​Do not get us wrong. We are not luddites here at Copel Communications! We love shiny new tech. 
 
We use AI a lot, too. 
 
So don’t think that this article—about yanking the plug on Apple Intelligence—is about some kind of irrational fear of technology. 
 
Nope. It’s far simpler than that. 
 
It’s about helping our clients to make money. 
 
Wait, what?? Apple Intelligence stands in the way of that?
 
A solution in search of a problem
 
The comedian John Mulaney once compared his aging body to the iPhone: each year it looks the same, but it just gets worse. LOL! 
 
We’ve been on Apple tech since the very first generation of Macs, so we have a well-entrenched more-love-than-hate relationship with the folks in Cupertino. But Apple Intelligence crossed a new threshold for us. 
 
Sure, you’ve seen all of the “ingenious” new features that Apple will foist on you, every single year, with every new OS update, whether it’s for your Mac, your iPhone, whatever. Each one purports to be the greatest thing ever—which is a tacit admission that the very thing it’s replacing, which had been identically hyped at its outset… wasn’t. 
 
Fine. It’s easy for us to throw stones, and we’re well aware of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the arena” quote (the important part: “It’s not the critic who counts”). And besides, every time Apple rolls out a controversial feature, it typically back-pedals with a new slider whereby you can disable it. Liquid Glass, anyone? 
 
You certainly remember--remember? it’s still ongoing—all the hype around Apple’s version of AI. It was so special that it wasn’t just AI, i.e., artificial intelligence. Oh no. The “A” now stood for “Apple.” Apple Intelligence. Capitalized. 
 
It would solve everything in your life. 
 
Until it didn’t. 
 
The last straw
 
As we’ve taken pains to make clear: We’re not afraid of technology. When Apple Intelligence rolled out, and even as it got updates and bug fixes, we stuck with it, waiting (and wondering) for it to help us in our daily lives. 
 
Until it tried to answer emails and text messages on our behalf.
 
Woah. Stop the presses. It’s one thing to suggest some verbiage. It’s another to insert it into a reply by default, whereby our accidentally depressing the spacebar would constitute “Send.” 
 
A client asked us a question. We were about to give them a well-considered and nuanced answer, with a few factors to consider. 
 
And there’s Apple Intelligence, replying to our client with “Sounds great! I agree!” 
 
Fortunately, we caught this before any damage was done. 
 
Here at Copel Communications, clients pay us for our intelligence. The real kind. Not the over-hyped artificial kind. 
 
Hence the illustration for this article. We effectively rocketed our way to System Prefs to disable this hallucinogenic digital sidekick. 
 
Should you? Your choice. 
 
But now you know where we stand. And should you contact us, you also know that you’ll get a real reply, from a real sentient human. 

If you’re an aspiring business book writer, this article is for you. And if you know someone who is, this article is for them. Share it with them. 
 
Our topic: How to get the most from your ghost copy-editor. 
 
We feel pretty qualified to weigh in on this topic, having ghost-copy-edited numerous books for various authors, some of whose works have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers. 
 
First things first: Credit where it’s due. Those aforementioned bestsellers did not become bestsellers because of us. It was due to the authors’ vision, as well as the complete marketing team that guided the book through its gestation. 
 
Still. We were along for the process from concept to completion. 
 
Interested in penning a business book? Let’s dive in. 
 
Division of labor
 
When you hear phrases like “ghost writer” or “ghost copy-editor,” you likely think of some celebrity, sitting back and sipping martinis, while some poor hack does all the work of actually writing the celebrity’s so-called “memoir,” or whatever. 
 
And that may well be true, in that instance. 
 
But that is not what we’re talking about here. 
 
Here, we’re talking about you, as a thought-leader in your business area of interest. You want to share your wisdom and experience with others. Done right, everyone benefits: Your readers elevate their knowledge. And you elevate your status as an authority. Heck, a published authority. 
 
