this at work, this idea of frames.

I’ll give you his description, “Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world.” For example, if your frame is low-carb, that eating carbohydrates makes you fat and unhealthy, then sugar is always going to be the devil, full stop. No matter if there was a massive new study that came out tomorrow that said that eating a small amount of sugar every day was critical to health, you wouldn’t believe it, because it wouldn’t work within your frame. If right now, you’re saying well that kind of study wouldn’t come out tomorrow because it’s not possible, and in any event, I’m sure it would be fake science. I’m sure it would be funded by the sugar industry. That’s a sign that that’s your frame. Right? Your frame is that sugar is destructive.

Now we don’t get to opt out of these. These are sometimes called cognitive biases or confirmation bias. It’s what we believe to be true and so then the more we hear of that, the more we accept. But it goes deeper than cognitive bias or confirmation bias. It’s not just what you believe about climate change, it’s why you believe what you believe about climate change. When Lakoff is talking about frames, for the purposes of our conversation today and for the purposes of his book, we’re talking about very deep and broad landscapes for cognition.

Why Facts Aren t, by Themselves, Persuasive

A couple of things that are really interesting about how these frames work. Possibly the most interesting and the one that we are all seeing a lot of right now, is that if you take in a fact and it doesn’t fit your frame, that fact will just bounce off. That is confirmation bias. If you get a mountain of evidence that says that we live on a comparatively tiny blue-green rock that orbits the sun, but your frame is that the earth is flat, then that mountain of science is just going to turn into a conspiracy theory. There is no evidence that’s ever going to convince you that the world is round because your frame needs it to be flat.

Just to be totally clear, because we have seen political spokespeople talking about alternative facts with a straight face, I want to make it clear that I do not believe that this belongs to one side or the other side of the political spectrum. I have seen lots and lots of confirmation bias and every single point on that spectrum and others beside. It’s not a left thing, it’s not a right thing. It’s just how we operate.

If we get a fact and it doesn’t fit the frame, it’s gonna be incredibly difficult for us to incorporate that fact into how we see the world. There’s simply too much stuff in the world for us to go through every single fact, every single thing we learn, and then weigh it for its truthfulness. I would also pick up, speaking of good books, Daniel Kahneman’s, Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s really long. I got through a good two thirds of it. I felt pretty proud. He’s another UC Berkeley alum so, go Bears. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics. It’s a very interesting read about quick mental processing and slow mental processing.

Frames are one of the things that enable that quick processing, where you can just take in a piece of information and essentially immediately decide, Is this relevant, is it credible, am I going to add it to my store of information or not? Human brains use frames and since I’m just going to guess that you are issued a human brain, that’s kind of what you have to work with and what I have to work with. We might as well get some clarity about how they tend to process information. Both for ourselves, but also when we’re talking to other people.

Why You Must at All Costs Avoid Using the Language of Your Competitors

The second thing Lakoff talks about in terms of frames that I found was super interesting was the observation that negating the frame reinforces the frame. Here is an example that is fairly easy to understand. When Richard Nixon tried to defend himself by saying, “I am not a crook.” In fact, he repeated it, “I am not a crook. I have never been a crook. I don’t even know what a crook looks like.” We had Nixon and we had crook. We had Nixon and we had crook and everybody walked away from that thinking, yeah, that guy’s just completely a crook.

For a much more recent example, we can see that many people who have very controversial voices will tweet something on Twitter and it gets retweeted like hundreds of thousands of times by people who say, Look at this. This is terrible, it isn’t true. It’s bad. It’s wrong. All of that retweeting, all of that restating the frame, even though you’re stating it in a negative context actually helps that frame solidify in people’s mindsets.

For this reason, Lakoff has a recommendation and I think it is sound, I think it makes sense, which is, Do not use your competitor’s language. Don’t spin off clever versions of their catchphrases, or their taglines, or their slogans. Don’t use their language to talk about what it is that you’ve got to offer. Use your own language that’s rooted in your own frame. Otherwise you’ll actually reinforce their message even if you’ve just piled up a magnificent mountain of evidence against their point of view.

The Two Big Frames that Inform Culture and Politics in the U.S. (and are Active in Other Places as Well)

Continuing with Lakoff; he identifies two big frames in United States culture. I don’t, for a moment, think these are the only two frames at work, but I think they’re important. I also think that they definitely play out to a significant degree in Europe. One of the frames that we see play out in quite a few different walks of life, different spectra is the strict father frame.

Here are some of the tenets of the strict father frame. Human nature is fundamentally evil. There is a concept here of original sin. People are basically born bad, and because people are born bad, kids need a lot of discipline so that they can learn to be good. That kids are not naturally good, they need to be taught how to be good people. The strict father model, as the name implies, is very hierarchical. You might know the name of that television series from the 1950s, Father Knows Best. That’s kind of the tagline for this model.

The head of the household, who is the father, makes the rules and then everybody else needs to get in line and obey those rules because he’s the one who knows best. He’s the one who takes care of everybody. Discipline is a really key concept in this frame. Discipline is created by punishing wrongdoing and part of wrongdoing is questioning authority. Okay, so that’s a frame that’s important in our culture, the strict father frame.

Another frame that’s important in our culture is what’s called the nurturing parent frame. In this frame, human nature is fundamentally good. Kids are fundamentally good people, and if you don’t wreck them, then they’ll grow up to be good people. That’s what this frame believes. The family structure is much less hierarchical. One of the cornerstone values is empathy. The family’s job is less to discipline and punish and more to just create a space where children can learn and grow by making mistakes without making major problems. That kind of idea is in the nurturing parent frame.

What to Do With an Audience that Has Both Frames Installed (a Common Scenario)

For me, one of the more important things to notice about these two frames is that there are people that are nearly all one frame and there are people who are nearly all the other frame, but many people have both frames What Lakoff calls activated at the same time. They have some strict father beliefs and have some nurturing parent beliefs. Both of those frames are active and which one is gonna get used to make a decision is going to depend on the context. That’s where most people are.

Just as an aside that I found actually bonafide amusing, I taught nurturing parent, like I used those words, for quite a few years as a particularly solid, particularly reliable archetype to use when creating content marketing. Thinking of the nurturing parent as the archetype for an authoritative figure, but in a different way with a very different flavor from that strict father figure. I kind of chuckled when I saw that in Lakoff’s book, because again, clearly it’s probably not a massive surprise to you that would be the frame that is much more activated in my worldview.

Another thing to notice about these is that … Again, many people do have both frames activated and often one will be activated in one context. So, like, one will be active at work, and a different one will be active at home, or one is active in the political sphere, but maybe not in a hobby, or in health. People will tend to activate these frames differently depending on where they are, the context they’re in, and what’s going on around them. People who have both frames installed can have one or the other triggered, depending on your messaging.

That’s where it starts to become quite important about how we communicate. We’ve already talked about facts. If they don’t fit the frame, will just bounce off, just like meteors bouncing off the atmosphere. Messages, apart from just dry recitations of fact, are going to activate a frame of some kind. They will probably activate one of these two frames most of the time, for most of the things that we do.

I think it’s really critical, if you are in the business of persuading people, that you know what your frame is, which most of us tend to recognize it fairly immediately, and then really study the language, and more important, study the ideas of your frame, because these are going to inform everything you say and everything you do. They’re going to inform the kinds of stories that you tell. The kinds of language that you use. The images you use on your website. Your pop culture references. Everything is going to come out of that frame.

You may have noticed, if you’ve been reading Copyblogger, we talk a lot about this. This is the Unity principle from Robert Cialdini. This is belief. These are our values. Where I think the frame model comes in handy is just giving the whole thing, like a framework, to sit in. That it’s not just that I have the value of integrity, or have the value of empathy, but that those values sit in a frame. They relate and connect with other values.

One other thing that Lakoff stresses … He gets asked by political parties, Could you please come up with a tagline that’s going to be the next great political tagline? Could you please give us two words put together that are going to change everybody’s mind about an important concept? It doesn’t work that way. It’s not about a catchphrase. It’s not about a tagline. It’s the idea and it’s the framework of values that that tagline activates. You can’t just zoom in and go right to that skimming off the top and come up with a couple of cheap words that convey what you mean. It’s really about the whole message resonating properly within the frame that is the correct frame for your organization or your personal communication.

Some Parting Advice

I’ll leave you just with the advice that is his advice very much, which is that the time to start is now. Because repetition strengthens the activation of the frame. Literally every word of your content, every syllable, every pixel should be consciously chosen to fit within a frame. You have to know your frame. Now, I’m not saying that you necessarily, wholesale, take the frame from Lakoff’s book, or from this description.

These frames have flavors. These frames have exceptions. They’re not tied to a single group. They’re not tied to a single religious group. They’re not tied to a single part of the country, but each of these frames has flavors. You need to understand the specifics and the nuances, the deep beliefs, the family beliefs, those dinner table beliefs that your frame implies. Then work with that as your ground level and construct it from there.

I would be very interested in hearing, if you would drop a comment. Swing on over to Copyblogger.FM and leave a comment. Let me know, what’s your frame for your organization? The communication that you’re doing right now, whether it’s your own blog, a podcast, work you’re doing for your company, which frame is it? Is it a strict father frame? Is it a nurturing parent frame? Or do you think it’s a blended frame or maybe a flavor of one of those frames? I would be very, very interested to know.

