What are some examples of business writing work that pays well? Here are three examples, and links to articles and an e-book I’ve written on how you can write these documents for clients.

• How to Write a White Paper 
• How to Write a Case Study
• Press Releases Made Easy

How well do these projects pay? One page press releases can go from mid three figures up to four figures. Report-style documents and interview-heavy ones like white papers and case studies can pay several dollars per word. What’s not to love?

Are you a business writer? What are your favorite types of projects? Which have led to the best pay in your experience? Share your own examples in the comments below.

Do you wish you could rake in six figures writing for businesses? If you’ve ever considered a freelance writing career as a copywriter and you want to learn how make some serious dough, AWAI’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting might be the kick you need.

I’ve been promising these nice folks a review for months now. What’s taken so long? I just couldn’t find the time to get through everything included. There’s that much information. Even if everything isn’t for you, you’re bound to find something here that moves you in the right direction. Look how much this program has to offer!

What’s Included?

First and foremost, you get access to a 13-installment copywriting program designed to take you from the very beginning to your future as a successful direct-response copywriter. The program is set up in digital book format for easy reading or you can download a .pdf copy of each section if you prefer.

Here’s what each installment covers:

1. Getting Started as a Copywriter: The Opportunity & Lifestyle
2. Taking the First Step Towards Copywriting Success
3. Copywriting Myths and Realities
4. The Secret Structure of Direct-Response Letters
5. Communicating with Your Prospect
6. Building Your Offer One brick at a Time
7. Making and Closing the Deal
8. Why We Need Guarantees
9. Ready… Set… Write!
10. Backing Up Your Claims
11. Putting it All Together
12. Becoming a Master Storyteller
13. You’re a Copywriter!

In addition to the program itself, you’ll get loads of extra resources. For example, you’ll also receive:

1. PDF versions of the exercises found in each installment
2. Access to the AWAI Hall of Fame (Learn from copy that really works!)
3. Glossary of Direct Marketing Terms (.pdf)
4. Materials for Writing Your First Direct-Response Package (.pdf)
5. 24 Companies to Start Building Your Seed Library (.pdf)
6. Webinar Access: Use Your Copywriting Skills to Write for the Web (with Nick Usborne)
7. Webinar Access: The World of B2B Copywriting (with Steve Slaunwhite)
8. Bonus Report: How to Safely and Quickly Change Careers (.pdf)
9. Understanding the 4-Legged Stool (.pdf)
10. The AWAI Peer Review System (.pdf)
11. Access to the AWAI Member Forum for lifetime support (talk to other copywriters in all stages of their careers)
12. Access to AWAI’s exclusive job board – DirectResponseJobs.com

Why I Recommend This Program

Let me be clear. I’m not being paid to review this service (although I was given access to review the materials). This isn’t a paid placement and I haven’t joined any kind of affiliate program for this copywriting program.

I’m recommending this to our readers because it’s one of the most comprehensive online resources I’ve ever seen for new writers, and I think it’s incredibly well-targeted.

You won’t find a lot of general advice here. This is for copywriters. More specifically it’s for direct response copywriters. And if that’s what you want to do, and you want to make a great living at it, this is one of the best resources around and it will arm you with the information you really need.

That doesn’t mean it will make you rich overnight. Just like I tell you in reference to my own products, what you do with the information falls on you. But if you’re ready and willing to work your butt off and master this specialty, you’ll want this resource on your side.

What is “Direct-Response” Copywriting?

I’m not a big fan of long sales letters (from a buyer’s perspective). So I don’t write them for clients as a part of my business model. That doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them. They can work for clients. And they can bring in big bucks for you as a writer. Sometimes when writers hear the term “direct-response” these sales letters are all they think of. But direct-response copywriting is more than that.

Don’t write off the program if you don’t want to write sales letters. The skills you’ll learn and the tools you’ll have access to can help you with other types of copywriting as well. For example, when you see an ad or sign-up form designed to get you to do anything from clicking a link to registering for a site, that’s direct-response copy. So is a lot of PR copy. For example, I used to work for a major international nonprofit organization before going out on my own. Even they use a lot of direct response copy — fundraiser letters and volunteer requests as just two examples.

Direct-response copy is any copy that’s designed to get the reader to take a specific action. That’s all there is to it. And because those actions are directly measurable, they give companies numbers to measure results.

Let’s face it. Businesses love numbers. They love stats. They certainly love results. That’s one reason direct-response copywriting gigs can bring in so much money.

How much are you making right now? Would you like to increase that to $100,000, $200,000 or even more each year? If so, direct-response copywriting might be what gets you there.

What Does it Cost?

The price tag for AWAI’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting is $397.

