I had the opportunity to be a “guinea pig” for a new program Marcia Yudkin is running. She has revamped her Marketing for More site and now is offering members the opportunity for marketing help via “Feedback Feasts.”
I was the “feastee” for the first call. The topic was how to position our book Happy Hound, without using typical copywriting “scare tactics” to encourage people to buy it.
Since my goal with the book is to promote adopting pets from animal shelters, the last thing I wanted to do was write a bunch of negative copy that made it sound like shelter dogs are all problem dogs. (They aren’t!)
I was nervous about doing the call, since I don’t think of myself as a great copywriter, but I had a good time. It was also inspirational and I rewrote the Happy Hound page afterward, liberally drawing from some of the many drafts I had on my hard disk that had never seen the light of day.
Unfortunately, I had gotten so excited about redoing the page that I overwrote the old version when I uploaded the new page. But after Marcia asked if I still had the old one, we realized we could get it off our weekly server backup. So my less than great initial effort gets to live on in infamy as the “before” version.
In addition to feeling way better about the Happy Hound site, I also know what I need to do to revamp the Happy Tabby page. Cats need equal time, after all 😉