Visions Archives - Content Marketing for Contractors

How to Proofread … Better

By Tess Wittler Every PC user knows that spell-checkers in word processing programs are lousy at catching words out of context. For instance, a major accounting firm recently sent a proposal to a Fortune 500 client. On the cover they identified themselves as: “Certified Pubic Accountants.” Oops! So how do you find an effective way [...]

Facebook Button Sweeps the Web

By Tess Wittler Did you catch this Facebook news last week? Facebook’s famous “like” button is now available for anyone to use on their web site (as you can see, I’ve already added it to my blog). According to this article from Advertising Age: “Facebook’s new tools, including the like button … are designed to [...]

How to increase response in lead generation

Part I: The Bait Piece (aka white paper) Never do a lead-generation promotion – ad, banner ad, email, direct mail – without a “bait piece.” The “bait piece” is an informative booklet, white paper, or special report addressing some aspect of the problem your product or service helps the reader solve. For example: Fala Direct [...]

What offers work best in direct and online marketing?

By Tess Wittler According to catalog consultant Stephen Lett, the most effective catalog and multi-channel offers are: Free shipping. Dollar amount off. A percentage off. A free gift with purchase. Lett notes that free shipping can increase catalog sales by 20% or more. Dollar discounts work better than percentage discounts because, says Lett: “Consumers can [...]

Best tip for writing a great home page

By Tess Wittler “Keep your home page language simple,” advises master web copywriter Nick Usborne. When visitors arrive at your site, they are in a hurry to find out if you have what they want. Your copy needs to communicate a great deal, quickly, and demand very little. In other words, don’t make your visitors [...]

Monday Morning Motivation

While surfing the ‘net this weekend, I found these photos that I thought appropriate for this week’s edition of Monday Morning Motivation. Thanks to Photo Dump for sharing these gems! Thank you for reading the Built Write blog! Tess Wittler Writing Services • Dedicated to giving your visions a voice.

Monday Morning Motivation

Entrepreneurs Can Change the World I saw this amazing video (thanks to Ed Gandia at TheWealthyFreelancer.com) – and quickly recognized that it was too powerful to keep to myself and not share with you. Many of my clients are entrepreneurs. They may not call themselves that; they may prefer the terms home builder, engineer, developer, [...]

Connecting with Personal Notes

In today’s business world, we are focused on maximizing efficiency and automating our systems. We only have so much time in the day to accomplish our every growing to-do list, right? So to take full advantage of our time spent communicating we’ve set up our email newsletters to launch on a specified date, and when [...]

Check and Recheck Your Work

My husband and I get a kick out of the various signs we see in our travels, and the one to the left is no exception. After spending (too many) hours traveling back to our home-state of Pennsylvania from New Hampshire over the Independence Day holiday weekend, we spied this beauty of a sign in [...]

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