 Great photo by Meta AI. Okay, this question--"Which would you rather earn: $10 an hour, or $1,000 an hour?”—sounds like a no-brainer. We know an old-timer who puts it another way, “What would you rather do: Step on a rusty nail, or [totally inappropriate choice about having intimate relations with a famous, beautiful person]?”
Don’t worry. There’s a business-building lesson here. One that will help you make more money. That’s always our promise to you in these articles. But first. Where does the $10/$1,000 question come from? Actually, it’s really only two-thirds of the analogy, which a colleague of ours mentioned to us recently. Maybe you’ve heard this one. But this is how he’d put it: “During my business day, there are different things that I can do. Some of them are worth ten dollars an hour. Others are worth $100 an hour [yep, that’s the one we’d skipped]. And others are worth $1,000 an hour.” We found ourselves nodding vigorously. Aren’t you nodding vigorously? This doesn’t require much soul-searching. The $10/$100/$1,000 analogy applies to all of us. The trick, of course, is weaning yourself off of the $10/$100, and doing as much of the $1,000 as possible. Sure, you can delay some of those lower-value activities. Or try and be more efficient as you perform them. But that will only get you so far. Personal story: Years ago, we shot footage of a great interview for a B2B video, and were licking our chops at the prospect of editing it down for our client, when we had an epiphany: We had a great young video editor, in Florida, who was really, really, really inexpensive. It would be stupid, inefficient, and a disservice to our client if we edited that video footage ourselves. Not to mention egregiously overpriced. So we handed it off to our young editor in Florida. You knew the magic word before we spun this tale. It’s “Delegate.” Think about it. If you know someone making $50 an hour, they would be thrilled to get some work for $100. Of course, they’ll need to earn that. You likely will need to coach them. There may be a learning curve and setbacks. But isn’t it nice, if only from a purely humanitarian standpoint, to elevate that person and let them rise to the occasion? In the context of this article, that isn’t entirely altruistic. If you’ve just offloaded some of your $100/hour work, you’ve made time for more of your $1,000/hour work. A $900/hour raise. Think about it. What’s on your plate right now? What can you offload? Who’s in your orbit? Who can you offload to? We wear multiple hats here at Copel Communications. One of them is fractional CMO. Do you think we do all the knob-turning ourselves? Our clients wouldn’t like that. And neither would we. Need help shaking out those marketing challenges so that everyone is working at the peak of their abilities… and you get more time for your $1,000/hour work? Contact us. Let’s talk.
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 Great photo by Grok. There are a surprising number of businesses today that could benefit from a “two-door” website, yet they have only one “door.”
Is your business one of them? And, more pointedly, what on earth are we talking about? In this article, we’ll explain what we mean by a “two-door website,” and you’ll quickly see if your business could, and should, use one. A simple analogy A door is an entrance. A way in. Right now, the typical website has a big front door: The home page. That’s fine, if your prospects are homogenous. But often, they’re not. Your one business may well serve two target audiences, at the same time, without conflict. But you want each side to have their own personalized experience. Thus the two-door website. Basically, it’s a very simple home page. Imagine, above the fold, your logo, and beneath the above-the-fold headline that says what you’re great at, there are two big clickable tiles: one for Audience A, and the other for Audience B. Ta-dah. A two-door website. Once you start thinking about these, you’ll come up with lots of examples. Here are some we created for clients of ours:
And there are also lots of other sites that operate the same way:
Play by the rules When you create a two-door site, bear in mind that anyone can visit either side, or “peek over the wall” between them. So you must be respectful. You can’t appeal to hiring managers that you’re low-cost on one side, and then boast to job seekers that you can get them massive bonuses on the other. Be discreet. Be careful. Review each side, prior to publishing, through the “lens” of the opposite side. You’ll quickly see any glaring errors to omit. And help the viewer along. Simplest technique: Color-coding. Give one door’s side a blue theme, and the other door’s side a red theme, for example. If a visitor accidentally clicks the wrong link, they’ll know (and they won’t be offended by anything they see on the “wrong” page, thanks to your prior diligence). Two-door sites can be super effective. And they’re nice and clean, since you’re not trying to be all things to all people. You get a very un-cluttered home page. Each visitor gets a super-tailored experience. And yes, you can have a three-door site, too. It all depends on your situation. Need help with a two-door site, or any other marketing challenge? Reach out to us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Meta AI. Pay attention. This is a good one.
