And I can tell you from personal experience that I launched an entire real estate brokerage firm with a white paper that revealed the inner workings of the MLS. I’ve seen countless other small businesses go from struggling to successful with educational marketing content that not only goes viral… it persuades people to buy.

Mike Stelzner has just released a great free video that reveals how he went from desperate to knee-deep in lucrative new business… all thanks to a single white paper.

Why should you listen to Mike (other than the fact that he was a Copyblogger contributor all last year)?

Because he’s that freelance writer who makes over $300K a year writing white papers.

There’s a whole series of free videos and other content that will follow the first video. And Mike is cooking up something else that I’m not at liberty to discuss, so that’s the reason for the tracking link.

But I will tell you this. If you decide to opt-in for the rest of Mike’s free content, you’ll receive an exclusive audio lesson in which Mike and I discuss our favorite techniques for using white papers and free reports to get people to imagine themselves buying from you.

And that’s more than half the battle.

Check it out here, and don’t forget to sign up for all the additional goodness.

If you’re blogging to promote your services, physical products or digital offerings, you understand that getting a return on investment for the time and effort you put into blogging is important. On the other hand, if you spend all your time relentlessly pitching your wares, you’ll find that you alienate a good portion of your prospective audience.

The problem bloggers face from a selling standpoint is that various readers are at different awareness levels, depending on how long they’ve been reading and how much exposure you’ve provided to your offer. I was reminded by the great John Forde of Copywriter’s Roundtable that this is not a new problem.

Jack recently pointed out that Eugene Schwartz tackled the issue in Breakthrough Advertising back in 1966. Schwartz broke down prospect awareness into five distinct phases:

1. The Most Aware: Your prospect knows your product, and only needs to know “the deal.”

2. Product-Aware: Your prospect knows what you sell, but isn’t sure it’s right for him.

3. Solution-Aware: Your prospect knows the result he wants, but not that your product provides it.

4. Problem-Aware: Your prospect senses he has a problem, but doesn’t know there’s a solution.

5. Completely Unaware: No knowledge of anything except, perhaps, his own identity or opinion.

As usual, we often find that the challenges we face in modern marketing have already been thought through decades before by very bright people like Schwartz and David Ogilvy. Let’s take a look at how the 5 stages of awareness contained in a 40-year-old book can help you craft content that works for your blogging goals.

The Five Stages of Reader Awareness

1. The Most Aware

These are long-time readers who may have been specifically attracted to your offer as well, but have held off on becoming a customer for one or more reasons, even though they’re interested. These are the people you can speak most directly with, but you’ll need to make sure your direct messages are not hurting your chances with those at different awareness levels.

Strategies: Take these readers “off road” for periodic offer specific messages delivered via another channel, such as an email autoresponder. You can also do occasional offer announcement posts in between regular content, or tack on a P.S. to a relevant article.

2. Product-Aware

These people are still not sure if what you offer is right for them, even though you’ve educated them about it with a white paper or other tutorial. They don’t want to be pummeled with offer information, because they’re hung up at an earlier stage of the process.

Strategies: Often, a white paper or tutorial series of posts is not enough to convert these people. This is why there is value in establishing a second content channel, either by autoresponder or a separate blog (or both). The key is to deliver real content with independent value, but that also demonstrates a benefit of your offer and a link to your sales page at the end.

3. Solution-Aware

This person has a need, perhaps subscribes to your blog, and yet doesn’t know you offer a solution. This the perfect person to offer a white paper, free report, multi-post tutorial delivered by email or simply from a dedicated part of the blog.

Strategies: Keep in mind that without a specific way to follow-up with this person related to the educational content you’ve provided (see above), you’ll have more fence sitters than is desirable.

4. Problem-Aware

This is the classic example of the person who needs to be convinced to subscribe to your blog and begin a relationship with you. They might have arrived via search engine but they don’t know or trust you. While strong content with independent value is critical to all readers of your blog, these people most need to see the value up front to get on board as a subscriber.

Strategies: We’ve covered this topic quite a bit, so if you’re a new reader, check out these posts:

• 10 Effective Ways to Get More Blog Subscribers
• Four Simple Steps to More Blog Subscribers
• How to Get 6,312 Subscribers to Your Business Blog in One Day

5. Completely Unaware

This is your typical social media news traffic. They aren’t necessarily looking for anything about you or your offer, but they’re responding to a piece of content you put out. This is the reason why I don’t favor link baiting with off-topic content. Sure, you get backlinks, and that’s good. But wouldn’t it be better if you got links and boosted your subscriptions too?

