Never again will I wonder, where will that next big job come from?

I’ve cracked the code, my friends.  And it was oh so easy.

How did I do it?  Simple.  I went on vacation.

That’s right.  Vacation.  I sent out a simple email, letting people know that I’d be out for a week enjoying some surf and sun with my family.  My hopes were that I could sit poolside and let my brain unravel and actually read, instead of writing.

Little did I know.

Not ten minutes after sending the email, I received two emails back from clients letting me know that two projects were heading my way.

Argh, I cried, as thoughts of poolside luxuriating slipped away.

Then I realized that this had happened before.  I recalled a previous vacation when a client called me only an hour before I was heading out of state, and dangled an enormous project in front of my nose.

I accepted then, just as I accepted the jobs this time.  Life of a freelancer.

But now that I realize clients are perched and waiting for my vacation email.  They secretly envious of any vacation time I take, and they want to squash it with a heap of work.

Well guess what?  I’m going to turn this annual ambush into a cash cow.  And if you’re a freelancer, feel free to steal my methodology. 

Here’s how you do it: Every month, announce you’re going on vacation.  That’s right.  Every month, drop the bomb that you’re heading out of town.  Clients, desperate to spoil your fun, will scrape up some sort of project and heave it your way. 

Of course, you won’t actually go on vacation.  You can stay at home, and build your empire with all the work that will be dropped in your lap.

Now some clients may become suspicious of your constant vacationing, and may even question your rates, considering it allows you to be out of the office 50 weeks a year.  But don’t worry, they won’t hold back.  They don’t want to risk the chance that you might actually be heading out of town.

It’s a very simple methodology, and if you’re a freelancer, I invite you to give it a try.  As for my clients, please don’t misinterpret this post as looking a gift-horse in the mouth.  A freelancer is happy to work around their clients’ schedules, and to be honest, I really don’t mind writing copy while my toes are dipped in the pool.

 That’s why tomorrow, I head out for a month long vacation.  Feel free to contact me if you need help in a pinch…

Click here to view the site.

Check out the new blogsite I just helped The Vision Therapy Center launch.  Created in WordPress, it gives us nice content management capabilities.  Design and programming was handled by Iota Interactive, and the photography was by Tara Kuhlow Photography. 

Note also the post for the upcoming visit by Dr. Sue “Stereo Sue” Barry.  We’re using her visit as a buzz generating event among teachers, parents and students.

As I’m prepping for an upcoming presentation on buzz marketing, my daily email from the Word of Mouth Marketing Association comes across the wire.  Fortuitously, it includes a link to an article  on the best and worst social media campaigns of the year. 

While I think it may be a little early to start posting the best and worst of the year – it’s the equivalent to Christmas décor showing up in the department stores before Halloween – this is definitely a good read.

What’s noteworthy about the top selections is that they fit in perfectly with the top traits of buzz. 

Obama won the top slot, naturally, for his campaign.  While the article applauds his use of social media, you’ve got to recognize the buzzworthiness of the man as well.  The nation’s first African-American president.  Young, charismatic, stirring up hopes of change, mobilizing a country to get out and vote.  His team’s use of social media was fantastic, but would McCain have won the election if he’d been just as proficient?  I doubt it.  Buzz shows up at the ballot boxes.

The next campaign to win a top slot is the Compare the Meerkat campaign, which outfitted a cute little meerkat and equipped him with a cheesey Russian accent.  Humor hard at work, combined with a rip-off from the Wonderful World of Disney.  Personally, I liked Timon’s one-liners better.

The third post is for Zappos, a company that really understands how to use social media because of its simplistic approach.  It seems like they’ve unlocked the secret by bypassing all the PR strategies and Mad Men media models, and they’re simply being authentic.  (Unlike the worst of campaigns included in the article.)  The CEO tweets, and he’s really an engaging Tweeterer.  Twittererst?  Tweetist?  