It’s based on a true story which we’ll naturally anonymize, but let the lessons-learned shine through bright and clear. Because you can apply them, easily. And make more money, doing so. A persistent business-development problem is the search for new leads. An equally persistent biz-dev truth is that ice-cold leads are the hardest to reach. Whereas upsells, cross-sells, and especially referrals represent the lowest-hanging fruit. Ignore that low-hanging fruit at your peril. But you knew that. Right? Not so fast. Imagine “the tree of invisible fruit.” It’s growing right in your backyard. Allow us to explain. Not too long ago, we needed to find a new vendor—let’s say it’s a graphic artist—for one of our clients. There are many ways to do this. You can search on gig platforms like Upwork and Fiverr. Heck, you can check reviews on Yelp. But there’s an interesting parallel here to the biz-dev challenge we’d just described. Doing an ice-cold search on, say, Fiverr can certainly yield good results. But it takes a lot of work and time, and you need to trust the reviews posted by the graphic artists themselves. Finding ice-cold vendors is just like finding ice-cold biz-dev leads. See where this is going? If you do, then think two steps ahead. Again, let us explain: While you can certainly scour the gig-economy platforms for that new vendor, wouldn’t it be easier to simply get a referral from someone you know, trust, and respect? Of course it is. So it’s the obvious path to follow. Obviously, you can—and we did—reach out to your network. Sure, you can ask vendors in your network to recommend other vendors: That video editor may well know a good graphic artist. Totally fine. But what if you also reach out to your network of clients? Or better yet, recent/cool/lukewarm clients? Past clients? Heck, ancient clients! We did exactly this, when we’d needed to find that new graphic artist. And we can’t recommend the process enough. Sure, it was a fun trip down memory lane, re-connecting with old clients from years gone by. Know what else it was? It was Step Two that we’d just hinted at, above. Let’s be very clear about this: We were on a mission. We absolutely needed to find a new graphic artist for our current client. So we weren’t pitching our services, at all, when we reached out to all of these former clients. But still. As soon as they heard from us, they connected us to the work we’d done for them in the past which, we’re happy to report, was all good. And so it should come as zero surprise to you that more than a few of those conversations went something like this: “Hey! Nice to hear from you again. No, I don’t have a graphic artist to recommend right now, but I’ll keep my eyes open for you in case I find one. Still, I’m glad you called. Think you could help with this challenge my team is currently facing…?” It’s the no-sell sell. Granted, you can’t do this every day, but when the opportunity genuinely arises, it beats the heck out of Fiverr. Need help with a biz-dev challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Grok. Many prospective clients ask us how we work, in terms of fees, here at Copel Communications. In this article, we’ll tell you.
We provide writing, marketing, and creative services to numerous different clients: consultancies, B2B businesses, and ad agencies, to name a few. And over the years, we’d found that many of our clients wanted, well, all of our services. Which was fine by us. Indeed, more and more, in addition to pure deliverables, such as written pieces (web sites, B2B video scripts, blogs, bios, etc.), our clients wanted us to consult, and to manage, for them. This isn’t out of our wheelhouse: In a past life, we’d served as Creative Director of a New York ad agency, so we’re used to directing other creatives, such as web designers, graphic artists, video editors, voice-over artists, other writers, you name it. So it’s more than natural for us to help direct what are largely hybrid marketing teams these days: Some of our clients will have a few people on staff, such as a graphic artist and/or intern; they’ll also have a roster of vendors, such as digital marketing firms (the companies that, to dumb it down, do SEO and make social ads), video editors, and so on. And of course, many of our clients turn to us for marketing direction and strategy, as well as the tactical/operational/managerial details we’d just described above. And of course, when it comes to writing, we can switch and wear that hat. So the way that we work with our clients, these days, has evolved in sync with what they tap us to provide. In the early days, we were mostly doing writing/deliverables. So we would bill for just that. But as we’d noted above, that’s become more the exception than the rule; nowadays, most clients use us for both the writing/deliverables and the consultative services, too. And so that’s the way we bill, in case you were curious. For a typical client, we’ll work on what we call a retainer-plus-deliverables basis. First, there’s a monthly retainer: For a nominal flat fee each month, that client will get up to a given number of hours of our time, with the intention that it feels like they own us/we’re on staff. They can call us, email us, have us join or lead meetings, and feel like they never run out of hours. And of course they get all this without having to pay a big salary, or our insurance, taxes, benefits, vacation, equipment, overhead, anything. It’s a classic 1099 arrangement, with all of the perks thereof. So each month, at the end of the month, they’ll get an invoice from us for that flat-fee retainer. This includes, for example, directing all of those other creative/marketing people/assets we’d mentioned previously, as well as the big-picture strategic marketing consultative services. And if there happens to be any writing that also needs to be done, for that client, that month, the fees for those specific deliverables will be added, as line items, above the fixed-fee retainer. Hence “retainer plus deliverables.” For many years, now, that arrangement has worked well for our clients, and for us. It’s just the right mix of fixed vs. variable. There are, of course, exceptions. Some clients just pop up for little projects from time to time, so we charge them for, perhaps, discrete marketing-strategy sessions and/or deliverables, as needed. So in case you were interested in working with us, you now know how we typically work. We can give you more details, and a quote to fit your specific situation; just contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  Tremendous photo by Grok. If you’re reading this, you’re targeting executives as part of your business. Read on. And learn.