Okay. So I can already hear a few of you gasping. But think about this for a minute:

1. Using the skills you learn through this program, you’ll earn several times its cost before you know it.
2. This isn’t a simple e-book. It’s an all-out course, plus an ongoing community, plus access to exclusive leads, plus access to webinars and bonus reports for even more specialized knowledge from the pros.
3. Compare its cost to that of a limited time course at a local community college. Here you get input from more than one professional, access to a community and email newsletters with new information long after you’ve completed the initial course material. And it probably still costs less. Plus, you get to keep this stuff forever — no note-taking required!

Is it worth it? In my honest opinion, yes. It is. And you can’t really go wrong. If the program doesn’t work for you or you realize that direct-response copy just isn’t for you, they’ll refund your money for a full year. Yes. A year.

If you’re ready to start a new copywriting career today, or grow your existing writing business, AWAI ‘s Accelerated Program for Six Figure Copywriting is a great place to start. There’s plenty in here even for existing copywriters — expand your network, find new leads, or improve your craft!

Sign Up Today!

Interested in other independent careers? Check out all AWAI has to offer — programs on self publishing, Web marketing, resume writing, design, and more! Visit AWAIonline.com today to learn more.

The Comedy Writing Workbook, by Gene Perret
I absolutely adore this book, and if you can get only one book on comedy writing, I’d make it this one. It covers a variety of techniques with detailed examples and exercises for you to try. If you can’t find it, though, you can make do with The New Comedy Writing Step by Step, another book by Perret that condenses this information. Either one is worth reading if you’re serious about improving your jokes.

Step By Step to Standup Comedy, by Greg Dean
This book is primarily geared to developing stand-up comedy routines and improving your performance, but it also offers the “joke prospector” system to help create great jokes. I’ve adopted some of the tips in this book into my own writing, so even article writers can get some mileage out of this one. Definitely a worthy purchase.

And Here’s The Kicker, by Mike Sacks
Sacks has gathered interviews with 21 fine folks in the comedy writing business, from column to film, in this neat little volume. There’s the obligatory advice on how to break certain markets and how to get your material in the right hands, but the strength of this book is reading where all these people came from and how they got to where they are now. And some of these cats come from poor or unpleasant backgrounds. It just goes to show you (and me) how you can get anywhere you want as long as you keep faith and stay tenacious. Without that, no dream is possible, especially one as tricky as comedy writing.

There are a few other books on comedy writing out there, but these are some of the best as far as I’m concerned. Of course, you can be sure I’ll feed you helpful comedy writing advice as well! Learn from everything you can, I say. And keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

Remember that jokes start with a setup and end with a punchline. The trick to using other jokes is to change the setup or the punchline to create a fundamentally similar line. This way you can preserve part of the original joke while putting your own spin on it.

Let’s demonstrate with one of the jokes I wrote for Twitter:

Life is full of disappointment and pain. Most of it comes from my performance of The Mikado.

Now, let’s try switching out the setup. Remember, it should still logically flow to the punchline in some way. Feel free to modify the punchline’s wording as well in order to accommodate your new setup.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people fall ill from contagious airborne substances. This is why my performance of the Mikado was labelled a “biohazard”.

And now, let’s try switching out the punchline.

Life is full of disappointment and pain. But that’s not a very marketable name, so instead they called it “Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark”.

You can do this to both setup and punchline, creating your own new wording while keeping the essence of the joke idea intact. As long as the idea’s funny, it should work.

Of course, I still recommend you make your own original humor when you can, and if you feel bad about stealing from other writers, you can always rephrase jokes you’ve written yourself. But like they say, nothing is original…might as well take advantage of it a LITTLE bit, wouldn’t you say?

Until next time, keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

How do you catch these? Simple. Just read it out loud and use your head. I’ve mentioned before that written and spoken humor flows differently, and what constitutes “unneccessary words” in either of these mediums is different. Spoken humor needs to get to the point while written humor can lollygag a bit. Still, if you can cut out any extra words, the better.

Read humor aloud. See what words you can trim. Remember, you need to convey all the information the audience needs to understand a joke in the smallest amount of space possible. Besides trimming words, can you replace bigger words with smaller ones? Can you pare down phrases to their bare essentials? You’re not dumbing it down, per se – think of it as removing the joke’s barrier to entry, so the most amount of people can enjoy it. That can be a fun challenge in its own right.

Like all writing, make sure you hammer it out first before revising. It can be tempting to capture the flow of the words as you go, especially for something as short as a joke. Resist the urge, get everything else done first, then go back and clean it up. You’ll be glad you did.

Until next time, keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

Of course, you have to be careful of whom you mock. Using a joke like that against a celebrity or a politician is fine, since they’re acceptable public targets. But busting out the “takeout lane love” routine at a friend’s party could land you in a world of hot water. How far should you go?

