Success ultimately comes down to one thing: getting known. Whether it’s in business, scholarship, entertainment or the arts , for you to rise to the top of your profession, people have to know who you are. It may not be fair, but when one person gets more notice and attention than another, we assume that that person has some distinction or edge or positive quality the other person doesn’t. And that’s the person that gets the job and leads the pack.

Every field has such a figure – Donald Trump, Real Estate Millionaire; Anthony Hopkins, the Actor’s Actor; Lee Iacocca, Mr. CEO; Margaret Thatcher, Madame Conservative; Walter Cronkite, Mr. Anchorperson; Harry Houdini, the Great Magician.

Even locally there are always a handful of figures who are the local doctors or lawyers or people to go to.

What gives them that edge? What can make you the acknowledged leader in your field?

A special kind of marketing. The kind that promotes not a product but a person.

How is it done? And how can you do it?

Start With A Niche

It’s easier to become a great anything than a great everything. To become eminent in a particular field, you have to first select a field, and the more particular and focused it is, the better. The more focused your area is, the less competition there is for the top spots, and the easier it is to master the unique skills or requirements of that field.

It’s easier to become a famous liberal or conservative politician than to become a famous politician, and a famous heart surgeon or neurosurgeon than a famous surgeon. You can expand that niche, but a niche remains the easiest place to start out.

So to become an acknowledged leader in your profession, first ask yourself what makes you unique within your profession.

Get Qualified

And by get qualified, I don’t mean get over-qualified. The best known person in a field is not necessarily the best qualified person in the field. Shakespeare did not have an MFA in English, and Einstein’s failing grade in math is legend. But while future leaders are not always the first in their graduating class, by and large, they at least went to a good school or studied under someone good. If you want to be a notable doctor, you have to start by getting a medical degree.

Do you need to demonstrate expertise? The answer may surprise you, but no. You don’t have to be the very best at what you do, or even remarkably good at what you do, to be an acknowledged recognized expert at it. You can have exceptional skills. But even without them you can make a mark.

How?

By organizing and directing people who have exceptional skills. Lee Iacocca was not a great mechanic, nor Leonard Bernstein a great instrumentalist. But they could organize and inspire people of talent.
Or you can associate with people with remarkable skills. Oprah is not generally considered a great writer or a leading actress or vocalist. But she continually connects with leading writers, actors, vocalists. Associate with the acknowledged leaders in a field and fame will rub off on you.

You can also simply explain or evaluate how it’s done. The thought leaders in many a field are not active practitioners in that field. They may well be academics or writers who have never run a company or acted on stage, but who explain and articulate powerfully and brilliantly. (Or have a ghostwriter who does it.)

Join Articulate Communities

Fame is social. No one ever became famous staying home hiding behind the curtains. You have to mingle, and you have to mingle in the right circles. What circles are the right circles? They’re not always expert circles – rather, they’re articulate circles: groups that not only hear what you have to say, but actively spread your words and spread word about you. A single journalist with no particular experise in an area can make you more well known than several colleagues renowned in that area.
Needless to say it pays to cultivate both. And the new social media has allowed articulate communities to spread their views so widely that it merits a later section all to itself. The principle remains: to become a hot topic of conversation, find and mingle with those who converse and whose conversations are followed.

Build Your Web Site

These days a web site is as necessary to a person as a business card or a personal ID. It is the one place where you can make a definitive case for yourself, and present the world the image of yourself that you want it to see. It’s the best means you have to say exactly what you want to say to the world.

But it can be so much more. A professionally constructed site can show you who’s visiting, what pages they linger over, and how long they stay. It can allow them to download your information kit, hear you talk, see you on video, make a payment, leave a message – the works.

In a world of global information, the first impression many people get of you will be through the web. If you shape that impression rightly, you’ve taken a major step to making yourself the knowledgeable and notable expert to call.

Build Your Blog

What’s the difference between a web site and a blog?

Roughly, a web site is about you and what you can do.  A blog is you, speaking directly.

That’s not to say that there aren’t blog-style web sites that aren’t compelling and powerful too. Blog-style sites may feature multiple bloggers, or may be comprehensive interactive content management systems, or may host truly massive amounts of information.

But the classical blog approach is one person, communicating his or her personal thoughts, often in the give-and-take of online conversation. That can certainly help highlight you as the obvious expert, and this personal, conversational style is at the heart of social media marketing.   Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the rest all stem in various degrees from the blog approach to developing a web presence conversationally.

