To be clear, I’m not talking about “regular” competition. We all have competition – I understand that. But certain businesses, especially creative businesses, have a subset of competition that must live in mud huts, because their prices are sooooo ridiculously cheap. Web designers go through this. So do graphic artists and marketing people. And, like I mentioned, us copywriters go through this.

Here’s what I’m up against in this respect: like I mentioned above, there are companies out there that will produce a 500 word article for $5

Five dollars.

I’ve written a LOT of 500 word articles. Depending on the topic, it’s anywhere between one and three hours work. Sorry, but like most professionals and/or business owners, one to three hours of my time runs into the hundreds.

To me, there are only three ways this can happen: a machine is copying existing articles and changing a few words to pass plagiarism checks; a third world person is writing them from the high speed connection in their mud hut; or the company “crowdsources” and has hundreds of wannabe writers “compete” for a “chance to be published” (which these days means “on a blog somewhere”).  And in the fine print, the writing is property of the company, so they always have hundreds of articles that they didn’t pay for. Personally, I think it’s more #1 than anything. I think a lot of copying/editing/pasting is going on.

So how do I handle this? Simple – I don’t even give them the time of day. If a client brings up “hey, I can get this done for $5″, I say “go ahead”. Fortunately, the writing is sooo God-awful, only the most desperate person would do such. I won’t even acknowledge the price in a negotiation – no “let’s meet in the middle” stuff. It’s so out of the norm (and the writing is pretty bad too) that it doesn’t even exist on my radar.

In other words, I sell / negotiate on writing quality that’s on a par with my writing. And I’m a damn good copywriter. Given sufficient visitors, I will raise sales every time.

THAT’S how you handle that kind of competition folks – you don’t even give it the time of day (well, save perhaps writing a blog post on it.) And good clients are ok with that (unless they are living in mud huts themselves, I suppose.)

Sometime last year, I found myself at the beer advocate website. I like beer a lot, and signed up so I could post on the forum. I made a post or two, and kind of forgot about it. Never went back, and never heard from them.

Fast forward to ten minutes ago. I get an e-mail from them offering a subscription to their magazine for $19.99. Having enjoyed a fine ale or two on the deck earlier tonight, I was in the perfect mood.  Went to their website, put in my cc info, and bang, they have a new subscriber. All because they spammed me.

Now I know some will disagree, but to me, that’s really not unwanted spam. And I kind of proved it by placing an order. I look at it this way: At some point, I said to this company “hey, I like beer”, and hence, a nice beer-related offer eventually made it to my inbox.

Well done, Beer Advocate. And cheers.

Not in some mystical way, mind you, but more like ”if you’re a jerk, people will be jerks to you”, or “if you’re dishonest, people will be dishonest to you”. This probably stems from a “this is your values and the company you keep” aspect – e.g.: people who are dishonest usually hang around with other dirtbags who are dishonest. And so on.

This extends to business. Especially web-based businesses. There’s a lot of downright shady (or simply “wrong”) things going on in the web world. I think it’s probably because everyone wants an amazingly successful website right off the bat. Well, it really doesn’t work that way. Here’s some business karma I believe in in regards to web-based businesses:

• If you do shady things to get better Search Rankings (like buy links/have garbage articles/etc), you will not last long.
• If you are cheap, your prospects will repeatedly be cheap with you.
• If you spam forums/blogs / etc, you will not get the business you are looking for.
• If you work for free / participate in crowdsourcing (on either side), you won’t be around long either. 

It amazes me how inconsistent some businesses can be. I knew some guys who were starting a web-based consultancy, and were going to charge a pretty decent penny for their services. Which is fine. But man, they wouldn’t pay a decent graphic designer to make a nice logo. Instead, they (proudly) “crowdsourced”  and got more than  100 desperate, starving designers to work for free, and the “best” logo got the $50 prize. Gee, what a treat.

I saw the results. It was predictable, really – they got 100 crappy designs. Stuff a  “can’t even draw a stick figure” non-designer like me could probably bang out with an old copy of CorelDraw.  Yea, they got their $50 worth. And they never did launch the business. I’m not surprised.

I realize a lot of my thoughts above involve money. Sorry about that. But it’s very true – if you want to go the crowdsource route because you are starting out, hey, that’s fine. Then you best take that route yourself in offering your own service. Not so attractive anymore, is it? Or if you are going to take shortcuts to get a high google rank, don’t be surprised when they don’t rank you at all. 

