When I was getting ready to start my business, I had a bit of trouble deciding what to call myself. I develop content for commercial purposes—text for brochures, flyers, corporate newsletters and the like. Sometimes I write for magazines, but only if the story’s backed by a business objective.

Still, I wasn’t sure whether to position myself as a copywriter, a content developer, or a marketing writer. So I described each position to see where I best fit. I’m sharing my (edited) descriptions with you, so that next time you’re offering a commercial writing service or looking for someone who does, you’ll have a better idea what to call it.
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When I left full-time employment to start my own business, I had to give up good, cheap health insurance. What I have now is an HSA with a $5,000 deductible. Being 32 with no pre-existing conditions, I decided that combining a low premium with cash in the bank is better than shelling out $600 a month for coverage I will likely not use.

But as every full-time entrepreneur knows, you work your butt off the first few years. You don’t mind the long hours because it’s “your thing,” but working long hours also means less time for sleep, exercise, and preparing healthy meals.
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When you’re communicating to sell, you need to seize people’s attention right away. But how do you do that? How do you capture an audience immediately, and then transition into your argument in a natural manner?

Next time you’re writing an article or presentation, try opening with one of these:

1. Analogy. Analogies compare two seemingly unrelated things. They’re great for explaining anything that’s obscure or complicated because they pack in so much information. Take “the brain is like a computer,” for instance. In six words, you’ve communicated that the brain processes, stores, and retrieves information; has short- and long-term memory; and needs energy to function (plus a bunch of other things you associate with a computer). It’s the same with explaining the structure of an atom by comparing it to the solar system. Don’t overreach with your analogies though. The comparison has to to make sense, or you risk confusion.

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Companies get us to buy products and services by engaging in what marketing strategist Barry Feig calls “hot button marketing.” We all have hot buttons. Triggers that when hit, take us in or push us away. Things like the desire to be safe, to achieve, and to procreate. The desire to dominate, nurture, and control our environment.

Duke University’s banking on our desire to save money. Beginning on January 2013, Duke will be charging employees who smoke an additional $10 a month for health insurance.

“Tobacco use is linked to many cancers and other health conditions, so it drives up the cost of health care,” Duke said in a statement. Obviously, the university wants to recoup whatever extra it’s paying for employees who get sick from their bad habits. But if Duke’s also using the surcharge as an incentive for people  to stop smoking, it should probably use the money to expand its award-winning smoking cessation program as well. That’s because by itself, $10—about the cost of three lattes—won’t make much of a difference.

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Last week, a reader chided me for using the word, “lede” in an article on how to spot an awful press release. She thought it was either a misspelled version of “lead” or a term peculiar to the public relations industry. Either way, it was bad. Here I was telling people to double check for errors and jargon before submitting a press release, and I hadn’t followed my advice.

Another reader, however, mocked the first. She replied, “If you think that ‘lede’ is either spelled wrong or too-technical jargon (in an article on writing for writers), you have no business being in any writing profession.”  Someone else told me I had “no need to apologize…[because I was] talking to people in [my] own industry who should know the term.”

Even though it hurts to be criticized, I agree with the reader who called me out. Journalists coined the term “lede” to refer to the first paragraph of an article or story, but all kinds of writers check out Ragan’s PR Daily, where the article appeared. I actually got an email from a communications manager that same day who thought “lede” was a typo, too. When I defined it for her, she replied, “I’m a communications professional who was not trained as a journalist, so it was lost on me! My apologies.”

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When I was in journalism school, I got a big fat F on a paper. My professor actually liked my story about a couple who spent 3 years sailing around the world, visiting more than 30 countries along the way. But I had misspelled “Colombia” as “Columbia,” and at my school, factual errors (she considered it one) slash 50 points off your score.

I thought it was a little extreme, but the F made me keenly aware of the consequences of mistakes in reporting. When I left journalism for public relations and marketing, I applied the same gun-to-the-head approach to press release writing.

Now about the word, “press.” I know press releases are no longer just being sent to the media. Distribution services like PR Web and Business Wire (not to mention Google Alerts, Twitter, Facebook, and other tools people can use to monitor and share content) now allow for a strategy that targets customers directly. David Meerman Scott, author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, actually prefers to call them “news releases” instead of “press releases,” so it doesn’t sound like they’re exclusively for the press.

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MarketingProfs and the Content Marketing Institute recently released reports stating that live events and case studies are the two most effective content marketing tools for B2B companies.

Case studies are stories of how businesses overcome obstacles, so no wonder they’re so effective. Even though we now receive enough information to make a typical laptop crash in a week, our brain still responds to data like it always did—by looking for stories to make sense of the experience.

Unfortunately, it can be challenging to convince customers to say yes to case studies. Some customers see your solution as a competitive advantage that they’d rather not share with others. Those with hundreds of vendors avoid the hassle of saying yes to many by saying no to all (common among Fortune 500 companies). Some are simply busy.

It could also be that from your customers’ point of view, they already did you a favor by giving you their business. They’re not especially inclined to do another one.

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Public relations has changed dramatically since the advent of social media. It used to be that courting the favor of journalists was the only way businesses could cultivate the goodwill of  customers. Now they can directly engage those customers. They can create and upload videos, blog posts, and tweets just as often as they send out news releases, if not more.

Yet every business owner and PR practitioner I know still gets a buzz every time a trade magazine publishes his or her clip. After all, someone else writing an article about your business does more for its credibility than you writing an article about it. Especially if that someone works for a reputable trade publication.

So while you should definitely interact with customers directly through your website and various social media channels, don’t forget to engage the publishers and editors of publications relevant to your industry. They may not be your prospects, but they are in a position to influence your prospects.

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There’s a pattern to all stories that most of us recognize. We see it in Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter, and read it in almost every popular fantasy novel.

New Yorker cartoonist Roy Chast described it using the following sequence: “once upon a time,” “suddenly,” “luckily” and “happily ever after.”

“Once upon a time” introduces the story’s characters. It encourages us to relate to their traits, situations, and problems.

“Suddenly” messes up the characters’ lives, and we care about it because the writer did such as good job with “once upon a time.”

“Luckily” demonstrates how the characters deal with this challenge.

“Happily ever after” describes what happens to the characters as a result.

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I like reading fiction because it’s fun and it hones my writing skills. But when it comes to non-fiction, say, self-help books, business books, books on pop psychology, or how-tos, I prefer to watch and listen.

I listen to audiobooks while commuting between my house and office. I remember stories I see on YouTube more than stories I read in magazines. I tend to click on video links first after Googling instructions on how to use a new application. Over time, my patience for reading big blocks of text that don’t involve characters and plot has worn thin.

I’m not the only one. According to eMarketer, approximately 80% of Internet users regularly watch online video. Meanwhile, we’re continuing to witness the sad and steady decline of print material—print publications are either moving online (where articles tend to be shorter) or closing down altogether.

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