We were once directing a young video editor, in a Zoom call, about how to approach a project we’d handed him: a script for an exec-focused video. Our client wanted to be on this call, too, and kept mentioning that we wanted to be at “C-level.” We saw the look on this kid’s face. And quickly realized: Oh my goodness. He thinks our client is saying “sea-level.” We were right. He couldn’t figure out what the video had to do with being submerged in the ocean. Once we explained it to him--“C”-level and not “sea”-level—he understood his marching orders better, and went on to deliver a perfectly good video for us. But back to your challenge: Marketing to executives with purchasing power. Sure, we can embrace some basic tenets here. This isn’t about flashy images or breathless claims. The tone should befit the audience. And of course you want to convey the value of what you’re offering, whether it’s a product or a service. Those are fairly given. But here’s what isn’t: We recently produced a marketing piece for a client of ours which was showcased on a global media platform (can you tell we’re being cagey here? we need to be). This piece we created was exposed to literally billions of people. Checking the metrics on it after it had been published a while, we saw that it had garnered just 300 views. Failure? Nope. Success. Deeper diving showed that it had reached exactly whom we’d wanted it to. Execs. In other words: This is a small audience. Remember the quote “Speak to the target. Let the others listen”? It certainly applies here. Unlike mass-market approaches, this is not a quantity game. It’s a quality game. And here we’ve learned, from some of our incredibly astute clients, some interesting, if counterintuitive, tips:
So if that executive leader is looking to advance their strategic roadmap via automated decisioning, you’d better 1) know it, and 2) say it. This is a very subtle and nuanced challenge, that you shouldn’t entrust to a junior writer or AI. The stakes are high, and you’ve only got one chance to get it right. Need help? Contact us. We work on these kinds of projects—sorry, “initiatives”—all the time.  Great photo by Grok. Credit where it’s due. Here at Copel Communications, we’re blessed to have some really great clients, and this article showcases one of them. What started out as something fairly mundane, transformed—for us, at least—into a teachable moment. And we’d like to share it with you.
The setup: We were one of many attendees to join on a 45-minute Zoom call with our client, to cover a number of in-progress projects. Others on the call included another vendor, and several internal members of the client’s team. One woman from the client company would be running the meeting. Let’s call her Sally. In case you were curious, we arrived prepared. The agenda had been shared with us in advance, and we were ready to step up, when called upon, and give our update on the various projects we were working on at the time. So. The call begins on time. There’s maybe 30 seconds of hello’s and how’s-the-weather-by-you’s. Then Sally started running it. She “went around the table,” asking everyone for their updates. Like us, they came prepared. So the responses were along the lines of “Progressing well,” or “On time,” or “I’ve had a slight delay due to X.” There was an occasional question for the group, which either the group, or the appropriate member within it, quickly answered. As it turned out, the other vendor didn’t show. Not sure why, but it’s a factor in this story. Sally completed all her check-in’s. Then she asked us all, “Is there anything else to cover?” Everyone said, “No.” And so she said, “Okay then, this meeting is over. Have a good day.” And she ended the call. If stuff like this happens to you all the time, then 1) this story shouldn’t surprise you, and 2) consider yourself lucky. That’s because 3) stuff like this almost never happened with us. And we’ve been in business, replete with meetings, for decades. The teachable moment Everyone left the meeting in great spirits. Not only was the meeting short, but it was productive. Kudos to Sally for recognizing that once all the boxes were checked, there was zero need for additional bureaucracy. Indeed, you could say that the meeting was effectively extra productive, because it gave every attendee an extra 40 minutes back in their day to do real work which was on their plates, when the meeting had started, waiting for them. Do the math: If there were 12 people in that meeting, that comes to eight person-hours recouped. An entire day. Jeff Bezos, when he was still running Amazon, was famous for requiring six-page updates from his reports. You had to be succinct. Time is everyone’s inventory, and it’s precious. Sally reminded us of Jeff Bezos. In the best possible way. Of course, if there’s 45 minutes’ worth of stuff to actually cover in a 45-minute meeting, then expend every second on it. But if not, heck, the five-minute version of the 45-minute meeting is an aspirational goal. Putting all wind-baggers on notice: This is a teachable moment. Thoughts? Pile-on ideas? We’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment below or contact us directly.  Great photo by Grok. We had a client who recently showed us a whole new program they were going to present to their clients and new prospects alike.