So this is, clearly, not about sipping martinis and letting someone else come up with the ideas. The ideas here are yours. All of them. 
 
After that, however, it gets fuzzier. 
 
And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the opposite is true. When this process is done right, it’s custom tailored to you, and no one else. We’ve worked with authors who are detail freaks. We’ve worked with authors who are bulls-in-China-shops. And in every case, it’s our job to accommodate their style of working. 
 
Ta-dah. If you take nothing else away from this article, it should be this: Your preferred and most comfortable style of working is the one that is best for you, when working with a ghost copy-editor. Period.
 
It’s hard enough for you to get these ideas out of your head and down on paper. And then to pay someone to lubricate that process can feel like adding insult to injury. 
 
But if it’s a good fit, it will be the opposite. It will be intuitive, stress-relieving, and rewarding. You’ll get to see pages appear that make you say, “Dang! I never realized I was that good!”
 
And that’s just when it comes to the finished product: the pages. In consultant-speak, that’s the “destination.” Which is certainly crucial. But equally important is the “journey.” How do you like to work? In person? Via Zoom? Transactionally and asynchronously, via email? Or some crazy hybrid of all of the above? Are you serious? Are you playful? Do you work in marathons? Or sprints? 
 
Again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works best for you is what’s best. Period. 
 
So we’ve done brainstorming sessions to help authors tease out ideas. And we’ve worked with others who have simply “thrown stuff over the wall” at us, nearly completely baked. 
 
And what’s our reward? Sure, we get paid. But the far bigger reward is seeing the happiness that our authors derive from both the journey and the destination. 
 
Remember: “Ghost.” Our name does not appear, anywhere, on any of the books we’ve helped shepherd to press. So it’s got to be a good relationship—on both sides—for it to work. 
 
Writing a book is a big project. It takes a long time, typically measured in months. So be sure you choose a ghost you can live with. 
 
Have a book project you’d like to discuss? Contact us, and let’s see if it’s a good fit. 

​There’s a hint in the headline to this article. Read it again. 
 
We’ll circle back to it in a minute. But the topic is important: You want to fill that room for your upcoming webinar! Otherwise, all of that prep work is for naught. 
 
Here, we’ll give you some pointers, based on actual client experiences, to help you boost your odds. 
 
To webinar or not to webinar
 
This entire article, and the recommendations herein, predicate on some pretty big assumptions: 
 
1) You think a webinar is an optimal marketing tactic for your business, and 
 
2) You’ve done a stellar job creating the presentation you’ll deliver during the webinar itself. 
 
Those are huge assumptions. 
 
A webinar is, as we’d noted above, a big commitment. They’re hard to do. It’s much easier, say, to be a guest on someone else’s well-established podcast (we have an article on that topic, too), but that isn’t necessarily easy to get, either. 
 
To have a successful webinar—and by “successful,” we mean “one that brings in prospects and leads to future business-generating conversations with them individually”—you need to choose a ripe topic that will attract your desired audience. You need to craft a really great presentation for them. You need to hone it and rehearse it. You need to publicize the event before it happens, in order to “fill the room.” You need to manage attendee lists and email sequencing thereto. You need to nail the presentation when you do it live. And you need to crush the follow-up, because that’s the impetus for the entire webinar in the first place: building new business. 
 
Phew. 
 
If that checklist sounds daunting, good. It should. But the upside can well be worth it; we’ve helped numerous clients with webinars that they’ve used to build business. 
 
While we’ve worked on various facets of webinar development and production, we’d like to focus on just one aspect here. It’s the “teaser” that we’d teased in the headline. 
 
Building unbearable suspense
 
Marketing a webinar is like marketing a Hollywood movie that’s slated for theatrical release: It’s all about driving the maximum traffic for one specific date. For a movie studio, it’s opening weekend. For you, it’s your webinar date and time. 
 
So your marketing—let’s say, your social ads—for this webinar is exactly like what you see—say, on TV—for a movie. You may not have noticed this, but you’ll almost never see a TV commercial for a movie that’s already opened. That window has closed. Ditto for your webinar. 
 
