Strategy & Content Services with Sandra Lee Schubert

As we celebrate independence in July, let's also celebrate the power of interesting copywriting! Good copy can persuade, inform, and inspire your audience to take action. Here are some tips for writing red-hot business copy: 1. Know Your Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Highlight what sets your product or service apart from the competition. 2. Focus on Benefits: Clearly communicate the benefits your customers will gain from your offerings. 3. Create a Strong Call to Action (CTA): Encourage your audience to take the next step, whether it's making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or contacting you for more information. 4. Be Clear and Concise: Avoid jargon and overly complex language. Make your message easy to understand. Compelling copy is about connecting with your audience and persuading them to take action. Keep your message clear, concise, and customer-focused. What is a USP and CTA?  ·          Know Your Unique Sellin...

July is synonymous with fireworks and freedom, making it a great time to celebrate with patriotic-themed content. Whether you're running a Fourth of July promotion or simply want to engage your audience, focus on themes of independence, freedom, and celebration.  Share stories of how your business embodies these values or spotlight products and services perfect for holiday festivities.  Use red, white, and blue visuals to enhance your message. Or use lots of color, think fireworks against a dark sky. Have fun with July.  Remember, July is also a great time for mid-year reflections, so consider a blog post that looks back on the year's accomplishments and sets goals for the second half. Note: We don't share the same weather around the globe. You may be enjoying warm weather while others are loving their cooler temps. If you have a global reach consider whether you are reaching everyone with warm weather posts. Consider that while crafting a compelling post. Authored by mys...

April showers bring May flowers, and great storytelling can bring your business writing to life! Storytelling is a powerful tool that can captivate your audience and make your brand memorable. What is your story?  Here’s how to harness the power of storytelling: 1. Create a Narrative: Develop a story arc that includes a beginning, middle, and end. This helps guide readers through your message. Is your narrative consistent? It may change with the seasons. The message you have in December may change when we are in spring and the weather is changing.  2. Use Relatable Characters: Whether it's a satisfied customer or a passionate founder, relatable characters make your story more engaging. 3. Highlight Challenges and Solutions: Showcase the problems your customers face and how your products or services provide the solution. Help your customer. Provide tips.  4. Incorporate Emotions: Emotions make stories memorable. Tap into your audience’s emotions to create a lasting im...

February is all about love, and what better way to celebrate than by falling in love with your business writing?  Whether you're working on a blog post, a product description, or a newsletter, authenticity is essential. Genuine content not only captures your audience's attention but also helps to build trust and credibility.  Here are some tips to help you infuse love into your business writing: 1. Understand Your Audience: Get to know your target audience's needs and preferences to create content that resonates with them. 2. Be Authentic: Let your passion and enthusiasm for your products or services shine through your writing to connect with your audience. 3. Share Stories: People relate to stories, so use anecdotes to illustrate your points and create an emotional connection. 4. Focus on Benefits: Emphasize how your offerings can enhance your customers' lives and make them feel valued and appreciated. Written with the assistance of ChatGPT, and Grammarly. Content, ton...

Write A Way: Journey to Creativity   "You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some with you."     ~ Joseph Joubert   Poetic Spam? The Quest for Inspiration Where do you find your inspiration? Some people pull it deep from inside them. Others glean it from life experience. Or you can find it on the side of the road. When you are ready to express your creativity how do you do it? Do you write for two hours every day or grab your time on the bank line? Do rules govern your creativity? In a writing workshop, a participant refused to do one of the exercises because she didn't create it that way. She couldn't write unless she did it just her way, thus missing the opportunity for exploration. A schedule can provide you with a successful framework for a writing life or it can make writing dull and ordinary. Keep to your schedule but shake the tree every now and then and see what kind of fruit hits you on the head.   "Creativity is piercing the mundane to find the ...

Write A Way: Journey to Creativity Start Your Story Now  by Sandra Lee Schubert Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story.  John Barth When I created the course,  Writing for Life: Creating a Story of Your Own , I wanted to give people the opportunity to share their stories in their own way. Creating your life story is easy. You already know the main characters, the storyline, locations. Not only that you have complete control over how your story unfolds and how it ends. Most people worry about telling the truth, hurting the feelings of family and friends, or that it will be boring. Remember you are valuable. You don’t have to be a rock star or even a good storyteller to share your story. You can keep your story completely private or choose to share it more broadly. First of all, decide what you would like to do with your story? Do you want to record the events of your life for personal use? Share a family history? Or do you envision your story being an insp...

Spring to me is the perfect time to make plans and set goals. The air vibrates as everything wakes up. The birds are perkier, and lunchtime is for walking outside and not just for huddling in warm offices. The ground has thawed enough for planting to begin. What we plant now will blossom and bear fruit in the summer and the fall. It is also the time to seed our creative gardens. My grandmother’s garden took two forms. Her front lawn was manicured and beautiful. A wayward dandelion knew not to rest in her grass. Flowers lined her house, leading to the backyard. At first glance, it mirrored the front lawn with well-placed bushes and trimmed grass. But toward the back, there was a line of demarcation. Behind the careful planning, she gave her garden over to its natural desires. The garden was a riot of color and textures, a cornucopia of sensory pleasure. Wildflowers grew with abandon, trees linking with shrubs. Bees had their choice of nectar. My grandmother loved her perfect garden ...