Let’s look at each target and see how to handle them:

1. Public figures: Celebrities, politicians, companies, big websites…comedians mock these all the time, since everyone knows who they are. And since the media tends to report on every blooper they make, you’ll find a ton of potential topics to joke about. My only obvious warning here is that you can’t make stuff up. Do your homework first, and make sure what you’re talking about is true and recognizable by your audience. Other than that, you’re home free – how exactly you mock these figures depends on your style.

2. Big events: Approach these like public figures – don’t make stuff up and make sure the audience knows what you’re talking about. And, of course, if it’s too soon, DON’T make a joke about it. Don’t even try the most polite joke you can think of. Professional comedians have the experience to walk around huge tragedies, so if you don’t, just don’t bother. Trust me.

3. Friends and family: You can definitely get away with poking fun at the people you know, but you have to set boundaries. Don’t mock any problems they may be struggling with. Stick with the things they already make fun of themselves about. Exaggerate traits they already have or boast about. Poke fun at the stuff that ultimately doesn’t matter, and everyone will come out of it with friendships intact.

4. Yourself: Yep, making fun of your own faults is also possible. Comedians do it all the time – it’s a great way to build a connection with the audience. The best way to do this, I find, is to discuss a topic that most people are familiar with and occasionally remark about how it affects you. The trick is to come off looking like the fool, and there’s no limit to how you can do this. Just make sure it’s funny.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

Confronting the impact of your work is something all cretive minds have to deal with. This is especially true in comedy. A badly framed joke gets you blank expressions if you’re lucky…or gets you cussed out nine ways to Sunday. Standup comedians have to face a tougher heat, since they deal with a live audience, but even writers can feel the burn when their work tanks, and it can be difficult to move past that and get back into the groove.

Here are some things to keep in mind to help you cope with a bad reception:

1. Seperate yourself from your work. It’s very easy to invest your identity into a work and use a good reception to fuel your ego. Of course, this becomes harmful to your self-worth when you inevitably tank. Pull back. Don’t concern yourself with the outcome. Instead, make your goal to improve your work through any kind of feedback. It’ll keep you humble, dedicated to the craft, and most importantly, sane.

2. Get yourself laughing again. If you’re stuck in a funk, load up your favorite funny videos or comedians and get to laughing. This serves two purposes. Most important one is to get out of that funk and put your brain towards doing better. The other is to give you a little subconcious help – by refreshing your mind on what makes good humor, you’re more likely to pull it off next time.

3. Look towards a brighter future. Just because you’ve tanked once doesn’t mean you will again. Writing terrible material is part of the process anyway – you just published it when you thought it was finished. It happens to all of us. Still, I believe a good idea with a poor execution is worth revisiting. And even if you don’t feel like rewriting, you’re not doomed to write poorly forever. Pick yourself up and try again – pressing on will always solve the problems of the human race, as the quote goes.

That’s it for this year, folks. Thanks for sticking with me for this long – stay frosty and I’ll see you in 2011!

“…the goal of advertising is not to be liked, to entertain, or to win advertising awards; it is to sell products.”

I agree with him halfway. On the one hand, Bly is an advertising professional, so when he advises that you write your words to sell as opposed to make a fancy ad just for the sake of it, then you’d best sit up and listen. On the other, word of mouth is one of the most powerful marketing strategies out there, and memorable, funny advertising does tend to blaze trails around YouTube and Facebook. I need not mention the Old Spice commercials.

Of course, by that same token, commercials that try to be funny but fall flat on their face are mocked. While writing primarily to sell is important, an ad’s reception does play a major part in the results, and a good use of humor can help that out.

So, how can we appease both sides of the cassettes? There’s a few simple rules to follow:

1. Don’t attempt humorous copy unless you KNOW you’re good enough to write it. Bly mentions this in The Copywriter’s Handbook, and you should heed his words. You’re here to help your client sell something above all. A poorly-made joke will not improve matters.

2. Don’t forget your purpose. Your ad still has to sell something. Don’t let a great and funny idea overshadow it. Try using humor to punctuate a selling point while backing it up with normal copy.

3. Keep other humor writing rules in mind. Be subtle, be clever, and make sure your gag fits the tone and logical progression of the ad. And don’t force anything in. Now more than ever, you don’t want your attempt at humor to stick out and distract the viewer.

Humor is a powerful and memorable tool, as I’ve mentioned before. Use it right and it’s the best skeleton key you’ve got to make your ad pop.

This article is now diamonds.

YOUR ASSIGNMENT: This one only applies to freelancers who write to sell through ad copy, web copy, sales pages, and so on. See if you can work a bit of wit into a passage or two. You don’t have to keep it in the final product, of course, but challenge yourself to sell your product with a little cleverness.

