Business & corporate ghostwriting services.
Thoughts on how professional writing services
can improve your odds of success!
Speech writing, copy writing, advertising text, website content, memoirs and ebooks, video scripts, user manuals,
blogs, social media posts, training manuals, public relations, crisis communications and writing for SEO. All you have to do is contact us.
By- Michael McKown
Imagine this for a moment. The day has finally arrived when you will be presenting at a renowned and prestigious business event. This event gets exposure in Forbes, the New York Times, social media and elsewhere. It’s a big deal. And so is your presentation.
The future of your business, or job with your giant corporation, depends on an effective presentation. News coverage will get indexed by Google and Bing and will be out there on the Internet for decades. What you do or say will echo through coming decades. No pressure, right?
The preparation
You and your team have discussed strategy, options, possibilities, and more. You have gone into the data, the insights, studies, and the finest of details. You have fully analyzed your competitors and you have literally covered every aspect you and your entire team can think of. You are fully confident that this year, you are going to really succeed.
Prior to this, you have just shaken hands with some accomplished business leaders. Now, you realize, you will be facing them all at once, plus many more you’ve not met. You are wearing your sharpest outfit; you’re all set and ready to go, fires blazing. When it is time for you to step into the spotlight, you get up like the confident person that you are and walk to the lectern.
How to get unhappy
And so, you deliver your speech. To your utter disappointment and horror, you are not able to gain the attention of your target audience. You have no idea why this is happening considering you have been giving presentations smoothly for years. Something just seems to have gone horribly wrong, and it felt awkward. It wasn’t terrible but the audience was nowhere near as receptive as you thought they would be.
All the time, effort, and planning have actually resulted in a monumental loss regarding both money and time. Now you and your team are going to have to think about new strategies to make up for the financial loss.
The reasons for this were simple. You were using too much technical jargon and you assumed because the audience was made up of professionals that everyone would know exactly what you were saying.
You couldn’t have been further away from the mark; these were just regular people who happened to excel in business, not the other way around. Your technical talk that you thought would highlight your skills and abilities had the exact opposite effect. What a waste, right? Not only did you not connect emotionally with your audience but you totally blew it. You’re thinking that this should not have happened because you did a test round in the office with everyone. The folks at work know your industry and product line. They are not the ones to practice on. Your mind is boggled and you put it down to “a bad audience.” Your crew at the office isn’t starting from zero. That “bad audience” you addressed did have to start from zero.
A professional writer, to do a fine piece of work, needs to know the substance of your remarks as well as information about the audience. She will do the necessary research so the opportunity won’t be wasted.
Advertising, copywriting and website content
When you walk out on stage, figuratively speaking, don’t trip and fall. Crashing during the big moment is embarrassing. Think about how your company presents itself to the world and all its potential customers or clients. Get your ad or promotional copy right. Exorcise the grammatical demons from your website.
One of my favorite things to gripe about is product descriptions online and in user manuals. Manufacturers and vendors from Asia seem to be the biggest culprits. I think many of them either run their copy through translation software (just don’t), or assign the translation to someone for whom American English is not what they learned from childhood. Language is intricate stuff. How often do you see “your” used instead of “you’re,” or “affect” instead of “effect”?
Sure, you sell to people who usually can’t spot typos, so why bother? Because you also sell to people who will spot the mistake. And they will wonder why you’re so careless, and what else you may be careless about. They will wonder whether you could even afford to present correctly. Maybe they’ll think you farmed out the copywriting to a staffer who told you she’s a better writer than she is. Don’t call your judgment into question. Do yourself a favor and don’t cut your own throat.
Memoirs and ebooks
Many CEOs, executives and business owners have valuable – and fascinating — stories to tell. Everybody loves a good story. Did you know that FedEx founder Fred Smith once made the payroll by flying to Las Vegas with the company’s last $5,000 and winning at blackjack? Or that the famed Wal-Mart greeter was installed to: 1) make you feel welcome, and 2) to prevent you from walking out the door with unpaid merchandise?
Memoirs are useful and can raise the public’s esteem of the business. Memoirs are also valuable to readers who want to know about how someone achieved something. That can be useful information which can be adapted to some other, perhaps completely different, business.
Ebooks – meaning books published electronically that are available for download such as from Amazon or perhaps your own website – are often used as promotional devices. For example, you can publish an ebook about a product you offer. You can go into far more detail about it than you can on a single webpage. You can talk about how the original product idea came about, details of its development, reception by buyers, reviews (both professional as well as user), and perhaps include an offer. Ebooks can be an effective marketing tool.
Let’s not forget video
Let’s say you’re going to set up a YouTube channel for your company. Somebody points a camera at you. Now what? It couldn’t be much worse than the example set by an LA-area Chevrolet dealer’s general manager. They shot TV commercials using him. The poor guy looked terribly uncomfortable. In later commercials, he tried some dad dance moves. Awkward!
I fired off a couple emails commenting on his sad performance.
