Writing for leads: How professionals can market themselves online

Writing for leads
Ian Lurie

Friday, February 17, 12

I know what you’re thinking.

portent.com
copyright 2011 Portent, Inc. conversationmarketing.com


Engage! Converse! Write gooder!

Oh, great. Here’s another
jackass to tell me all the
stuff I hear 30x a day, like
“engage your audience”.

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Ian’s Life, 1990-2011
Not true! I’ve spent 16 years now 150000 Hours
150000
testing, experimenting and learning
what kind of writing works best
online.
So we’re gonna get specific.
112500

75000

50000
37500

15000
0
Law School Writing & Marketing Parenting
portent.com


I’ve had to use this learning writing
copy to sell, teach and promote stuff
like the Tacoma Dome’s roof, the
importance of colon cleansing, and
rubber grommits.

Yeah. I’m livin’ the dream.

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Writing for conversion
But I digress. I’m not going to give
you platitudes. This is about writing
for conversion. And make no
mistake: Everyone coming to your
blog post should somehow convert.

I’m not talking about deception, or
selling, or anything else ‘cheesy’. I’m
talking about making sure readers
keep reading, or subscribe, or
otherwise stick around. That’s the
kind of conversion you want.
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You need to fill the top of the leads
I nd/read your post ‘funnel’. That’s what the blog is for. It’s
not to get folks to hire you.

So your job is to get folks who read your
I subscribe
stuff to this point.

You keep in touch

I hire you

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Blog = Top of funnel

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9 rules
I’ve got 9 basic rules I use whenever I
write for online consumption. Follow
them and you maximize the odds that
you can get readers to convert.

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No one cares.
Write accordingly.

1

me.
mememe

you. no... me.

me. me.

People are self-interested. On the web,
they’re more distracted, less attentive and
less willing to stop for a second than a
preschooler who just ate a bag of M&Ms.
Beg, plead, bribe. You’ll get nothing.

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Tell people why
they should read.
So, you need to put whatever you’re writing
in their terms. Why would they want to
read your post?

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For example:

“Don’t let an uninsured loss devastate
your project. Look out for these
insurance policy gotchas.”

If I’m a general contractor, guess what? I
worry about this all the time. So this first
sentence tells me why I should read this post.

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Around tax time, this one will grab me, too:

“Check your payables or you may
end up with IRS penalties.”

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Don’t write a white paper.
Whatever you do, don’t write the staid, white
paper. First, most of the readers aren’t lawyers,
or accountants, or engineers, or whatever.
Second, even the nerdiest of us will have a hard
time not going into a coma when you start
throwing white papers on a blog.

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ect nt
hit ta
arc oun
n- cc
no -a
a on
a n -lawyer
an on
Answer this: Why should I care?

Answer this question: Why should someone
outside your profession care about this post?

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Sell the page.
Sell the page, not yourself.

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Write for a blank sheet of paper.

2

Your headline must, when written on
a blank sheet of paper, explain your
post to a complete stranger.
‘nuff said.

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Headlines get taken out of
context, all over the place.
Here’s the headline on a
post I wrote a while back.


And here it is, in a search
result.


Headlines show up in feed
readers, too.

My point: Any headline you write - any title for any post - must be fully
descriptive. It must stand on its own, because it’s going to have to.

Ignoring this rule leads to all sorts of tragedies...


This is from an Anderson Cooper article. What
the heck was he writing about? I dunno.

Come on in, the water’s ne.

portent.com


This one probably touched off an
international incident.

Karzai pardons Taliban

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Ewwwwwwww....

Royals Get a Taste of Angels’ Colon

(it’s about baseball, by the way)

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And my personal favorite.

Supreme Court Tries Sodomy

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Clickthru from headline/titles, by type

Clever Descriptive
40%
We’ve tested this over the years.
Descriptive beats clever, every time.
30%

20%

10%

0%
Search Feeds Twitter E-mail


Be fully descriptive.

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Just say it.

3

Active voice should always
be what you use.
Er, yeah. Use active voice,
Er, yeah. Use active voice,
not passive voice.
not passive voice.

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Use active voice.
Ah. So much better.

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“A study of properties”
Lose the ‘of’.

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“A properties study”

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“Trend higher”
Can you think of a better
way to say this?

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“grow”
Yep.

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“Skill at communicating”
Again, lose the ‘at’.

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“Communications skills”
Much better.

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“The manner in which”
Can you think of a better
way to say this?

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“How”
Uh-huh. Don’t use 4 words
where 1 will do.

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Know the no’s.

4

“This will be too hard to read”
“I won’t understand it”
“It’ll be the same stuﬀ I read everywhere else”
“It will be a waste of my time”
Know the reasons people give
themselves for leaving your blog
post. Most important: You have
to constantly reinforce that this
is a fantastic use of their time.

