Dependable Solutions, a technology management firm based in Wisconsin, provides professional technology solutions for organizations ranging from small to large businesses, government, police departments, and K-12 school districts. In September 2007, the team over at Dependable Solutions contacted Young Copy requesting professional writing services for their upcoming K-12 conference. Aside from writing postcard copy for the conference, full website copy, and brochure copy, I developed a catchy advertising slogan to help the company boost revenues. Did it work?

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One of my favorite topics - developing a winning slogan. Aside from it being easy, at least it is for me, developing a slogan is one of the best things you can do for your company. But unless you understand the fundamentals of how to develop a catchy slogan that will stay in the minds of your customers, do not attempt to develop one on your own. So before you consider creating a slogan for your business, take a look at the following process I use when I create slogans for Young Copy clients.

First you need to understand there are two sides to every great slogan. One side represents what you do and the other side represents how what you do benefits your customers. Each side can consist of one or multiple words. And when you bring both sides together, you have an effective business slogan. For example, I wrote about Peer1's "We Get IT" slogan a while back.  Let's break the slogan into multiple pieces.

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If you work in the hosting industry at any capacity, you should be familiar with Parallels, a software company dominating the industry with their new virtualization and automation products. Back in December 12, 2007 Parallels announced their rebranding initiative, changing the name from SWSoft to the now popular Parallels. The new brand took off as expected, thanks to the genius marketing team led by Kurt Daniels, senior vice president of marketing and online at Parallels.

I talk to people in the software and hosting industry daily. And since one of my most popular services is press release writing and distribution, Parallels always comes up in the conversation. Either my client mentions the name first or I ask them to give me their 30 second history on the company. To date, everyone I talk to in the industry accurately describes the company's history. So how does a software company develop a new brand, launch the new brand, and become a well known name in the industry - and do it in less than three months?

Parallels® (formerly SWsoft) is a worldwide leader in virtualization and automation software that optimizes computing for consumers, businesses, and service providers across all major hardware, operating system, and virtualization platforms. Founded in 1999, Parallels is a fast-growing company with 900 employees in North America, Europe, and Asia.

I personally think Parallels has an impressive marketing strategy, dating back to Plesk, their hosting control panel company. The marketing team at Parallels knows exactly what it takes to build a brand and gain recognition in the industry. Based on what I see everyday in hosting news related sites, Parallels takes advantage of press releases. From mid January 2008 to today, Parallels has released at least 15-20 press releases. That's an average of five a month. I recommend to my clients they should release at least 1-2 times a month and if budget allows, distribute press releases four times a month.

Imagine what Parallels (or your company) could achieve if they utilized optimized press release writing services. 

In the future I hope to interview the brilliant minds around the new Parallels brand. Hopefully I can chat with Kurt Daniels to learn more about the new Parallels initiative. I am most curious to see how well their press release marketing strategies help increase sales for their flagship products:

Parallels Desktop for Mac
Parallels Virtuozzo Containers
Parallels Plesk Control Panel

Meanwhile, please sign up for the Young Copy feed by clicking on the "Subscribe to RSS Feed" graphic to your right. If you have questions regarding how a well planned, well written, and well executed press release marketing strategy can help you achieve better branding and more revenue, please send your questions via the Contact form.

First note that I am not a web designer, but having worked with some of the best web and graphic designers in the world, I know a great looking (and functional) website when I see one. I tried to design a few websites between 1997-1999. Okay, I tried to design more than a few over a two year period, but never went beyond the basics. So over the last decade, instead of trying to be a web designer, I've spent my time focusing on what an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly, sales-driven website should look like. Now on to the point of this post. As a former employee of ModernBill, I worked with or was introduced to thousands of web hosting companies. One in particular stood out. 

Click on the Eleven2 link and browse around for a minute. The site is simple, yet elegant and has a high quality feel to it. Personally, I think it's one of the best web hosting sites I have seen in a long time.

Best Qualities

1. Top Navigation Menu - You cannot get lost on the site. The navigation could not be any easier. The top navigation (Host, Resell, Dedicated, Develop, Help) make it very easy to find the service you want.

2. Sign Up Button - It's the big orange button to the right of the top navigation menu.
3. Rotating Highlights - The homepage features four rotating highlights about Eleven2, its products, services, and special features. It's in your face, but has such a great impact.
4. Bottom Navigation - Basically the bottom navigation is like a sitemap of the site. What you cannot find in the top navigation, you can certainly find it in the bottom navigation. Plus it's great for SEO.
5. Inside Content - The site's content is not saturated with unnecessary content. The information gets to the point quickly and gives you what you need to know about the product/service. Notice the two boxes on the right side of each page. The top box provides links to learn more about the featured product/service you are viewing. And the bottom box provides links to learn more about why you should use Eleven2 as your next hosting provider.
6. Next Step - At the bottom of each inside page you will see "Ready for the next step?" and a big, orange graphic that says "Order Your Plan Today!" just below the package details table. Great call-to-action elements, actions elements that take you to what I think is truly one of the best sign up forms in the industry.  

Overall Grade: A+

Unique Feature

Before I sign off, let's review one of the most unique features about the company itself. They provide an email and anti-spam solution for your iPhone with their new iPhone hosting platform. You can watch a video of founders Rodney Giles and Travis Weerts discussing the new feature at http://www.eleven2.com/iphone/.

Needed Improvements

Every website has elements that need to be improved, but that's part of the learning process; consistently reworking pieces or sections of your website to make it better for the end user. Two things are difficult to find on the Eleven2 website:

1. The link to the iphone information and video page. I knew the page existed on the site somewhere, but I had to do a quick Google search with a few added clicks to find it.
2. A link to their news section. Either it doesn't exist or the news area is hidden somewhere?

