Coaching on the Pitch and on the Page

Coaching was always in my blood. I am the son of a year-round football coach, and the chalkboard erected in my basement was always full of X’s and O’s. My brothers coach football, and I started coaching at 14. I was barely more than a [...]

Is your writing running on empty?

My husband recently gave me one of the most beautiful gifts I’ve ever received, a Waterman fountain pen with a body satin-finished in two shades of jade green.  Just holding this gorgeous instrument elevates my daily journaling. I may just be scribbling in my pj’s, [...]

Three Techniques Anyone Can Use to Think Like a Graphic Designer

To borrow a theme from the eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope, a little Canva is a dangerous thing.1 Canva and other web-based applications provide small businesses with affordable tools that are easy to manipulate. But ease of use doesn’t guarantee quality of results. It wasn’t the [...]

What “the end of average” means for your startup’s messaging

Let’s play a game of Truth or Lie. I’ll share three statements about myself, and you try to guess which one is the lie: I am a woman of below-average height. As a child, I scored above average on IQ tests. My weight falls within [...]

How to win an argument in writing

When I was young and naive, I foolishly thought that a career in academia would be the ideal place for someone who disliked conflict. My plan was to tuck myself away in the library for most of my days, curl up with my stack of [...]

You had me at About Us

Wooing readers online doesn’t happen as spontaneously as two characters falling head over heels in a rom com. Yet when you’re creating a website, it can be easy to fall into the trap of putting all your effort into attracting readers through a seductive home [...]

Five Surprising Best Practices to Make Your Web Copy Sing

Too many home pages read like damp doormats. Instead of inviting web visitors into the site, they push them away by using a writing style that’s impersonal and indistinct. Your website should attract your audience to you with a unique, powerful voice. The words shouldn’t [...]

Which comes first—web developer or web copywriter?

This is the chicken-and-egg dilemma faced by many startups. With limited resources at hand, where should you invest your few marketing dollars? If you don’t have the in-house capacity to produce your own website, whom should you call first—a web developer who can design and [...]

Why Click-to-Sell Web Copy May Not Produce the Results You’re Hoping For

Hope, we know, is not a strategy. And yet too many startups anchor their marketing efforts in web copy that’s based on mere hope. They hope that mimicking content they admire on someone else’s website will produce jaw-dropping results.  But there’s more to crafting compelling [...]

Why Outsourcing Messaging is the Wrong Paradigm for Chrysalis Companies

Some startups grow up to be unicorns, but before that, in the early phases, all of them are butterflies—fragile, beautiful business concepts. As Stephen Blank so eloquently puts it, “A startup is not a smaller version of a large company. A startup is a temporary [...]