Why should your copy be delicious?

June 8th, 2009 § 0

Because the world needs to know the story of your business, and potential clients need to know the history of your products. Your marketing materials need to build a connection while imparting information.

In a market full of easily-accessible choices, facts are easy to come by. The Internet has made research everyone’s favorite hobby. The feature list, while still necessary, is no longer a winning tool. Narrative is the most effective strategy to engage both the emotional and rational sides of the mind.

The time has come round again to put the human element back into corporate communications. People will buy from businesses they trust, and the way to foster trust is to be open and to share your business’s vision, its history, and the stories of its employees. The very word communication means a successful sharing. For sharing to be successful, a dialogue needs to happen between entities.

The written text that represents your business must include the reader. It must be part of the journey that brings a potential client to your product. It has to show how your solution fits into their life or process. The client’s story and the story of your business must become the same story.

If you want a client to join into the story of your business, that story must be well-written. It must make the potential client want to be a part of it. It must be enticing. It needs to be…

delicious.

My name is Amanda Green, and I am a freelance copywriter. I offer business writing, technical writing, and typesetting services. Please use the links to the left to learn my story and see for yourself if our narratives will be a perfect fit.

downloading

January 31st, 2010 § 0

So after the haze of updates, I have finally been able to download MadCap Blaze to my virtual machine. I have to say that after being so excited to get started, I was not a little bit dismayed to see this on MadCap’s “Free Trial Downloads” page:

“Blaze runs in trial mode. The trial is limited to a 30-day evaluation period and cannot be used for production work. To ensure this, while in trial mode, Blaze marks its outputs with random characters.

Upon purchase and activation of Blaze, the limitations are removed and the projects created during the evaluation period may be published for production use.”

I had figured on only having 30 days for the trial, and it had been my hope to use those days to nab a freelancing gig or two to test out Blaze while defraying the cost of purchase for me. In fact, this weekend I had planned reproducing my resume in Blaze and helping two friends with their resumes as well.

Now that I know I can’t actually make anything in the trial version of Blaze, I feel a bit like my plans are dashed. Certainly my plans for the weekend are; I will have to use InDesign to work on the resumes.

I still want to learn MadCap, and I am now installing the software. I’m just not quite sure what I am going to do with it.

step two

January 25th, 2010 § 0

Now that Snow Leopard is safely installed and updated, it’s time to start up Parallels for the first time in months.

That has been an adventure; there are certain things about the Windows world that us Mac users blissfully forget, and right now my virtual machine is frantically updating and indexing and downloading more security updates than I really want to contemplate. It is right now trying to scan for viruses at the same time that it’s trying to reboot to finish installing updates, and I have decided the best thing to do at this hour is walk away.

While waiting Windows out, I’ve headed over to the MadCap website to poke around. They have a free demo for Blaze; I’ve signed up to get my special linkage to check it out!

Sadly, I can’t seem to find any information about MadCap’s trial software limitations. It looks like I am going to have to download it to find out.

My link came in! Tomorrow I’ll download Blaze to a hopefully swift and updated virtual machine, and check out the demo while that’s happening.

the beginning

January 24th, 2010 § 0

I would love to have more time today to get started, but it seems I will have to start small. My house is a Mac-only place, though I have Parallels to run Windows as Framemaker is now a Windows-only product. So I decided to start there. I’ve had Snow Leopard just sitting on my desk for months now, patiently waiting to be installed onto my iMac. I’ve installed Snow Leopard, and my next step is to update Parallels to match.

I’ve decided to start gently; though Flare is the showhorse, I’m going to begin with Blaze. It’s the closest to what I have the most experience with, and I’m dying to see how its interface compares with Frame.

If this post seems wildly esoteric and confusing, go here.