In the past few months, we’ve added lots of excellent just-for-members content to Digital Copywriter. Whether you’re looking for new ways to use AI tools in your business, new ways to make your writing work better, or updates on what’s changing in the industry, you’re sure to find something here you’ll be excited to start using in your business.
AI Tools and How to Use Them
First up, if you’ve been thinking about AI as your writing assistant — helping you with research, brainstorming, outlining, editing, and proofing — but haven’t explored how it can assist you in other ways, you’re missing some big opportunities to save time and to improve communication between you and your clients.
In How Freelance Copywriters Can Use AI to Streamline Client Communication and Project Management, Michele Peterson shares seven non-writing ways to use AI tools to improve your workflow.
Quick Takeaway: Next time you’re on a Zoom call with a client or prospect, turn on the AI Companion — Zoom will prompt you to do this, so just accept rather than decline. Shortly after the call is done, check your email — you’ll have a nice tidy summary of the call!
Next up, do you know how to build a custom GPT? Building a custom GPT for your client is an excellent way to keep up with AI technology while adding a service you can charge for.
It combines your writing expertise with AI to create a useful tool clients can use over and over… without replacing you!
And including a custom GPT in your offer can bump up its value in a client’s eyes. If you’ve never heard of custom GPTs (or if you’ve been avoiding them because they seem too “techie”), you can discover how simple they are to build in How to Create Custom GPTs for Clients in Minutes.
Quick Takeaway: Building a custom GPT is way simpler and faster than you think. Perfecting a GPT that works well will take time, but experimenting with custom GPTs is something you can easily start doing today.
Finally, on the AI front, AI tools can provide a useful assist when it comes to generating ideas for social media posts, articles, and more… but they also run the risk of recycling what’s already out there. Fortunately, there are ways to make smarter use of AI tools for brainstorming.
In this training session, Smarter Ways to Use AI for Brainstorming, I walk you through how you can use AI tools to come up with fresh ideas, unexpected connections, and new ways of framing your existing knowledge.
Quick Takeaway: Instead of asking AI what you should write about, do a stream-of-consciousness session where you write down everything you’re thinking about a topic and then ask AI to draw ideas from that document.
Set Your Writing Skills Apart
First up, if you can make the core message of your copy stick in the mind of your reader, then you’re doing your job. When your copy is memorable, your reader is more likely to come back to it, more likely to trust your client and their product, and ultimately more likely to become a customer.
Rhetorical forms are a proven way to give your copy staying power and create associations between your words and a product, company, or person. In Make It Stick: 10 Advanced Rhetorical Forms, you’ll find 10 powerful, but not overused, writing techniques that will make your ideas stick in the mind of your reader.
Quick Takeaway: Don’t try to add any rhetorical forms while you write your first draft. Instead, wait until the first draft is done and then go back and look for places where applying one of these writing techniques can make your work stronger.
And then, one of the things Google looks for when ranking web pages is how fresh and original the content is. Specifically, Google looks for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). AI search tools are also looking for answers that are backed by authority and experience.
One way you can check all those boxes is by interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs). In The Interview Advantage: How Going Old School Wins in the Age of AI Search, Daniel G. Taylor takes you through the steps of conducting a great interview and then using it to make your content better. You’ll learn how to prepare for an interview, how to make the interview itself go more smoothly, and how to integrate quotes from the interview into your work.
Quick Takeaway: Conducting an interview isn’t an interrogation; it’s a conversation. You’ll get better quotes, insights, and stories, when you come to the interview prepared to listen more than you speak and to follow up on answers rather than sticking strictly to a script.
Also, most writers are taught to feel for the reader — to have empathy for their pain. That’s fine, but it’s passive. Tactical empathy is different. Tactical empathy is when you actively consider what your reader is feeling at each point in your copy — how you might be overwhelming them, confusing them, or boring them. When you consider how every sentence is landing for your reader, you can edit and adjust your copy so that it holds the reader’s attention, respects their time, and offers value… do that, and you’ll see higher conversions.
In Tactical Empathy: The Secret to Holding Attention in a World That’s Bored to Death, you’ll discover three ways you’re losing people’s attention along with a fix for each one.
Quick Takeaway: When you finish a draft, look at it without reading it. Does it look like it would be easy to read? Or hard? If it looks hard, break up paragraphs, add subheads, and include bulleted lists to give your words more breathing room.
Finally, every piece of writing you do should have a goal. Too often, companies publish for the sake of publishing — to occupy more online real estate. But if their content lacks intention and strategy, it’s unlikely to connect with readers and even more unlikely to deliver the desired result… mostly because that result hasn’t been identified.
In this Reality Blog post, 5 Content Strategy Decisions Great Writers Make Before Drafting, you’ll see how you can make decisions early about what you’re writing, so your work is better able to achieve something meaningful for your client.
Quick Takeaway: Company marketing goals can be boiled down to five things: increasing awareness, earning leads, deepening relationships, making sales, and retaining customers. Decide which of these you’re trying to do before you write.
Keep Up With Marketing Trends and Industry Changes
First up, how companies are tracking success is changing, and it’s important you know what clients are looking for. In Marketing Metrics: How to Keep Up With the Changing Conversation, you’ll learn about share of voice, lead-to-close rate, and incremental lift. Each of these success metrics creates new opportunities for you as a writer and will help you join the conversations your client is already having.
Quick Takeaway: When you know what clients actually want, you can structure your offers to meet those needs, and that automatically sets you apart from what most of your competition is offering.
And next, running your own digital-copywriting business means being more than a copywriter. You’re also a marketer and a branding expert — at least for yourself. It’s easy to believe, if you polish your writing skills enough, success will be inevitable. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Yes, you want to offer excellence in your writing. But, for your clients to see that in action and to experience how your work can move their bottom line in the right direction, you need them to become clients in the first place.
In this Reality Blog post, Why Better Writing Didn’t Bring Me Clients (and What Did), Edgar Morales talks about how understanding this changed his business.
Quick Takeaway: Think about who you want to help (your ideal client or your niche market) and what gets better when you help them. Practice talking about your services in those terms and see what happens.
Finally, when you start studying the websites, newsletters, and sales funnels of your potential clients, you’ll quickly see how often there is room for improvement. In this Reality Blog, Seeing the Code: There Are More Clients Than You Think, Edgar shows you how spending time analyzing the work you want to do and the clients you want to do it for reveals how big the potential is for you to land work and earn really good money.
Quick Takeaway: Carve out some time each week to study what your market is doing. Look for unexpected strategies you can bring to other clients, and figure out how you would make things work better for the sites and newsletters you review.
There you have it — 10 excellent resources to help you grow your business, sharpen your writing skills, and stay on the cutting edge of the industry. Put these quick takeaways to work and watch how they improve your results!