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It’s Halloween. Are you scared yet? If you are, it’s more likely to be this terrifying marketing climate as opposed to those horrific Duck Dynasty costumes ringing your doorbell.

The simple truth is that small business owners have every right to be scared right now. While running your own company certainly has its advantages, it also has some real drawbacks, like having to fight for a regular paycheck and never really being able to leave the office behind. You learn to live with aspects like those, but that doesn’t mean your fears are quite gone. Here are just a few of the most common.

1. Search Engine Optimization: You can have a phenomenal website. You can have great blogs. Your site may still never see the light of day. What’s more, though, is that a single wrong SEO move can put you on Google’s naughty list, making certain most potential customers will never order from you. Good optimization is essential, no matter what vertical you’re in.

2. Time Management: There’s no way you can do all of it. You can’t optimize your site, send out a newsletter, return client phone calls, find new jobs, deal with the jobs that are already on your schedule, update your blog, virtually socialize, and plan for the future all at the same time. This is often the single biggest problem cited by small business owners, and getting to all of those tasks is important! It’s okay for time management skills to be the scariest thing on your list. It really is a little frightening to try to get to everything every day.

3. Missed Opportunities: Small businesses rarely want to stay small businesses forever. Most business owners have hopes and dreams of doing something more, building something bigger. You don’t simply wake up one morning to a bigger company, though. What’s more is that all of the hoping and dreaming in the world doesn’t actually build that bigger company. Instead, it takes persistence, hard work, and the right opportunity. Close the door on that opportunity, and you have just missed what might have been your only chance at the bigger company you always wanted. No wonder this one inspires so much fear.

Being a small business owner is scary. It’s hard to know what to do and when to do it. We can help with some of it. We’d love to help make sure your site has SEO friendly copy. We can even deal with most of your marketing tasks to alleviate your time management worries. All of that can lead to the right opportunity at the right time, which may just make the next big holiday one in which you are truly grateful for something. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help.

You may lay awake in bed night after night with great thoughts for your company. Maybe you even email them extensively to your business partner, who thinks all are fantastic ideas. How do you get those thoughts out of your head and on to the virtual page? How can you capitalize on that and make great content? This quick guide can help.

• Make sure you’re truly passionate about it. You can’t honestly write about something you don’t care about. While you can offer some version of writing, it’s not going to feel authentic to your audience unless you have some stake in it, so if you’re not committed to the idea from the start, don’t bother turning it into content.
• Plan carefully. The best writers do some amazing planning before they ever start staring at that blinking cursor. Whether you’re using the dreaded Venn diagrams from elementary school or you’re simply brainstorming on a scrap of paper, do some planning before you move those ideas to content.
• Research still matters. You can’t simply fly with what you have. Whether you need to look at other similar content or just some data to back up your ideas, you have to pull from other sources to have a great piece of content.

Great content, even for the creative, isn’t an automatic. It take a bit of hard work and planning to move your thoughts and ideas into something a bit more marketable.

Don’t even have those early thoughts for great content? Have great ideas but you just can’t translate them? Let us help. Our writing services are ideal to meet your needs, no matter where you’re at in the development process or what your budget looks like. Learn more now.

Did you know that copywriting is a science, as well as an art form? It’s true! Just wait until you hear some of the scientifically-proven methodologies that can be linked to the text running from your fingers onto the keyboard (or pen to paper, whichever you prefer, of course).

Time, they tell us, is fleeting – seconds come and go – there goes one now! And another! And another! Ooops . . . they are flying by now – entire batches of them have escaped! We need to make the most of our seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years . . . you get the picture.

It does take TIME to create compelling, persuasive, quality copywriting texts. Many people don’t seem to understand the VALUE of TIME. Words definitely carry weight; they can be extraordinarily impactful when chosen with care. They don’t always come spilling out from your pen or your fingertips; they require careful thought. Careful thought requires TIME. And . . . TIME is MONEY.

Do you want copy that creates conversions on your web site? Details, details, details . . . as evidenced in this article by Mike Ransdell at CarnegieMellonToday. This article, if you are interested, has a lot of scientific and economic jargon and principles in it (it’s going to take more than 20 seconds, I’m just warning you . . .). It boils down, however, to this: feelings and emotions – the brain is battling between pain and pleasure. In order to write persuasive copy, you need to understand what your target audience wants and how to present the CALL TO ACTION that is needed to get those neurons firing in the brain to make the decision that they like and believe what you say and . . . need what you have.

According to Gregory Ciotti in The Psychology of Going Viral: 12 Proven Ways to Get People Talking (About You), there are six buttons you need to push to get the attention you desire. Those six topic areas include:

• Taboo
• Unusual
• Outrageous
• Hilarious
• Remarkable
• Secrets

Those all sound fascinating, right? You would enjoy reading about any of those things, right? Don’t think they can apply to your business? Wrong. It just requires thought, and thought requires time, and time requires, well . . . value. If you understand the basic, scientific, and emotional concepts that can lead people to purchasing your products or services, you will be well on your way to understanding what type of content can cause them to have the desired reactions. And you will, therefore, understand how precious TIME is, in every respect, to all of us.