Can blogging alone gain fans and followers, and build and even make a reputation?  Sure. But why let your blog go it alone? The more tools you have, the more ways you have to build a compelling reputation. Create a dazzling web site, blog and tweet. The farther you stretch, the more you reach

Article Market

Blogs can make you look casually knowledgeable, and books can make you the authority in a field. But is there no middle way between the offhand approach of the first and the major commitment in time of the second?

There is. Article marketing. Concise, keyword-rich, properly tagged pieces on particular subjects can drive traffic to your web site, pop up on page one in Google, and demonstrate expertise and a flair for articulate writing and thinking with a quickness matched only by blogging – and, the articles can be combined into ebooks and even eventually books themselves.

Optimize

Optimization means making sure that every digital document you put out onto the net is written, designed and formatted so that search engines and content-hungry websites will pick it up. OK, it’s a little esoteric, and you may have to hire a specialist. It’s worth the money. If anything you have to say goes out on the web, be sure the document is written and formatted in ways that are search-engine and RSS friendly.

What you have to say doesn’t matter if no one reads it. Optimize. Bad optimization = zero readership.

Use Social Media

Can you get to the top of the list in your profession by working social media alone? Probably not. But if you don’t make it a key element in your efforts, you’re nuts. A thousand followers on Twitter, five hundred friends on Facebook, and two hundred and fifty connections on LinkedIn, is considered to be the ‘triple crown’ of social media influence, and the closer you approach that goal, the closer you will be to having and maintaining the kind of lasting prominence that builds notable careers.

There are well over fifty competing social media tools, and the landscape will surely alter sooner than we know. The fact remains that anyone wishing to advance their career needs to know these tools and get familiar with them, not simply because they can get you known and talked about quickly and widely (even globally!) in literally a matter of moments.

Social media affects us whether we take part or not, because those who do take part in it discuss and praise and criticize even those who don’t. And so everyone involved with others now either has or can have a social media presence, deliberate or not, and the effects can reach back in ways positive and negative, major and minor.

Should someone wishing to advance themselves take part in those conversations, or let others discuss them without knowing it? Clearly, it’s better to take part. And there’s no better way than to begin with the three current leaders: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Use Old School PR

I know, I know. Print is dead. Even TV is dead. Everyone keeps saying that. And everyone keeps picking up the paper at the newsstand, reading the magazine in the doctor’s office, opening up that junk mail, and tuning into Oprah.

Print is not dead. Nor is TV. When a newspaper writes you up, you get attention – not least because, these days, whatever appears first in print appears next online. When you appear on TV, tens of thousands if not millions of people see you. And then see you over and over again on YouTube.

Get into print. Get on TV. Talk to radio interviewers too, while you’re at it. Is using pre-internet media Old School? So what? Old School works, and when you use it it’s augmented by New School digitization, video, and podcasting almost at once. Do it.

And get out among people, too. Yes, you can be Max Headroom and become world-famous without ever making a personal appearance and even without being a person at all. That’s the exception, not the rule. Talks still work. Seminars still work. Workshops still work. Reality builds pretty good web traffic too.

Write The Book

If PR is Old School, books are straight out of the Paleozoic. But Old School or not, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can get you recognized as an expert or  a leader in your field than writing a good book.

Why the mystique of authorship is so strong in an time so awash in Google and Yahoo is a mystery. But you don’t have to understand a mystery to acknowledge its power. Whether you’re George Soros or Bill Gates, Arnold Schwartzeneggar or Seth Godin, Barack Obama or David Ogilvy, if you are a person of influence you are the author of a book. Nothing sets the seal of expertise on a person more strongly.

Unfortunately few things are more time-consuming to produce or difficult to carry through. The actual text has to be researched and written and revised, publishers and distributors need to be involved, the physical book layouts has to be created and the book cover designed, and post-publication promotion can make or break the reception of the book.  A manuscript alone is not enough. If a book is not part of an overall marketing effort, its creation may well be wasted.

But that’s all the more reason to think of a book project in marketing terms right from the start.

In a world without deadlines, taking the time to write a book might well be considered a pleasure. But if someone is a busy professional with a full To-Do list, writing assistance is mandatory. Should you have your book ghostwritten? Increasingly, many businessmen, professionals and experts do.

