One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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Part of my job as a copy­writer is com­ing up with names. A while ago, I wrote a blog post on the power of names. I won’t repeat it here, except to reit­er­ate that brand­ing, albeit not a pri­or­ity for most, is still incred­i­bly important.

And it’s some­thing you mustn’t ignore.

Why? Because choos­ing a name for your busi­ness or prod­uct, even your domain name, is often the sin­gle, most impor­tant busi­ness deci­sion you’ll ever make.

To that end, let me share with you some nam­ing tips. In my expe­ri­ence, I have five char­ac­ter­is­tics of great brand names, which I call the five “S’s.” I encour­age you to fol­low when try­ing to come up with a solid, long-​​lasting, and highly prof­itable name.

For starters, let me point out that the best names are rel­a­tively short, easy to pro­nounce, and easy to remem­ber. They have con­sid­er­able mnemonic value.

And mnemonic value often trans­lates into finan­cial value.

A mnemonic is a device — such as a word, sym­bol, or sound — intended to assist in recall. If a name car­ries some mnemonic value, it will increase traf­fic, sales, and value to your busi­ness on its own. The more mnemonic a name is, the more valu­able it is.

There are var­i­ous rea­sons for this.

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I recently merged my library with my blog. I had mul­ti­ple resources, books and tele­sem­i­nar record­ings on var­i­ous sites, but decided to con­sol­i­date them all and add them to my blog.

Rea­son? The fact that these resources are no longer as scat­tered makes them eas­ier to find and fol­low. If you want to book­mark these pages or even tell oth­ers about them, please do!

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The next ques­tion is, what does Web 2.0 have to do with saleslet­ters, if any­thing? And how does it affect them? For mar­keters, Web 2.0 presents a num­ber of new oppor­tu­ni­ties and avenues that allow more interaction.

More specif­i­cally, tools cre­ated by Web 2.0 can help to not only human­ize but also mag­ne­tize a web­site, which, in turn, gives mar­keters the abil­ity to cre­ate bet­ter rela­tion­ships with prospects, and sup­plies them with bet­ter tools to offer more proof, com­mu­ni­cate more effec­tively and develop that trust they so seek.

In terms of mar­ket­ing, it can lever­age a viral mar­ket­ing cam­paign by cre­at­ing a cer­tain buzz about the busi­ness, which can enhance a website’s traf­fic, expo­sure, stick­i­ness and, to some degree, believability.

But in terms of saleslet­ters specif­i­cally, which is what I really want to focus on, it can serve up a sales mes­sage in the way the user wants, not how the busi­ness behind it wants or thinks their users want.

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The “Google Slap.” You’ve heard of it. You were prob­a­bly affected by it. Essen­tially, Google, the world’s largest search engine, recently penal­ized a whole bunch of sites because they, too, judged them to be of poor quality.

Either they dimin­ished their pager­anks into obliv­ion, or they increased their AdWords costs by jack­ing up the prices if the cam­paigns led to poor con­tent. (And as you prob­a­bly know, this has dri­ven a lot of mar­keters out of business.)

But keep in mind, Google didn’t make this change by pulling it out of thin air or to dic­ta­to­ri­ally decide what’s good for the Inter­net. They’re sim­ply fol­low­ing what peo­ple want and giv­ing it to them.

(In fact, when Google makes such major changes, let it be a good indi­ca­tor of what’s going on in the marketplace.)

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A spin doc­tor is a per­son, mostly politi­cians and pub­lic rela­tions firms, who attempt to do dam­age con­trol by down­play­ing some­thing truly neg­a­tive. They try to put a pos­i­tive “spin” on some­thing unfavorable.

Are copy­writ­ers spin doc­tors? Maybe.

But there’s a dif­fer­ence between putting a pos­i­tive spin on a neg­a­tive idea, ver­sus putting a prod­uct, a fea­ture, or an idea in a pos­i­tive light that can be per­ceived as negative.

Left to her own devices, a reader can come to many con­clu­sions. Both right and wrong. Both true and false. Both real and nonex­is­tent. Copy, in this case, has the power to steer the reader in the right direc­tion — and there­fore avoid going in the wrong one.

One such tool that enables copy­writ­ers to do this is hyperbole.

Hype is not bad and it’s often given a bad rap. The prob­lem is not hype in and of itself. It’s when it is per­ceived as hype. When hype is con­spic­u­ous, that’s when the copy did a poor job, mak­ing the offer or its author appear smarmy, mis­lead­ing, even scammy.

How­ever, hyper­bole is pow­er­ful because it helps to drive home some impor­tant points, and aids in the com­pre­hen­sion of crit­i­cal or com­plex ideas.

So, how can you turn puffery into praise? “Hyper­bole” into “hallelujah?”

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