My wife gets the urge, on occasion, to have a garage sale. So we teamed up with a couple of neighbors on either side of us (one of them did the advertising so it was a nice way to piggy-back on their efforts) to unload some of our stuff.
For those in other cultures, or perhaps the unfamiliar – a garage sale isn’t a literal selling of one’s garage. On scale, a garage sale is typically much smaller than the commonly understood estate sale. And (if I could go so far as saying it) is a bit more sophisticated than a yard sale.
Aside from the few dollars of “fun-money” you earn (one summer we actually paid for all of our vacation road meals for our family of four with our earnings) a garage sale provides a good excuse to clean and sort.
It’s important to get rid of the clutter.
How cluttered is the copywriting used to market your products and services? A thorough cleaning before you unleash it to your niche market will sharpen its impact. And that translates into more earnings!
Here’s a 3-step “copy-cleaning” process I use and recommend:
1) Read your promotion aloud.
You get a feel for the voice, tone, and emotional connect-ability when you actually hear it read. And here’s the deal with reading it aloud…
If your writing doesn’t sound like you’re talking to a friend, it’s NOT good copy! Copy that connects – whether it’s a sales letter, web copy, an email promotion or autoresponder, a case study, or a social media feed like a Twitter, Facebook page, or blog post – needs a conversational voice.
2) Let others read it.
A fresh or different set of eyes and ears is an effective copywriting test-drive. It helps too when you allow someone (if possible) in your content’s target/niche market to read it.
For example, if the marketing content is targeting the baby-boomer market niche, find a reliable baby-boomer aged person to read it. If it’s targeted to a female audience, by all means have a female read it.
The extra eyes and ears can sharpen the focus and sound of your copywriting.
3) Proofread every sentence of your promotion – from the bottom up!
Yes, you read that right. The bottom-up approach helps spot misspellings and unnecessary words easier than merely reading it top-down.
You’ll miss a few here and there. But the bottom-to-top idea gives you a less routine and even more efficient way to proof the copywriting before it hits your market.
Clean copywriting helps increase the crystal clarity of your marketing approaches. And I’m close to certain you’ll earn more in the process than just a little extra fun-money when you get rid of the clutter!