It’s not a question of lack of skill but lack of time. An expert who takes six months to a year off to write a book will probably not be as competitive an expert at the end of that time, and his or her other marketing efforts and business may well have taken a back seat too. Using a ghostwriter can be the fastest way to the single strongest thing you can do to establish expertise. It’s definitely an option to consider.

But solo or with assistance, the book is a must

Get Help

Don’t have time to write a book? Haven’t got all day and night to wade through all the cutting-edge social media? Not sure how to reach, pitch, and get the attention of journalists? No idea how to design a web site, set up a blog, arrange for a series of talks and lectures, assemble and distribute a Press Kit?

Welcome to the human race. People who rise to the top of the profession have a well-known secret: they practice their profession. Promotion they leave to others. Yes, you can concentrate only at working at your profession, and being the best you can. Word of mouth marketing gets clients too. But competitors who are not necessarily less able will get the same word of mouth marketing, and amplify it many many times over through all varieties of print and digital media, and all without taking away from their regular tasks, if professional assistance is brought in.

Of course, if you have multiple promotional talents at the professional level across several areas, and can cram 48 hours into a 24-hour day, you can get known all by yourself. You deserve to be!

But if you’re human, you’ll probably need professional help.

Where can you find it?

A good starting place would be www.davidpascal.com. Humility aside, the site is the only one I know with sections on social media, writing for the web, book design, ghostwriting, search engine optimization, and, not least, an extremely wide-ranging section of informational links and resources. The site covers more marketing in general that personal marketing geared at advancing one’s career. But parts of it do, and if you don’t find what you need there, you will almost certainly find a link to what you need there. On the subject of online identity management, Radically Transparent, by Andy Beal and Judy Strauss, is the best book to read. And if you would look further into the subject, search Google.

All World-Famous All Of The Time

Whether you go it alone, or get help, or decide to try out only one or two of the above recommended steps, definitely realize that things have changed.

Andy Warhol once said famously that in the future we would all be famous for fifteen minutes. He was wrong. The future is here, and we are all world-famous twenty-four hours a day. What we are and what we do leaves light or heavy traces on the internet, and we can use this to our advantage to advance our careers and values and beliefs, or we can ignore it and let things happen to us as they will.

Intelligent professionals and entrepreneurs will respond actively, not passively, and shape their futures the best way they can. History and technology have given us extraordinary new tools. We only have to reach out and use them.

Designers and copywriters don’t always get on well.

Partly it’s a turf thing. Rare is the agency whose art department isn’t straining to splash dazzling visuals across multi-page spreads and browser screens. The copy department has a similar obsessive urge, a primal ache to cover every inch of white space with Times New Roman.

Whichever side wins, the marketing materials that emerge, like their creators, are heavily lopsided towards either the verbal or the visual.

And that’s too bad, since neither approach appeals to all of the market, only parts.

How do you avoid that? How you get visuals and copy to work effectively together?

Here are some tips:

What Do You Want The Target Market To Do?

I write and I also design. But when I create marketing materials for a client, the main thing that concerns me is not visual, not verbal, but behavioral. Marketing isn’t there to create art for art’s sake. It’s there to advance business goals.

Marketing materials are there to get a measurable active response from a target public. You want to get someone to do something – to make a purchase, send a donation, vote for a candidate.

Advertising ‘concepts’ touch on this with the notion of expressing one central idea in both words and design. Yes, but what is the point of that concept? What is its goal?

Good marketing and advertising is not about making pretty pictures or memorable remarks. The concept — and the copy and the design that express that concept — have to move the audience to action. If people see your promotion and just drift away, why bother?

So always ask yourself first: what are the words and images intended to get people to do?

Different Ways Of Expressing The Same Idea

Once you’ve got that target action clearly in mind, ask yourself this: what sort of visual imagery alone would incline a person to do that thing?

Say, for example, that you want someone to buy a car. What visual impressions would incline someone to want to own that car?

Images of stylish exteriors, surely. Roomy interior space, rich accessories, gleaming dashboard paraphernalia. Images of happy campers happily camping, if the vehicle is geared to that market. Or of James Bond at the wheel, if geared to another.

Then do the same thing with the copy. Ask yourself, what words or statements would have the same effect?

Often the time-hallowed ones will do it. Great mileage. Easy payment plan. Quick and helpful service.

But if you’re truly aiming for the same effect, you’re likely to come up with individualized words and phrases that say in words what the pictures are saying in terms of imagery.