Basically, it’s just the golden rule – treat other businesses exactly how you want to be treated. Do things honestly, ethically, and if you want to charge professional rates yourself, then pay other’s professional rates.

A five hundred word article (2-3 hours work), for $5. Amazing. (an aside… no chance that’s an original article, my friend. Cut and paste / five minutes of ”anti-copyscape plagiarism” touch up, and out the door).

Anyway, someone e-mailed me looking for article pricing. They wanted to know how much a 1,200 word article would be. I replied with “generally, anywhere from $350-$500, depending on the topic”.

The guy replies with:  The most expensive article writing service I’ve ever heard of. It’s just simply ridiculous!

Usually, I just delete these. But this one I answered. Here’s what I said:

You need not have said this to me. It was unnecessary, and it speaks poorly of your business acumen. If you cannot afford me, just delete my e-mail and move on.

But since you did respond, I’ll reply in kind.

I’m generally a web and business conversion writer. I do write articles, but I do not write cheap, throwaway, cut and paste articles (I make this pretty clear on my website). I write articles for my clients that make magazines and the front page of the Huffington post. I have a specific clientele that uses me for articles – successful businesses that don’t want to hire someone off Craigslist or from India/etc. They want their articles read and responded to. 

There’s room for every price point. By the way, I’ve been in business a decade with these prices, and have written two books as well. You?

Would you know I got another reply with an apology? I thought that was pretty big of the guy. It sounds like a young businessperson, and I hope the guy learned something. There IS room for every price point.

One of the things I have noticed in this blink-a-minute internet culture is how much mediocrity is tolerated – and even accepted as the norm – in terms of business communication.

I first started thinking about this last year, when I got my iphone. I downloaded an app called “line 2” that was supposed to give me a second number that would replace my business line. I figured since the business landline was running me $40 a month, and Line 2 was $5 a month (or whatever it was), hey, why not? So I did it.

Well, I found out something really quick – it’s not as good as having a landline. It just isn’t. It dropped calls; the sound wasn’t very good; the forwarding aspect was pretty murky, etc. I would say it’s 80% as good as a landline. And in the case of a business phone, that’s totally unacceptable. 

But, for many people, that IS acceptable. Mediocre service, for many people, is just fine. They’re happy with iffy phone service if it means keeping $35 a month in their pocket. Well, not me – I switched back a.s.a.p. But I know other people – businesspeople – who use Line 2 and just put up with the glitches. It amazes me, really. 

Let’s stay on the phone with another subpar service (at least for business) – Skype.

A lot of businesspeople use Skype exclusively. For the life of me, I cannot understand why. Let me be clear about this – Skype is terrible for everyday business calling. It just is. Again, it’s about 80% of a landline, with a myriad of dropped calls, bad connections, etc. Now, I CAN see some use for Skype – it’s a nice IM program, and it’s fine for broke college kids to call home. And it’s even ok for international calls (which are typically still spotty with a landline). But if you’re here in the US with me and want to talk business? No, I’m not going to Skype you. Get a real phone (either landline or good cell).   

I like technology – I really do. But I’m not going to put up with garbage to save a few bucks. It’s just not worth it to me.

Dan’s advice: If you are serious about business, you need solid phone tech, even if it sets you back forty bucks a month.

I told them they had to get more “interested” people to the site. So they changed their keywords, and made it so their $2 budget would bring in 10 people a day. No effect – now the problem was the keywords were awful. Yea, they were cheap keywords… and they were useless. The client actually expected the web copy I wrote him to “make up” for the fact that the leads were lousy. That’s not going to happen.

On the internet, you have to have quality visitors. Period. You need people who want what you do.

You can’t fool around on the fringes with your Pay Per Click keywords. The fringes are great for filling out your marketing, but you cannot expect copy to make up for bad leads. If you are a local carpet cleaner, you need to have “{your city} carpet cleaning” as a keyphrase. I don’t care how much it costs. If you design websites for florists, you need to have “web design for florists” as a keyphrase. You can’t omit these in favor of, say, “flower seller internet design” because the latter is cheaper. You won’t get the same quality visitor.

It’s this simple: No writing, no expensive design, no nothing will help you until your site is visited by people who want/need what you have/do.  I can write the best copy in the world – but even with that, if you sell shoes and you get visited by people who really aren’t interested in shoes, well, there’s not going to be many sales made.