The book is by George Lakoff, L-A-K-O-F-F, it’s called Don’t Think of an Elephant. Again, you don’t have to be a political junkie to just find this take on communication and communication strategy really fascinating. He has a million interesting little linguistic insights. If you’re not turned off by politics, I definitely recommend picking it up. It’s a fascinating, fast and fascinating read. Thank you so much and I’ll catch you next week.

The Transcript

Thriving Freelancers and Clients from Hell

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by the all-new StudioPress sites. A turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those of you who are selling physical products, digital downloads, or membership programs. If you re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. You can check it out by going to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Well hey there, welcome back everybody. It is so good to see you again here at Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about enduring content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone, I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do all the hard work over at the Copyblogger blog. You can always get additional links, resources, the complete archive for the show by visiting Copyblogger.FM.

I am super tickled and delighted today and I would highly recommend, if you would like to raise your blood pressure with something other than politics, just kind of make a refreshing change of pace, I have to recommend you check out ClientsFromHell.net. The stories are … They’re engaging, they’re enraging, they’re hilarious, they’re painful, and I’m so glad that we managed to convince their Editor in Chief, Bryce Bladon, to come today and talk with us about Clients from Hell. So Bryce, thank you, thank you for being willing to show up, and we would love to hear more about your site.

Bryce Bladon: Sonia, thank you so much for having me. The site is, it’s all in the name there. It’s anonymously contributed stories of horror and humor from people working on the front lines of the freelancing industry.

Sonia Simone: It’s amazing. I haven’t been a freelancer for a while and it’s amazing how viscerally these stories hit you. It’s just highly recommended. How did you get started with the idea? It’s such a great idea. What sparked the idea and then how did you kind of get it rolling?

Bryce Bladon: You know what? To be perfectly honest, and this comes up every time I talk about the site, I was not actually the original creator. I helped the original creator basically grow the site and I’m still with it. It is built on that foundation of commiseration and these very universal experiences freelancers of all shapes, sizes, and colors have to endure in their … Well, hopefully not their day-to-day life, but some of us aren’t quite so fortunate.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, yeah. I mean, there’s even stories about contractors, like building contractors, it’s really fascinating how the same issues come up again and again for people who do very different things in their freelance life.

Bryce Bladon: Mmm-hmm. (affirmative)

Why There s Still Room for More Freelancers, Especially Copywriters

Sonia Simone: Well, let’s … I want to talk a little bit about freelancing, because although your site does focus on interesting disasters, you’re a big booster for freelancing. You see it as a model that’s on the rise. I certainly see, I mean, in my own experience, when I was sitting around thinking about … Thinking, in my job that was not going particularly well for me, “Wouldn’t it be great to go out on my own and go freelance?” which I eventually did. I believe that you said that freelancing really is the future, especially for copywriters. I was just curious about why you think that is and do you think there’s enough work to support increasing numbers of people who are coming into that market?

Bryce Bladon: Well, oh, so many questions there.

Sonia Simone: So many questions.

Bryce Bladon: Yes, to almost all of them, I’m sure. I’m sure that will come to bite me in the butt later, but I think all of those things are things that I believe. I absolutely do think freelancing is the future. The typical nine to five, 40 hour work week … I mean, that was just basically built out of one guy s car factory and it just became ubiquitous practice, because it made the most sense at the time. Year after year, there are just more tools empowering people to work for themselves in some way, shape, or form. Now, for most of us, and the reason we care about it is because it empowers a lot of us to write for who we want, when we want, and all that fun stuff.

When you talk about the amount of work for writers, I mean, that is always a difficult thing to quantify and I’m not even sure how you’d go about measuring that, but it s at least been my anecdotal experience and the experience of people I’ve spoken to, that the kind of work that blends creativity and technical knowhow, like copywriting for example, is the kind of work there’s really no substitute for at this stage of where we are as a society, as a world, all that fun stuff. There’s a lot of talk about automation stealing jobs, and tools to make certain things you can do easier, but there’s really no substitute for a good, original copywriter in any shape or form.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: It was a few years ago where I came across the idea of pitching my services to agencies that were trying to hire a full-time writer, but pitching to them as a freelancer. There’s a whole anecdote I can tell here, but basically, I was just finding agencies. Companies, they are so, so hungry for writers of … Quality writers, at the very least.

As a result of that, it’s not a job … Typically, their needs don’t qualify for a full-time employee, but for a contract employee, for a freelancer, and in some cases even a consultant, it fits such a perfect need and I can’t overstate how good its been for my career to explore that space and to … I feel like kind of a jerk saying it right now, but to kind of take that work away from full-time people and instead of one full-time employee, who’s sitting on his hands for half the 40 hour work week, a place would hire me. I wouldn’t be quite as available, of course, as a freelancer, but I could be a very useful resource and it’s … Again, anecdotal experience, so take it with a grain of salt, but every client I’ve had like this over the years, they’ve wanted to hire me on as a full-time employee.

Sonia Simone: Right.

Bryce Bladon: They’ve wanted to keep me on. Sorry, that comes across as very braggy, but what I’m trying to underline is, if somebody wants to work with me that much, it’s probably not me. It’s probably the actual demand for the work I do, let’s be clear on that point.

Sonia Simone: Oh, Canadians.

Bryce Bladon: You’re not wrong.

Having a Good Relationship with a Client is a Two-Way Street

Sonia Simone: It’s a good quality, it’s a good quality. I will say, I have been on both sides of that desk, the freelance desk, and I think sometimes good freelancers don’t realize that it’s not only necessarily the clients who are from hell. There’s a lot of terrible freelancers, unfortunately. There’s a lot of copywriters who are not good with deadlines and there’s quite a few writers who are not too good with client briefs. They don’t deliver what’s required.

Now that’s always a dance, right? Because, sometimes what’s required is insane, so then we have a conversation. Yeah, I think for people who are professional, they approach their craft and their profession in a serious way, they have good skills and good work habits, good work ethic. Yeah, I do think the company that wants you really, really wants you and it’s usually multiple organizations. I want to … Yeah, go ahead.

Bryce Bladon: I was just going to say, I’m sorry, we’re both being too polite now, and that s the worst. But you’re so right that there are freelancers who are from hell. I run a site called Clients from Hell, and a lot of people just assume that I must hate clients. Absolutely not, and to be perfectly honest, in my own personal decade of working as a freelancer, I’ve really only had one or two, or maybe as many as three clients I would qualify as from hell. It’s one of those things that I don’t want to quite elevate it to a rite of passage, because that legitimizes people acting like jerks, but it is one of those things that once you’ve been burned you kind of know what to watch out for.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: If you do read the stories on my website, you will absolutely know what to watch out for. Perhaps, to a comical, like Batman villain-esque degree in some cases, but you get the idea. The other aspect of this and the part that I really try to bring up whenever I talk about the site. Yes, the site is a lot of fun and we poke fun at silly clients, ignorant clients, and sometimes just anger inducing clients, but a lot of the time it is very much a two-way street.

A client from hell emerges from a set of circumstances that the freelancer absolutely has a hand in shaping. There are certain characteristics a client can have, where they’re probably just going to be bad to work with and you know how to watch out for those. Things like ambiguous expectations for what are they expecting to come out of the work you’re doing for them, they’re unappreciative, they’re disrespectful, they devalue good work, things like that.

I could go into way more detail about each of those, but there are things a freelancer can do that contribute to those ambiguous expectations. There are things freelancers do where they don’t do the work they promised to do, or they burn a client and as a result, that client is less trusting of the next freelancer they work with. It creates this really sort of hostile relationship and … It’s my opinion that freelancing, what makes it such a great thing, is you get to do the work you want to do the way you want to do it.

The catch-22 here being, you have to do the work and you have to do it relatively well. If you’re creating an environment, if you or your client are creating an environment that isn’t built on respect and trust and mutual benefits, it’s probably not going to be a terribly positive experience for either of you, and no one, either of you, is particularly at fault. It is a two-way street a lot of the time.

Sonia Simone: Actually, let’s talk with you a little bit more about that. I think that fear of a horrible client does kind of stop some people. It’s always like the people, the good people who get stopped, right? The bad people just go right forward. The people who do have a good work ethic, they’re very talented, and they could actually have a really nice freelance career, but they’re worried about getting burned on money and they’re worried about these terrible clients that we hear so much about. Do you have … I mean, I know what I’ve seen come up again and again. Do you have some, maybe one thing that you see come up again and again where a good freelancer gets taken advantage of because they’re not wise about a particular area of that life?

Bryce Bladon: It’s hard to limit myself to just one-

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Two Recommendations for Staying Out of Problems with Clients

Bryce Bladon: To be perfectly honest. I’m going to give you two.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, go for it.

Bryce Bladon: Kind of related. One mistake I see a lot of first time freelancers make … I run a course, by the way, called Start Freelancing, we have a few hundred students, so I’ve conducted a bunch of surveys, I’ve reached out to people that ask after this stuff and one of the things I asked was, “Why haven’t you gotten into freelancing up to this point?” A lot of people are scared of those variables, those ambiguities of working with clients that can bite them in the butt. The fear of … I compare freelancing to dating a lot of the time. At least working with clients as a freelancer. That fear of a bad breakup.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: That fear of entering into a relationship with someone and then finding out they’re someone else. It all boils down to this fear of the unknown, this idea that something could go wrong, so why even start? Again, I’ve been freelancing for ten years and over that time I’ve had, at best, a handful of bad clients. And that is pushing the definition of what a bad client is. I’ve had projects I didn’t love how they turned out, I’ve had clients I’ve chosen not to work with in the end, but I’ve only had one or two bad clients, really, truly awful clients. And it was less them being an awful client and more of them being an awful person.