Put it this way. Imagine that you’re thinking of hiring a salesperson. You interview two candidates at Starbucks. One is articulate, eloquent, and suave. Unfortunately the mark of Satan is tattooed on his forehead. The second candidate is grey-haired and square-jawed, wearing a silver Rolex, a Brooks Brother pinstripe, and an alumni pin from Harvard. Sadly, his language skills are limited to Latin.

Now if you could combine that affable eloquence with that good business suit, you’d get a positive response. If you combined the satanic tattoos and the Latin, that might work too, if you’re marketing Death Metal albums.

And that’s the point. People going to interviews try to talk in ways likely to get them a positive response, and they dress in a way that secures a good response too. Intergration follows naturally.

Ads are like that. They make a verbal impression on us through what they say, and a non-verbal impression on us with how they look.

It isn’t that difficult to figure out what makes a good and similar impression in each area. Or to see how similarities harmonize.

The Strip Test

Here’s a test. Look at any given ad. Ask yourself this. Suppose there were no visuals at all. Strip them out.

If all you saw was the plain text by itself, would you remember it?

Would you still be interested, and be more inclined to buy the product or take the action than if you hadn’t seen it?

If so, the copy works.

Now put back the images and strip out the words. What if you saw just the images alone? Would you still get roughly the same idea? Would you still be inclined to get the product?

If so, the imagery works.

And when they both work, the marketing piece will generally work too.

Overkill Kills

Do imagery and copy need to work together really tightly? The inclination is to say yes. If your ad proclaims Leo Associates to be The Lion Of Theatrical Agencies, you generally want to couple it with an image of the Lion King and not a dead dog.

But in my experience, the only thing you must avoid when integrating copy and imagery is blatant incongruence. Overkill kills: it’s enough for them to be quietly complementary, so long as the core idea gets through.

Images of pleasant skies have nothing to do with pharmaceuticals, for example, but they can provide effective backdrops for pharmaceutical ad copy, and yield effective ads. You don’t need literal one-to-one equivalence between words and pictures to create a fine piece.

It’s also true that text and imagery can comment on one another ironically, of course. The face of Frankenstein might make an effective visual for an advertisement for cosmetic surgery, for instance.

But irony and dissonance are paths to take with reluctance. Marketing materials fly by consumers at the speed of light, and impressions they make are instant. To assume the public will stop and take the time to savor your ad’s urbane ambiguities can be fatal.

Which Matters Most – Copy Or Design?

Both matter, obviously. But which element deserves the highest attention? It really depends on the particular situation. Pictures of fashion models sell fashion better than words, and paperbacks flash the author’s name across the cover, not their photo. Wise marketers let the market determine the medium.

But if I absolutely had to pick? I’d pick copy.

The fact is, there are perfectly effective ads that have no visual element at all. From personals to classifieds to full-page ads in the New York Times, words alone will move people.

And – the critical distinction – they will move them with precision. A picture of a tire cut in half won’t tell you that Crazy Al is selling his tires half-off this Sunday only. Text will tell you. And it will sell those tires too.

Images are wonderful at conveying emotion and mood, but mood isn’t language, and more sales are closed when buyers can articulate the reasons for the purchase than when they can’t. Design makes a wonderful sauce. But text is the meat.

Though of course a good cook will give as much attention to the one as to the other. You have to prepare both expertly to bring the client to the table.

David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.

Web Copy Has To Stand Alone

Back in the old days when print was the rule, things were static. What you saw was what you got. Every element of an advertisement worked together to create a single fixed effect. The finished ad or brochure or billboard looked the same to every reader every time.

Those days are dead. Print still counts, but not the way it did. The way we write now is for the web. And it’s no secret why. Magazine copy, direct mail, annual reports reach only so many people. Digitized versions can reach the whole world. So even when you do print, one eye is always on the web, since that’s where print materials are likely to turn up. And stay turned up for a long long time.

But the web is a very different medium. Web browsers don’t show a fixed creation the way the designers envisioned it. Browsers take raw code and separate files and reconstruct them as best they can. So what you see can look different in each different browser.

And different can mean very different. Images can be turned off to save download time. Type can be halved or doubled or in size, depending on the viewer’s default setting. The viewer may be blind and use a program that speaks the text aloud. Copy can appear on a massive monitor running multiple screens simultaneously. Or on a 50-inch WebTV. Or on a mobile phone screen the size of a postage-stamp.