So you can learn—and borrow a page—from Hollywood here. Think about a movie ad or a trailer: It gives you glimpses of the very best moments of the movie. Because the (untrue) assumption you have, as a viewer, is that the rest of the movie will be that good. But it isn’t. It never is. It can’t be. 
 
Still, you can tease snippets and factoids from your webinar, since you already know all of its content, and can gauge, pretty easily, what you think are some of its juiciest tidbits. 
 
And here’s the last bit of inspiration we’ll give you. It’s the one we’d teased in the headline of this article. And it’s one you’ve seen in several places. Here’s one: 
 
You’ve seen it on the TV news. Just as they’re about to head into a commercial. They’ll never tell you, for example: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose Los Angeles as its next host city! We’ll give you all the details after the break.” 
 
That never happens! You know that. It’s always something more like this: 
 
“The U.S. Olympic committee just chose its next host city, and you won’t believe where it is! Get all the details after the break.” 
 
It’s a teaser. Reading about it, here, makes you groan, but you’ve got to admit that it’s effective. 
 
And here’s the lowest form of teaser, but we still love them, in a perverse way; and it’s what inspired our headline for this article: 
 
Clickbait! 
 
Yep, all of those “stories” you’ll see at the bottom of a news article’s page, with headlines like “You won’t believe how so-and-so looks today” or “My jaw dropped when I saw her dress” or whatever. 
 
Now look at your webinar content. Think of what, in it, is exciting. And then tease the heck out of it.
 
Need help with a webinar challenge, or any other marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

Steve Jobs famously said “It’s not the customer’s job to know what they want.” 
 
What did he mean by that? Is that a hard-and-fast rule that you should never break? If not, when should you break it? 
 
And most importantly, how can you generate more revenue from the answers to these questions? 
 
Let’s dive in! 
 
Creative inference
 
That (in)famous Steve Jobs quote was about his notion of eschewing focus groups when it came to product development. His thinking was, that if you’d asked a customer, say in 1983, what they “wanted,” in terms of electronic brainpower, they would have simply said “a better calculator.” They couldn’t envision a Macintosh, because they didn’t know what was technically possible, nor how to transform that technology into a wholly new product category which would surprise and delight them at every turn. 
 
Gee. Steve Jobs was onto something. Who’da thunk? 
 
Is this a hard-and-fast rule? Hate to be squishy, but it depends. If you really want to nail product or service development, you can certainly borrow a page from Steve Jobs. The whole idea of creatively inferring what customers want, based on their day-in-the-life situation, is a specialized practice that doesn’t come naturally to many business owners; as such, there are consultancies (and we’ve worked with them) which specialize in this. 
 
Let’s talk about marketing. And let’s assume, for now, that you’ve got a product or service to sell which already checks the surprise-and-delight boxes for your customers. 
 
If those customers are repeat customers, you have an opportunity here. Yep: you can ask them things.
 
Oh, the sacrilege!
 
Survey the situation
 
We recently helped a client craft a customer-satisfaction survey campaign. We say “campaign,” because it included a few components. Pay attention, and you’ll get ideas for your own business: 
 
Our client had always conducted customer-satisfaction surveys at the conclusion of any engagement with any of their clients. It was, and is, a sound business practice: It helps them to continually improve. 
 
But, assuming that they’re doing most things very well, it also makes for a very nice marketing opportunity. 
 
Think about that: Let’s say you’re a client of this company. They just served you very nicely. You’re about to move on, and lose that precious top-of-mind awareness of what they do… when you get a friendly email from them, asking you to please complete their customer-satisfaction survey. 
 
Aha. You’re instantly reminded of them! When you complete the survey, you’re instantly reminded of just what they did, and how good they were at it. What a wonderful reinforcement!
 
…But what if you don’t complete the survey? Then what? 
 