Strategies: When you’re creating content that is specifically designed to attract attention and links, keep it related to your ultimate goals. Traffic just for the sake of traffic is a waste of time when you’re selling something other than ads.

Value First

The blogs that attract audiences in the first place offer valuable content—it’s as simple as that. Pitching relentlessly from your blog will likely ruin effectiveness for most (if not all) businesses.

Again, you’re blogging in the first place to promote your business, and there’s no reason to be shy about that fact. But if the vast majority of your posts don’t offer independent value (telling more than selling), you won’t have as much trust with your audience, and you likely won’t have much of an audience at all.

When it comes to selling online, getting someone to take action right now is often the key to success. Many people get excited about copywriting because they believe great copy has the ability to tap into a prospect’s brain and push a “buy now” button that magically produces the sale.

It doesn’t really work that way.

The key to selling online or off is putting the right beneficial offer in front of the right person, and having great copy that overcomes the objections the prospective buyer will set as barriers to the sale. So, rather than targeting a “buy” part of the brain that triggers a sale, it’s more accurate to say that you’re aiming to knock down every “don’t buy” barrier that stands in the way.

Just recently, neuroscience researchers have located an area of the brain that actively seeks to prevent impulsive behavior. As Roger Dooley of Neuromarketing points out, this may be the location that throws up an innate barrier to buying, which the brain seeks to logically support with objections based on skepticism, price, usability or a myriad other potential barriers.

Neuroscientists Marcel Brass from Ghent University and Patrick Haggard of University College London have found an area, the dorsal fronto-medial cortex located just above the eyes, which appears to be responsible for stopping impulsive behavior.

Scientific American describes the study as, “the first neuroscientific evidence that people have self-control or the ability to reverse gears mid-action” in Impulse Stopping: When the Mind Exercises ‘Free Won’t’.

This is something copywriters intrinsically understand—that even when people are perfect candidates for a product, and even when those people want to buy, they will talk themselves out of it unless you address each objection they come up with. On the flip side, people are often actively searching for a way to shoot down their own objections and justify the buy, but if your copy is too sparse you’re out of luck.

An effective face-to-face salesperson is trained to extract objections and address them. In writing, we don’t have that luxury.

So, for unusual, novel, expensive or specialty products and services, longer copy is necessary. If you fail to address a prospect’s innate tendency to throw up objections by countering with the right information, your conversions will suffer.

This can be done with landing pages, but also with whitepapers, reports, ebooks, email tutorials, blogging, audio and video seminars and webinars. Simple and clear language, benefits and the features that support them, testimonials, specific supporting data, a sweet offer and risk-removal via solid guarantees all help you overcome objections and build trust. The more a prospect trusts you, the easier time you’ll have bypassing barriers to the sale.

Beyond putting the right offer in front of the right person, and wrapping it all up in objection-slaying information, there’s another critical element to getting past the “don’t buy” button. It’s so important that I have the words taped on the wall above my monitor.

Make them see themselves buying.

This is the art of copywriting—the story. Sometimes the story is straightforward, and sometimes it’s quite fanciful. But it’s definitely the story that makes people visualize themselves enjoying the benefits of the purchase, and if you can accomplish that, you’ll find that the objections fall a lot easier.

More on that in an upcoming series.

Today we have a simple question that will likely draw many different answers from different people.

What prevents you from sitting down and writing?

What’s stopping that great blog post, killer landing page, compelling white paper or even bestselling book from pouring out of your mind and onto virtual paper?

Don’t be shy, step up and have your say.

About the author: Michael Stelzner struggles to write daily posts at his blog Writing White Papers.

I clearly remember that first day I wandered into an IKEA megastore.

A line from that famous Eagles song came to mind: “Welcome to the Hotel California… You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

The Selfish Path

IKEA, a Swedish-based retail chain that specializes in low-cost household items, designs its stores with only one way in and one way out. The path to freedom mazes shoppers through the entire store, most of which is completely irrelevant to the shopper.

There are no shortcuts, no easy way to find what you like, and no friendly assurances that you’ll actually get what you’re after. By the time you reach the checkout line at the end of a mile-long, zig-zagging path, you have been exposed to far more than you bargained for and are likely frustrated and exhausted.

From Selfish to Safeway

Does the above sound like some white papers, articles or blog posts you have read or even written? Unlike IKEA shoppers, it’s a lot easier for a bored or frustrated reader to head for the exit. And they will if you treat them the way IKEA treats its artificially-confined customers.

Let’s carry the retail analogy a bit further. You can gain some better insights from your favorite grocery store.