The bottom line is that Zappos is that these guys generate buzz because they’re a highly successful company that appears to be run by a very normal, goofy, fun-loving group of people.  No stuffy CEO types here.  Unless this is a covert front established by some truly ingenious Mad Men.

The final campaign is for Beat Cancer everywhere.  It draws upon a disease that has touched far too many people.  The campaign featured eBay/PayPal and MillerCoors donating one cent to breast cancer research for each mention of the #beatcancer hashtag on Twitter.   The campaign boasted a buzzworthy statistic, beating a Guiness World Record for the “distribution of the largest mass message through social media within 24 hours.”  I’m sure this blog post will top that mark.

Of course, you’ll want to read the worst campaigns.  Each includes such tremendous lapses in judgment and common sense that prison sentences or astonishing levels of government regulation should be inflicted upon the perps.  And I may pick a fight on this one, but I was even more amazed by the amount of time people invested in complaining about the drivel. 

We can talk about these in greater detail if you can join me at the Midwest Regional Conference hosted by the American Marketing Association at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater.  Now I need to quit working on this post, and get back to working on that presentation….

This sad news came to light this past week, as I was preparing the deliver the first-ever address to the nation’s schoolchildren by a freelance copywriter and buzz marketing consultant. 

I had spent months working on my speech, practicing for it hours on-end in front of my cat.  I was ready to speak to our nation’s young on the merits of staying in school and pursuing a career in copywriting and buzz marketing, my two specialties. 

As you’ll surely agree, the need for this speech was glaring. 

Yes, our country is always looking for more engineers to build things like bridges and strip malls, but we also need practitioners in the art of writing persuasive copy and exceptional content.  Small to mid-sized businesses also need buzz marketing specialists who can help them generate buzz through use of creative ideas and the leveraging of social media.  Our young ‘uns need to know that the world needs help in these areas.

I was ready to send out the uber-Tweet announcing my speech.  And that’s when I heard about President Obama’s “historic first.”

Was this a coincidence?  I think not. 

I’ve been producing buzzworthy ideas for clients for years, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all this the President had employed his vast covert-resources to keep an eye on gmwrites, and conveniently “borrow” some of my epiphanies whenever he decided it would fit into his agenda.

You think me paranoid?  Then ask yourself, isn’t it strange how on the exact same week I had prepared my historic speech, President Obama suddenly decided to deliver the exact same type of address?  Don’t you think it somewhat odd that in the middle of a highly controversial, nationwide health care debate, he found time to make a speech on education and snatch the “historic first” title only days before I was about to do the exact same thing?

What truly annoyed me is that this wasn’t the first time I’ve been, shall we say, “intellectually plagiarized” by President Obama.  I’ll give you an example that’s sure to upset your stomach. 

A few years ago, I began using a service called Facebook, and a nifty little social networking tool called Twitter.  I would use it to generate word-of-mouth advertising, leveraging the buzzworthy events I’d create for myself and my business.  Well wouldn’t you know it – candidate Obama decided to formulate an entire campaign around social media, and it became a key factor in his capturing the White House.

I let that transgression pass, but enough is enough.

As a buzz marketing specialist, let me point out why President Obama’s address was so successful.  It adhered to one of the buzz marketing principles:  It’s something remarkable.  It was the first time a President had ever addressed the nation’s schoolchildren, and it didn’t hurt that it created a bit of controversy.

I can only imagine the kind of buzz my speech would have delivered. What’s done is done, however.  I don’t have time to dwell in the past.  Since President Obama stole my swagger, I’ll have to pick another of the buzz marketing methods.  

Fortunately, there are plenty of other tactics to generate buzz.  The use of humor, for example, can get you noticed.  Maybe next time I’ll try it.

Sure, I could send people to visit it, and people could reach me via the contact form, but overall, I didn’t really touch the thing.  Making changes through a programmer was a bit of a cumbersome process.  I didn’t want to launch a blog, primarily because what was the use of having a website if your blog was going to hog all the traffic?  In a quandry, I did what most people do:  Nothing. 

