Words to the Wise

A web designer/friend of mine called this week to talk about the economy and his job. He mentioned that in these current economic times, he believes it’s often ‘creatives like us’ who are the first to lose our jobs.

Now, I’m no economist, but I am a big fan of exact language, so I had to correct him before he got too much farther into the conversation.

“You mean creatives like you,” was my interjection.

I’m paraphrasing here, but his response involved a blanket statement placing both of us in the same realm of creative ‘employment’ whose inhabitants are at increased risk of losing their jobs in tough economic times due to decreased marketing budgets, blah, blah, blah.

“Maybe,” I said. “But I’ll never lose my job. Even if I have no clients and no income, it will ultimately be my decision to give up. Nobody can fire me, nobody can cut my salary and nobody can pass me on the corporate ladder.”

I think he grasped the concept, but he strikes me as a serial careerist, so I’m not so sure. The last eight years of my life have been a balance between freelancing, full-time employment, part-time employment, self-employment and (I’m being realistic here) plain old collecting unemployment.

But that was a long time ago. It took me a little while to catch on and say ‘hey, I’m in charge here’ and put my all into freelancing. I now count myself among the lucky ones to be working for myself. Yes there are added stresses, but, to me anyway, stress is just a code word for fear of which I apparently have little.

Look at all the things I have to be thankful for as a freelancer:

• I work from my home office via the Internet and buy gas one or two times a month
• My clients are located around the world - I estimate I’ve met 5% of them face-to-face
• Even if the economy sucks, I can find new income streams via the Internet without worry about the boss firing me for surfing the web
• My online network exceeds my offline network by a ratio of 75:1 - I am officially connected
• Nobody tells me to stay late - I decide when to do the extra effort
• There are no egos to protect, no gossip and no HR departments to hassle you with lame policies

I can certainly see my friend’s point about how tough economic times can affect creatives, and by no means do I consider myself impervious to the current markets. But, when my friend’s company cuts jobs, it means someone becomes unemployed. When I cut back, it usually means peanut butter and jelly for lunch - if I eat lunch.

Jason Pedley is a freelance copywriter in Clayton, North Carolina. He’s been hired, fired, laid off, yelled at, called ‘F#$^ing stupid’ and sent cease and desist letters by former employers. Now, he laughs at all (and thanks some) of his former employers while he writes marketing copy for his clients around the world.

Nine times out of ten, you probably do a Google search hoping for results from the billions of pages that reside on the Internet. Search for Freelance Advertising and PR copywriter on Google, and you’ll probably be happy to get those 42,500 results.

But did you know you can use Google to search for certain terms on specific websites?

A real estate client of mine had a ‘problem’ with a particular property the other day. The property owner decided that my client would no longer be allowed to offer the property and even took things one step further by prohibiting my client from even mentioning the property’s name on their website.

Now, my client has nearly 1,000 pages on content on their site, so finding the instances where the property is mentioned might seem daunting. Aside from going into web development software like Dreamweaver, you can use an advanced Google search to find terms on any website you choose. You can even search particular sub-folders in the form domain.com/subfolder/subfolder1.

For example, if you wanted to find what pages on jasonpedley.com contain the word ‘copy’ in their text, description and body copy just do the following:

1. Go to google.com.
2. Click ‘advanced search‘ next to the search term field.
3. On the advanced search page, enter your search criteria, “copy”, in the fields in the first four fields.
4. Look down to the line that says “Domain” and enter jasonpedley.com.
5. Enjoy your 143 results.

You can also tell Google what part of the resulting web pages to search. The line above Domain lets you choose the following:

1. Anywhere in the page
2. In the title of the page
3. In the text of the page
4. In the URL of the page
5. In links to the page

So if you’re looking for a specific term on a specific site or in a specific location, Google’s got you covered. Again.

I was talking to a client/friend of mine the other day when she mentioned that the more she tries to learn things about marketing and ‘web tech stuff’, the more overwhelmed she gets.

She went on to differentiate between being an entrepreneur and being self-employed, placing herself in the self-employed category. And she makes a very good argument for the differentiation.

She points out that, as a self-employed person, she has little choice but to learn and do just about every component of her business since she (and quite frankly, many other self-employed people in America) doesn’t have enough money to pay others.

The catch-22, as she points out, is that she’s doing it all herself, which limits the time she has for other activities - including core business.

So the theory here is that if a business owner does all it takes to market, brand, write and promote their business, then they’re really in the marketing, branding, writing, and promotions business. Right?

As a freelance copywriter, I’m lucky (I think) in that much of the promoting I do for myself is based in, of course, copywriting. Whether I’m writing an email to prospective clients, or writing a blog post here for you to read, my core business matches well to my marketing and promotions.

But my friend isn’t so lucky. Don’t get me wrong, she’s great at what she does. I almost ventured into her industry after college, and it can be a very specialized and lucrative field. I think for my client, what would take her from ’self-employed’ to ‘entrepreneur’ is the one thing she mentioned early on - money. Money is the lifeblood of business. With money, you can hire someone to do your marketing, create your website and do all the things you don’t have the time to learn and do.

The point of all this? There is a difference between being an entrepreneur and being self-employed, but you’ll always be working for yourself.

Creative briefs can be long and intricate, and they often take up precious time that could be spent actually creating something. However, there is a place in this world for the creative brief as it does help agencies (and freelancers like myself) better understand the task(s) at hand.

The creative brief typically involves questions. Lots and lots of questions. Now, I don’t always use a creative brief. If I believe that a client and I are on the same page about the scope and goals of the project, then I forge ahead. But when I think a creative brief will clear up some questions and help both me and the client better understand objectives, these are some of the questions I ask:

1. Who are we trying to reach? If you’re a real estate agent, are you trying to reach people selling their homes? Or are you trying to reach people in the Raleigh, NC area who are selling a home worth between $300,000 and $900,000 and has been on the market over 120 days?

2. What’s your objective? Is your objective to simply reach them? Or is your objective to send them to a special landing page on your website that gives them a unique offer and information that is tailored to their situation?

3. What are the obstacles? Does your audience have a belief that precludes them from thinking your product or service is for them? Are you one of a dozen companies sending similar offers?

4. What’s in it for your prospect? Will you solve a problem? Will you save them money? Will you MAKE them money? Will you save them from embarassment?

5. What feeling or personality will your communication take on? Will you be the voice of authority? Will you speak to your prospects’ emotions? Will you be out-and-out human?

6. Is the timing right? Some messages are more effective at certain times of the year. Do your prospects need your service right now? If you send them a message now, will they forget about you when they truly do need you? Can your message be used in more than one medium? For example - can you turn your blog posts into articles that can be distributed via the Internet?

7. How does this project fit in with your overall brand? Will this be one piece of the marketing mix? Are there other agencies working on other parts? For example, if I’m writing web copy, I like to be in touch with the web designer to see how my copy will be laid out in the page.

8. Are there any creative mandatrories? Is there a phrase or paragraph that must be used? An image? A logo?

This is just the start. Often, these questions lead to more answers. Fortunately for me, more questions lead to more answers and a better product in the end.