Which brings me to the second mistake, and the mistake I see a lot of those very nice people making. That is, just a failure to stick up for yourself and to ask the potentially hard questions. This can be as innocuous as not bringing up your rates earlier on in the conversation, and it can be as extreme as a client continually expanding the scope of work and putting unfair expectations on you that were wildly outside of your agreement, and you not wanting to shake the boat, you just wanting to be a pleasant person to work with, you just being too polite and not pushing back and not saying, “Hey, great idea. Unfortunately, it’s not what we agreed upon. It would take me X amount of hours more.”

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: Just having that conversation, and that conversation does not need to be rude. That conversation, bringing it up, does not make you a bad person. In most cases, it makes you a professional, and that’s what professionals do. They talk about this stuff, they bring it up. Yes, you know what? I still get awkward talking about money with my clients. I still feel weird pushing back sometimes, but as long as you’re polite, as long as you’re professional, only the worst kind of people are going to have a negative reaction to that, and if you run into those people, it is just a great litmus test for, “Hey, I don’t want to work with you anymore.”

Sonia Simone: Right, right. Because it’s not going to get better.

Bryce Bladon: No, no it isn’t.

Sonia Simone: It’s not like they’re going to blow up when you set reasonable expectations and then later they’re going to be great. Yeah, and that would be, I’d say, the thing I see over and over, is not setting proper expectations. Everything from not working with an agreement, so you’re not spelling out what’s actually going to be delivered, to just that very point you mentioned where you have to have that conversation and say, “We talked about project A and what you’re asking for now is project Q, so would you like me to work up a proposal for the additional costs, or do you want to put that on … What do you want to do with that?” Yeah, it’s a …

Bryce Bladon: The worst thing I see is when the freelancer lets it go from A, to B, to C, to E, and then all the way down to Q.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: During that time span, they’re just kind of hoping to themselves that the client realizes their mistake. At the same time, they’re becoming bitter.

Sonia Simone: Right.

Bryce Bladon: They’re becoming annoyed, but they’re not bringing up these issues, and as a result, it’s allowed to fester and the client’s expectations are going in a completely different direction. Whereas, your expectations are going in the complete opposite direction of them. The more you allow that dissonance, the worse that eventual conversation is going to be, so sooner always better than later.

Bryce s Problem with Aspirational Freelancing, and What He Did to Combat it

Sonia Simone: Sure. I know you mentioned, when we were kind of setting this up, a phrase, aspirational freelancing, and I thought that was a compelling phrase, and I would love you to explain what it is, and then what can you tell us about it?

Bryce Bladon: Quick admission I need to get out of the way, real quick. That is, that I often work as a communications consultant, which means I often work in the realm of marketing. Which brings me to my next point, which brings me eventually to the point we’re going to try to make here. One of the first things you learn in marketing is what you’re trying to sell to a person is not the product or the thing, it’s the person this product or thing is going to make them into. It’s that brighter tomorrow, it’s that grass is always greener on the other side concept. When I talk about aspirational freelancing, I mean if you ever see those little articles that appear on a monthly basis in Forbes, or Fast Company with that very just delicious sounding headline of like, “Work for yourself. Work 15 hours a week from home freelancing. Do it. This guy does it. It s never been easier.”

It has never been easier to get into freelancing and that is a life you could potentially have, but it really undercuts the journey that the guy had to take to get there. Again, been at it for a decade, I love my career, I love where I’m at with it. It’s still not perfect, it’s still not where I want it to be, and even if I had been a lot more targeted in everything, even if I’d done everything absolutely right, even if I had a much clearer idea of where I wanted to be, I still would have had to put in the time, I still would have had to put in the work. What I’m getting at here is when … An idea that irks me is the idea that freelancing is an easy ticket to happiness. Again, I love freelancing. I think a lot of people would enjoy freelancing if they do it. I also think freelancing isn’t necessarily for everyone.

It requires you to be a structured person, to be self-motivated, to do the work even if there isn’t immediate work in front of you. To handle deadlines, to organize yourself, to even do a little bit of business and marketing, and those unsexy things that a lot of us writers just turn up our nose at, and understandably so. Don’t expect me to get off my high horse as a marketer a lot of the time. I miss my bourgeoisie days. What I’m getting at here is the idea of aspirational freelancing. Freelancing is something you can absolutely aspire to and it’s something that can lead to a better life for you. It can absolutely do that, but just don’t confuse the destination, oh God, I can’t believe I’m dipping into this cliché, with the journey.

Sonia Simone: Right.

Bryce Bladon: Freelancing, your career growth, it never really stops, and you’re not going to get to that dream life within your first week, within your first month, maybe not even within your first year. And even if you do, there are going to be aspects of your job you don’t like. It’s still a job sometimes, even if you’re doing the work you love. There is still the business upkeep. There are all these little unsexy things. You still need to put in a little bit of time, of effort, of that oh-so-unsexy sweat. Yeah, that’s where I get a little irked with aspirational freelancing.

Sonia Simone: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny how these same tropes come up. The four hour work week, which was a great tested Google AdWords ad, but it’s not really how it works. There’s not a four hour work … If you have a four hour work day maybe, that might work. My favorite part of the four hour work week is when Tim Ferriss kind of outlines what his typical day looks like and realize that his work week is quite a lot longer than four hours long.

Bryce Bladon: Very true, very true.

A Wealth of Resources Available at Clients from Hell

Sonia Simone: Well, cool. You do have a lot of resources on the site. I think a lot of people would’ve launched a site called Clients from Hell and just kind of monetized it with advertising and called it good. But you have a lot of resources for freelancers, or people who want to know more about freelancing. Feel free, if you want to … If there’s some resources you want to let people know about, I would love to share those with people and let them know what you might have available.

Bryce Bladon: Oh, for sure. Yeah, no, the site itself, if you go to ClientsFromHell.net, it is being entertaining, giving you content that you find fun, or charming, or humorous, or even anger inducing if you want to punish yourself like that. We got all that good stuff and that’s what 98% of our audience is there for. I 100% appreciate that I’m never going to try and force this other stuff down your throat.

That said, a lot of the time people end up on our site because they’re having a terrible client experience, they’re having a frustrating time getting started as a freelancer, so as a result I built up all these resources. If you just go to ClientsFromHell.net, you’ll see a handy link at the top that says resources. Things like, I built a free course, pretty much based off of my frustration with those aspirational freelancing articles, and courses, and books, and products.

It’s called, Is Freelancing for You? and it’s free and it just goes over the realities of freelancing, and the things you need to actually do it. It makes you take a hard look at yourself and ask the real questions before you drop a bunch of money and make some serious life choices that may not be for you, sometimes. They may absolutely be for you, but one way or another you’re going to know.

Earlier, when I talked about that mistake, one of the two mistakes freelancers make with clients. This one is trying to address those ambiguities that scare us so much when starting something new. Speaking of starting something new, I also run a couple courses, Start Freelancing, which is a complete guide to, I’m sure you can guess it, and Find Freelance Work. Just trying to provide resources that hit on a lot of the pains I had when I was getting started as a freelancer. Is Freelancing for You? Start Freelancing. Find Freelance Work.

I also wrote a book called Hell to Pay, which is all about freelancing finances, stuff like how much you should be saving for taxes, to how you should be charging your clients, to how you can calculate your rate. Yeah, I also run a podcast, Clients from Hell. I have great conversations like I’m having with Sonia here. Our host isn’t nearly as charming as she is, but besides that …

Sonia Simone: Cool. Yeah, no, that’s really cool. The Hell to Pay thing, I think is genius because a lot of people do, especially the copywriters and the design professionals, we get into it because maybe we weren’t math majors, but there’s still math. So I love the title.

Bryce Bladon: Mmm-hmm. (affirmative)

Bryce s Thoughts on the Wisest Way to Get Started with Freelancing

Sonia Simone: I love the idea of it, so I highly recommend. All right. Well, you know I’m going to ask this question, because everybody probably does, right? If there was one piece of advice … So you’ve got somebody listening to this, they’re thinking about taking the plunge, they’re thinking maybe they’ll do a little freelance work on the side, or maybe they’ve got some money saved, but they’re not quite sure. I’d say, let’s go ahead and say, go ahead and pick up the free course, because I think that’s just smart. If there’s like one little piece of advice that you would give somebody thinking about going ahead and jumping in, what would it be? It can be something from the course, it’s okay.

Bryce Bladon: Oh, it almost will be. Almost all of my advice is in the course in some way, shape, or form.

Sonia Simone: There you go.

