My family just made two purchases this week: Guitar Hero III and Dance, Dance Revolution.

You may be asking yourself “What does this have to do with internet marketing?” Well, I think I’ve decided that search engine optimization is to copywriting as Guitar Hero and DDR is to playing music and dancing. Yes, they’re fun, creative activities all on their own. Yes, it’s great to get positive feedback from people such as “Hey, nice job!”

But there’s something undefinably gratifying about having statistical evidence that you rock.

I’ve been busy this week doing end-of-month analytic reporting and analysis for some of my SEO clients at work. I feel like I’ve done a good job for them, but “feeling like” you’ve done a good job is not nearly as nice as looking at those numbers and realizing you’ve really made a big difference in their traffic, average time on site, and conversions.

For me, this sums up in part why writing for the web is where it’s at, and why SEO and web copywriting is such a great career direction to take if you’re a copywriter. Creative directors and clients can be harshly critical. Heck, they wouldn’t be doing their jobs if they weren’t. Creatives (particularly writers) can be a sensitive sort. So when your ego is taking a beat-down after a first-draft review, there’s nothing quite as gratifying as pulling up client stats and seeing concrete evidence that you don’t suck.

It’s also yet another reason why if you’re a writer, you should be blogging. It’s a great gauge of your ability to capture and retain an audience with your words. Wordsmiths are usually not so hot with the numbers thing, but it’s well worth the time and effort to get up to speed on reading and understanding web analytics. If you need to improve, you need to know that. Once you start improving, you’ll be able to see it in improved numbers.

If you’re already doing well, the boost to your ego is really sweet. Think of it as a nice high score on Guitar Hero. Sure, you may have already known that you could play “Pride and Joy.” In fact, it’s probably more meaningful that you can play it on a real guitar, in real life (and there’s a nice analogy in there for copywriting and analytics, too. As nice as the numbers are, you also need that real human feedback). But you’re still going to type your name in the leaderboard proudly when you get a high score, aren’t you?

Criticism, and the ability to handle it, is probably what separates most aspiring writers from most working writers. The inability to let anyone else read your work for fear they won’t like it is pretty much a hindrance to ever getting paid to write. Similarly, “safe,” bland writing, with all the soul and personality of an insurance adjuster on Valium, is not likely to win you any gigs, either.

To be any good, you have to be personally invested in the work you produce. I’m often surprised at my coworkers’ expectations when I get feedback and critique from clients on my writing. I think they’re expecting me to get all neurotic and defensive. I usually just say “It’s only copy. It’s not personal.” That statement both is and isn’t true.

What I write is my opus, in a sort of Jungian sense. Aggregately, it makes up my personal body of work. It’s not “just copy,” and it does matter to me personally, as a whole, and in considering each individual finished piece. But I don’t take criticism of what, for a sculptor, would be a rough piece of unfinished raw material (otherwise known as a “first draft”) personally. I also don’t expect that each piece, even when finished and “released into the wild” of social media or even the more static web, will make everyone happy or be a study in perfection.

I do take the criticism, for the same reason my kids take the medicine I give them when they get sick. Because it’ll make you better.

Not all criticism is valid, or valuable. But a writer in any media who can’t do anything but get defensive and deflect criticism is “protecting” herself from what could be the most valuable tool in improving the overall quality of her work.

It’s probably not too surprising to hear that I received some criticism of my work today. It was valid, valuable criticism, and it immediately prompted me to do better. Did I enjoy getting it? Sure. And right afterwards, I had to zip off to get my halo polished and my wings waxed.

But seriously, if someone gives you honest criticism, they’re giving you a gift. You just have to be big enough to handle it, take it in, and apply as necessary. I’m a better writer today because of the criticism I received yesterday, and I’ll be a better writer tomorrow because of today’s feedback.

And when I get home, I can just pop in Oblivion and hack goblins to bits to work out that lingering post-graciously-handled-criticism aggression.

The smart and hardworking Gabriel Goldenberg of SEO ROI Services just published an interview with me. Gab was extremely gracious, and asked some really smart questions (to which I hope I gave some intelligent responses). So I figured I would say thanks, and share a little link love.