Well, you still got the email, inviting you to participate. And there was another dollop of incentive therein; as we’d said, this was a “campaign.”
 
Sweetening the deal
 
The customer-satisfaction survey email was a classic opportunity for our client—and for you, reading this—to easily capture low-hanging re-sell and/or up-sell opportunities. 
 
That’s because the email included a referral offer. 
 
It went something like this: 
 
“Complete the survey, and we’ll send you a $25 Amazon Gift Card. Bonus: After you’ve completed the survey, you can earn a $500 Amazon Gift Card by referring a new client to us. And to make you feel better about referring us, you can tell your friends that we’ll give them a $1,000 discount off of our services because you sent them our way! Everyone wins!”
 
You got that right. Everyone wins. 
 
So. The survey is somewhat anti-Jobsian, in that it asks customers how they feel about something that they already bought. But in that regard, Apple is no different: We’ve actually received surveys from them, asking us about products we’ve purchased from them… which have actually included radio-box options for products and features that Apple has not released yet (32-inch iMac, anyone?) So much for their ultra-secretive/customer-detached company culture. 
 
You can also use this technique for other, very basic stuff: What topics would your clients like to see addressed in your upcoming blogs, webinars, or YouTube videos? Ask them.
 
And if you toss in, say, a referral program along with the ask, we surely won’t hold it against you. 
 
Have a marketing challenge you could use help with? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

Intrigued? 
 
“ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes?” Has Copel Communications completely lost its few remaining brain cells? 
 
Not yet. Stay with us on this. And learn how—no kidding—this observation can help your business make more money. 
 
Here’s a dirty little secret. While we specialize in marketing here at Copel Comms, we’re really “closet salespeople.” Think of the playwright who shudders at the prospect of getting on stage… but is completely comfortable writing a powerful speech for the play’s leading man to deliver. That’s us. 
 
Okay. Shoes? ChatGPT? Is there a thread anywhere in this story forthcoming? 
 
Sure there is. As we’d said, stay with us. 
 
ChatGPT, and all of the generative large-language-model AI platforms of its ilk, have really changed the way that people sell. The way that you can sell. And, upstream of that, the way you market. 
 
Shortly after it appeared on the scene, ChatGPT basically torpedoed email-based marketing and outreach—and thus the sales that those were supposed to generate. The reason is simple: It used to be that only reasonably intelligent English speakers could create grammatically correct outreach notes. ChatGPT eliminated that requirement. 
 
Since its advent, every mouth-breather who can click a “Generate” button has been able to churn out grammatically flawless… spam. 
 
Yep. Spam. 
 
The ISPs quickly clamped down on this. The spam filters got tighter. Even now, Google (in a related story) is tweaking its algorithms to filter out AI-generated content. 
 
But ChatGPT is old news. The platform debuted during the pandemic, for goodness’ sakes. 
 
The “old news” aspect of this story is good news for our clients and businesses like yours. We’re seeing an uptick in the effectiveness of email outreach again. Isn’t that nice? 
 
And, just like in the old days, quality matters. Remember the ol’ “three-legged stool” of email marketing? It consisted of the quality of: 

• Your list 
• Your offer 
• Your email which presents the offer

 
Guess what? That’s true again. 
 
Which gets to shoes. Specifically, “shoe leather.” We’re talking about the old days, when salespeople would “pound the pavement,” going from business to business, to the point where they would wear holes in the leather soles of their shoes. Hence “shoe leather.” 
 
ChatGPT does not wear shoes. It doesn’t understand how you can (and perhaps should) “pound the pavement” to actually generate sales. 
 
Example: We recently penned an email (is that a mixed metaphor? We actually used a keyboard) for a client of ours, directed toward their current clients, introducing a referral program for their services. 
 
Per best practice, the offer was “two-sided”: “Refer a client to us, and they’ll get a massive discount on our services. And you’ll get an Amazon gift card. Everyone wins!” 
 
So. It was a matter of taking this good offer (Leg 2), turning it into a compelling message (Leg 3), and sending it out to our client’s list of existing customers (Leg 1). 
 
