Writing Tips at GarySpeer.com

The title of this post really isn’t all that profound, but it’s easy to miss the obvious, so consider this a little review of the obvious.

Whether your writing copy to market a service for web masters or personalized gifts to Christmas shoppers, never forget that the focus of your writing MUST be the customer, not the browser, and certainly not the merchants you may be working with or for in your writing. Everything you say and the way you say it must be aimed at people who want to buy or need to buy the product or service. Your job is to speak to them in a way that will make them WANT what you or your merchant is offering.

Simple enough, isn’t it? You look at the product or service you’re marketing, then think about what you’d like to know or do with that product if you were a customer. Then write accordingly.

I’ll admit that ad copy writing is not my strong suite, but I know some of you are very successful copy writers. Leave a comment and share some tips with us.

If your writing involves writing content for a website, and especially if it involves writing content for an affiliate marketing website, I assume you understand the need for early planning and preparation related to the annual shopping holiday — I mean, related to Christmas.

Seriously, if you haven’t got your websites in order for pre-Christmas shoppers, you’re going to miss out.

It’s never too late, as an affiliate marketer, to add to the selection of merchants and merchandise you feature on your website. You must plan for year-around shoppers if you are going to make affiliate marketing a “real” business. But if you haven’t gotten things pretty well tuned up by the end of October, you’ll probably miss a lot of the holiday shoppers. Do you understand why?

Obviously, not everyone shops by or before the end of October. Although online shoppers do tend to shop earlier than those in the “real world,” in order to factor in shipping, returns, etc., and still have stuff ready for holiday giving.

BUT — here’s the punchline, so to speak: As an affiliate marketer, you know your shopping website needs to be polished up and ready to be found by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other search engines for you to get the most traffic you possibly can. And that generally takes 2-6 weeks even if you’ve built your sites well and optimized them for the search engines.

So get out there and build some pages for your shoppers today.

Your character walks into a room, takes a look around, goes over to the counter, and sits down. He looks quickly along the counter, evaluating the people sitting in the room, apparently looking for something or someone.

Is the counter just a counter, or is it a bar? When he sat down, did he plant himself on one of the bar stools in the room — or were they just counter stools?

Why on earth am I asking? Why is that important?

It’s important because precise usage of terms here makes all the difference between a story about a teenager meeting buddies at a local ice cream store or an off-duty cop meeting shady characters in a smoky bar. Establishing every physical detail in your mind when you’re writing a scene enables you to make that scene rich and interesting to your readers.

Don’t write general “stuff,” write detailed scenes, scenes as vivid as you can possibly write so that your readers are drawn to your characters and drawn into the places and events of your story.