Use these strategies developed by the folks at HR Daily Advisor to help your writers and editors sell more product.
How do you teach a journalist to sell more products? Journalists can be very persistent about the integrity of their content; the willingness to “compromise” that content with a sales pitch can be daunting.
Jay Shleifer, Managing Editor at HR Daily Advisor is currently training two people to take over his duties as author of HR Daily Advisor and BLR’s newly launched Safety Daily Advisor which are both email newsletters and websites reaching HR and Safety professionals, respectively. You might assume, by reading an HRDA email or blog post, that they have a whole crew of talented editors or copywriters over there. Not true.
“The two people who I’m training now are both editorial writers previously, and I think that’s what you’re going to find more often. I thinks it’s harder for a copywriter to flip the looking glass the other way around,” he told us.
Schleifer compares the work he does, and the work he is training his two editorial writers to do, to service journalism. “If you can convince your editors that the style of their writing is similar to those who write movie or book reviews, the transition will be much smoother.”
On the other hand, if you were to try and convince a seasoned copywriter to be more journalistic in their writing, you might not get as far. “There could be too many exclamation points (in the writing),” Schleifer joked.
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But how do you train a journalist to write more like a copywriter?
The key to selling more products through editorial stories is learning how to transition from talking about the article to talking about the product. Mr. Schleifer and the folks at HRDA developed four strategies for their writers on how to “smooth” the process of selling product via editorial content:
Editorial Copywriting Tip #1: Use samples from the product to support the story
“Here’s an issue or a problem that most people in our market our facing and here’s what our book says about it…”
Editorial Copywriting Tip #2: Use “our editors recommend”
“Here’s a question or a dilemma everyone faces, we’ve asked our editors what they think and they recommend these strategies, which are explored more deeply in this product…”
Editorial Copywriting Tip #3: Write the article as a behind the scenes story on how the product was created
“This is the process we went through in coming up with this product…” Schleifer says his customers respond especially well to this strategy.
Editorial Copywriting Tip #4: Position the product as a product review, especially if it’s new or recently updated:
“Our new (or revised) product features XYZ, we added this component after realizing…”
As we said in our tip Increase Email Revenue by Using Service Journalism, Mr. Shleifer trains his editors to sell products while maintaining the honesty and tactical transparency required to preserve a trusting audience. The key is to make whatever you are pitching, the answer to the question your audience is asking.
And if the question you are asking is how to train your staff to run a profitable online business, then perhaps you should attend the next Mequoda Summit where we have an entire 90 minute session on how to effectively organize your online publishing business.
