​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! 

​Here at Copel Communications, we recently completed the sixth revision of a project we were working on for a client. And boy was it fun!
 
No. We are not being sarcastic. We’re serious as a heart attack here. 
 
So what gives? And how can this be the basis for an article? More to the point, what can you take away from this story? How can it make you more productive? Happier? 
 
Once the bones are in place…
 
We can’t tell you too many details about the project itself, because it’s confidential/protected by NDA. But we can say that it was an internal written piece, very important, that would be shared across the organization, and eventually re-jiggered into a prospect-facing piece, to help drive sales. 
 
So it was a very important document. And our client was understandably maniacal about the thing, sending us change after change after change. It was a real revisions hamster-wheel. 
 
But by the fifth round, the client had run out of new ideas and tweaks. The ideas, the tenets of the piece, were fixed. The bones were in place. 
 
And so it was our turn to create Draft Six. 
 
And yes, it was actually fun.
 
Why? 
 
In praise of polishing
 
At this point, since the facts of the content were locked, Draft Six became an entirely stylistic challenge. It was 100-percent “polish this document.” We didn’t have to worry about getting new material tossed out wholesale by the client because new quirks and features had crept in. In other words, we could happily roll up our sleeves, and dive into making the English better.
 
(Did you know that Google will ding your website if you use AI-generated copy? As a prime purveyor of AI, Google can recognize it better than anyone, and since their goal is to serve their users with trustworthy content, they seek out human-written material, vs. stuff that had been created by clicking the “Generate” button.) 
 
As you might’ve guessed by now, we certainly didn’t use ChatGPT to “polish” this document. We had the luxury of reading passages aloud, consulting a thesaurus, testing out different sentence structures and phrasing, and getting to the point where it was so tight that it squeaked. 
 
It wasn’t hard. It was gratifying. It was like scratching an itch. And the piece just got better and better, the more we polished it. 
 
Mind you, we didn’t spend a week on what we just described. Creating Draft Six only took us an hour or two. But boy did it come out great, and the client was delighted, and to this day, that piece is doing its job, ably. 
 
The reason we tell this story is that it doesn’t just apply to this arcane document that we were working on, here at Copel Communications. It pertains to everything that you create, in your business, too. 
 
There’s always going to be the ideation phase. Then the creation phase, based on the vetted ideas. 
 
But too many people overlook the final polishing phase, which is when that piece really comes to life and shines. This is true for web pages, for product designs, for graphical layouts, for sales plans, you name it. 
 
The key here is recognizing the inflection point when the initial creation ends, and the polishing begins. Once you can spot it, you’ll be liberated to apply the best possible polish to whatever it is you’ve been working on, without that looming dread of “Oh, this will just get tossed because new input for Version 7 is on its way.” 
 
So enjoy your time in the black hole, with your email and text notifications disabled, as you polish away, knowing that you’ll emerge with a gem in your hand. 
 
Need some help ideating, creating, or polishing that next project? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. 

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. 

This is an article about producing B2B videos: the kind you post on YouTube to bring in prospects. In this story, it was actually about the slick home-page video we were creating for a client’s new website. 
 
For these types of videos, the approach is usually pretty straightforward: You send off your approved two-column (“Video” and “Audio”) video script to your video editor, who does the rest. This includes finding stock footage and music, building titles, editing the footage, and farming our the voice-over or V.O. 
 
It’s that last part we want to talk about here. 
 
Sure, you can proceed the way we just described. But we don’t recommend it. Here’s why. 
 
We’ll use the case of our client, and their new website, as an example. For their new site, they were also updating their brand, and, more importantly, the audience they wanted to target. Specifically, they were going more upscale in their demographic. Very high-end. 
 
Sure, this was conveyed in the video script. And we could have entrusted our video editor (who is fantastic, by the way) to source the V.O. on his own. 
 
Instead, we worked with the client to produce the V.O. first, before sending the script to the editor. This gave us the advantage (“luxury”?) of casting that part ourselves, letting our client listen to audio samples of different V.O. artists, and then narrowing down to the final one. 
 
Then we were able to work with this voice-over artist very directly and intently, explaining to him the exact audience we were looking to target, the similar reads on his reel that would be relevant/close to what we wanted, the intended look and feel of the finished video, and so on. 
 
Armed with all of this info, that V.O. artist delivered. He nailed it. You could just see the gorgeous video it would accompany… even if that video hadn’t been created yet. 
 
Take 2
 
Now we could send that V.O. recording—along with the script, our client’s logo, and other files—along to our brilliant video editor. 
 
And think of this: Not only did our producing the V.O. (whose cost was ridiculously nominal, by the way) save our editor work and time, but it also provided killer input to help create a better video.
 
All he had to do was listen to the thing. It helped him pick just the right background music—on the very first try! It helped him source the right stock-footage candidates, with minimal back-and-forth from us.
 
We knew, all along, how this video was supposed to come out. That’s our job. It was tougher for our client to visualize in advance; that’s neither their job nor their skill-set. But boy were they delighted when the final product came together. 
 
And note that nothing mentioned above increased the production budget of this video. It was simply a matter of choosing to sequence it in this way which elevated its production value so much, and so efficiently. 
 
