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Whose chocolate chip cookies would you rather try — a knight in shining armor’s, a brilliant scientist’s, a chic supermodel’s, a super-handy master carpenter’s, or a kindly grandma’s?

All of these archetypes send out positive vibes, but setting aside the question of which person we’d rather have offering us chocolate chip cookies, most of us would probably assume that among this cast of characters, granny’s the one who makes the goodies. We trust Granny with that task. It’s a stereotype, sure, but we buy into it. If we were shopping for the most seductive perfume, on the other hand, it’s probably fair to say that even the kindliest grandma will lose ground to the chic supermodel. It’s a matter of applying the right “face” to the right subject.

If you own a bakery, you might have the fabulous good fortune of a real-life smiling mother or grandmother type handing out lots of sweets to your customers (in exchange for lots of money). If you’re a cosmetics store, you may have elegant salespeople gliding from section to section, at least, celebrity models’ pictures gazing longingly over the perfume stand or lipstick aisle. But what if your “salesperson” is your website?

Just as your commercial spokesperson, sales rep, or brand icon represents the face of your company, so must your 24-hour, 365-day virtual storefront. So the question is, what face should it have?

Think about it from the customer end. If you needed, say, a repair service, who would you choose? A happy-go-lucky guy with a bag of tools? A local pro with a 30-year track record and plenty of advice on how to maintain the stuff once he fixes it? A national corporation with a slick warrantee and guaranteed delivery times?

The truth is that any one of these three images might work, depending on the nature of the problem (Simple? Complex? Urgent?) and your own personal priorities (Speedy turnaround? Sheer skill? Friendliest folks?). So the ideal persona for your online brand reflects your target audience, which means it’s always worthwhile to ask yourself — if your website were a person selling your stuff to your ideal customer, what type of person would truly dazzle that customer? How would that character look? What would that character say, and in what tone of voice? Who is your website?

Answer that question for yourself. Then express it to your audience. And get ready to sell some cookies.

SUPEREGO
Right, he’s asleep.

INNER CRITIC
You wrung him out like a rag today.

SUPEREGO
Oh, pish-tush. A 17-hour day is nothing to an entrepreneur who truly cares about meeting his deadlines.

CREATIVE SPARK
I don’t feel well.

INNER CRITIC
I don’t blame you. I saw what you did today.

CREATIVE SPARK
I did great things. Okay, good things. Okay…Anyway, who can get anything done when he’s being chased all over the frontal lobes by a sadist wielding a hammer?

INNER CRITIC
Wimp. It was a foam rubber Whack-a-Mole mallet, and you know it.

CREATIVE SPARK
I don’t care what it is, it’s distracting.

INNER CRITIC
Do you even have a clue about what my job is?

CREATIVE SPARK
Well, what about my job? What about that?

INNER CRITIC
You give me a pain, you really do. Always leaping up out of nowhere with some half-cocked idea. Every time you throw a lightning bolt I have to shoot the stupid thing down. It’s exhausting. The mallet’s better than you deserve.

SUPEREGO
Stop this bickering, both of you. It reflects poorly on the literary art. Vigilance and work ethic count for far more than any petty internal squabbles. In fact….what time is it?

EGO
4 A.M.

SUPEREGO
Time for me to wake him up and make him wonder if he ran the spell-check on the draft he sent tonight.

INNER CRITIC
Hey, while he’s up, lemme at him for a minute.

CREATIVE SPARK
You’ve had enough fun for one day. Sit down.

INNER CRITIC
He had no business feeling good about that thing. No business. I didn’t even mention the clumsiness of the organization. The pacing was poorly judged too.

CREATIVE SPARK
How am I supposed to spring him into action tomorrow after you two have had your way with him all night?

SUPEREGO
I simply feel that it’s a service provider’s duty to check his work again. And again. And again. He appreciates it, deep down. It makes him feel responsible.

CREATIVE SPARK
It makes him feel sleepy.

INNER CRITIC
Feeling the pressure, are we? Maybe he’ll decide to just stay in bed tomorrow.

SUPEREGO
No, I won’t have that. I’m make sure he notices that utility bill as soon as he wakes up.

CREATIVE SPARK
I won’t allow it either. You want thunderbolts? I’ll show you thunderbolts! And just you try shooting them down once he’s on his third cup of coffee. Just you try!

INNER CRITIC
Yeah? Well, you just wait till he’s completely awake and gets a second look at his work from the night before. Game over, pal! Game freakin’ over!

ID
QUIET UP THERE! I’M TRYING TO WORK!

Once upon a time, a consultant contacted me about possibly ghostwriting some informative articles that he could post online to display his expertise in his subject. He explained that this would be a relatively easy job. “All we really have to do is take some existing articles we like and change the verbiage a little so we can post them as ours.”

Well, no. Apart from the (I hope) obvious ethical considerations of simply dressing up someone else’s article and sticking your name on it without his permission, a generic article doesn’t do you much good. This is the Internet era. We have online articles coming out of our ears. Your readers don’t want more anonymous information — they want your information.

Here are a few tips for promoting your expertise:

Write your article. Not someone else’s, and especially not everyone else’s. You can create a piece that works for a general audience and still bears your individual stamp. that’s the point of posting an expert article — you’re the expert.

Sure, being the expert means reporting general industry trends and observations, but it also means interpreting them for your readers. I don’t need a financial expert, for instance, to relay the latest stock reports or unemployment numbers — I can get those myself from Google or Yahoo or wherever. What I do need, since I’m not an expert in that field, is my trusted advisor telling me what, in his opinion, it all means to me.

When I have industry experts in various fields explaining things to me in language I can understand, and advising me on how to respond to this information, I’m getting the direct benefit of these advisors’ expertise, and I begin to rely on them for all my needs in those areas.

And the expert — that’s you — gets more business.

Keep it short. If you’re boiling a thorny topic down into something understandable, condense it into the least we need to know. Give us a few good pointers, a brief rundown, or ask some leading questions to get us thinking in the right direction. If we need more information, we can contact you. That’s the the whole point of marketing — getting that phone call.

Brand yourself. There’s no point in writing an expert article if a first-time reader has no idea who the expert is. Always include a sentence or two about yourself in a little blurb underneath the article (most web-based article directories require this before they’ll post the article) and include your company email address or website link. Make it easy for the reader, once he’s dazzled by your insight into his problem or question, to click a link and start a conversation that might lead to business.

Which reminds me….

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WILLIAM REYNOLDS is a freelance marketing copywriter specializing in website content, print marketing copy, and radio/TV/video scripts for businesses. He can be reached through his website, www.reynoldswriting.com.