Great web copy can work magic with the right visitors. I prove it every single day. Give me people who are interested in your product and service, and I’ll sell them. It’s what I do. But you do have to deliver those eyeballs.

Years ago, I worked as a tech support person for a customer service company. People would call with computer problems, which were almost always the result of their incompetence, and not the fault of the machine. So essentially, my job was to guide people through double clicking the mouse and such. It was mind-numbing work, to be honest.

One time, this lady called, and felt I didn’t help her enough. She wanted to back up a 150 MB file to one floppy disk (1.44 MB capacity.) I told her (nicely) it couldn’t be done. She got angry, and insisted I was wrong, and that her brother (a truck driver) told her it COULD be done,  since he’s a “computer genius” (to which I replied “guess he just drives trucks on the side, being a computer genius and all.”)

Anyway, she writes a nasty letter to my boss (perhaps my sarcasm didn’t go over too well.) My boss gets the letter and calls me into the office. He shuts the door, and says:

“This is unacceptable. One more, and you’re gone. Now, this is going in your file, as part of your PERMANENT RECORD. It will be there FOREVER. In fact, in thousands of years, when archaeologists find this place, they’ll know that Dan gave lousy customer service!!! BWAAAhahahahha”   

Ok, I’m making the archaeologists part up. But my point is this – my action was so bad, so unforgivably terrible that it could never be forgotten. Ever!!!!

Sigh… fair enough. I was rude to the angry computer illiterate lady. It’s one of the lessons you take away from customer service – you learn how not to be rude. I guess I was still learning at that point.

But I learned quick.

Two weeks later, I got not one, but TWO letters saying what exceptional service I gave. I felt really good, because I really made an effort and tried to be nicer and better help people, and obviously, my efforts were paying off.

My boss beamed at me as he showed me the letters. Then he did the most underhanded thing in the world – he handed them to me to keep.

At first, that didn’t seem so underhanded, but I then remembered being in that same chair two weeks earlier. Then I thought about my reputation with the archaeologists and such. So I asked him “wait – can’t THESE be a part of my permanent record too?”  

Turns out, that’s not the way it worked in his eyes - only BAD things go in the file forever. Good things are given to you. Because the boss knows you’ll lose them. It also makes it really easy to fire you when your file has nothing but negatives in it.

Not a day goes by that I’m not thrilled I work for myself. The above illustrates just one reason why.

******

A client once came to me and wanted me to help him write a few Google Adword ads – he wanted to bring more traffic to his site and increase business (he sold financial products). A quick chat about his site revealed that he already had exceptional traffic – he was getting close to 1,000 visits a day from interested prospects (he advertised heavily on Google.)

He was getting perhaps 10 inquiries a day, meaning he was converting at 1%. His goal was to get 20 inquiries a day, so he figured that if he increased his advertising enough to bring in 2,000 interested prospects, he’d reach that goal.

I looked over his site and recognized right away that I could help him by not increasing advertising, but by increasing conversion – his site was not very well-written, nor was it user friendly. So I told him “why not try and get more out of the traffic you already have?” We talked, and he agreed with my assessment and hired me.

I wrote up a quick plan for what to do: the first step was to change the page order a little, and get the most important information clicked on first. The second was to change the copy. Under my direction, he had his web designer do the first part, and then I rewrote perhaps 4 pages of copy. Then he put up the new site and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long – from the very first day, with the same amount of traffic he always had, he started getting 30+ inquiries. This kept up consistently for weeks, and then months. All told, his new conversion rate jumped to 3.5% – I more than tripled his business.

But here’s the really neat part – had he upped his advertising to raise business, he’d be paying increased advertising fees month after month after month.  But because I instead used the traffic he currently had, he instead had a ZERO increase in advertising.

Now, some of you may be saying “That’s great, Dan, but he had to pay YOU”. And yes, this is true. But my total fee was less than one month of increased advertising. So after the first month, that part becomes irrelevant. But it gets better – based on how much he makes from a sale, I actually paid for myself in one week. After that, it was pure gravy.

And here’s ONE MORE “even neater” part: This new conversion rate (3.5%) will almost certainly hold true even if he DOES decide to eventually increase advertising (as he obviously was willing to do before I changed things.) So he could feasibly be getting 3.5% on 2,000 visits if he so chose. ANOTHER doubling of business.