Bryce Bladon: That’s why it’s in the course in the first place.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: It’s good stuff. I guess my main piece of advice always circles back to, take your time getting into freelancing. If you have a full-time job, if you have a part-time job, hold onto that, keep trying to save up some money, three to six months of all your living expenses is what I strongly suggest. So many people are in debt right now, and it’s super unfortunate and it will just add to your stress and anxiety if you’re in debt when you make a big life change like starting to freelance.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: Getting started does not need to be a giant leap forward. It can be as easy as just trying to find those first few clients while you’re working your regular job. Maybe try and negotiate a few extra hours off each week so you can spend that time on work, whatever. What I recommend is you try to start in a very sustainable and very easygoing way. This way you don’t have a lot of the stress, the anxiety, the confusion that comes with starting something brand new completely from scratch.

You get to ease yourself in, you get to pick and choose your clients and the projects you’re going to work on, you get to take the time to focus on those first few projects and learn what it is to work with clients. If you want to take it a step further, and this is I think the best advice I give out, that would be to take the time to try and research who your ideal client is and why they’d want to work with you.

By this I mean, just send freelancers you admire, creatives you admire, professionals you admire, companies or clients that would be potential clients for you. Do a little research on them. Maybe even reach out with a short email and when I say short, I mean like 150 words short. Do not create work for this person, but personalize the email, thank them for their work, and maybe ask one or two questions related to freelancing that would be relevant to you. Like, “What do you look for in a freelancer?” Or, if you’re talking to a freelancer, like, “How did you find your first few clients? What advice would you give?” Little things like that. It gives you the best knowledge you can get, it tells you who you might want to work with, what they actually care about, how to speak to the things they care about.

It also sets you up with a budding network, which is built on sincerity, and mutual benefit, and caring about the other person’s work, as opposed to … Something that scared me as a freelancer when I was first getting started was that marketing aspect, was that networking aspect. I hate the idea of the slimy used car salesman. It’s funny that I consult on marketing now, because I’m just, I’m such a big believer in, if I genuinely think I can provide value to you, I have no problem speaking to somebody like that now. Likewise, if I reach out to you, it’s because I like something you’re doing and if I want to work with you, it’s because I genuinely think you’re doing good work.

If you build up your network with that same principle in mind, the principle of, Don’t reach out to a person because they might give you money, reach out to a person because it would be good for both of you. You’ll just get so many more positive responses. You’ll have potential referrals coming down the pipeline in the long term. I’m basically giving you a lot of advice for planting seeds. It’s super easy to plant these seeds, it doesn’t need to be something you do all at once. You don’t need a forest to grow over night, you just need to be taking the time to plant a couple seeds every now and then.

Sonia Simone: Yeah.

Bryce Bladon: Wow, that was a little corny, wasn’t it?

Sonia Simone: Oh, I love corny. That’s my favorite thing, because people who are corny are not cynical and I like that. All right. Well, this has been so much fun. Thank you so much. The site is a delight and I really think your advice is … Both in my own experience, and then lots and lots of conversations with freelancers on my side of the fence, I think it’s all spot on. I just want to thank you. Thank you so much. The site is ClientsFromHell.net. Check it out, it’s fun, it’s entertaining, and there’s good stuff there.

Bryce Bladon: Absolutely. You know what Sonia? You’re a delight.

Sonia Simone: Oh.

Bryce Bladon: If you guys like conversations like this, check out the Clients from Hell podcast. That’s probably more up your guys’ alley, but otherwise check out the site and check out all the other stuff. Sonia though, she’s great. Isn’t she great?

Sonia Simone: All right everybody, thanks and take care.

Bryce Bladon: Thank you so much.

The Transcript

Politics, Content Marketing, and the 2017 Super Bowl Ads

Voiceover: Rainmaker.FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by the all-new StudioPress sites. A turnkey solution that combines the ease of an all-in-one website builder with the flexible power of WordPress. It’s perfect for bloggers, podcasters, and affiliate marketers, as well as those of you who are selling physical products, digital downloads, or membership programs. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 200,000 website owners trust StudioPress. You can check it out by going to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the chief content officer for Rainmaker Digital, and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, and the complete show archive by going to Copyblogger.FM.

Today I’m going to be talking about Super Bowl commercials, Super Bowl ads. I know you’re probably thinking, “We already talked about that to death last week, so why are you talking about it today?” The answer is that this podcast has about a one-week lead time. In another year, I might skip it and say, “Yeah, it’s good. We’re set.”

But this year, the kind of overwhelming theme of the Super Bowl commercials, which are of course, for those of you who don’t fixate on such things, the television ads run during our big American football Super Bowl, which is the big game of the year. These ads and the context of these ads are so relevant to what we’ve been talking about on Copyblogger for the last eight years that I thought it was worth talking about. Hopefully, maybe I’ll have something fresh to bring to the conversation or a different way that you might want to think about it.

To give super brief context, the Super Bowl advertising, it’s very expensive. The starting cost is about $5 million for a spot, but then you’re talking about maybe another $2 million to produce and another million dollars, in some cases, of PR to promote the ad outside of the time that it airs during the actual game. This is serious money being thrown around for a chance to talk to a very large number of people for a couple of seconds.

The way that advertisers — smart advertisers, smart agencies, smart PR firms — have gotten around this is, you guessed it, to treat them like content. To make them so interesting that people will go find them on YouTube if they didn’t catch the game. They will talk about them. They will record podcasts and all that good stuff.

So we do talk about them every year. I’m not personally a football fan. I don’t watch the game, but I always look at the ads. Many people share that, and of course, many, many people do watch the game. The big news about this year’s ads is the same as the big news about everything else in 2017, which is that this year, for the first time, they are political. This crop of ads is political, even going toward being controversial.

So today I thought we would talk about, is this a good idea? Is this something you should try out? Is this something that somebody who doesn’t have $8 million to spend for a 30-second advertisement, is this something that the rest of us can benefit from? And just try and pick out what’s going on with these ads. Then, is there something here that would be relevant to normal people creating normal advertising and marketing to get attention for normal businesses?

The New ‘Brand Activism,’ and How It Plays Out in Huge Businesses — or Normal Small Businesses Like Ours

Traditionally, historically, Super Bowl ads were just emphatically not political. It’s never really been particularly popular for this kind of ad form. Traditional wisdom is to keep out of politics with your advertising because there’s not enough perceived benefit. You lose half the audience, and then the other half may or may not really be that excited with you.

Now, to be clear, that is the thinking of the mass market advertiser. That’s the thinking for Ford, Coca-Cola, and the giant, giant companies that can afford this kind of advertising. Their targeted customer is everyone, so that kind of advertising has always tended to play it safe, especially with things that really matter to people.

And in recent years, the trend has been to become remarkable by just being bizarre. To create evermore strange and bizarre little animated characters to represent the brand and tell odd stories that stick in the mind. There’s still some of that, the Skittles ad told a weird little story. That’s the traditional Super Bowl ad in the last few years.

This year was a little different. Now, that kind of Super Bowl ad strategy — creating a very bizarre and memorable story, possibly with a bizarre and memorable character — it can work for a normal small business. It might work. It’s something that one could experiment with. It’s going to be tricky to pull off, but it’s a way that you can go.

However, this more political, more politicized position has actually always been something that a small business could have more room to play with than a larger business. We’ve never been able to reach everyone with a small business. We’ve never been able to be Coca-Cola. We’ve never been able to be the Levis jeans, the brand that was almost the generic brand.

We’ve always had to reach specific somebodies with a specific message, and a memorable message. Going a little more toward the political has always been more open to the smaller business than to these massive, mass brands.

But let’s talk about what that’s been looking like this year. The history of Super Bowl ads has been they tend to be quite patriotic. People who like to watch football games often also identify as patriotic people. Scribbled in my notes when I was pulling together some thoughts on this podcast is the statement, “Patriotic or political in 2017, is there a difference?” Now, I think there is still a difference.

But something I’ve found striking is that, this year, advertisements are political, that if you had run them in 2015 or even 2016, would not have been taken that way at all. I think probably the most striking example of that is an ad for Budweiser, which is a pretty straightforward, hardworking immigrant story.

For those of you in the audience who are American, you recognized these stories. They’re part of our national story, our national mythology. The hardworking immigrant who comes to the country faces a lot of difficulties, overcomes a lot of obstacles, works very, very hard, and builds the American dream. When I say ‘mythology,’ I’m not saying in the sense of not being true. I’m saying it in the sense of it’s one of the most culturally resonate stories that Americans tell about America.

So an advertisement for a beer company that showcases a hardworking person who goes through some trials and tribulations to go from his country of origin to a new country, then meets with another immigrant, and they have an idea to sell beer — this is not a controversial story.

The fact that it’s being taken as a controversial or political one really shows that the landscape changed much more, I would argue, than that core story did. In fact, Budweiser’s VP of marketing did go on record saying that they had no intention of creating a political statement with the ad, adding, “We recognize that you can’t reference the American dream today without being part of the conversation.”

I remember seeing the actress Eva Longoria interviewed once, and she talks about when people ask her, “When did your family cross the border?” She says, “We didn’t. The border crossed us.” Their family came from a place that has been in the United States and in Mexico, depending on where the political line has been drawn.

That line really struck me about the political environment right now. It’s not so much that brands are crossing a line, although some have moved. Some have shifted position. The line kind of crossed them.

I would really argue that Budweiser ad, if you had run it two years ago, the primary criticism of it might have been it was a bit boring. It didn’t have any dancing chimpanzees or strange little characters with funny voices singing a catchy theme song. It would have been entirely unremarkable.