You can be fairly certain that in most cases browsers will be looking at an end product sort of close to what the web designer wanted. Maybe. But you have no assurance.

The online copywriter has to work on the assumption that none of the visual elements that normally support the copy – not even typography — will do so.

The copy you write has to be able to stand alone.

Entrance From Anywhere

It isn’t just that the look can’t be taken for granted. The logical flow can’t either.

When reading print, people normally start at the beginning, move through the middle, and go on through the end. The logical stages of an argument, a presentation, a process, unfold in clear sequential order.

On the web, readers enter your site from any page, not necessarily the home page. And they progress through it any way they please.

They leap away to other sites via hyperlinks. They scan, bouncing from sub-head to pull quote to pop-up window. They may follow a link into your site at a page devoted to your staff’s bios. They may jump next to the links page, see one they like, and click away never to return, or bounce back and hop over to the FAQ, or bookmark it to del.icio.us where they (and thousands more) may access it later. They may click an mp3 file to listen to your pitch with their ears while replying to email with their hands and browsing a competitor’s site with their eyes.

How much of your site do such visitors seen? A tenth? A twentieth? What order have they seen it in? Even they may not remember. How much do they come away with?

Again: web copy has to stand alone. It’s isn’t just that it has to work independently of the visuals or the surrounding imagery. It has to work independently of the surrounding pages. Sometimes even of the surrounding paragraphs. Writing for the web means creating content that makes instant sense or gets instant interest regardless of overall context.

Can Effective Web Copy Be Written At All?

Sounds bad, doesn’t it? Well, yes. Your site’s readers can drop in at any point, move in any order, and see get your message in ways totally different from the way you wanted them to get it.

But is it fatal? No. The fact is, web readers follow the news, not only visit sites but comment on them, read blogs and wikis and fanfiction, and make online purchases in the billions. Clearly people read online, and take actions and make buying decisions on based on what they read.

And that’s the key to writing effective web content. Because when you find things that work, you can study the process. And re-create it.

Web studies abound tracking the way people read and react to writing on the web. (The archives at Jacob Neilsen’s www.useit.com contain a Niagara of material on the subject.)

In my case it’s led me to four principles that I continually keep in mind when writing for the web:

Who Are The Readers And What Do They Want To Know?

That’s the first question to ask. And it should be asked in that order. Start with who, not what.

Say you’re writing a travel blog so your family can follow your foreign tour. They want to hear about your feelings, your experiences, your surprises. Because they want to hear about you.

Say you’re writing copy for a travel agency web site. You write about the place, the sights, the prices, the cuisine. Why? Because what potential tourists care about is not you. They care about the tour.

Both categories of reader really want the same thing: information. But they want different kinds of information. Your first task as an online copywriter is to find out what that target readership wants to know.

Think of web readers as information hunters. They want to know something, and they want to find it out as quickly as they can. They don’t want to have to dig for it and they don’t want to have to puzzle over it. They want it straight and the want it now. Bang.

What sells is relevance. And relevance is only relevant in relation to a person.

Find out about that person. If you’re lucky, review the market research. And if you don’t have any, talk to a few actual target prospects or check out where they chat on the web.

The more you learn about the prospects, the better the eventual copy.

Long Copy Still Sells

What? Long copy sells? “But I thought web readers barely read at all?”

Readers don’t. Buyers do. Long copy sells – to serious buyers. And those are the only kinds you really need to consider.

The fact is, not everyone who visits your site or reads your online piece is a likely prospect. Some are. Some aren’t. Most aren’t. Most visitors flicker in, have a glance, and click away.

But people seriously interested in a subject, people who are seriously thinking about making a purchase, will want more information not less. And they will go through it. Don’t think of it as long copy. Think of it as rich comprehensive content.

Example. Imagine that you want to buy a Volkswagen. You see two classified ads.

Ad One: “Car For Sale. Contact POB XXXX.”

Ad Two: “2004 VW. 20,000 Miles, Perfect Condition, Inspected, Automatic, A/C, CD Stereo. Price Negotiable. Must Sell By Tomorrow! Call XXX-XXXX.”

Ad One is short. Which in principle is fine. But are you really going to send a letter to a P.O. Box and wait to see if that car even is a VW, when the second ad looks like a good VW deal and could go any second? Ad Two sells because Ad Two tells.

