Self-Sabotaging Your Writing Writing is pretty straightforward. Sure, there are complexities and you aren’t guaranteed success. But it remains an activity with very little barrier to entry. Most people who try to become successful writers fail. They don’t finish projects, they don’t make money, they aren’t happy or they otherwise mess up somewhere along the…
Building An Enemy One of the most effective ways to separate your customers from non-customers is to create a common enemy. This can be a real or perceived threat, a person holding them down or their own lack of knowledge turned into a personification. It’s pretty common pretty much everywhere, and if you watch more…
How To Build Copywriting Templates There’s the old adage about teaching a man to fish versus giving him the fish. I prefer to teach you all to fish. I’m not sure how successful I am at that, but at the very least my articles say, “Here’s the rod” and “Here’s a river, go fish!” This…
Is The Client Always Right? No… the client is not always right. Now, what I will say is that the client has the final say. They’re paying you to do a job and if they want the job done in a specific way, then they’re the one who is paying. However, most jobs are undertaken…
How To Write A Good Contact Us Page Contact forms are one of those invisible bits of a site. You create the Contact Us page, you add a shortcode for your contact form. Done. Then you take it away when you get spammed. That’s if you’re stupid like me. In reality, your contact page should…
Fiction Swipe Files File this under “topics I thought I’d already covered but can’t find.” This is more relevant because filing is exactly what we’re going to be discussing in this article on the fiction swipe file. For those of you who write copy, you’ll be aware of the practice of keeping great examples of…
What To Do When Your First Draft Sucks I’m a big fan of one-draft writing. It forms part of a wider philosophy regarding professional writing put forth by sci-fi novelist Robert Heinlein and referred to mostly as “Heinlein’s Rules:” Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What You Start Three: You Must Refrain From…
Sometimes I feel like a genius. Then I realise I’m a total product of the Dunning-Kruger effect and I’ve been an idiot all along. Take the idea from this article for instance. The fiction swipe-file. It’s a novel concept, taken from the common knowledge of one discipline (copywriting) and applied to another, (Fiction writing.) Now,…
What About When You DON’T Want Long-Form Sales Letters? Many, many people have issues with long-form sales copy. Some of them don’t know what they’re talking about. They’ll say: “Nobody reads those long pages” “That looks like a scam” “It’d never work on me” “If the product is good, you don’t need to sell it!”…
Start Here For Market Research, Audience Profiling And Competitor Analysis Want to learn about audience profiling and market research but don’t know where to start? Here’s a list of a number of articles on the subject, written by a direct response marketer, multiple-time business owner and author, and creator of a fledgling online empire. In…