The Ads Sonia Thought Worked, the Ads Sonia Thought Didn’t

I figure I might as well give you my take on a couple of the ads, trying to take a strategic look at them and what they were doing. I thought the Audi ad was a well-told story. I thought it was pretty straightforward.

Anytime you’re telling stories about kids and parents, that’s a theme that’s going to resonate with a lot of people because a lot of people have kids. Even more people have parents. Then they’re expressing an opinion that’s not exactly ultra-controversial — “We’re committed to equal pay for equal work.” That’s pretty mainstream at this point.

I thought it did a good job of speaking to their people. Who buys Audis? People who have money, because they’re expensive, professional people on the younger side. It’s kind of an affluent, professional brand.

If I were going to criticize, and I don’t really need to criticize it, but I would say it has the appearance of taking a brave stance when, in fact, they’re not exactly taking a risk here. I think Audi knows its customer very well. It knows that its customer thinks this is a pretty non-controversial statement. Professional men and professional women should make the same money, and professionals are very much who Audi is speaking to.

Another ad that might have felt controversial in a way, not because it crossed a line, but because the line crossed it, was the Coca-Cola ad. There is an absolutely straight line from the classic Coca-Cola ad, “I’d like to teach the world to sing,” to this year’s Coca-Cola ad, which was singing America the Beautiful with different voices in different languages. Coca-Cola’s PR person on their YouTube video of the ad puts in quotes, “We believe that America is beautiful, and Coca-Cola is for everyone.”

I’m just going to go out on a limb and say I don’t feel like this is a super radical statement. They do go on to add, to actually call out certain values by name. People are talking about values right now. The values they mention are, “Optimism, inclusion, and humanity. Values that bring us closer together.” Again, that’s a quote.

Again, I don’t know. I’m not sure I’m seeing a bold controversial statement here. Then, again, it’s Coca-Cola, so we’re not looking for Occupy Wall Street from Coca-Cola. It’s just very in line with their brand. Their brand has always had that feel-good inclusiveness. It’s just part of the Coca-Cola message.

I thought an altogether a more interesting presentation, the presentation of the ad, which was a very dramatic story, and then the backstory behind it, was a company called 84 Lumber, which is a company that a lot of us have never heard of. I’ve never heard of them.

They’re a small huge company. According to The New York Times, they bill about $2.9 billion annually. They do business in 30 states, so by any normal measure, they’re a huge company. However, they’re not Ford motors, and they’re not Coca-Cola.

They told a very dramatic story, again an immigration story. They had a longer version of the ad that they ran on their website. There’s various stories around that. The thing that I find interesting about 84 Lumber is it’s a little hard to figure out what they stand for, even though the ad was really dramatic and was a really intense, dramatic story.

It is the story of a mother and daughter trying to immigrate from Mexico to the United States. They have a very difficult journey, and they come to the border. They encounter a wall. If for some reason you have not heard this, there is a highly controversial proposal to build a border wall with Mexico. Then they see a big door in the wall, they go through the door, and they come to the United States.

The CEO and owner of 84 Lumber has given quite a few interviews about the ad. Her position seems to be interpreted as all kinds of different things, all over the map. Many people believed this was an overly political ad, a daring ad, that was criticizing this controversial proposal to build a border wall with Mexico.

The Biggest Danger from Going Political with Your Marketing (and No, It’s Not Making People Mad)

Now, here’s where it gets weird. The CEO and owner supports the wall, thinks it’s a good idea, voted for the president who’s proposition it is. The message of the ad, the story of the ad seems completely, directly counter to her actual values. That’s where I think it might get tricky for this company.

I’ll give you a couple quotes from that CEO. “This came from the heart, and I didn’t do it for personal gain.” That’s cool — $8 million is a lot of money to spend just to do something for giggles, but that’s fine. They make 2.9 billion dollars annually, so they’ve got money in the budget.

Now, The New York Times and other venues report that this ad is not necessarily aimed at consumers. It’s aimed at potential employees. The company owner has stated that they’re trying to employ young Millennials who really believe in the American dream because they’re going to be doing massive expansion.

The issue here is, this owner is trying to attract an audience by expressing values, but nobody who sees the ad really understands what the values of the company are. She’s for some kind of immigration, and she’s not for other kinds of immigration. It is an industry, the construction industry, that’s strongly associated with immigrant works, including a lot of immigrant workers who don’t have documentation.

Many people thought she was supporting that. She says, “No, this is actually the opposite of what she supports.” It’s really confusing. She’s coming out with a message, and it’s a well-told story — but it’s not telling the story that she actually believes. I have absolutely no personal insight into this person. I can’t tell you what she meant or didn’t mean. All I can tell you is what she’s gone on record telling reporters.

Here, I think is maybe the instrumental story in terms of what we can take away, a lesson if you will, that we can take away from this set of ads. If you’re going to create a piece of content and that’s what this story absolutely is, is a piece of content. It’s very memorable. She spent a lot of money on it. The story was so strongly told. The piece of content is intended to express your values. You have to make sure it expresses your actual values. Otherwise, I just don’t see how this is going to work at all. She’s not intending to fool people. I think that the message just got maybe a little lost in translation.

I’ll give you a quote from David Armano. David Armano is the global strategy directory for Edelman. Edelman is a massive PR firm, or as they now market themselves, a ‘communications marketing firm.’ Very interesting choice of language, about the term ‘brand activism’ — “when a brand decides to take a definitive stance on a societal issue and bring it front and center into the message or value proposition.” David Armano says that he thinks it’s a good idea. He thinks it’s a really good idea for brands to go ahead and participate in this brand activism and say what you mean, say where you stand.

But notice some of the language, ‘definitive stance’ and ‘bringing it front and center.’ When your stance is something nobody can figure out after reading four or five articles about it that are laced with your quotes, that would not be the gold standard.

The Compass That Always Points the Right Direction for Your Business (Spoiler: It’s Your Audience)

So final analysis as I see it — should we or should we not advocate certain specific political positions in our content marketing? Should we go there or not? I think it depends. Everything depends in content marketing. In my opinion, yes, if it’s relevant. I feel like that’s kind of a no-brainer.

I’ll give you an example. Copyblogger posts essentially zero political content. We have gone on record twice supporting net neutrality. And we will go on record again supporting net neutrality, probably later this year. It’s extremely relevant to our audience. It’s political in the sense that it’s a law, right? You have lawmakers who support it or lawmakers who oppose it.

We think one of those positions makes much more sense for our audience and for our business. That one is pretty simple. If it’s relevant, if it’s highly relevant to your audience and they care about it a lot, then you should talk about it because it makes sense.

I would also say, if it really feels, if you feel culled, this is very personal — if you just feel as the voice of your business, you’re the business owner, the CEO, or what have you, if it just feels like there’s a giant error of omission there if you don’t speak up, then I think you should speak up because it’s going to show.

I don’t think it’s mandatory, necessarily, for every business to take a brand activist position on political matters. It just depends a lot. But remember that point — the border might cross you. It might not be that you cross a line politically, but it might be that a statement that you make, that you think is fairly mainstream, will take some heat.

What’s mainstream today might be taken by some people as being really radical tomorrow. In my experience, and in my view of dozens, hundreds of businesses, that just tends to work out just totally fine. If you are speaking from a position of integrity and if you know that you and your audience share that point of view, then if you take some heat, if you get some people who are angry with you, the odds are very great they were never your customer in the first place.

I would encourage you to be as brave as you can. You don’t have to seek it out, but if it comes for you, I would just advise courage, steadfastness, and integrity.

It’s always about your who. It’s always about who you serve. Values in business — talking about values, sharing your values, and all of that stuff — if it’s not a shared expression between you and your customers and prospects, then it’s kind of pointless. It’s just kind of grandstanding.

If your audience is with you, then don’t back down off of it. You don’t need to wimp out on it. Frankly, I just don’t think there’s any avoiding some blowback in this climate. Things are running very emotionally right now. The climate is very intense right now. I will tell you that the sites, the businesses, the content websites, podcasts, and blogs that I see that are trying to play it totally safe, and they’ve just turned themselves into these bland piles of leftover cream of wheat. That’s not a solution.

That’s a solution to be forgotten. That’s a solution to be overlooked. And it’s not going to keep you safe. It’s going to do the exact opposite because there is no safety in your business unless you can rally your audience and get them to support you. So that’s how I see it. Very interested to hear what you think about it. Drop a comment to Copyblogger.FM, and you can always Tweet me @SoniaSimone.

Thanks, guys, and take care.

The Transcript

Copyblogger Book Club: Winning the Story Wars

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hello there, it s great to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the content marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You could always find more resources, extra links, and just general good stuff by going to the show notes at Copyblogger.FM. You’ll also get the complete archive for the show.

Today we’re going to do something slightly different. We’re going to do a segment I call Book Club. We’ll try these out, see how they go. I am going to talk to you guys about a book I found really significant or meaningful or important or useful, crack open some of the ideas in the book, and explain why I think they’re relevant, how I think they might be useful, and then encourage you to pick the book up and let us know your thoughts on it, let us know how it’s striking you.