Rather than wandering up and down aisles looking for vitamin B6 or Pop-Tarts, most grocery stores place helpful signs around the store to guide you. And even though they may put the milk at the back of the store to expose you to more items along the way, they don’t restrict your path—you can look for the dairy section and travel straight there.

Don’t Create IKEA Content

Similarly, well-written content must clearly guide its readers. Plus, it should remain relevant to the goals of the reader, by sticking to the promises you made to get them to read in the first place.

The key to avoiding the IKEA trap is to expose salient points to the reader in a clean and efficient manner. Don’t make the reader digest more than a few sentences before the section objectives become clearly evident. Make sure that EVERYTHING you discuss is relevant and related to the topic of the paper or post.

You should also use compelling subheads to help people make their way through your content and find what they need, all while enticing them to read more. Try adding sidebars and callouts to summarize key points for the rushed shopper.

Relevancy + Engagement = Happy Readers

Make no mistake, the goal of a persuasive piece of writing is to take the reader down the path you would like for them to travel, and ultimately to the conclusion you wish for them to reach. IKEA takes the wrong approach by making people suffer through the extraneous in order to (hopefully) satisfy their goals. Don’t make this mistake with your content.

Make the path of your content relevant and engaging every step of the way, and your readers will be happy and more likely to buy or take positive action. The simple tips in this article will help you guide your readers all the way through to the last page of your white paper or the end of your article, and leave them satisfied with the experience.

Michael Stelzner is author of the bestselling book, “Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged.” Learn how you can get a free copy of his book by clicking here.

Are you struggling to attract prospects? Do you need to increase the size of your opt-in email-marketing list?

How can you stand out in a sea of noise?

With so many disruptive (and alluring) technologies such as email, RSS readers, instant messaging and mobile phones, prospects are distracted like never before—and chances are, so are you!

This attention-deficient dilemma makes it exceptionally difficult for businesses and professionals to stand out.

So what can you do?

The answer is very simple, and rests on this premise: If you provide something of value to prospects, they will give you their respect, loyalty, time AND ultimately their business.

People are hungry to learn and find great value in educational content. Educational marketing strategies can rapidly change the face of your business.

Perhaps nothing is more valuable to readers than white papers, how-to guides, reports and ebooks.

Consider the research. A major study by KnowledgeStorm and MarketingSherpa found that readers value white papers most—more than case studies, product literature, articles from industry journalists, analyst reports, company websites, webcasts, blogs, online video and podcasts.

While white papers are super hot right now, most fail to bring opportunity.

Share Your Secrets in White Papers

Chances are you or your company has knowledge that people find valuable.

This may seem counterintuitive… If you give away some of that proprietary, hard-earned insight in the form of a white paper or ebook, you actually can propel yourself to a position of thought leader and attract opportunity.

Consider Brian Clark’s free report on viral marketing with blogs, Viral Copy. When I first read this 30-page report, I forwarded it to many of my friends with the label, “Required Reading.” This excellent resource convinced me that Brian knew his stuff. If Brian had something to sell, I’d be first in line to buy it.

Here are the core character traits of effective educational marketing tools. They:

• Downplay the mention of your product or company
• Focus on problems or needs faced by readers
• Examine trends and look at history

How to Leverage White Papers to Grow Your Business

Once you have written your masterpiece, it is time to put the document to work for you.

If your goal is to capture a lead (a name, phone number or email address, for example) or to encourage folks to join your email list, you should place the white paper, report or free ebook behind a registration form.

There is a right way and a wrong way to do this…

Mistake #1: How many times have you seen a single sentence or a paragraph summary of a white paper and then a long registration form? There may as well be a pit bull standing at the door, because I wouldn’t go near that paper.

Unfortunately, many white papers fail to provide enough content to engage readers or scare people away with 20 questions such as “What is your budget?”

Mistake #2: On the flip side, how often do you see a white paper that is instantly displayed with the click of a link? While this provides immediate access to a reader, it fails to capture any information or make it easy for readers to sign up for your newsletter.

The Solution: What I am about to propose is a strategy that appeals equally to readers and businesses. Revisit my earlier premise, when you provide value, you gain respect.

Consider real estate investment specialists Brown & Brown. A few pages of their white paper, Achieving Early Retirement With Real Estate: Rethinking Traditional Retirement Planning, are presented before the registration form appears.

With this example, readers are given plenty of sample content before they are asked to trade their personal contact information for access.

This idea flows from the video game market. Remember playing video game demos that provided you access to the first two levels? By providing a good sample taste of the product, the hope is that people will act and want the full game. The same strategy can be applied to white papers.

