Monday, March 17, 2014

Words Words Words....

I had yet another amazing call with my business coach last week and we were hammering out the details of the message I want to present to the world and my marketing strategy.

I've decided that I'm going to do a mix of the antiquated stuff, mailing things by snail-mail and the new stuff, meeting people in person and asking for the business.

The mail/email part is where things started getting a little tricky.

He asked me what I wanted people to know about The Millionaire's Assistant.

"I want them to know I get shit done!"

He asked me if I was prepared to own that statement.

I explained that I've gone around this barn and played hide-and-seek with my message for a while now and I'm sick of it. Look, the truth is, was and has always been that I get shit done and the people I've enjoyed working with the most aren't afraid or threatened by that phrase and most likely use it themselves frequently.

We marched forward and at the end of our weekly call, we had a draft of what my script would look like. Sure, we're going to do some tweaking on it later, but, the main thing that struck me was that it's too many words.

But, this isn't my first time struggling with this issue either. When it came to writing copy for my website, all the "experts" that I consulted believe(d) that it needs to be an extensive amount of information. From the jump, I've asked - who is going to read all this shit? I mean seriously? TL:DR (too long didn't read) has become a way of life in social media for a lot of things, but it's not just for the young "microwave" generation...it's especially for the busy entrepreneur/executive, as well.

People don't have a lot of time and they don't want to spend it reading a bunch of fluff. They want you to get to the point. Which is part of the reason why I've fallen in love with the website Medium.com - before you commit to reading something, you get to know how long it's approximately going to take for you to read it. Incidentally, it's also the place where I found a couple of posts on this very topic.

One post suggests that you work on condensing whatever message you want to get across to the length of a single tweet - 140 characters. Talk about a challenge! I'm a chatterbox and I haven't even gotten off the ground good in that amount of space. But, that's not what counts for my business.

Another post, which I'm using to help fine-tune my message states that you want to give the important points - keep it short, format for clarity, have a clear call to action and be reasonable with the request.

We're all busy. Time is limited and the old way is dead. Those web pages where you have to scroll and scroll and scroll to get to the meat of the discussion are so antiquated. If that's what you're doing or who you're listening to, you're better off writing blog posts where you can make it as long as you want...I just don't think it's the best way for sales/marketing.

Drop me a comment and let me know what you think.