It was well thought-out. It was super detailed. It had lots of impressive features. It promised to deliver a ton of value and ROI. And it was terrifying. Who sees what—and when This may seem contradictory, if not counterintuitive. Here it is, we’d just lauded this new program which our client had created and unveiled to us. And then we undercut that review with the dreaded T-word. What gives? We can give you a little more detail now, and you’ll certainly say “Ohhhh…!” Our client—like many business owners—lives and breathes in spreadsheets. So that’s what they’d shared with us. Indeed, they screen-shared it with us. And this spreadsheet (was it Excel? was it Google? who cares?) was about 40 rows deep by about 25 columns across. All at once. Yep. Terrifying. The good news: We were the first, and only, ones to see it in this state. Our client was justifiably and understandably excited by the cool new program they’d worked so hard to develop. But boy was it ever un-exciting when presented as a swimming sea of spreadsheet cells. This is hardly a tragic story. And you likely can see exactly where it’s going, even if our client wasn’t able at the time. We patiently listened to the whole presentation, which took about a half hour. We took notes. And then we asked some pointed questions:
The idea was to turn down the spigot on this fire hose so it would better resemble a soda straw. The client—they’re very smart—immediately saw where we were going. Easier than you think Once our client realized that they needed to carve their presentation of this new program into bite-sized chunks, all that was left was the execution. And here we can describe a kind of MVP or minimum-viable-product version of that effort: Sure, the client could have gone on and created a snazzy new PowerPoint deck, with discrete slides for the different phases of this proposed program. But that would take time, effort, and resources—and at this point, the client really just wanted to test out this idea: socialize it with existing clients and see how receptive they’d be. So why even make a PowerPoint? The solution was even simpler: Tabs. Yep. That’s all they needed. If this program has five phases, then carve the spreadsheet into five clickable tabs. Simply screen-share a single tab when you present it. And if the conversation leads to a discussion of Phase Two, then click the Phase Two tab. Done. Steve Jobs famously said that simple is hard. But sometimes it’s hard to see what’s simple, and staring right at you. Do you really need to spend a fortune on a shiny new CRM (customer relationship management) platform when your Excel is still working fine? Of course not. Wait for the expense to be more than justified. Ditto for things like learning management systems or LMSs, or even slick PowerPoints as we’d described in this story. Have a marketing challenge that you suspect is simpler than it appears? Contact us and let us put a fresh set of eyes on it for you.  Great photo by Grok. Wait. What? SEO for YouTube? Is that even a thing?
Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO gurus. But fortunately, some of our clients are. So we learn a lot. And when it’s prudent and discreet to do so, we’ll share some of the love. Hence this article. Short takeaway/spoiler: You can, and should, max out the SEO for your YouTube videos. In this article, we’ll discuss how. But first, the genesis of this story. As we’d noted above, this comes to us from an actual client assignment which, as we write this, is ongoing; they have tons of YouTube videos (most of which, incidentally, we also scripted). The challenge, as our client made clear, was to drive more search-query traffic to this huge repository of videos, spread across multiple playlists on our client’s YouTube channel. But how? There are two parts to this. Both are basic, yet nuanced. They are: 1. The actual title of the video. 2. The YouTube description of the video Let’s review each. 1. The title We’re talking B2B videos here. So you might have an existing video about a product or service that you offer to prospects. And what’s its title? Sure, it’s something like “Our Great Product.” You must understand that there’s the real world, and then there’s the SEO world. In the real world, populated solely by humans, “Our Great Product” is a perfectly good title. It tells people what the video is about. Simple. No clutter. Great. But in SEO World, it’s unfortunately insufficient. You want to “think backward” from what someone who would ultimately want that product or service would be searching on in, say, Google (or in AI; more on that in a minute). So if your Great Product solves Challenge X for, say, logistics executives, you might want to revise and expand the title accordingly: “Challenge-X-Solving Product for Logistics Executives Seeking Productivity Gains.” Not terribly exciting in the real world, but a step forward in SEO Land. But wait. That new title is pretty darned long. Aren’t there limits on this, imposed by, say, YouTube? There sure are. Titles max out at 100 characters, including spaces. The one we just noted above was only 66. So there’s room to play. Often, depending on the viewing device (desktop or laptop browser, tablet, or phone), that title will get truncated and lopped off with just an ellipsis (three dots or “. . .”) after the first few words. Meaning, the first few words are the most important. Because those are the ones that will stick. So factor that into your re-naming. Put the most important stuff first. It's