Another dirty little secret: The client’s list of clients was small enough that no automation was needed. So “Dear [First Name]” was typed in as “Dear Linda,” and so on. 
 
Sure, it was old-fashioned manual labor. But it was effective. Proving that pounding the pavement, in its modern iteration, can still yield sales. 
 
And proving that ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes. 
 
Need help with a marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

​We don’t know a company in the world that enjoys the prospect of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s often the epitome of stress. 
 
But you can alleviate a good chunk of it. Hence this article. 
 
Grab the lowest-hanging fruit
 
Sure, you’ll want to promote your presence at the upcoming show. That means creating ads and memes for social sites such as LinkedIn. 
 
But what if that were already done for you? 
 
Duh. It is, in most cases. The hosting company will typically create artwork that you can use for your own purposes. It’s in the “Exhibitor Kit” you got when you signed up, and/or it’s available for download on their website. 
 
These will be pre-created ads that say “Hey [Industry]! [Our company] will be at [Name of Trade Show] in [Location] on [Dates]! Look for us in Booth [Number]!” 
 
Granted, these won’t be stunning. Often, they’re stunningly generic. But they are there and you’re effectively getting them for free (with your paid entrance fee). So download ‘em, populate ‘em, and post ‘em. 
 
And if you belong to multiple LinkedIn groups—you do belong to multiple LinkedIn groups, don’t you?—be sure to post these things in every group you belong to, at regular intervals. 
 
That’s one little bit of pre-trade-show stress reduced. 
 
By the way, be sure to take advantage of all the stuff that the exhibiting venue gives you in advance. Submit all the information about your company to help populate, say, the mobile app that visitors will use to navigate the venue. You certainly don’t want to be left out of that. 
 
Update what you bring
 
Is your booth or stand-up display skin still showing that outdated version of your company’s logo? Or artwork featuring people wearing Covid-era masks? Now’s the time to re-visit those materials, and update them as needed. 
 
This also applies to things like handouts, leaflets, flyers, brochures, and even business cards (you have them ready for that new sales rep you hired, right?). 
 
Note that all of the above-mentioned materials are fairly production-heavy, as in turnaround time. So prioritize those first. Get the input out the door and into the vendors’ hands, allowing ample time for both revisions and delays. 
 
Also consider the promotional items you’ll bring. We had a client who would prioritize what kinds of goodies to give away at their booth based on whether or not they would fit into a carry-on bag, LOL! It’s true. Whatever works for you. 
 
Speaking of updating your materials: You’ll want to tweak your slide deck, for whether you’ll be showing it at your booth, presenting in a conference room, or entertaining prospects in a hospitality suite. Fortunately, unlike those printed materials such as booth skins and brochures, you can update your slide deck with just a few clicks, no vendors or turnaround time required. 
 
This is similar to your website. You do have a big tile on your home page advertising your upcoming presence at the show, don’t you? 
 
Don’t reinvent the wheel
 
Here’s a classic question: “How do we get more prospects to visit our booth and give us their contact info?”
 
It’s a valid question. It’s also one that’s been brainstormed, and answered, a zillion times. So don’t reinvent that wheel. Use the latest iteration of Google, a.k.a. ChatGPT. Simply ask it that exact question. It will effectively search the entire internet, and give you a list of suggestions, from giveaways and contests to customized swag bags. 
 
Speaking of not reinventing the wheel: We had a client employ a little desktop carnival-wheel game, wherein visitors could spin for prizes. Again: Ask ChatGPT: What are some good prizes? Obvious answers are discounts on your services, loss-leader free services, Amazon gift cards, “Spin Again” slots, and so on. 
 
Speaking of Amazon: these little wheels are easily found there. They’re inexpensive. And they’re made of dry-erase/white-board material, so they’re easy to customize—and re-customize, say, when you run out of a certain prize. 
 