Creativity comes to us in many forms. We are born with talent, or we earn it through study and diligence. But most artists know that training alone will not give you inspiration. It comes from many places. Senses help us navigate the world and provide us with enough stimulation and inspiration to make a lifetime habit of our art. What wakes you up in the middle of the night with a burst of an idea? Have you ever had a feeling so deep that it compelled you to your computer or canvas? One advantage of being an artist is being in touch with our intuitive nature. We have developed our senses so we can be fine-tuned to the inspiration that is all around us. You can’t escape the need to follow a creative urge. The impulses that drive creativity can come in many shapes. Trusting the promptings that intuition gives you can lead to unexpected creative surprises. I know some of my best writing comes when I trust my gut and write with my heart. Consider that each sense has an intuitive aspect. Th...

Food, glorious food, we can’t escape it. The taste, the texture, the way sugar dissolves on the tongue. How salt brings out the flavor in our meals. Food thrills us. It can torment us with desire. I don’t know many of us who successfully live without food. Without it, we die. Food represents who we are. Taste. A good meal shared with friends is a sublime pleasure. We live in the best of times because we can taste so many things. A neighborhood is a feast of tactile delights. The Korean store is next to the Turkish market and across the boulevard from a string of Restaurants that include Thai, Dominican, Mexican, Romanian, and a McDonald’s just across from a Subway franchise. There is a taste of delight for everyone. I am happy to live in a place where I can sample a variety of foods and all the intricacies of taste. Gourmet magazine used to publish an anthology of food-related stories. Food was the central character. Taste is paramount in each story. The driving forces are the sensuali...

Sniff, sniff. Sniff. Do you smell that? Is that the scent of creativity filling the air? Of all the senses, this one can really affect you in multiple ways. According to the now-defunct Sense of Smell Institute, the average human being can recognize approximately 10,000 different odors. They said, “And a connection between artists and scent can be traced back at least as far as Leonardo da Vinci, who had such an abiding interest in fragrances that he listed among his many duties for Ludovico il Moro in Milan the practice of court perfumer.” Typing at your computer limits you to the screen in front of you. Using a journal can give you more sensual opportunities. Choose a journal not just for its visual pleasure but for the smell of the new leather and paper in the journal. Have you ever walked into a room and sniffed the air? Your mood can shift completely by its smell. We have a long memory regarding scents. Our childhood is full of scent experiences. Discovering our own body odors is ...

As artists, it is important to engage in all our senses as fully as possible. Think of a potter out of touch with her clay. She might create technically correct pieces, yet they lack a certain feeling to them. There is a potter whose work I love. I like to hold her pieces. They vibrate. Each piece seems to have a special energy. Each item in her collection has a feeling of love in it. Wouldn’t each of us want our work to elicit that kind of energy? Do you   remember the first thing you ever touched? Most likely you don’t. When you were young your senses were on fire. Every touch was a fresh experience. Watch a baby and how they react to new textures. It surprises them. You can see the baby trying to figure out what it is they are feeling. Even when touching something they don’t like they are still willing to keep exploring. How can that happen? First, remember what it’s like to feel. Explore the world as if you were a child again. Don’t take for granted the ordinary things. As you ...

Artists use their senses. Everything is a playground for the muse. The way the light hits water can lead to a brilliant piece of art or an interesting story.  A friend and I discussed the insanity of our senses. How we can be over-stimulated, fractured by the sounds, the shapes, and the colors surrounding us. We are in a state of wonder about this heightened awareness and where we take it. As I write I am listenig to Irish music on a public radio station. Outside my closed door, I can hear the fan as it oscillates in my living room. Out of this mass of sound, one thing can catch my ear. It could be the sound of a baby crying or the distant wail of a fire truck. As a child, I could hear fog horns of the East River. I knew from stories my mother told me that the river was a dangerous place. The sound made me think of a lone ship lost on the water searching for its way out of the darkness. Many years later that sound still haunts me. What do we hear? Angels singing while listening to ...

Photo by  Daniil Kuželev How do our senses influence our creativity? We use our available senses all the time. We touch, taste, feel, smell, and listen. Our creative selves swim in a sea of senses. The question is, can we use this to be our better selves? Let’s start and become keen observers and writers. At the beginning of the year, we imagine what that year will bring. According to the dictionary vision “is a special sense by which the qualities of an object (as color, luminosity, shape, and size) constituting its appearance are perceived and which is mediated by the eye.” What if using this special sense, we look at our lives in a novel way? My eyesight is not the best. When I bought new glasses the world came back into view. I didn’t know what I had been missing. Not that everything sparkled; I couldn’t help but notice that I needed to revisit cleaning my apartment. But the fuzziness I had been living with disappeared, and the edges came back into focus. I rediscovered a new s...