Nice little story, huh? And trust me, things like this happen all the time. Conversion is that powerful.

*****

To buy a copy of Do the Web Write, visit its page here on my website.

It’s a very powerful thing – if you can envision something, I mean REALLY envision it, well, that’s the first step to making it happen.

Now I’m not going to get outrageous here – envision as I might, I’m not becoming the starting center fielder for the NY Yankees. But as I sit here, looking at my books for sale on Amazon.com, and looking around my office and how my life turned out, I’m struck by something profound…

I kinda planned this.

Thirteen years ago, I had just gotten divorced, and was making $10 per hour working a tech support job. I was 32. It seemed like life was going nowhere. I had been in business for myself a few times before then, but never really went anywhere. I think that’s because partially, I didn’t know where I was going.

So, at 32, I started thinking about where I really wanted to be.  I didn’t set any “official” goals. No five year plan or anything like that (that’s WAY too “type A” for me.) But I envisioned what I wanted out of life. And here’s what I wanted:

• A loving wife and a great marriage
• A nice little house – nothing fancy, mind you, but a place I really enjoyed living in
• To work for myself, as a writer.
• From a basement office.
• I even had the office decorated in my mind. I’m not kidding – I’d have a nice desk, a nice TV, surrounded by my favorite movies, horror film memorabilia on the wall, Owls everywhere…
• I’d have a black pickup truck in the driveway. Seriously, I even had the color picked out.
• And yes, writing a few books was part of this dream, too.
• A hot tub would be nice too.

I was dead serious about what I wanted - I actually envisioned myself living this life.

And you know what? It’s all there now. Even the black pickup and the Hot Tub.

Now I have to make a new list… a third / fourth book (not on just business, either – I’d like to also write about life motivation, relationships, living a happy life, etc.) I’d also like to be on the radio some, maybe do some seminars. More consulting for sure, because I’m good at writing and web conversion and such – and I can teach it, too. Lots of things, really.

The point is, I don’t just dream this stuff. I actually envision it.

Then I do the next step (which is vital.) I ask myself the all-important question – “Ok Dan, how do we go about making this happen?”

Like I said before, I set no timetables, no “goals”, none of that. I just envision what I want, and begin the process of making it happen.

Do you think it was an accident that I started my writing business? Was it dumb luck that made me send a proposal to a publisher (truth be told, hundreds of thousands of writers have millions of rejections – I have like four. Once I decided to write the book, I simply made it happen and sold it.)

I don’t say the above to brag or impress you in any way. I say it because millions of people dream. They dream, but they don’t ENVISION. And even if they do, they certainly don’t say “ok, how do we make this happen.”

I’m telling you to do just that. Envision what you want. Then really go about making it happen.

So how do we go about making it happen? We’ll talk about that another time

Anyway, I’m a big movie buff / borderline film snob, and I got a few classic films for Xmas (including the Giorgio Morodor version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.) I immersed myself in that one last night, and it was awesome. But I view movies a little different than your average Joe, so I wanted to post a little something about the art of watching a movie for those that are interested.

Now, it may seem odd that I post this, because “watching a movie” takes no more effort than, say, “looking out the window”. In fact, depending on if the sun is in your eyes or not, the movie might be infinitely easier.

But to me, there’s a profound difference between watching a movie, and watching a movie.

Most people simply watch movies. But a few watch movies. Here’s the difference (besides the overly clever use of italics):

• You can watch a movie over a few sittings. Just pause the DVD and come back later.
• You watch a movie in one sitting. Straight through.
• You can watch a movie with interruptions. Kids, phone, dinner, etc.
• You watch a movie with no interruptions. Go away.
• You can watch a movie with friends – you goof, yell at the screen, comment, etc.
• Watching a movie with friends is hard, unless they are watching it also.

You probably get the point. In other words, when you watch a movie, you actually carve out time to really watch it. And you allow yourself to get absorbed in it. You understand the characters, what’s going on, etc – the movie gets your full attention.

Now, whether I watch a film or simply watch one depends on the film. I merely watch “Transformers 2″. But I watch “The Seventh Seal.” To me, it’s really the only way you can truly enjoy such a film.

I’ve been told by people “I wish I could get into movies like you do”.

Well, it’s easy – just watch them.