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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I was recently inter­viewed by a print mag­a­zine about how I started my busi­ness. In it, I offered sev­eral tips and ideas on how to carve a niche in the mar­ket­place that I per­son­ally applied.

I real­ized some of these tips were par­tic­u­larly pow­er­ful. So I wanted to reprint some of my answers here for you.

If you know my per­sonal story, you know how niche mar­ket­ing played an impor­tant role in my career.

Long story short, as the child of an alco­holic I feared rejec­tion immensely, which led to a reclu­sive child­hood. We all fear rejec­tion to some degree. But for me, it was debilitating.

I wanted to over­come my fears and decided to dive into the world of sales in order to fight them head-​​on. Years passed and many fail­ures ensued until I finally became the top pro­duc­ing sales­per­son in Canada for a major For­tune 500 company.

How did I accom­plish that?

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Last year, a bunch of copy­writ­ers who also blog — like yours truly — shot the breeze on the Nuts and Blog­bolts talk radio show.

It was an inter­est­ing and at times spir­ited discussion.

After some talk about con­tent and copy (or should I say, writ­ing con­tent ver­sus writ­ing copy), the show’s host, Mike San­sone, asked each pan­elist if we would indi­vid­u­ally respond on our blogs to this question:

“Writ­ing for the vis­i­tor is more impor­tant than writ­ing for the search engines. Can both be met with­out sac­ri­fic­ing quality?”

Ryan Healy posted his answer on the sub­ject. Good answer. I agree with him, because he makes some great points. But I also dis­agree as I think there are ways around it.

So I guess my answer is both “yes” and “no.” Here’s why.

First off, I’m not a search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) expert by any stretch. How­ever, I do know enough about SEO to know that it’s pri­mar­ily based on three major factors:

Code, links, and content.

Let’s take a look at each one…

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Lately, I’m see­ing a lot of posts in pub­lic forums and blogs these days about peo­ple get­ting sick and tired of see­ing “crappy,” “hypey,” used-​​car, Ginsu-​​like, looooong copy.

Some of them come from guru-​​bashing naysay­ers who hate mar­ket­ing, which I always take with a grain of salt.

But some are intel­li­gent, mature, and com­mon­sen­si­cal. They are inter­est­ing because I believe that, while neg­a­tive feed­back does have its place, it’s often misplaced.

Here’s why. They blame long copy when all too often it’s not the copy’s fault. More impor­tantly, it’s not because of the length. Let’s get some­thing clear off the bat: long, Ginsu-​​like copy does work. It has always worked. It will always work. And it’s here to stay.

But (and it’s a big “but”)…

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The other day I was asked the fol­low­ing ques­tion: “Should I use active or pas­sive voice in sales copy?” My answer may sur­prise you.

The premise behind this ques­tion is sim­ple. Tra­di­tional rules of good writ­ing state that we should use active voice. When it comes to copy­writ­ing, it makes per­fect sense.

For instance, active voice engages the reader and makes it easy for them to quickly under­stand the copy. They don’t have to sort through a sen­tence to under­stand it.

For those rea­sons, writ­ers are told again and again to focus on using active voice. But I’m telling you that, in some cases, you shouldn’t. And here’s why…

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Dan Kennedy often says clunky copy out­sells clean copy. I some­what agree with him, but not all the time. In fact, clunk­i­ness can work against you. And a recent uni­ver­sity study proves this.

Peo­ple have a ten­dency to forge not only a last­ing opin­ion based on first impres­sions but also a blan­ket opin­ion that per­vades all other areas as well.

The adage, “a first impres­sion is a last­ing one,” is not only tem­po­ral (i.e., the ini­tial opin­ion remains con­sis­tent and nearly imper­me­able for a long time) but also spa­tial. That is, a first impres­sion is also a uni­ver­sal one. It per­me­ates other areas, even unre­lated ones, as well.

Illog­i­cal? Yes. But it’s human nature.

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Most of the copy peo­ple ask me to rewrite seem to offer great prod­ucts and ser­vices. In fact, some offers are so good, prospects would be crazy to turn them down.

But they do.

And these sales pieces end up falling on my lap because they’re des­per­ately unpro­duc­tive. When clients ask me to cri­tique or rewrite copy, one of the biggest prob­lems I see is the fact that the copy is stale, limp, and anemic.

Copy so down­right dull, the only response it gets are yawns.

You’ve heard the adage, “copy­writ­ing is sales­man­ship in print.” This is noth­ing new. It comes from the age­less teach­ings of the mas­ters, like Hop­kins, Bar­ton, Col­lier, and oth­ers, which still ring true today. Includ­ing the Internet.

But peo­ple tend to for­get this axiom. Here’s why…

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