There were about 12 incubators in 1980 and today they number in the thousands in the USA alone. Some of the most famous ones are Y Combinator or TechStars. Even governments are getting into the act: the Obama administration in White House has launched Startup America to facilitate public and private partners investing in American entrepreneurs.

In different ways, incubators and accelerators aim to leverage high-quality mentorship and access to funders to produce dramatically different results; but do these methods actually work?

Another question we’re interested in is where the trends are going. Even if definitive metrics are hard to come by, there’s no doubting the popularity of the incubator and accelerator model – can it be applied broadly to companies outside of the technology sector?

Sounds snarky, I know. Sorry. I ‘m just a little frustrated because four out of five businesses I just tried to contact by phone didn’t have a number listed.

Some people like to get in touch by Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But much of the time, a good old-fashioned phone call is the primary point of contact, even before an email. Some people just like to talk. Make it easy for them. You might just be rewarded by your phone ringing with a new customer on the other end.

Mad Men a la Sesame Street shows off the creative process at work. It’s actually pretty accurate.

While the session was aimed at professional (and prospective) writers, one point we touched on was the value that professional web copywriters (freelance or otherwise) provide to their clients. That value can take a number of forms:

• Getting the company website found by customers. Companies that aren’t getting customers to their website are leaving money on the table. More company owners today understand the importance of getting their website to the top search results on Google.
• Telling the company’s story a better way. Professional web writers help companies focus on the messages that will appeal to customers.
• Providing strategic expertise. Before the copywriter writes their first word, they’re going to research the heck out of the company so they understand their product, value offering, competitors, target market, etc. By the end of the process, they’re in a position to provide strategic advice.

Contact us to learn more about the value we can provide for your company through our website copywriting services

Some email newsletter points to consider:

• Do you have actual news? Most likely, the answer is “yes”. Maybe you’re launching a new product. You’ve got some unique data from a survey. You’re launching the new and improved version of whatever it is that you’re offering — and it’s going to improve people’s lives by 79 percent. You’ve got lots of options; but remember, don’t send out news about your companies various new hires and departmental promotions — that’s for an internal memo, not a promotional newsletter.
• How are you going to distribute your newsletter? MailChimp works. So does Maximizer CRM or Salesforce. Heck, plain old email is fine (though tracking metrics won’t be so straightforward). Test stuff out and then use what works.
• Who are you going to send your newsletter to? Customers, obviously. Business partners? Networking contacts? You may want to send it out to your entire contact list, minus your weird uncle and those two drunk cousins… but don’t spam people. They should have opted in to your list (not necessarily through a formal response — if you met someone at a party who gave you his email and who told you to send him your business information, that’s cool, too).

Yeah, you should probably have an email newsletter. So get to it. Or contact us and we’ll write your email marketing newsletter for you

• How many website pages do you need? A lot of small business websites can get by with 6 to 10 pages of web copy for their entire website. Large companies that have been around a while (or new companies looking to go big fast) may need hundreds of pages (eg. a computer hardware company that sells 100 different kinds of memory sticks alone), typically written in phases. You don’t necessarily need an exact count, since you may decide to move content around after or combine sections, but an approximate one is helpful.
• How much web content needs to be written from scratch? Maybe you’ve already got some pages you’re totally happy with and want to add more. Or you want stuff rewritten. Editing and rewriting may be quicker and easier than writing from scratch, but that’s not always the case.
• How much “industry-specific” jargon will there be? Writing for a software firm can be a bit trickier than writing for a restaurant. Financial and legal firms demand very exacting language. The amount of research a copywriter needs to do to familiarize themselves with the industry will be a factor. We’ve worked with a wide range of industries and are familiar with requirements for many sectors, but there’s always something new on the horizon.
• How much consultation will be required? Some jobs will just require one or two meetings over the phone. Some are more in-depth, necessitating meetings with multiple board members or executives.

That’s pretty much it. The more information you can provide up-front, the better we can quote before we get to the contract stage where we get into minute detail for the scope of work for the project.

Want to get a quote on a website copywriting project? Contact us

In some cases, the blog always had a definite end in mind. A blog about being unemployed ended when the blogger got a job. Another blog about being an ex-pat who moved to Vancouver dried up after the writer had pretty definitively covered every aspect of his transition between the USA and Canada.

In other cases, the blogger just ran out of steam. A blogger who wrote about their personal life surely hasn’t stopped having a personal life; they just stopped feeling the need to document it. Another blogger who wrote about American politics similarly would not have run out of material; but for whatever reason, their passion died.

Blogs die all the time. It often happens when the blogger doesn’t have another reason besides passion to keep going. Bloggers usually need something behind a sheer bloody-minded writing urge to keep the blog alive:

• Financial incentive. Whether you’re being paid to write the blog by a client, taking Google ad revenue or using your blog as a marketing strategy to bring in customers for a business, money is a big motivator to keep blogging. Heck, money is a big motivator to do anything. (This is also a reason why some of my clients keep me on as a blogger on their site — they’ve lost the passion to keep blogging, but they don’t want to lose the revenue they get from social media marketing).
• An engaged audience. Particularly when bloggers are starting out and not getting a whole lot of attention, the isolation can be really demoralizing. If a blog manages to engage its audience to leave comments and share links, and traffic seems to be growing, a blogger will keep up the hard work in the hope of even greater reward and attention.
• Collaborators. Getting friends and colleagues to contribute to a blog doesn’t just help keep the blog fresh. Being part of something bigger also imposes certain psychological obligations. Now you’re not just writing for yourself; if you don’t write your heart out, you’re letting your team down. With community blogs, you can also have a kind of succession. The original blogger who started the thing moves on, but the blog takes on a life of its own beyond what the prime mover foresaw.

It’s a little bit sad when blogs die, but no more than when a magazine or television series stops production. If there’s an audience, a blog will emerge to cater to it. When the audience’s tastes change, other blogs will rise up to cater to them. An online version of natural selection takes place in a world of ideas. There will be death. There will be life. But so long as you take care to update your Google Reader to keep track of all the new stuff, at least it’s always interesting.