And be sure to pre-write the “Congratulations!” emails you’ll be sending to all the prize winners, since you’ll have their email addresses—and will have input them into your CRM. 
 
For the love of QR codes
 
How can you not love QR codes? They apply to almost everything we’d mentioned in this article. Put them on your flyers. On your swag. Business cards. Everywhere. Link them to the most appropriate page on your website—which, in this case, might be a special landing page for trade-show attendees, replete with some kind of promotion/savings for visiting that page (and providing their contact info, booking a call, or other similar call-to-action). 
 
Everything we’d mentioned above is stuff that you can, and should, do well in advance. The sooner you do it, the more pre-show stress you alleviate. 
 
Need help? Contact us. We’d love to pitch in. 

Special news! Sure, we’ve got a good blog article here, and we’ll get to it in just a second. But first, a little announcement, which segues to this article quite nicely: 
 
We’re proud to announce that this article, these very words you are reading right now, are officially our tenth anniversary blog post. That’s right: We started publishing these in January 2015, and at that time, committed to publishing them twice a month. 
 
If you’re unaware—or simply curious—our cadence goes like this: At the top of the month, we publish articles focused primarily for our consulting/business-owner audience. At mid-month, we publish blogs focused a little more toward our “creative” audience, which includes ad agencies and other creative people we enjoy working with. 
 
Ten years! And we never missed a post. That’s 240 articles, if we’ve done our math right. 
 
And we’re not stopping now. Thanks so much for joining us for this great, long ride! Let’s dive into our latest topic. 
 
Why blogging shouldn’t be a New Year’s resolution
 
If you watched any TV during New Year’s, you were surely inundated with ads for gym memberships. It’s as predictable as sunrise. 
 
Why? Because people invariably make a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape,” and those gyms are all too happy to cash in. 
 
Be honest. How many people have you known (you may be one of them) who made one of these resolutions, joined a gym, bragged to all their friends for the first month or two… and then kind of quietly quit thereafter? 
 
Getting in shape takes commitment. In that regard, it’s exactly like blogging. Or doing social posts. Pretty much anything that has to do with your marketing outreach. 
 
Not everyone is an Olympian or an NFL star. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t whip your marketing into shape. The good news: It’s much easier than doing squats or lifting weights. 
 
You might be surprised at the trick to all this. 
 
Ready? 
 
Aim low.
 
What??? 
 
What????
 
You read right. This is counterintuitive advice if ever we’d dispensed any. 
 
Aim low.
 
Allow us to explain. 
 
The attainable cadence
 
The reason that so many people burn out on those January gym memberships is that they aim unrealistically high. So they over-do it. They can’t sustain that level of exertion. And so they just drop out. By aiming so high, they turn it into an all-or-nothing proposition. 
 
Which is exactly what you don’t want to do. 
 
So ask yourself this: How many blogs could I reasonably push out, every single month?
 
Factor into your answer disruptions like client emergencies and vacation time. 
 
Now take your answer, and cut it in half. 
 
Really? Really. 
 
The resulting number should be laughably easy to attain. And that’s the number you want.
 
For us, here at Copel Communications, we could probably turn these out every single week. But that’s pushing it. So we do it every two weeks, i.e., twice a month. And, as we’d noted above, we’ve never missed a beat. 
 
The calendar trick
 
Surely, we’ve had our share of client emergencies, vacation time, and what-not. But the trick is to create what’s called an editorial blog post calendar in which you pre-select the topics you want to blog about. 
 
Once you have that in place (we do ours in the fourth quarter each year for the subsequent year), you can then use it to write your blogs in advance so that you always have a cushion for when those client emergencies and/or vacation dates arise. 
 
Think of it. You now have two cushions: 
 
1) You cut your originally-intended cadence in half. 
 
2) You have extra blogs, already written, in the pipeline, which you can publish with a single click. 
 
When you look at it—and do it—that way, there’s zero stress. And you hit the mark every time. 
 