Often when I or other business writers talk about earning more money as a freelance writer, people comment with things like:

“But you’re a business writer, so of course you earn more. I want to be a Web content writer, or blogger, or ‘article writer,’ or whatever.”

Yeah? What’s your point?

Here’s the thing. If you think you can’t earn as much as “business writers” you’re fooling yourself. Guess what a lot of those business writers are doing? They’re writing for company blogs. They’re writing niche SEO content to promote a company in search engines. They’re pitching feature ideas to magazines just like you would if you wanted to write for magazines yourself. They’re ghostwriting feature articles picked up in magazines and major industry websites (I even covered this kind of work before here). They writing… you guessed it… content!

Misconceptions About Business Writing

Business writing is often confused with copywriting — more specifically with writing sales copy. Is copywriting a part of business writing? Absolutely. But it’s one type of business writing — not the whole specialty area. When you work as a business writer, you have to be able to adapt to different types of writing that benefit your clients’ business.

The bulk of my business writing work used to be press releases, because I ran an online PR firm and my full-time writing work kicked off by bringing along most of my former PR clients. But now the vast majority of my freelance writing work as a business writer is actually blogging.

Sometimes I’m asked to help launch a new blog — coming up with the branding / domain name, choosing the categories, and creating the content. Other times I’m there to serve as a spokesperson for the company (usually ghostwriting short news posts to keep their customers updated about what’s going on with the company). Sometimes they have me respond to reader comments, and sometimes they prefer to have regular staff do that once the posts are written. Sometimes if I blog for them I also tweet for them.

Sometimes I write beginner-level content that takes 20-30 minutes to write (introductory articles to business or finance-related topics). And sometimes I’m even hired just to write up my opinion on industry issues in my specialty areas. Why? Because those opinions ignite conversations, build organic incoming links, and get resulting organic traffic — all things being done with a business purpose, and all falling under the umbrella of “business writing.” (And let me tell you, that’s an awesome job to have.)

It’s All About Your Hourly

Do I charge less for this kind of writing than I do for writing press releases, pitch letters, newsletters, email marketing copy, or Web copy? No. Not really. I know how long an average project will take me in each category of services I offer, and I set my rates based on a set hourly goal ($150 per hour). Sometimes, especially getting to know a client’s business well over the years, I exceed that significantly. And sometimes, like when I’m first putting research into a company to get to know them and their market, I just pull it off or come in slightly lower. That’s regardless of the type of writing I’m doing. It’s just how per-project pricing generally works.

I make as much writing Web content and blog posts as I make with more traditional forms of business writing. And you can too. Remember, you only make less than someone else (thinking on an hourly level) if you choose to. If you want to earn more you have to charge more, and you have to show clients that you’re worth it. Web content is worth a lot more than some folks seem to think. And as long as you stay within that group’s mindset, it will continue to be true. For you.

First, be funny. You cannot write humor without being funny. I would suggest that you spend some time being funny, like perhaps making observations that seem obvious but turn them on their ear slightly so people see them differently. Or perhaps you ought to take two things that aren’t alike but then make a comparison between the two of them so that people laugh. People generally laugh when you create tension or confusion and then explain it. Sometimes they also laugh at people like Dane Cook. That is something I cannot explain.

Second, write something. So that would mean forgetting that it’s your day to write a humor article for a website that you happen to work for–say, for example, a freelance writing site–and then putting together some sort of hastily written material so that you don’t fail to meet your commitment. I would recommend not sitting down and researching anything, as that would make you prepared and your jokes more clever. Instead, just put down any old thing and then make a wry observation. I find that helps.

Third, combine the two.

Fourth, find people that want you to be funny for a living. I would hit up clients like comedy clubs, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and laugh factories. There are also content mills that specifically deal with comedy that I just made up and didn’t research, so you should try to find those too. You can also easily get a job writing for a comedian by being funnier than them and writing better jokes, then mailing those jokes to them and sending a SASE for their payment. I have earned several restraining orders this way.

Fifth, drink your earnings away. Be smart about this. I would recommend bargain shopping for alcohol, as you are probably going to combine cheap bourbon or vodka with Sprite or Fanta anyway. My favorite alcohols come in plastic bottles and are simply marked Alcohol XXX. Brands are only going to fool you into treating your liver with any modicum of respect. Be sure to drink alone. If you get any joke ideas, write them down. That way your friends–the ones who tell you to get a real job–can’t steal them.

Sixth, go find a real job.

I wish you great success as I have had as a humorian. I bid you a fond farewell.

Disclaimer: following any of the above advice would make you no money or friends, but perhaps you’d meet a cute girl at Alcoholics Anonymous. But then you’d probably go and mess that up too.