By providing a sufficient example of the document you want users to register for, you:

• Increase the likelihood people will complete the registration form and you capture a lead.
• Improve lead quality. If people do not find your opening words relevant, they will never scroll down the page and see there is a registration form at the bottom.
• Create a content-rich page for search engines.

When your registration form finally appears, this is the prime opportunity to ask readers if they want to join your email opt-in list, in addition to receiving the white paper.

Thus, by providing a compelling sample of your white paper, you improve the likelihood that people registering are truly interested in your topic AND you can quickly grow your opt-in lists.

Your feedback: Have you utilized this strategy effectively? What are your thoughts?

Michael Stelzner is the author of the book ‘Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged.’ For a sample chapter of Michael’s book, visit his blog and sign up for his newsletter.

This is the first Copyblogger post by Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers.

Today’s “I want it now” culture dictates that you make people happy by providing what they want, when they want it.

Need information? Google it.

However, is it really wise for marketing folks to satisfy people’s desire for instant access?

M. Scott Peck describes delayed gratification as a sacrifice of present comforts for future gain in his book, The Road Less Traveled.

By NOT providing people what they want, when they want it, you can actually improve your image, enhance your branding and increase your sales.

Why?

Unlike any other point in history, we can immediately access information.

With this great accessibility comes information overload.

With information overload comes poor retention.

With poor retention come weak branding results.

And we all know what happens if no-one remembers your brand—business stagnates.

What I am about to explain may seem counterintuitive or even downright crazy.

However, remember that you are in business to make money AND that people are willing to wait for the right something.

The Common Lead Generation Mistake

Let’s say you have some great information and have formatted it into a white paper or an ebook.

You have written this material to ultimately grow your business.

You really have two marketing options:

• Give it away: With this option, you simply have a PDF file publicly available for immediate access and hope the document does all the selling for you.
• Gate it away: This involves providing a sample of the content and then asking people to do something to gain access to the rest.

I am going to focus on the concept of gating your great content.

This is particularly common with lead generation campaigns tied to white papers or free reports.

After people read a sample of your wonderful content, you ask them to complete the registration form.

Now here’s the big mistake many marketers make: They simply send on the requested information immediately after the form has been completed.

The logic goes like this: I have captured my lead and that’s all I care about.

However, you’ll have a much bigger marketing opportunity if you send something else, rather than what was requested.

With immediate access after registration, you end up simply making a very quick impression on readers that is easily forgotten.

Because the only post-registration touch point is the document itself, you are banking fully on the strength of your ebook or white paper to do all of your selling.

If you could, wouldn’t you rather have four or five touch points?

Delayed Response Marketing

There are acceptable ways to get a few marketing messages delivered and improve your image, while maintaining your reader’s interest.

What I am about to outline comes from personal experience.

I wrote a document called, “How to Write a White Paper: A White Paper on White Papers.” More than 44,000 people registered for the paper and I still have between 50 and 100 people signing up daily. To see how I set up the main page, click here.

Here is the delayed response marketing principle applied:

Touch Point 1 – The “Thank-You” Page: After the registration form is submitted, send the reader to a “Thank you for registering” page. This is where you make your first pitch for some of your value-added services. You should also include the email address your document will be sent from so folks to add it to their white lists (increasing delivery rates). See a sample here.

Touch Point 2 – The “Thanks for Registering” Email: Set up an autoresponder that sends a thank-you message to new registrants. This is where you can thank them for registering and state, “While you are waiting for our paper, you might be interested in this other information.” You can link to some of your services, your blog and so on.

Touch Point 3 – Send the Content One Hour Later: Set up a delayed message that sends the requested document (or links to a page that contains it) after an hour has gone by. Be sure to mention again some of the other services you offer.

Touch Point 4 – The Actual Document: The ebook or white paper is the final touch point. By this time, the reader has been expecting your content and should be familiar with your name, company and brand.

Touch Point 5 – Your Newsletter (optional): If you have a newsletter, it would be wise to add the option to subscribe to it on your registration form. Set up a three-day delay and send a special prefabricated edition of your newsletter. This provides another opportunity to get your name in front of a prospect.

The Benefits

By NOT sending what they want right away, you can actually:

• Increase your name recognition: Every time the prospect reads something from you, your name becomes etched in their brain. More touch points mean more chances you will gain their business.
• Establish a relationship: By sending well-crafted messages, you begin the process of establishing trust with your prospect. These relationship-forming steps help take you from an information dispenser to an advocate.
• Increase your open rates: Because readers are expecting an email from you, your thank-you message and follow-up message will have a very high open rate. This is the prime time to mention related products and services.
• Improve the desire to read the document: When the final document arrives, the reader will have been prepared for this great piece. The delayed gratification concept kicks in and they will likely treat your work as extra special, devoting time to your useful resource.