Have a creative project you need help with? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in. 

​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: 

• Which part of this program comes first? 

 

• Which components does it feature? 

 

• Which part comes next? 

 

• Which components does it feature? 

 

• And so on. 

 
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. 

​In case you were unaware, here at Copel Communications, we alternate our blog articles between those directed toward business owners/consultants (at the top of the month), and our “creatives” audiences of ad agencies and other creative folk (at mid-month). 
 
This article is one of the latter. 
 
And it begins with a story. A colleague called us up not long ago, bemoaning the fact that her creative agency (we’re obfuscating/anonymizing here) had seen a sudden drop in business, since all of her clients were switching to AI for their creative work. To say she was unhappy was an understatement; there was a distinct edge of panic in her voice. 
 
But was she right? 
 
And how does this story relate to you, and your business? Are the ubiquitous doom-and-gloom headlines correct? And what the heck is an “Upwork moment,” which we’d teased in the headline? 
 
Let’s unpack this part-by-part. 
 
They’re going where?
 
A little more (fudged/anonymized) info about this colleague of ours. Her creative agency serves big you-know-them national brands. They’ve entrusted her and her great staff, for years, to deliver beautiful hand-crafted creative which elevates these brands to their respective audiences. Collectively, there’s billions of dollars of brand equity at stake here. 
 
Now ask yourself an obvious question: 
 
Are these huge brands suddenly asking ChatGPT to do the same thing for them? 
 
Yeah, we’re laughing, too. 
 
These huge brands know that ChatGPT can’t come close when it comes to quality. They also know that ChatGPT (or any other widget of its ilk) treads in very murky waters when it comes to copyright clearance. 
 
Do you honestly think that they’d risk their billion-dollar brands on that? Do you think that they would dump our colleague and her team, in order to get such sketchy and legally-questionable content… merely to save a few bucks? You think they don’t have “a few bucks”? 
 
Or is the answer perhaps far more mundane? 
 
Spoiler alert: It is. 
 
As we’d told our colleague: “This isn’t AI. It’s just a downturn. A basic dip in your business, wherein a few accounts happen to be slow at the exact same time.” 
 
You could hear her sigh of relief. “Oh,” she said. “That, I can deal with.” It was, in short, familiar territory. Solve-able via old-school tricks like shaking the trees and good old-fashioned business development or biz-dev. 
 
Beware the ostrich
 
Does this mean that AI isn’t a threat, or at least a factor? Get your head out of the sand. It’s a real thing. But then again, so was Google. So was the internet. We’re still breathing. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall. 
 
Which brings us back to our “Upwork moment.” Several years ago, back around 2013, Upwork and other gig-economy platforms, such as Fiverr, burst onto the scene. Many people predicted that they would rob us of all our work and that we here at Copel Communications would promptly go out of business. 
 
We’re still breathing. The sky is still blue above us. 
 
But Upwork and Fiverr are still here and thriving. So what gives? 
 
As it turns out, Upwork was a really great find for businesses who, say, wanted dirt-cheap copywriting and didn’t care too much about the quality. So if you wanted to hire a writer from India who would create a 2,000-word blog for 15 bucks, Upwork was a godsend. 
 
This did not put us out of business. All it did was to better delineate various strata of clients and providers—and we don’t interact with either of them. Our work is higher-end than that, and our clients are, too. If you’ve read this far into this article, 1) thanks, and 2) you’re likely in the same watertight boat. 
 
Which gets back to AI. Sure, there are tons of people, worldwide, for whom AI/ChatGPT-generated content is good enough, and you certainly can’t beat the price. That is, free. 
 
For them, it’s a godsend. For us—and for you, and for our now-breathing-again colleague—it’s just another way the rest of the landscape is evolving around us. 
 
The sky ain’t falling tomorrow, either. 
 
Have a comment? Leave it in the comments below, or feel free to contact us directly. 

​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. 

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: 

• Your bio. You already have one, right? Well, this one should be tailored just to speaking engagements. You want to show off how many events you’ve spoken at; you might want to include, for example, an aggregate audience total (“Has presented to more than 50,000 people”). Include locations (“…across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico”). Be sure to mention any awards won; if they’re not recognizable, like Oscars, just say “Award-winning speaker…”. 

 

• Your headshot. Sure, a basic headshot is fine. But what’s better is a shot of you, on stage, doing your thing. Guess what? AI can help. Start with preferably a low-angle pic of you (as if taken from “the audience”) and ask a common tool, such as Grok, to add the catwalks and lighting way up in the stage ceiling behind you. 

 

• Your programs. These are the different topics you’re available to speak about. Each needs a sexy title, a bullet list of take-aways, and an “ideal audience” (such as “middle managers and their teams who are eager to take their sales production numbers to the next level”). These need to entice, entice, entice, and sell, sell, sell. 

 

• Your sizzle reel. Your what? This is a brief (about three minutes) compilation of clips of you on stage, doing your thing. Bookend it with an intro title, featuring your headshot and bullet-list of top credentials, and closing titles that include audience testimonials, your website, and where to book you. 