Again, blogging is just one type of output. You can apply this exact same approach to all kinds of marketing and business-development outreach, including emails, webinars, videos, you name it. 
 
Who’da thought it would all start by aiming low? 
 
Need help with this or similar challenges? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in. 

​Boy do the months ever sail past. Time, already, for our annual round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2024. Here’s your chance to catch any you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit: 

• How to clone your favorite client. You already know who your favorite client is. How do you 2x them? Find out here. 

 

• Wait, what… we actually use ChatGPT? Do you know how often people ask us if we consider this tech to be an existential threat? It’s not. The trick is in how you use it… as we reveal here. 

 

• The business gift that keeps on giving… follow-on work. We credit our brilliant clients with the most brilliant ideas. This one may well top the list. You’ve got to try this trick. 

 

• What should you give your clients for free? Do you draw a line in the sand, based on billing? Of course not. Discover the tips and cool stories here. 

 

• The advantages of the hard-to-schedule on-site work session. When should you go in-person, when virtual would be so much quicker and easier? The answers might surprise you. 

 

• What is a marketing “content package”? And why would you want one? Put it this way: When does delivering more, cost less? Up your marketing game with these tips. 

 

• Wait, what… you sent a printed letter? And got business from it? Is “old school” the “next wave”? Find out which use-cases qualify for what you’d otherwise guess is an obsolete marketing technique. 

 

• Can you write a good “next steps” email? (And how much is that worth?) We spent an hour writing a single email. And made money off of it. Find out when, and why, you should, too. 

 

• You’d be surprised by how many emails we ghost-write for our clients. We had to cloak it anonymity, but this article includes the story of the email we ghost-wrote which netted our client millions. 

 

• When should—and shouldn’t—you respond to that RFP? At what point do you commit your team to pursuing that opportunity… and at what point do you conclude, “No, that would be a race to the bottom”? 

 

• The easiest marketing videos you’ll ever make. Even if you’ve never made a marketing video in your life, you’re already sitting atop a video goldmine. Intrigued? Read on. 

 
As we start working on next year’s articles, we’d like to take this time to thank you for tuning in to our 2024 entries. We love sharing the love, and your comments make our day. 
 
Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you! 

​"Ghost Email Writer.” Kind of an odd role to put on your resume, no? 
 
It’s on ours. More importantly for you, however, is the answer to this question: 
 
Which business emails that you need to send are so important that they would warrant having a pro step in to pen them?
 
That’s what we’ll explore in this article. 
 
Touchy subjects
 
There is a common thread when it comes to emails that we ghost-write for our clients. It’s generally what we’d call “the big ask,” which kind of goes hand-in-hand with “the humble brag.” Both of these are hard to do. They put you, as the writer, in an uncomfortable situation. 
 
Err in one direction, you look like a jerk. Err in the other, you appear too meek. And in both of those situations, you don’t end up getting what you’d wanted. Talk about a fine line. 
 
First things first: You don’t really need to hire a professional writer, like us, to write an email like this. You can really work your tail off, and polish it, run it by colleagues, and even push it through ChatGPT if you want it to sound generically-correct enough. The question is: Is that worth your time? If you’re reading this article, chances are, it’s not. (Spoiler alert: We charge a mere pittance for things like these, for our clients, especially considering the upside ROI they deliver.) 
 
But so far we’ve been dealing with generalities. Let’s dive in and give you two real-life examples. 
 
Ghost-Written Email Example 1: To a former client
 
We recently helped a client create a series of marketing videos for their B2B consultancy. On their website, they’d had an ancient, but great, testimonial from an old client of theirs. They hadn’t spoken to this client in ages. 
 
Can you guess where this is going? 
 
Of course. A written testimonial, on a website, doesn’t do you much good when you’re creating marketing videos. Talk about a big ask: We wanted this former client to record themselves, on camera, giving a testimonial about this company that they’d worked with, a long time ago. 
 
Yikes. 
 