What are your thoughts? Do these concepts run against the grain of typical online marketing strategies?

Michael Stelzner is the author of the book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged. Subscribe to his 20,000-reader newsletter here.

The key is to cover all the bases when it comes to the different learning styles of the audience. Let me elaborate on that point a bit.

One way in which otherwise quality content fails to satisfy the needs of much of the prospective audience is by failing to address different learning styles. Moreover, failing to properly structure the different approaches to communicating information will leave many of your readers confused and your content in shambles from a flow perspective.

Luckily, it’s easier than it sounds, thanks to the 4MAT methodology developed by Bernice McCarthy as a strategy for teachers to create more effective instructional materials. This same approach will help you develop educational marketing materials such as essays, blog posts, and white papers, and develop tutorial content that draws traffic to your site and creates satisfied new subscribers.

The Four Learning Styles

Studies have identified four discrete styles of learning based on the different ways people perceive information:

1. Innovative Learners (approximately 35% of people) want to know why they should learn something, and how it will benefit them. This is the “what’s in it for them” factor.
2. Analytic Learners (approximately 22% of people) want “just the facts,” and will be keen to see what the features or supporting data looks like once the benefits have been communicated.
3. Common Sense Learners (approximately 18% of people) are interested in how things work, and are best served by concrete, experiential learning activities.
4. Dynamic Learners (approximately 25% of people) are enthralled with the possibilities offered by the information, rely heavily on their own intuition, and seek to teach both themselves and others.

Integrating the Four Learning Styles

Failing to address any of the four learning styles will likely diminish the impact of your content. More importantly, the four styles are interdependent, in that type 3 and 4 learners cannot optimally connect with the lesson without having first experienced content aimed at type 1 and 2 learners. Plus, addressing each learning style also offers something for everyone, regardless of that person’s preferred style of learning.

This is why the 4MAT approach is called a cycle, and is represented as a sequential pie chart with each learning type representing a phase of the instruction. Structuring your writing or presentations with this cycle in mind can make you a more effective communicator.

• Phase One: Why

  Besides targeting the largest learning style group, starting off your content with the reason why the information is of value is a foundational element of the rest of the piece. It’s also critical for attracting attention. This is why your headline and opening paragraphs must quickly and clearly express a practical benefit to the reader, and why presentations must grab attention immediately before getting into substance.

• Phase Two: What

  Now we come to what analytic learners call the meat—the features of a product and the supporting data. In other words, they want cold, hard facts and analysis. This phase of your content naturally follows the statement of the “why,” and failing to properly segue into phase two by dwelling on too much fluff up front will hurt you with these people, as well as bog down your overall delivery.

• Phase Three: How

  Once common sense learners have heard the why and the what, they’re ready to dive in and learn—by doing. While it’s tough for people to get hands on when reading or listening, you can appease the how crowd with specific examples and illustrations of how things work in the real world. Case studies and other concrete scenarios bring things together for the common sense learner, and add extra understanding to the innovative and analytic learner.

• Phase Four: What If…

  The dynamic learner has absorbed everything offered so far, and has been sitting there wondering what would happen if x is modified, or what if I did y instead because my situation is slightly different? These are the people who shine during Q and A at a presentation, who take the time to email a question to the author, and who leave comments requesting clarification or offering up their own illustrations in order to sharpen their understanding. Having an interactive online presence completes the learning cycle, and allows for the conversation to spread onto other blogs and social media sites.

Engaging Left and Right Brain

Now that you have the four-step cycle down, make the presentation of your information flow by keeping the reader constantly engaged across both hemispheres of the brain. How? Follow up facts or main points with stories, anecdotes, relevant quotes… basically anything cool that holds attention and reinforces learning. This method engages left and right brain in a healthy cadence that makes the experience less of a chore, and more entertaining.

The Four Phases and Business Blogging

You’ve likely noticed that this post is heavy on the why and what, with only a sprinkling of how and very little in the way of stories and illustrations. Comments are open so we can engage in what if… However, the great thing about applying this methodology via a blog is you can do a series of posts on the same topic and approach the subject from each of the four learning styles, or otherwise break up the content in a way that makes sense. This is why blogs can be such powerful tools for both educating and converting readers into customers and clients—they allow for a running dialogue via easily digestible portions.

Any questions?