The Beginnings of the Book Club

I’m going to start with one that Brian Clark recommended to me a month or two back. We were on the phone and he was saying, “You gotta read this book. If you read it, it’s going to give you post ideas for the next five years.” I pick it up on Amazon, and I click to pick it up on Kindle, and Kindle says, “You bought this three years ago.” I look and lo and behold, not only did I read it, I took extensive highlight notes in it.

So I re-read it and realized, yeah, actually I thought this was a great book. I really do think that Brian’s right. I think these ideas are actually very core to the way that we work at Copyblogger, to the way that we write, to the way that we try and structure how we communicate, how we structure content. I thought it would be a great introduction to this book club idea of thinking kind of deeply about a book and then getting together. I would love to know if you’ve read it, what you think, or pick it up and let me know how it’s striking you.

The title, again, of this one is Winning the Story Wars: Why Those Who Tell (and Live) the Best Stories Will Rule the Future. It’s by Jonah Sachs. I have five quotes that I pulled out of the book from, again, my extensive notes. I’ll also share with you how those ideas struck me and how I think they’re applicable. One of the reasons I like this one, in addition to the kind of ridiculous story of how I came to re-read it, is it’s very much the kind of thing that speaks to me because it’s very idealistic on one hand.

He has a very strong sense of the innate goodness of human beings and how that can be turned away from our best natures, and then how it can be turned back again toward our better natures. But he’s also just super practical. It’s not a manifesto full of high ideas. It’s really about practical, concrete things that we can do to make better messages that are more effective, and also messages that just make humanity better, to call on the better angels of our nature, which was a phrase used by Abraham Lincoln that I’ve always found really powerful.

I’m going to read you the first quote: “Stepping into the world of meaning-making means stepping onto a high-stakes battlefield where important stories compete. To thrive in the digitoral era, we must be prepared to understand and then join the story wars. After all, great stories and great conflict have always been inseparable.” End quote. I’ll start by just referencing that word he uses, digitoral era, which is a word he made up to talk about the way the digital era is kind of reinventing the oral tradition. It’s kind of an ugly word, but maybe it’s useful.

This quote, I thought, was valuable because you may have noticed, if you are a denizen of the internet, that the level of discourse right now is intense. The level of emotion, the level of passion spilling over into absolutely, you could say great conflict, is all around us. In my observation, a lot of us think that when there’s a strong negative reaction to something that we publish, that we’re doing it wrong, that we’ve made a misstep. We’ve said something wrong. You’ve said something incorrect or insensitive, and there’s a counter to that that I think can be useful.

The Difference Between Taking a Strong Position with Your Content and Just Being a Troll

We have talked a lot on Copyblogger, and we will continue to talk a lot about speaking to the right people. If you’re not speaking to people who share your values and they have a real issue with what you said, that’s sort of going to happen because you don’t share the same values. You may get a very negative reaction from somebody who just really is coming from a very different place of values than you are. This is what I do to just keep myself sane, just so I feel like, I want to make sure that I’m doing the right thing by publishing, that I’m trying to publish something that is fair and true and beneficial.

My first recommendation is just check your position. In other words, make sure you have real facts, like the kind of facts other people can see and hear and verify, not internet facts. Make sure that your evidence is strong and that it’s coming from something that someone without skin in the game would be able to look at and say, “No, that seems like good evidence.” Every one of us has to really think about checking our egos. If we care more about winning than we do about what the evidence actually shows, then that’s kind of a red flag. You can get into a lot of trouble with it, and I’m going to talk a little bit more about that in a few minutes.

Real stories serve your audience, and the ones that are based on things that are simply not true, they’re just not true, they do a lot of damage. I’m old-fashioned, but I really believe that the truth is actually a thing, not some kind of capital T truth that necessarily beats up everybody else’s little t truth, but just more that we can look at the evidence and we can say, “You know, this seems a lot more likely than that.” I think that’s a thing, and I think that’s kind of a common sense thing that we can all agree on. Gravity is real. We breathe oxygen. These kind of things, verifiable facts.

That first idea from Winning the Story Wars is really about him calling it Story Wars, using that kind of intense language. I think when the book came out, that seemed pretty strong. I think now in 2017 I think everybody gets it. It’s like “Yep, nope, that’s probably right.” I would just add those sanity-preserving measures to make sure that you don’t embroil yourself staying up until three in the morning arguing with somebody who is wrong on the internet. You may your facts may be a little wobbly too.

The Formula for Inadequacy Marketing, and Why it s so Corrosive

His second point, I think it’s so powerful and so, really beautifully-put in the book, is about empowering your audience and not turning them into permanent children. He talks about a great divide in the history of advertising. If you ever watch the show Mad Men, or if you ever watched advertising, now but especially 20th century advertising, it was really marked by what is called the inadequacy approach. Here’s another quote: “Inadequacy stories encourage immature emotions like greed, vanity, and insecurity, by telling us that we are somehow incomplete. These stories then offer to remove the discomfort of those emotions with the simple purchase or association with a brand.”

The great proponent and practitioner of this in the early days was Sigmund Freud’s nephew, interestingly, a gentleman named Edward Bernays. He wrote a book called Propaganda. He was a war propagandist. He was actually a popularizer of Freud’s ideas in the United States, so he marketed those ideas in the U.S. He’s credited with inventing PR. He’s credited with inventing product placement. He was profoundly influential, and he created some really influential campaigns, advertising campaigns. Jonah Sachs’ book points out that this inadequacy approach to advertising always has two steps.

Step one is you create anxiety. Again, another quote: “In inadequacy stories, the moral always begins with the words, ‘You are not.’” End quote. It starts with, “You are not,” and then there’s some statement that stirs up a negative emotion. So, You are not loved, you are not safe, you are not good enough, you are not successful, this kind of thing. Then step two is to introduce a magic solution, so a solution that bypasses the real lessons of myths, the real lessons of maturity, which is that we can work meaningfully with negative emotions and get over them and not be like permanent, sullen children. Now, it’s important that the magic solution does not indicate any kind of real work or hard work. It has to be something that’s effortless, Just go out, by this product, get a little more in debt, and this bad feeling will go away by magic.

This kind of approach, this kind of structure, really comes out of Edward Bernays’ belief, which comes in turn from Freud’s belief that people are basically driven by anger and hate, that that’s what drives humanity, so humanity has to be controlled. They have to be calmed down, placated, and kept kind of pleasantly drunk with consumerism so that they don’t do anything dangerous, because basically human beings are fundamentally messed up. This is the worldview that informs that kind of advertising, that kind of marketing.

While we are talking about legendary, old ad guys, and if you like stories of the early days of advertising, this is a wonderful book, because not only does he present interesting ad campaigns, but he really looks at why they work and what they’re really saying. It’s so fascinating. Along with Edward Bernays, he introduces another gentleman by the name of John Powers.

Three Commandments from a Powerful Voice for Ethical (and Effective) Marketing

John Powers is sometimes credited with being the first copywriter as distinct from an advertising man. John Powers wrote ad copy that looked a lot like ad copy you might recognize today. It was content. It was interesting. It was truthful. It educated the customer about the product. It didn’t really do all this trickery or stimulating fear, things like this. I’ll read you John Powers, what he called his three commandments, because they’re very instructive. I think you’ll find they’re very resonant with good advice today about content marketing.

Quote: “The first thing one must do to succeed in advertising is to have the attention of the reader. That means to be interesting. The next thing is to stick to the truth, and that means rectifying whatever is wrong in the merchant’s business. If the truth isn’t tellable, fix it so it is. That’s about all there is to it.” So, that could be paraphrased as, Be interesting, tell the truth, and if the truth sucks, then fix reality so that you can tell the truth. This leads to what Sachs is calling empowerment marketing, as the other side of inadequacy marketing. Empowerment stories are really, first of all, they’re behind some of the most effective marketing and advertising in content that we see, businesses like Nike and Apple.

Here’s another quote from Sachs. Empowerment stories, quote, “…inspire action by painting a picture of an imperfect world that can be repaired through heroic action.” End quote. This idea of empowering stories resonates so closely and tightly with what we’ve been doing on Copyblogger, especially the series that we’re doing from the first of the year, where we’re really trying to get very structural about the kinds of stories that work for content about who you’re speaking to, about speaking from values, all of these things really, really resonate with that John Powers, those three commandments.

A lot of it is about getting to a deeper truth. The analogy that Sachs uses is it’s that core of cork in the middle of a baseball. That’s what makes a baseball springy and lively, is that it’s got cork in the middle. That same idea that there’s a core of real, sincere human values at the core of the message, and it really is about helping people be better versions of themselves and helping people help one another, that that’s the kind of message that creates this empowerment kind of context. It can be very, very powerful.

How the Empowerment Model is the answer to the Inadequacy Model

So Sigmund Freud is kind of the precursor to the Edward Bernays inadequacy model. Abraham Maslow with his hierarchy of needs is really kind of the grandfather of the empowerment model. It’s not necessarily really a new model. I mean, we’ve had empowering myths for as long as people have been people. So it’s not a new model. It’s really more of a return to an ancient model, and Jonah Sachs is making the case that it’s an inherently healthier model, which I found convincing.