One way that Gab perhaps doesn’t know that he helped me out was in asking one of his questions (number 2, specifically), he forced me to go ahead and come up with the editorial calendar for the next couple of months for Internet Bard. So if you’re wondering what I’ll be writing about in the next few weeks, hop on over to SEO ROI and find out. He’s essentially published my editorial calendar.

In addition to this week’s posts, which will be about the addictive nature of social networking sites and a rundown of some good productivity tools and strategies for copywriting and blogging, I’m going to be making a few “non-content” changes to this blog to make it a little more appealing.

I’m going to be creating a custom theme. Much as I like the chocolate brown and the nifty javascript categories menu, this theme was really just a placeholder because I ended up pushing the launch of this blog forward by several weeks. The new theme will be more similar to my other blog’s theme, sort of reminiscent of Matt Mullenweig’s Photomatt or MostlyLisa (which I just discovered last week).

I’m going to edit the blogroll. I know. Duh. It’s been a few weeks now, and I’m still sporting the default WP blogroll. I plan to fix that this week. Which segueways nicely into a request: if you write or edit a topically related blog and would like to be included in my blogroll here, drop me a comment on this post.

Going to install some link-love friendly plugins. It’s always a balancing act between courting spam and discouraging discourse, but I think I’m going to install Lucia’s Link Love, which de-nofollows comments after your third approved comment.

So hopefully, in a week, this will be a little nicer place to drop by.

EDITED TO ADD: I apparently picked a good week to think “themes” the always-on-the-ball Skellie just posted a list of six fantastic, minimalist WP themes.

Gather ’round, children, because today Auntie Kat is going to tell you a story.

Once upon a time, there was a web copywriter who was living the dream, writing copy for an interactive agency. As the web changed, clients stopped asking for updates to their static site copy every few months, and started asking for recurring media. It turns out that companies like search engines, and search engines like fresh, hot copy–the more, the merrier. So companies started adding corporate blogs to their sites. They found that in addition to the search engines, prospective customers often liked the blogs as well.

Then they realized that some people would rather get the same information sent to their inbox, so the clients started asking for coordinated email newsletters to go with their blogs. Then they realized that some people like audio, and so they started adding podcasts (and those podcasts needed scripts or outlines).

Since the copywriter loved writing very much, she was very happy. Not to mention very, very busy. The copywriter realized that writing email newsletters, blog posts, and podcast or video scripts for several companies was getting a little hectic. It was getting harder to remember what she’d already written about, when she’d written about it last, and for whom. Our poor heroine was beginning to worry that she would go crazy trying to remember it all, not to mention trying t come up with new, relevant topics for all this recurring media.

Just then, her fairy Godfather turned up, carrying magical piece of documentation: the editorial calendar. And she wrote happily ever after.

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[Brief, pride-induced disclaimer: I swear by all that's holy, I really was planning on writing this before I saw last week's Whiteboard Friday.]

Do you want to know why it was so important that I put that disclaimer up there? Why, in fact, I could not begin writing this post until I’d added it?

The answer is directly related to the topic at hand today: my personality. I’m a flaming enneagram Four. The idea of being thought a copycat is powerfully compelling to me. I almost can’t help taking action to move against that idea, because it strikes against my constructed sense of identity.

Every personality has certain hot buttons. If you’re observant, you’ve probably noticed people respond with remarkable predictability to certain stimuli. The implications for a web copywriter, whose job is to motivate your readers to take specific actions, should be pretty clear.

Personas can be extremely powerful tools for developing copy that is targeted to hit those hot buttons and drive desired actions on the web. Writing copy that speaks to a specific person produces stronger copy than writing for some fuzzy, nebulous audience.

That said, there are some drawbacks to using personas. Without the opportunity to build personas based on hard data, it can be easy to fall into stereotypes, rather than true personas.

In an ideal, perfect word you’d be building your personas from hard data performed by a qualified research firm; however, if you don’t have access to that kind of information, you can still develop personas that have value.

One great way to avoid straying from building personas into building stereotypes is to have a robust set of “people making” materials from which to draw. In short, the same resources that help fiction writers and screenwriters develop realistic characters to populate their fictional worlds can be tremendously helpful in building realistic personas. These include (but are certainly not limited to): (more…)