I only pointed out two elements that could be improved. Trust me on this - if you only have a couple of elements that need to be improved on your website, go reward yourself with something great, like a new iPhone (or buy one for me).

Before You Go

Take a look at the following video detailing some of the highlights, call-to-action elements, and features of the Eleven2 website.

Your Comments

Can you find any aspect of the Eleven2 website that could be improved? Please post your comments, ask questions, or request a site review. You can always send email to dave (at) youngcopy.com instead of posting your comments to the public.

I get a lot of requests for white paper writing. Companies are using white papers to produce new leads, educate prospects, and drive traffic to their websites. In the fall of 2007, I started working on a white paper for Applicure, an Israel based software company specializing in web application security. Prior to now I have not posted any white papers in my portfolio so I figured Applicure's Network Firewall Protection Is Not Enough white paper makes a great first impression.

If you have been reviewing my website, you know that I provide both promotional writing services and technical writing services. Since I mainly write for software, hosting, and technology companies, white paper writing falls under both types of services. That said, I decided to place the Applicure white paper in the promotional writing portfolio and the technical writing portfolio.

The Applicure white paper is a perfect example of how a technology company can successfully outsource their writing projects to an off-site, remote professional writer. I think part of the success comes from Applicure's marketing team. They did a great job in providing feedback to me during the white paper writing process. As a result, the white paper, the process, and the remote team communication turned out better than I expected. Team collaboration goes a long way and becomes extremely important even if team members are thousands of miles away from each other and located in two countries - (Cincinnati, OH, U.S.) and Israel.

Immediately following the white paper, the Applicure marketing team requested I write copy for a new brochure they planned to use to attract new prospects. The brochure's goal: reach new customers in the U.S. market with a target audience consisting primarily of executives and upper management at U.S. based data centers. I will post more about the brochure copy in a future post.

The other day I received my copy of WebHosting.Info's NewsGrid Daily newsletter. In the newsletter there was a banner ad flashing "free hosting, with no ads." What caught my attention was the simplicity of the banner ad, but more importantly, the name of the company - WebHero. 

I think the name is great. We all have our heroes - The Incredible Hulk anyone? The banner ad said "Free Web Hosting" and flashed "With No Ads." At the bottom of the ad was the WebHero logo (shown above). Typically I would not click on a free web hosting ad, but I had to check this one out. I almost never come across a free web hosting company that has such a great company name. That said, there must be something else to it.

When the WebHero site loads, it shows four products. The first product in WebHero's matrix is the "Free Web Hosting" package - the one mentioned in the banner ad. In the second slot, WebHero highlights the "Everything Hosted" package in green as the "Best Selling Plan." At $4.95 you get 10GB of storage space, 1500 throughput (bandwidth), an ecommerce cart, priority phone support, tons of email accounts, even MySQL databases.

The point of this blog is not to sell you on WebHero's products and services, rather I want to point out how effective company branding can be in terms of attracting new customers. Even though I would not use a free web hosting service, WebHero caught my attention and almost sold me on their paid hosting plan. 

How?

1. Great branding.
2. Extreme simplicity (design and copy).
3. Great color scheme.
4. Everything I would need in a hosting package.
5. Great pricing model.

WebHero, like many other companies I feature in this blog, has done a great job branding their company. Especially in today's overly saturated shared web hosting market, branding plays an even more important role in the success of a company that primarily sells shared hosting services.

Great job WebHero. Keep up the good work.

I recently published another article in Ping! Zine web hosting magazine called "Marketing With Press Releases" that list the top 10 rules for a winning press release marketing strategy. I have extracted those top 10 rules for you and placed them in their own document at Winning Press Release Marketing Strategy. The article makes my 10th contribution to the magazine.

As someone who practices professional writing daily, I have first-hand experience with how powerful a press release marketing strategy can be for companies. When you combine the 10 rules I listed in the article with optimized press release writing and optimized press release services, you can generate more traffic and more exposure to your potential customers, partners, and anyone interested in your products and services.

In the coming weeks and months I plan on writing posts and developing case studies on how well optimized press release writing works for my clients. The companies interviewed will be sharing the top benefits they receive from our regular press release writing, optimization techniques, and press release distribution methods. 

What's Xenu Link Sleuth you ask? Xenu is a link checker. It's free, easy to use, and provides a nice report on broken links found on your website. As a contract technical writer, I use it every time I update content or technical documentation, be it on the Young Copy site or on a client's site. Actually, all our technical writing services utilize Xenu Link Sleuth. So why should you check for broken links on your site?

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As a professional writer I have the wonderful privilege to write articles for two prominent magazines in the software, hosting, technology, and ecommerce industries. Although my primary focus is dedicated to promotional writing services and technical writing services, I often write about ideas and concepts that complement my professional writing services. For example, I wrote an article for Ping! Zine magazine in December 2007 that describes the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) and provides some useful SEO Tips and techniques that anyone can implement. I have posted the SEO Tips and a link to the full article on the Young Copy website to help you get started with your own search engine optimization campaign.

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Talk about cool software. MailChimp, an Atlanta, GA based email marketing solutions firm, has developed a really powerful, feature-packed, user-friendly email marketing tool. What's more is how they educate customers on the ins and outs of email marketing with their MonkeyBrains blog. Ben Chestnut, co-founder of MailChimp, writes regularly in MonkeyBrains on topics that help email marketers get the most out of their email marketing campaigns.

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