Those are some of the biggest ideas in the book. I’ll touch on a couple more, just because I found them so interesting, but I really would strongly recommend, don’t leave it with this podcast. Do pick the book up if this kind of work is at all interesting to you, or if you think it might be able to inform what you’re doing, because any kind of persuasion, marketing, content, journalism at this point, certainly editorial, political work, anything like that, this kind of empowering story is an amazingly powerful tool for helping people see things, helping people see things differently, and making the case for what you think is going to make the world better. I think it’s just a really, it’s a lovely piece of writing.

How to Use Sachs Freaks, Cheats, and Familiars to Make Your Content More Interesting

A couple of quick strategies you can go at and use right away, because I like to be very pragmatic, and what we’ve been talking about is a little abstract. One of his identifications in terms of that how to be interesting part … you might remember that John Powers, the first thing that he recommends is you have to be interesting. That was true when he was doing newspaper ads back in the day, and of course it’s much more true now because we’ve so many more distractions. Jonas Sachs has kind of three tips. He calls them freaks, cheats, and familiars. These are what he calls primal brain structures. They’re storytelling devices or hooks, if you will, that help stories become more interesting and help capture that attention of your reader, your listener, what have you.

The first one is freaks, and Sachs identifies this as a character who’s recognizable but really, really different. It’s a recognizable person. We know it’s a person, it’s not like a talking trash can or the space station or something like that. It’s a human character, but it’s a human character that’s really, markedly different and unusual. That kind of gets us to stop in our tracks and pay attention to who this is, who’s speaking.

The person could be unusual in appearance. The person could be unusual in … they could even be unusually great-looking. He has an example from the Old Spice ads of how that works. But somebody who’s so distinct-looking that it’s striking, and it captures our attention. I would make the point that in content, sometimes you do this not necessarily with something visual, but with a particular writing voice or a speaking voice, or a video style. It’s not always visual in my experience. It sometimes has to do with word choice, with really, really interesting language, or it can be a combination of those things.

The next word he uses for ways to make your content more interesting, kind of a trick to make your content more interesting, is cheats. A cheat challenges social norms. A person who cheats is a rule breaker. It’s somebody who’s not accepting the traditional ways that we’ve always done things. This is always interesting. It creates tension. Now, cheats can be used in stories two ways. One, you can have the lone wolf, the one who’s breaking the rules to make the world better and is willing to defy the powers that be in order to do the right thing. That’s a cheat.

The other way that this could be used is to identify someone who is cheating in a negative way, who’s being dishonest, who’s being hypocritical. There are cheats who break the rules we think should get broken, and there are the cheats who break the rules we don’t think should get broken. Both of those are inherently really interesting. Those are stories that, they will pull people in. If you can identify that element, that cheat element somewhere for a piece of content, it can really pull the story in.

Then his final element was familiars. If you rely too much on freaks and cheats, you’re going to create content that becomes off putting at a certain point. It’s going to become distancing. It becomes grotesque. We don’t want grotesque, right? We want a sense of belonging. Familiar is about balancing that out, balancing that tension, speaking a common language. This is closely tied, if not identical, to the Robert Cialdini principle of unity where we are the same. You and I are the same because we share a core, deep value or belief.

Arming the Choir, and a Few Requests

Jonah Sachs has a great, a great turn of phrase, which is arming the choir. We all say, “Well, you know, you’re preaching to the choir,” like that’s a negative thing. He talks about arming the choir, giving the choir evidence to go out and do your work because the choir is, by its nature, the people who believe most intensely in what you do. Again, that goes back to empowerment. You’re taking your choir of people who believe as you believe, and you are helping them craft the stories and the arguments and everything that they might need to go out and spread the gospel, right? Spread the word about what it is that you believe is going to make things better.

If you look for ways to use that freaks, cheats, and familiars, if you’ve ever used something like that in your content, or if you have some thoughts on anything in this podcast, please do leave a comment. I love your comments. You can leave one by going to Copyblogger.FM and just finding the post. A couple of asks from you. One, if you do pick the book up, please let me know how it struck you. Did you find it boring? Did you find it compelling? Did you get something useful out of it? I would really like to know how it struck you.

Two, I would love to hear your thoughts on books we might cover in a book club segment in the future. Is there something you think is just groundbreaking, you think everybody, kind of Copyblogger kind of person should read this book and benefit from it? I would really, really love to hear about it because I have some thoughts for the next edition, but I’d also like to hear what you have to say.

The third ask, and you’re never supposed to ask more than one thing, but I’m going to ask you three things, and you can pick whichever one, or two, or three you want. I’m thinking about writing about this freaks, cheats, and familiars idea. If you’d like to know more about it, if you feel like it wasn’t completely covered in what I talked about today, will you let me know? Just drop me a note. You can drop me a note on Twitter also
@SoniaSimone. Just let me know if this is something you’d like to hear more about or you feel like, “Nah, I really feel like this was covered.” Thank you so much. I appreciate you so much. I’ll catch you next time. Take care.

The Transcript

13 Ways of Looking at a Headline

Voiceover: Rainmaker FM.

Sonia Simone: Copyblogger FM is brought to you by StudioPress, the industry standard for premium WordPress themes and plugins. Built on the Genesis Framework, StudioPress delivers state of the art SEO tools, beautiful and fully responsive design, airtight security, instant updates, and much more. If you’re ready to take your WordPress site to the next level, see for yourself why more than 190,000 website owners trust StudioPress. Go to Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress. That’s Rainmaker.FM/StudioPress.

Hey there, good to see you again. Welcome back to Copyblogger FM, the marketing podcast. Copyblogger FM is about emerging content marketing trends, interesting disasters, and enduring best practices, along with the occasional rant. My name is Sonia Simone. I’m the Chief Content Officer for Rainmaker Digital and I like to hang out with the folks who do the heavy lifting over on the Copyblogger blog. You can always get extra links, extra resources, as well as the complete show archive by pointing to Copyblogger.FM in your browser.

If you are joining us this month for our content challenge, or even if you aren’t, the group, the audience over at Copyblogger.com is doing a challenge to come up with better headlines. We start by coming up with more headlines. The challenge for the month is to come up with, let’s say, 20 or 30 headlines, brainstorm a whole big stack of them, and then keep adding to that every day by brainstorming a couple of additions.

One of the things we’ve heard back, and this is not surprising really, is that coming up with that many headlines is just hard, it’s just kind of a brain teaser. Today I thought I would revisit an exercise that I did way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I went to college. I had a poetry class, and we did a riff on Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I don’t remember what the exercise was, but it was a poem to use that same idea, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Banana, I think it was.

So today, I am giving you Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Headline. This is intended as a way for you to kind of shake up your creative mind, shake out some additional ideas for headlines that you can try. Now, you might not use all of these ideas, you might only use one or two, but it’s a way for you to generate more ideas, so you can pick the ones that really jump out at you, the ones that you say, “Okay, that’s actually … seems like something I might want to read.”

If you’re doing the content challenge, and that’s awesome, I would love it if you were. This will help you get that done. If you’re not officially doing it, you can certainly sit down and brainstorm a big stack of headlines. It is so useful, no matter what you do to create content, to just have a bunch of headlines that you can start from and start writing something, or recording a podcast, or whatever it is that you do. Let’s get it started.

1. Start With a Number Or Tweak an Existing Headline by Adding a Number

The number one tweak you can make to an existing headline or jumping off point for a new headline is to work with numbers. You might have seen there are lots of numbers-oriented posts and content all over the web. The reason is that just numbers and headlines just seem to work really well together. Now, my favorite way to handle a numbered list post, or, 13 different ways to do X, Y, or Z, is to write the piece first and then pull the number out of that.

I’ll write a comprehensive how-to post about something and then I’ll just go back and count, “Okay, I’ve got 17 ways here, so this is going to be 17 ways to do a better job of X.” Starting from the content and then working back to the numbers, for me personally, is a best practice, but it doesn’t always work this way. For example, this podcast, I knew that I wanted to just have a little play on the Wallace Stevens poem, Thirteen Ways of a Looking at a Blackbird, so I knew that I wanted to come up with 13 ways to tweak a headline and come up with a new idea.

You can go either direction. Just realize that most of the time you should be willing to tweak the number to fit the content, rather than the content to fit the number. If you can only come up with 87 really good ideas and you had originally thought about a 101 list post, I would go ahead and go with the 87. Keep it strong, really make sure that the content is keeping the promise that the headline is writing the check for.

2. The Cosmo Technique, Taking the Structure of a Magazine Headline and Adapting it for Your Topic

Second tweak, this one is one of my favorites. I mention it nearly any time I talk about headlines, because I find it just handy and it’s something you can do right away, you can do it immediately. That is to head over either to a physical magazine stand or you can head to a virtual magazine stand, like Magazines.com, and look at very popular magazines. Look at their headlines and then just tweak those for your topic.

This is sometimes called the Cosmo headline technique, partly because Cosmopolitan magazine is really, really good at giving you headlines you can tweak for any topic at all: fitness, parenting, relationships, finance, business-to-business marketing. Their headlines structures are so tight and so solid, and so it’s a great place to go and you just take the shell, the skeleton, the structure, and then you just change the words around until it makes sense in your topic. It’s a really good way to knock out a bunch of ideas very quickly.