Enter ”the Blogsite”

My thinking changed a while back, when I saw a website written by a friend of mine.   It was written in WordPress, a blogging software.  It looked great, and had all the navigation of your typical website.  Soon I took a similar approach, launching a “blogsite” called www.wisconsinenergyconnection.com.  I was impressed by how easy it was to create webpages and manipulate content in WordPress.

I decided at that point to convert my static website into this Blogsite.  What’s my definition of a “blogsite”?  Simply put, it’s a site, written in blogging software (WordPress) that has the look and feel of website.  This is not a new approach, and I don’t claim to be a technology pioneer.  I usually come in after the early adapters have worked out the bugs on technology.  My arrival is probably a good indication that a Blogsite should appear more often in the mainstream.

I started working with a great programmer: Brian Groce of WatershedStudio.com.  Gurus of WordPress, Brian and his team took the graphics from my current static website, and turned them into a theme for this current site.  As a result, the look of my website is retained on my new blogsite, but I have the ability to get in and add posts and manipulate content.  Suddenly, I’m in the game!

Of course there are other Content Management Systems (CMS) out there, but I like the beauty of using WordPress and the blogsite approach for the following reasons:

1. The look and feel of a website: WordPress is very flexible, and allows you to adapt a wide range of looks.  For smaller businesses, this allows you to create a website feel, but still be able to routinely update your website and enter new content.  Keep your image, but beef up your content.
2. Blogs are better for social media: If there is one venue where websites are definitely old school, it’s in the give and take of social media.  The blogsite allows for commenting from customers/clients/friends/bitter enemies, and gives you the chance to chat back.  Perhaps not something for everyone, but hey, you can always turn the comments off. There are also plug-ins which can link you straight to your social media site.  A notification of this post will automatically appear on my Twitter account, for example.
3. Search engines love blogs, which makes them a great venue for keywords like “Freelance copywriter”: Blogs are loved by search engines like Google.  Those meta-crawlers are always in search of new, exciting content.  They want to find the pages that have great new, exciting stuff.  They love blogs because these sites tend to be updated frequently, with exciting new content.  Because blogs tend to have blogrolls with people who subscribe to them, they’ve also got a good number of back-links returning to the site.  I can fill my blog with great keywords (note the headline of this piece), which makes it easy for search engines to find me.
4. Content back in the hands of the creators: I’ve been copywriting for many moons now, and one of my frequent beefs with writing for websites has been the distance between me and the website.  I’ve always had to rely on website programmers to get in there and make changes for me.  Their service has always been good, but writing is a constant state of revision.  You’re always looking at ways to revise your copy and build upon it.  Making continuous updates and tweaks can be frustrating for your programmer and expensive for you.
5. WordPress is open source and a standard in the industry: The beauty of open-source is that it’s a collaborative effort among software programmers.  There has been much written about open-source software, but the bottom line is that it often tends to be better than a prepackaged software program, simply by virtue of the fact that so many people collaborate on it.  There is definitely strength in numbers when it comes to software.
6. Pay for content, not for programming. WordPress is also free, but I won’t say that creating a blogsite costs you nothing.  I pay my programmer and my designer, but here’s the difference:  In WordPress, you’re paying the designer to create a nice template for the look, and for your programmer to convert that look into a theme.  From that point, the creation of additional pages and content is in your hands. The amount of time required for the programming and the design is small compared to what is required for a traditional website.  So either you can spend less on the overall site, or you invest your savings in great content, whether that be writing, photos, video, podcasts or all of the above.
7. Free content management system. Ultimately, you’re getting a free content management system that many have described as superior to Joomla and other competitors.  Check the search engines and you’ll find a number of advocates and detractors from different sides of the CMS arguement.  For the reasons listed above, however, I think WordPress is a solid choice for smaller businesses and start-ups.

Ultimately, you’re getting the look of your traditional website, with the interactivity of social media.  And you’re getting a site that’s full of great content.  It works for me, and if you want some help, I can help make it work for you.