Don’t misunderstand. Prospects don’t read your writing for the joy of savoring your elegant prose style. Short sentences, short paragraphs, and straight-to-the-point copy remain the rule. But that doesn’t mean you cut down on content. Far from it.

Take a potential client who needs marketing. He sees one business card with the word MARKETING on it, followed by the company name address. Then he sees a second business card that says Print, Direct Mail and Internet Marketing, Branding and Strategy, In-House Design and Production, 20 Years Experience, Free Consultation, followed by name, address, phone number and URL. Which card is more likely to lead to a call?

A consumer making a low-cost purchase may buy casually. But when business people in business-to-business situations make a decision, they want as much relevant information as they can get. Give it to them.

Content is king for a reason: it rules. And while it’s smart to serve it up online in short sentences, serve up more content rather than less. Substance still sells, and a rich amount of strong selling content is always stronger than copy that’s information-starved.

Write Long Cut Short

Short sentences, short paragraphs, and straight-to-the-point copy definitely works well on the web. No question. Unfortunately that may lead you to think that not only is it good to write short, it’s good to think short too.

This is the ‘Just Do It’ school of copywriting: an approach that focuses on creating striking one-liners instead of persuasive appeals. And brilliant and memorable one-liners really do move people sometimes. But copywriters who think of themselves as Jay Leno rather than salespersons are playing a risky game.

The focus of commercial writing is never the writing. It’s the product. And while finished copy needs to be concise, I never advise being concise when writing the draft. There you should sprawl. Throw in all you can. Making a good loose case for the product during the draft helps you hone a sharp concise case in print. And a crystal-concise one on the web.

Think of it in terms of process. To write 500 words of good print copy, you may well have to write a thousand or two thousand words of bad draft copy. The draft is where you sketch, try different approaches, brainstorm. When final draft time comes around, you trim and compress that amorphous blob till it reaches 500 tightly focused words fit for print.

To write good web copy, you keep trimming. You sharpen it to 200 words or even 100.

But remember: you can’t sharpen something that just ain’t there in the first place.

Good print copy is like the proverbial iceberg. The tip is visible, but 90 percent lies underwater.

Good web copy? 95 to 98 percent may lie underwater.

But it’s what you don’t see that supports and makes possible what you do see.

Make the linear case first. Study the product in depth. Look at the research, understand the target market. Be thorough. When writing the first draft, sprawl.

And then?

Think Chunks

Once you get the long copy drafted, chop. Cut it down. Break it up. And – if it’s headed for the web – make sure each stand-alone section is comprehensible on its own, is compelling on its own, and is interesting enough to make the reader want more.

The test for print copy is generally to read all the copy. That’s a luxury you can’t afford online. You have to judge each piece of copy on a page-by-page, sometimes a screen-by-screen, basis. Does each screenful of text affect the reader in a way consistent with the marketing goal? If that one screen is all the reader sees – because it may well be – does it work?

The criteria is not the total impact of the whole site. Because the studies are blunt: people just don’t read whole sites. They pop in and scan chunks. So our criteria has to be: do the chunks work? If all the pieces work together, great. But they have to work effectively separately. Because separately is all that most viewers will ever see.

The Way We Write Now

There are times when I think that there is no such thing as body copy anymore. Only headlines. The art of writing copy for the web is in many ways the art of crafting subheads, labelling buttons, and unobstrusively inserting keywords. (Which brings up the whole question of writing for search engine optimization — a future article in itself.)

All in all it can be a very fragmentary perspective. Not every print copywriter has made the transition gracefully, and not all the web copy you see is graceful.

But the huge change in mediums hasn’t meant a huge change in fundamentals. On the contrary.

Copywriting isn’t a kind of writing. It’s a kind of thinking. It’s asking the question: what can you say that will persuade a person do something? What combination of words will grab attention, change a mind, open a wallet, move a heart?

Answering that question is still the goal.

David Pascal has nearly twenty years of freelance and in-house experience in marketing, advertising, and corporate communications. After receiving a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of the State of New York, and a second bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities, David began his career in marketing and advertising as an illustrator, became a marketing agency copywriter, and subsequently added web design skills to the mix. He has taught copywriting at the nationally celebrated writing center Writers & Books, published numerous articles, and spoken on marketing and other subjects at the Rochester Institute of Technology and other colleges and institutions. Contact information and samples of his writing and design work for clients is available at his web site at www.davidpascal.com.