3. Play With the Promise. Amp the Promise Up with Strong Words Then Try a Quieter Version that Sets a More Realistic-Seeming Expectation

Technique number three is to play around with the promises you make in the headline. Sometimes some words imply a big promise, like breakthrough, or sure fire, or instant. Those are just words that imply a big promise, they imply that the content is going to deliver on something big. Play around with using some big promise words and then generate a couple of more alternatives, dialing down the promise, making it less hype-y, for lack of a better word.

To take a big promise and, what would that big promise look like if you managed expectations on it a tiny bit and dialed down that promise? Play with the promises, go big, go a little softer, and see which one feels more compelling to you. It’s not always the big promise headline. Sometimes a more realistic headline is the one that will actually get more attention, but you have to play around with it and experiment and just try different possibilities.

4. Try a Warning the What Not to Wear Headline

Technique number four is the What Not to Wear headline. In other words, the negative headline. This is a headline that implies some kind of a warning that strongly suggests that people avoid some terrible fate, a headline that tells people what not to do, or what to avoid. These are always compelling, they are always interesting.

5. Answer the Protest March Questions: What do They Want? When do They Want It?

Technique number five is to answer what I call, the protest march questions, and those are, What do they want? and, When do they want it? So, How to teach your first grader to tie his shoes in less than an hour, okay. What do you want to do? I’d like my first grader to be able to tie his shoes. When do I want to be able to get that done? I’d like to be able to get it done in under an hour. What do they want, and when do they want it? Answer those questions. Those are just always very solid headlines.

6. The Monster Post 101 Ways to , The Ultimate Guide to

The sixth technique is the monster post headline. So, 101 ways to do X, Y, Z, keeping in mind what I said earlier that if you actually only come up with 87 or even 64, just go with the smaller number, it’s still impressive. The ultimate guide to, is another very time tested post formula. It can work very well, it’s used a lot, but it still has good promise. Think about what monster, massive, gigantic piece of content could you create and write a headline for that. Kind of an additional pro-tip on those, sometimes those can be turned into really interesting larger pieces of content also, like eBooks, tutorial series, autoresponder series, something like that.

7. The Brief Guide Identifying the Small Set of Key Steps to Getting Started

Countering that, the seventh possibility for a headline is the brief guide headline. This is a headline that promises the most important steps to getting started with a particular topic or a particular thing that the audience wants to do. Really think about selecting, winnowing down from all the possible advice they could get, what’s the most important, most salient how-to you can provide, and then create your own brief guide to getting more whatever it is that they might want.

8. The X Questions to Ask Before You (This is Often Nicely Paired with a Checklist, Cheat Sheet, or Worksheet)

Closely related to that is number eight, and this is the X simple questions to ask before you … The eight simple questions to ask before you publish your blog posts, the six simple questions to ask before you do your workout today, whatever it might be. This is very related to the earlier one, which is it’s very step-by-step, it’s very concrete. You’re telling your audience what they should do and in what order. This is a great kind of content type to pair with a checklist or possibly a worksheet, so that you can actually give them a cheat sheet to remember the eight simple questions to ask before they move forward with their project.

9. The Question Without an Obvious Answer. Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? Remember: The Audience Needs to Understand the Relevance!

All right, technique number nine is more difficult to pull off, but they work really well when they work. That is the question that doesn’t have an obvious answer. I’ll give you an example from Copyblogger, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? That one was written for us by Sean D’Souza and I like that because your first thought is normally, “Well yeah, law of supply and demand tends to suggest that when you lower price, you increase demand.” Then there’s a question mark and I think, “Well, maybe not. Maybe that’s not true.” There’s not an obvious answer there and I’m going to want to click through and find out why.

In one of his books, Bob Bly found this great one from Psychology Today, Do You Close the Bathroom Door Even When You’re the Only One Home? Now, I have no idea what that piece of content is about, that article in Psychology Today, but I think I would probably read it, because I’m just really intrigued. Now, these are tricky headlines, because curiosity is an important factor, but the pure curiosity headline, where the person really has no idea what they’re going to get on the other side of that, that, it tends not to get good results.

If I’m reading Psychology Today and I get that headline, I’m going to read it because I read Psychology Today to find out what makes people tick, right? I read to find out more about human psychology. That’s going to share an interesting fact about human psychology with me. That headline is very relevant for Psychology Today. It is not relevant for Copyblogger, and I think if we got clicks on that, it would be to ask us if we had been hacked.

However, Sean D’Souza’s headline, Do Lower Prices Lead to More Sales? is very relevant to Copyblogger and any reader of ours is going to know, “Oh, well that’s interesting, that’s going to be an article about the relationship between pricing and sales. That’s a topic that I think about and I’m going to click through and I’m going to see what Sean has to say about it.” If you have the question without an obvious answer headline, it has to be clear to the audience how it relates to what they come to you for. Otherwise, it just gets confusing and confusing is not helpful.

All right, so I’m going to wrap up the last four suggestions for you with the four U’s of copywriting, or the four U’s of headlines, which are useful, urgency, unique, and ultra specific, and I’ll walk you through how each of these might be something that you could use as a prompt to come up with some headline ideas.

10. Useful: What Will the Audience Get Out of Reading, Listening to, or Watching this Piece of Content?

The first U, letter U, stands for useful. This is a really major tried and true thing to keep coming back to for your headlines. Which is, to ask that question, What does the audience get out of reading this piece, or listening to this podcast, or watching this YouTube video? These are the how-to’s, the tutorials, the guides. These are also the warnings and the pitfalls.

If your headline makes it really clear what the person’s going to gain from checking out your content, you’re going to have a good headline. Even if, maybe your other skills are not incredibly fantastic, that’s probably the most important one to master. Some people apply the so what test, so you keep asking yourself, “Well, so what? Well, so what?” You should have a good answer for that. It should be an answer that makes sense to your audience.

11. Urgent: Increase the Sense of Urgency with Time Pressure or Warnings

The second letter U stands for the word, urgency. This is about getting people to check out your content today, rather than never. Urgency language can include things like, introducing, or announcing, that suggests, “Okay, there’s something new here, I want to look at it.” It appeals to that sense of novelty. Another good urgency phrase is why you must, and this is often paired with the word, immediately. So, you know, Why you must secure your WordPress based website immediately. That’s an important post, because there are actually super bad things that could happen to you if you don’t do it.

12. Unique: Can You Use an Unusual Word? Can You Challenge Conventional Wisdom? Remember: Don t Let Unique Turn into Confusing

The third letter U stands for unique. This is about catching attention and catching attention with things like, something unique, something that people haven’t seen before. You can get this done with possibly an unusual language choice, including one of my favorites which is, use words like weird. Now, we’ve all seen that terrible stupid ad on social media, this one weird trick to doing whatever.

Don’t use this one weird trick, because it’s horribly overused and associated with something that looks not very high quality. There are lots of other ways you could use the word weird, that would cause people to just pause for a second and say, “Huh. Weird. Well, I wonder what that’s about?” Think about playing with that. Any unusual language choice is going to make people just take that moment and stop and look at it.

Another very tried and true way to work the unique angle is to challenge conventional wisdom. To take something that everybody believes is true, and turn it on its head. You have to be able to do this legitimately. Don’t just be a contrarian to be contrary. This actually has to support a real and useful position. Otherwise, you’re getting attention, but you won’t keep attention, because you’re not perceived as being reliable.

Again, I just want to caution you that when we want you to try and put a unique element in your headline, that’s not the same thing as confusing people with your headline. A lot of people go for unique, and what they end up with is unique and confusing. Again, it just won’t help. If people are confused, they tend to get a little bit nervous and when people are a little bit nervous, they don’t act. Anybody who’s a little bit nervous about what they’re going to find on the web will just tend to not click. It just feels safer to not click, rather than going to that weird thing that I’m not sure what that is. Be unusual, be different, be unique, but don’t be so different that you’re confusing and scary.

13. Ultra-Specific: Precision is Interesting. Replace Vague, Waffly Words and Round Numbers with Specifics

Our thirteenth tip is to be ultra specific, that’s the fourth U, ultra specific. This kind of brings us full circle, because one of the best ways to get ultra specific is to use a specific number. Let’s talk about numbers for a moment. We have a tendency to want to round numbers, so we want to write posts with, Ten things you should know about this, or, 100 things you should know about this.

It is often more compelling and more interesting if you go with kind of a knobbly number. If you go with a non-obvious number. 17 is a much more interesting number than 20, and 17.2 is more interesting than 17. Getting incredibly specific with numbers, with the facts, getting really, really pointed about what you have to say … very, very useful, very compelling. It just makes it feel like this is somebody who actually knows what they’re talking about.

Of course, you always want to back that up by, in fact, knowing what you’re talking about. If you see vague words in your headline, then take advantage of that and create a second iteration of your headline that makes that word much more specific, that really speaks to a specific individual. Use specific, crisp, clear, especially verbs and nouns, rather than vague, waffly, fluffy ones.

Those are 13 prompts or tweaks that you can use to look at your stack of headlines and grow it by quite a bit, double it, triple it, perhaps. I will go ahead and post all of these in text. If you go over to Copyblogger.FM, you can get the complete list in text just for your general reference. I would love to hear from you. If you guys have some headlines that you have tried one of these out on, let me know, drop them in the comments, always interested to see what you’re working on. And keep an eye on the Copyblogger.com blog for the next content challenge, which will be coming up in early February. Thanks so much guys, take care, and talk with you soon.