I was talking to Christy, a great blogger and copywriter from Twitching Grey Matter. We ended up chatting about using the web as a platform for business — which is to say, we were looking around for the secret sauce that will turn mere mortals into internet rock star marketing machines. After much soul searching, we managed to whittle it down into into a easy to consume bulleted list.

This article speaks specifically about copywriting in several parts, but the same principles can apply to anyone who offers a service and wants to use the web to promote it.

Have talent

This one goes without saying but I think there is still a point in here. It’s not just that you need to be talented at writing, it’s that you need to be able to prove, show, relate in some tangible way that talent. If you blog, blog about the things that you want to be hired to do. If you have a portfolio, put together a showcase around the type of writing you feel best suited to.

You need to start building out your story.

There are a million and one copywriters is this crazy city, what makes you so special? Why am I going to hire you for my specific project?

The biggest part of creating a market for yourself is clearly defining what your market is not and making sure people know that right from the beginning.

Have focus

The most practical piece of advice I can give to anyone trying to make it on the web is to expand on the last sentence of the last section — it all goes back to the old say, “A jack of all trades is a master of none.” You will never be known as the copywriting expert.

That job has already been filled a thousand times over.

At best, you can become the go to expert for people looking for a very particular style of copywriting. Your business is word of mouth, you can tweet and blog until the end of time but the stuff that really converts is one person telling one more person to cut the check. That happens when you make it easy for others to tell your story.

Envision your perfect client and write the description of him or her on the back of a post card. What do they do? What can you charge them? Why are you the best fit for them? As silly as it sounds, really take the time to do this. The faster you are able to establish who it is you want to work with, the easier it will be for you to target your marketing efforts and use your resources more effectively.

Once you have your perfect client in mind, this is where things become hit or miss — start tracking him or her down. Look for the networks, blogs, forums and tradeshows where this particular client calls home and start looking. As always, when marketing your services directly like this the best way to do it is to prove before you sell. Once you have convinced them, unequivocally, that they absolutely, positively need to work with you on their project — you won’t feel like a shill when you ask them for a check to continue working with them. That leads to my next point.

Listen to Chris Anderson for about 15 minutes

If you don’t know, Chris Anderson wrote the book The Long Tail and is currently working on a book entitled Free (which will, in fact, be free) where he discusses the idea that the marginal cost of production of digital products is driving the price of all digital media down to zero, thus, he contends it would be in the best interest of digital producers to accept this and find alternative ways to monetize their work (instead of selling music, sell the live show; instead of selling software, sell the service). While I think there are plenty of markets that are perfectly willing and able to pay for digital products, I have to agree with Mr. Anderson on this point — it is much easier to sell one person a dozen things than it is to sell a dozen people.

Said differently, work really hard to make your customers love you so that you can keep selling them for life.

To that end, don’t be afraid to give a little away for free. If someone has a great idea but doesn’t necessarily have to means to take you on, help them out a little. Be sure to make them aware of the fact that you are helping them and that typically you charge for this service, that is a good way to avoid accidentally pricing your talents down to free.

One evangelist, one person who absolutely, positively loves everything you do can be worth thousands of marketing dollars. If you can find away to give away just enough to cultivate these evangelists without making you so crazy you can’t do your paid work — you will quickly start to see your work paying dividends.

There is an addendum to this, I recently saw the CEO of Zappos speak and he was talking about something that I am going to say he called the “Two Year Rule.” Basically, it is the principle that the people you meet and that you help, often need to ripen a bit before they become useful to you. Often, the biggest opportunities you will receive will come “two years” after you performed some random act of kindness. The nut of this is that in any service business you have to be willing to bet a little bit on your customers and recognize the fact that while you might not see immediate returns on every bet you are sewing the seeds.

Be everywhere

This is the tricky part but if you want to use Social Media (whatever that is) for the sake of building a business it is an absolutely necessary step.

You need to be everywhere, all the time.

You need to sell your story everywhere, all the time.

Tell it as clearly and concisely to as many people as you can manage and make sure that when people meet you in a professional context that they are left understanding exactly what it is that you do and exactly why they would be paying you right this second if they fit into the mold of your perfect client.

The big problem that people working in this field have is that they send out mixed signals. They aren’t clear about who they are so the people they market too aren’t able to form a clear picture enough in their minds. If your customers don’t get it, they won’t try to explain it to anyone else.

Think about your favorite Interweb celebrities, you could probably explain exactly what it is they do in under three seconds — that’s because if they have any talent at all it is in their ability to distill their message down to soundbytes and make it palatable to the public. Chris Brogan is about Community, Chris Pirillo is the Geek, iJustine really, really loves Apple products (and her video camera) they are artists when it comes to creating caricatures of themselves that make the complex things they do understandable to a large group of people. .

Being everywhere is as much about coherence as it is about volume. A modest amount of highly coherent content is worth a huge, jumbled mess of it any day.

Value your work

I left this one for last because it is very close to actual sales process and it doesn’t help you until you have someone on the line who wants to buy your service. Once you do, however, you absolutely have to value what it is that you do. Be willing to charge for what you do and since you know you are worth it, be willing to charge a lot. The people you want to work with will respect the fact that you value your time enough to charge them a fair market rate. You start running into problems when you worry too much about pricing yourself out of the market. If a potential client sees that you don’t value your time, they won’t value it either. You will end up with a client that pays less and expects more, it’s really uncanny how that works out.

Throw out a number that makes you feel really comfortable, and if your potential client balks at it, smile and work your way down from there. If you start feeling like you are getting no give at all from your potential, be willing to walk away from the table. This is the hardest thing I had to learn. Sometimes you just have to be willing to say, “thank you but I don’t think we will be able to proceed from here.” If you walk into every negotiation about price with the firm belief that you can and will walk away if necessary, you will find yourself closing more deals for a much higher price.

There are a million and one ways to make it on the web and all of them are tough. When you boil it all down though it can be summarized as, “believe in your unique story, find people who believe in it as well, make it easy for them to tell your story, and charge them appropriately for your talent.”

How fast any of this works has a lot to do with what type of marketing skills you are bringing to the table, but what I will say is that if you follow the spirit of what I have rambled at you in the last page or so you are going to start noticing a difference. It might be modest at first, but it’s a rolling stone that might make the difference for your business.

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