And so our client asked us to ghost-write the big-ask email for them. Confession: It wasn’t easy. 
 
But the finished product went something like this: It opened with a “Hello, old friend, we hope you’re doing well,” followed by “we’re so glad that our company has helped your company succeed.” We also thanked them for letting us use their written testimonial on our website. 
 
And that was the segue to the videos we were making. We’d already had the first one produced by the time we ghost-penned this email, so we included a link to it, so that the former client could watch it and see how good it was. 
 
Then we got down to the big ask: Could they simply read that same testimonial on camera, and send it to us? We even included its text in the email, like a script. We noted that, “By our estimation, this should take about, well, 15 seconds! So hopefully it’s not a huge ask.”
 
And we closed by saying, “Just as we have helped your company, you’d be doing us a huge solid by helping ours.”
 
The email worked. The old client was flattered by the request, and promptly obliged by recording and sharing a quick video. Bonus: Our client’s firm suddenly became top-of-mind for this former great client. Talk about a nice dollop of biz-dev! 
 
Ghost-Written Email Example 2: To “the secret handshake club”
 
Whereas the previous example was written to be sent to one specific, known person, this next one was intended to be sent, one-to-one, to a select number of very exclusive recipients who were all total strangers to the sender.
 
We need to be very cagey here, as this one is super sensitive. That said, it’s one of the best emails we’ve ever written, and it’s ended up netting our client millions. 
 
This client of ours had carved out a profitable B2B niche doing technical “cleanup work” for large enterprises. But they longed to broaden the business, and their client base, to include the specialists who helped those enterprises create the situations that inevitably required cleanup afterward.
 
Those specialists were the targets of the email. We can refer to them here as “the secret handshake club,” because that’s how close-knit, clubby, and insular they are. 
 
Our pitch, which we ghost-wrote for the owner of our consultancy client, went something like this; note how it combines the Big Ask with the Humble Brag:  
 
“Hello Mr. or Ms. Secret Handshake Club Member. I would like to help you as you advise big enterprises as they embark on big initiatives. Full disclosure: I’ve never done this before. But I have helped numerous enterprises with the ‘clean-up’ that’s come from all the overlooked issues in these initiatives, which I’m uniquely qualified to spot, given my experience. Would you have time for a quick call this week?” 
 
Guess what the response was? 
 
It was awful. That’s right. It’s a secret handshake club! Most of the sends ended up with no response whatsoever. The few that did respond, had some choice suggestions for our client, which we can’t reprint here. 
 
But then one—just one— Secret Handshake Club member wrote back. “Okay,” they said. “I’ll bite. Contact my assistant to book a call with me next week.” 
 
And that was all it took. 
 
That call led to a test project. That test project turned a toe-in-the-water tester into a new client. That client effectively provided entry into the Secret Handshake Club. 
 
Fast-forward to today, and that consultancy client of ours now splits their billing, 50/50, between their classic “cleanup” projects and Secret Handshake Club assignments. 
 
And it all started with one inexpensive, yet really well-crafted, ghost-written email. 
 
Have a challenge that warrants a ghost-written email? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

​We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something? 
 
Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. 
 
This was not easy. 
 
So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?”
 
Seeing the bigger picture
 
Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. 
 
Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. 
 
So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. 
 
This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. 
 
Chop, chop
 
Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. 
 
Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard.
 
We had to lay out: 

• What we’d received from the client. 

 

• What we still needed from the client. 

 

• What we’d received but didn’t understand or couldn’t make sense of. 

 

• The constraints for the project established by our client’s client—and how all of the above aligned (or didn’t) therewith. 

 

• The goals of the proposed working session. 

 

• A brief overview of that working session’s agenda. 

 
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. 
 
Yup. 
 
We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. 
 
And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose.
 
Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). 
 
This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. 
 
Speed reading
 
Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. 
 
We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. 
 
And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? 
 
Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?”
 
Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished.
 
Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. 
 
And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email.
 
Now do you see the broader lesson here? 
 
People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write.
 
Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.