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Don’t write like a lawyer.
(until you’re billing someone)

5

“Don’t write like a #$#@!@ lawyer!!!!!!”
-Steven Reinhardt, 1992
Judge Reinhardt is brilliant, and
super-liberal. He also called me a
fascist, and told me the above.
He got the latter right, at least.

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In the event that = “if”
Not less than = “at least”
Thereafter = “later” or “after”
Subsequent to = “after”

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http://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/legalese.htm
A brilliant classmate of mine at
UCLA is now a professor there.
He wrote the above list. You
should print it and tape it to your
monitor. It’ll improve your
writing in minutes.

portent.com


Search engines don’t pay you.

6

Don’t sweat the keywords.
I won’t belabor this: Just don’t
worry about search engines that
much.

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Do be fully descriptive.
If you’re fully descriptive in your
headlines, you provide a good
clue to search engines that lets
them classify your post.

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Do link like with like.
If you write 3 posts on a similar
topic, link them together. That’s
not just for search engines - it
also helps your readers.

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Do keep tags to a minimum.
If your blog or site uses tags, use
no more than 3-4 tags per post.
If you don’t know what tags are,
don’t worry about it - you won’t
have any issues, because you
won’t add any tags.

portent.com


Put on the breaks.
You need to break up your writing.
It’s hard to read online. People
tend to scan the page, first. Make
your pages scannable.

7

6-8 lines/paragraph.
Keep your paragraphs short.

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3-4 paragraphs per ‘chunk’.
And never have more than 3-4
paragraphs before you place a
subheading or an image.

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Subheadings.
Speaking of subheads, use ‘em.
Your blogging software lets you
add a ‘level 2 heading’ or an ‘h2’.
Use those as subheads.

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Use bullets and lists.
Use lists for three reasons: They help
people scan the page. They make
your points more obvious. And they
help you organize your thoughts.

Use lists for three reasons:
1. They help people scan the page.
2. They make your points more obvious.
3. They help you organize your thoughts.

See the difference? portent.com


By grouping lists and subheadings,
you can turn a massive post (this one
was over 1000 words) into an easily
readable page.

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Images.

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Images are a great way to break up
the page, too. And they add detail
your readers can take in at a glance.

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Use images wisely
Images are great, but they can really
screw up a blog post.

8

First, they can be too large. This image is
115 kilobytes. In plain language, that
means it’s going to take a really long
time to download to your readers’
computers. Will they wait? I doubt it.

115 kb


Here’s the same image, compressed to
18kb. You can use any photo editing
software to get the same results. If you
don’t know how to do this, have
someone else do it for you, or use a
service like Picnik, which is owned by
Google and won’t send you viruses.

18 kb


Scale images using that same editing
software. Don’t scale them using the
height and width attributes.

oy. this is
very
cramped.


Good ALT attribute: “Sheep say web 2.0”
Bad ALT attribute: “What the heck?”

Write a fully descriptive ALT attribute for
all images. Your blogging software lets
you enter a photo description and,
depending on how it’s set up, an ALT
attribute. Fill out those two fields and
you’ll be setting a good ALT attribute.


Have a call to action.
Finally, have a call to action. Ask folks to
do what you want them to do. And that
call to action doesn’t have to be ‘hire
me’. It should be an action that brings
them into the funnel.

9

Invite subscriptions/follows
How about asking folks to follow you on
Twitter, or subscribe to your blog using
an RSS reader?

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First, have a link that reads exactly like
this:

You should follow me on Twitter.
This wording gets best results as far as
building followers.

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Get in touch on LinkedIn.
Maybe have this, too.

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Social media = rankings
If you’re wondering, ‘why bother’, well,
there’s more to social media sharing than
warm tingles. Social media shares help
content rank higher in search results, too.
And they build the kind of authority
search engines and social media sites use
to rank and filter content.

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25
SEO: B+

108
SEO: F
Look at these rankings. These guys have
no business being #3 for ‘law firm’. They 11
only rank there because they have far SEO: C+
more followers on Facebook. Social
shares matter, a lot.
44
SEO: D-

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Subscriptions = visibility
And, of course, every subscription you get
builds visibility: It’s one more user who’ll
remember you, and potentially come
back.

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Chain your content.
Finally, use one piece of content - one
blog post- to draw the reader into
another.

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For example, ask folks to register for a
webinar, or sign up to download a related
white paper.

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blog post 1 By ‘chaining’ a series of posts together you
can build your authority and trust, and
then get more folks willing to provide
their information to get a more in-depth
piece. That gets folks deeper into the
blog post 2 funnel.

blog post 3

e-book/whitepaper/
seminar

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I read your post That’s how all of these tips work: They fill
the top of the funnel. Then they help
readers make a good decision about
whether they should subscribe to your
blog. If they keep in touch, they’re more
I subscribe likely to hire you.
There you have it: Inbound marketing,
without a hard sell.

You keep in touch

I hire you

portent.com


If you’ve got questions:

ian@portent.com
@portentint
portent.com
conversationmarketing.com

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