 

• Other stuff. You’ll want a nice 3-D image of your book, if you have one. You’ll want to create a doc known as your Presentation Rider, which includes all of your on-site requirements (time allotment for sound check, technical requirements, video recording limitations, etc.). You can also include discrete video clips of you, speaking at different engagements; these can be longer slices of the quick clips you’d featured in your sizzle reel. 

 
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. 

​Question: As the year draws to a close, are you merely older… or wiser? 
 
Not to flatter ourselves, but we think we can help with the latter. That’s because it’s time for our year-end round-up—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications —of our top posts for creatives like you. 
 
Catch the ones you’d missed. Or revisit those that helped. Enjoy! 

• How to keep your business videos on the rails—and on budget.  There’s a technique, developed in Hollywood, which will actually make the production of your B2B videos go faster, easier, and cheaper. Check it out. 

 

• What are website “pilot pages”? And why should you use them? Be efficient. Be frugal. Adopt best practice. And learn just what the heck “pilot pages” are, and why they’re an essential step in your next website or site re-brand. 

 

• Where do you draw the line, literally, with creative direction? When should you purposely create low-quality input and/or downplay the quality of the input itself? This is a fine line to walk, both literally and figuratively—but it can yield stellar results from other creatives who work for you. 

 

• How do you get good creative input from non-creative types? If for no other reason, click on this article to see the awesome AI-generated “nerd” we created for its illustration! LOL! Seriously, though: Great tips in this article, too. 

 

• When will real intelligence serve you better than the artificial kind? If AI makes things easy, isn’t it better for challenges like marketing taglines? Well… no. Read a true (anonymized) client story here, and grab some useful takeaways for your business, too. 

 

• How can you update your brand, yet keep it familiar? It’s a paradoxical challenge: Update your brand, keep it from going stale, yet keep it familiar, too. But how? Get the guidelines and guardrails you need, right here. 

 

• One blog is worse than none. Really! Even if you’re not a marketing guru, you don’t want to shoot yourself in the foot. Ready to cringe? Read this true story about a supposed marketing guru who did just that! Yikes! 

 

• The biggest shifts in book publishing since Gutenberg. You want your exciting new manuscript to be picked up by one of those famous New York publishing houses… or do you? You might be quite shocked to learn about the new reality of book publishing. Get it, quickly, right here. 

 

• We made a Gantt chart in Word! (And so can you.) Talk about counterintuitive: Here’s a way to make a Gantt chart not only in Word… but in reverse! Trust us: This will make you look like a hero to your client or boss. 

 

• How to live with a ghost (writer). There is a very specific way to structure your relationship with the ghost writer or copy-editor you choose to develop your thought-leading book. But what is it? You might be pleasantly surprised to find out what it is. So find out here. 

 

• What we’re thankful for, 2025 edition. It’s become an annual tradition here at Copel Communications, dating back over a decade. And we haven’t run out of things—or more importantly, people—to thank. Sit back and enjoy this one; it will inspire you to appreciate others in your life, even more. 

 
Well, that’s all for this year. Have a suggestion for a post for next year? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you! 

​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: 

• The most stress-reducing marketing tip you’ll read this week. This is, without a doubt, the most counterintuitive advice you’ll ever encounter. And you’ll love it! A ridiculously easy way to boost your marketing effectiveness. 

 

• Trade-show prep made easy. You’d be surprised how much stuff is already yours, for free. And how many “wheels” have already been invented. Get the tips here. 

 

• Is your business branding missing out on a blend word? Wait, what’s a “blend word” Or a portmanteau, for that matter? You’ll love this article; we’ve gotten great feedback from it—and it can really help boost your business, too. 

 

• A ridiculously easy trick for generating fresh marketing content. It’s staring you in the face: A source, right in your office right now, of endless custom marketing content for your biz. Read the article to find out where. 

 

• How to out-Google Google to broaden your marketing reach. We’re not SEO gurus, but some of our clients are, and we learned some wild tips that we freely share in this article. Take advantage! 

 

• Selling a client story is more than anonymizing a client story. You want to tell the world how you helped a client succeed. But sometimes, there’s a slightly different path to take, which will generate more business. Find out what it is. 

 

• So you want to be a podcast guest… What now? If you’re a thought leader, there’s nothing better than a podcast guest appearance for showing off your expertise, and engaging with new prospects. But becoming a guest is hardly straightforward. See how you can crack the code. 

 

• ChatGPT Doesn’t Wear Shoes. And if you think it does, stop reading right here. Seriously: This article points up a big weakness in generative AI, which you can easily exploit, to your sales advantage. 

 

• Sometimes it’s okay to ask the customer what they want. Wait—was Steve Jobs wrong? And if so, how can you profit? This is one of those staring-right-at-you revelations… you’re welcome! 

 

• You’ll never believe the best way to tease your webinars! You’ll likely laugh out loud when you discover this surefire trick to boosting attendance at your next webinar. Who said marketing isn’t fun? 

 

• How to McDonald-ize your B2B demo videos. Can you make a custom marketing video, showcasing your services… without any video footage on hand? And if so, how? Cash in on all the years of process improvement that we, and our clients, have been honing in this field. 

 
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!