not the real world. Sure, humans will read this stuff, too, but they’re only part of the audience. The rest is web crawlers, spiders, and all the algorithms that the search engines employ to serve up results which hopefully include your video. Now that you know about 1. The Title, let’s proceed to 2. The description Clearly, this is much longer than the title, but some of the same rules apply. Stuff will get cut off before you see the clickable “…more” to reveal the rest of the copy; a quick test on our desktop browser clipped it off at around 60 words. The max is 5,000 characters (not words), which can include links, text, and hashtags. That’s a lot of copy. It’s almost like a blog. About 1,000 words. Again, you want to fill this with info that your human searchers are searching for (what problems will the product or service showcased in your video solve?), as well as what the web crawlers want to find. For our recent project, these videos often offered solutions that helped with numerous arcane technology platforms, so we included bullet lists of those platforms in the description. The search engines like stuff like that. Know what they don’t like? Verbatim copy stolen from your website; they’ll ding you for that. So you want original copy. And you want it written by a human. All the search engines can spot AI-written copy from a mile away (as can we), and they’ll ding you for it. Which gets back to AI-based search vs. classic Google search. The landscape is still shaking out as we write this; even the term AEO (“ask engine optimization”) may not have legs. But what we’re seeing already is a refreshing overlap of what makes for good SEO content vs. AEO content. If you can nail the SEO side, the AEO side will likely catch up. Bottom line: Depending on the number of YouTube videos you already have posted, this could be a quick or long-term retrofitting assignment. And it should definitely shape your efforts for future videos; write the new titles and YouTube descriptions at the same time that you write the scripts. It will save you time and effort. Need help with any of this stuff? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  Great photo by Grok. We have a client who’s an accomplished executive speaker and wanted to book more bookings. We were tapped to help.
If you, too, want to build business by building your live audience outreach, this article is for you. Or if you know someone with the same desire, share it with them. Teaser: we’ve got a killer tip to help you, toward the end of this article. The lay of the land First off, we’re not talking about using some high-priced speakers’ bureau that books A-list celebrities at Fortune 500 corporate events. We’re talking about getting our client booked at things like regional association meetings and conventions of larger national business organizations. The point here, in case it wasn’t glaringly obvious to you, is to place our client in a target-rich environment. This isn’t about ego or garnering some kind of Tony Robbins-like adulation. It’s about presenting to business prospects, and then getting opportunities to close them, afterward. It’s a very narrow use-case of biz-dev. So. No big booking agency. No chanting crowds. But there are tons of these more-realistic gigs, across the country, all the time. And they’re booked, typically, ages in advance: we’re talking anywhere from six to 12 months, easily. How do you find them? These days, there are digital exchange platforms that connect speakers (such as our client) with event planners (i.e., people who seek to book speakers for their gatherings). An obvious one is eSpeakers; we’ll talk about that one here. Load up your ammo If you want to get booked as a speaker on a site like eSpeakers, you need to stand out. For the purposes of this article, we’re going to assume that you, like our client, are a stellar speaker with a great stage presence, absolute command of your thought-leading/breakthrough material, and have also done this before/are a published author/have been featured on podcasts, and so on. Yep. A high bar to start. Assuming all of that, you’ve got to let all of those eSpeakers-seekers know. Which means that, after you sign up for a (pretty darned affordable) eSpeakers membership, you’ll need to upload a lot of stuff about yourself to entice that audience. And herein is the gist of this article. Here’s what you’ll want to upload, with some notes and thought-starters to help you along:
The best tip you’ll get What’s the best way to find out how to put the best stuff up on a site like eSpeakers? Simply visit the “other side” of the site and pretend that you’re an event planner. Use the filters to drill down to direct competitors of yours. Take a look at them. You’ll easily see who the most impressive ones are. Then you can simply see what they’ve included in their “packages,” and use that as a baseline for you to, well, blow out of the water. Need help with a challenge like this? Contact us! We’d love to help you.  Great photo by Grok. Wait, it’s December already? We must have blinked.
Because it’s already time for the round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2025—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications. Here, then, is your chance to catch any articles you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
Phew! That should be enough reading and tips to tide you over for a little bit. But how about next year? Any topics you’d like us to address? Contact us and let us know! |