And then finally he learned to relax. He could banter with confidence. And he even pulled off some cool dance moves; not bad for a guy pushing 60. I was impressed and complimented him on finally getting it right. Maybe his grandkids now think he’s cool.
How are you at improvisation? If you can deliver a message with sincerity and a smile, fantastic! If not, you’re going to need a script. Our professional writers can get it done. But you’ll have to look elsewhere for dance lessons.
If you freeze in front of a camera, get training, use someone else in the company, or hire an actor. Or contact an advertising agency; they have their own resources.
User manuals
Engineers should not write user manuals, unless the target audience is engineers. The main problem is that they assume a level of knowledge that the buyer may not have. If the audience is other than engineers, then that engineer should explain the product and its use to a ghostwriter who will put the information into a form understandable to the non-expert user. Don’t aggravate your customers by talking over their heads.
Clearly, also don’t delegate the writing to a staffer, for all the reasons noted above. I recall a Japanese motorcycle manufacturer’s shop manual (issued decades ago) which was so rife with broken English that it was nearly incomprehensible. Fortunately, Honda has long since corrected that problem. Honda is a huge corporation and wants to project a correct image. Leaving itself open to ridicule is no longer a corporate option.
“Correct image.” Important phrase! To repeat: “Leaving itself open to ridicule is no longer a corporate option.”
Do what Honda does. Get it right.
Corporate communications
Blogs are informal or newsy ways of talking about your business, developments, products, services, maybe stories about executives, managers or line workers. They can be informative, entertaining and useful. Blog entries are made periodically. Check out our own blog.
Social media posts and pages are important, both to keep your company visible and keep people aware of developments. Who is managing your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts? Are your business pages regularly updated or old and static?
Sometimes you’ll need to address your sales staff directly. The CEO may need to gather her executives and managers, or maybe the entire company, for a speech. People retire; you may need to stand up and talk about the lucky person about to sail off into the sunset with a floppy old hat, fishing pole and a six-pack. Or perhaps you want a memorable roast instead as the send-off.
Procedures may require documentation. In one memorable occasion, a company summoned a writer into a pit late at night where equipment repairs were being made. The managers realized there was no reference manual for this procedure, so the workers were making it up on the fly. The writer’s job was to observe, interview and record the procedure for future use.
Public relations is the department that interfaces with the media. That may consist of press releases and even appearances on TV, or live transmission over the Internet. An experienced PR person will know what to say. And what not to say.
Crisis communications is how a business or government entity deals with situations that went dramatically south, with potential, or actual, tragedy attached. Ghostwriters Central has people on staff who are fully qualified to consult with your company, then to speak on behalf of your company with the goal of minimizing damage, resolving the problem, and charting a way forward.
SEO considerations
Today’s corporate honchos know what “SEO” means. Search engine optimization is the art and science of tuning webpages so they will rank high up in search results for important and competitive keyword phrases.
Search engines are a lot smarter than they were in, say, year 2000. Once upon a time, all you had to do was sprinkle keyword phrases throughout, no matter how awkward the resulting text might become, and you suddenly ranked. Old-timey tricks like that will probably get your website penalized these days.
The major search engines at the moment are Google and Bing. Yahoo search gets a lot of queries too, but they use Bing’s technology. Google, certainly, has developed the ability to parse language to detect keyword manipulation and text swiped from elsewhere. Consider this webpage. It’s entirely original content. We did not copy paragraphs from elsewhere or rip off someone else’s work and change some words to hopefully avoid detection of duplicate content. Google is smart enough to realize this article is about business and corporate ghostwriting services, and to note it is fully original. Originality benefits positioning in search results.
Topic, originality and natural language. The writing we can handle. Your webmaster or IT pros can do the rest, consisting of the nature of links pointing to the page, headline and title tag text.
Use a professional writer who understands the importance of unique content. If you hand off article writing to some office jockey, there’s a good chance he will…uhhh…borrow content from elsewhere, which may well result in the disappearance your website from search results.
Happiness is bliss
A business ghostwriter can make your product or service descriptions and articles both interesting and original. Doing so makes for happy customers or clients, happy search engines, and happy management. And a happy webmaster or IT department boss, because they won’t be called to the c-suite to explain why the company website fell off the Google cliff.
What can be said and promised is that with Ghostwriters Central, you will be with the absolute best in the industry.
We’ve been in business since 2002. We understand that time is money and your time won’t be wasted. The process is exceptionally easy. Everything is hassle-free and straightforward.
There are no surprises, hidden agendas, or hidden costs. Everything is discussed with you upfront. Once we understand your needs, we will recommend a highly experienced and skilled writer to meet your needs. Your first consultation with the writer is free. We are not the cheapest writers you can find, but we’re far from the most expensive. We go out of our way to hire writers who can deliver exceptional writing, on time and on budget.
If you have a story to tell and you want it to be heard, we are the “ghosts” that you want to use. It all begins with a phone call, email or text. Tell us what you need. And get happy.