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Listen to Your Voice
Whether or not you realize it, your company really does have a voice. It echoes through every product you make, every service you offer, every email you send. It's telling your story, and like it or not, it NEVER stops speaking. The Internet is always on...
...and your customers are always listening. Depending how good a storyteller you are, your voice is either speaking the lingo—or it's talking gibberish. If you do it right, ultimately, your customers will embrace your story as their own, and you and they will learn how to talk to each other. And then, they'll tell their friends.
If you do it wrong, if you garble the message, your customers will tune you out very quickly. Or even learn to hate you. And then, they'll certainly tell their friends.
But there's hope for you yet. You're here, after all. You realize you need:
The Whole Shebang—joecross dot com offers freelance and contract Web content development, information architecture, branding and positioning, copywriting, and corporate communications. Working and communicating online is an entirely different ballgame than traditional copywriting, and you need a much broader and more complex skillset. And, yes, "shebang" is a technical term.
Talk To Me—
It's knowing how to tailor your copy to your audience's needs, how to structure your information and tell your story in a way that's most relevant to your customer. It's a rare combination of cogent creative, common-sense information architecture, and customer-centric usability. And it makes a bottom-line difference.
Customer Love—Let's get this straight—it's not about you. It's about them. Your customers. They're out there, they want to get to know you, but you've got to make it easy for them. Think the way they think, enable them to help themselves, let them build their own enthusiasm for your brand—and they'll become your friends, partners, and evangelists. Irk them at your peril—and the surest way to do that is to ignore their needs, talk to them in jargon, or make it hard for them to get to love you.
If You Build It... They Will Come—There's a big difference between decorating a house and building one from scratch. In the Web world, you often need to be able to do both, and then some; it means that you need more than just nifty copy to connect with your customer. You understand that usability and effective architecture are just as important as spiffy wordsmithing; you know the difference between HTML and Flash, and you don't use the wrong tool or technology for the wrong job. You build to your audience's specs, not your own. (But you do get to pick the paint scheme and the drapes.)
That's the hard-to-find skillset of a new media writer—but you've found it all here at joecross dot com. Look around and find out for yourself.
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