As a copywriter, I love exploring the nuances of language and finding the one word that will hit the point home–because despite what the thesaurus says, no two words mean exactly the same thing. And sometimes, changing just one word can make a HUGE difference. Case in point…I recently heard a new radio ad for [...]

I went to see how the new sales copy looked on a client’s website the other day…and sighed when I found long blocks of text staring back at me on the web page. I’ll admit, it drives me batty when a client or designer changes my formatting. I know their intentions are good, but there [...]

Anyone who knows me knows I LOVE to laugh. And research is turning up all kinds of ways that laughter is good for you, including… Decreasing stress Lifting your mood Clearing your head Boosting your immune system Even burning calories! I even interviewed a woman once who insists that laughing every day helped put her [...]

My friend Teddy Garcia recently spoke about website testing at his Raleigh Internet Mastermind Meetup and shared some cool tools to evaluate how well your sales pages and other web pages are faring. Google Analytics — Everyone probably knows this one but even many of the big name Internet marketers who could well afford other [...]

One piece of copy found on virtually every web page (or it should be, since your website should have an ezine sign-up form on every page except sales pages!) is the call-to-action aka “submit button.” But the last thing in the world it should say is “submit”! Let’s look at the definition of submit from [...]

Saying “yes” to the  TV producer who wanted the CEO to anonymously work on the company’s front lines was a risky marketing move for Waste Management (WM). Especially since reality TV is all about drama…and the company was given no control and no say in what would air. So you can be sure they’ll choose [...]

… I saw the movie Up in the Air recently and thought it made a few interesting points about writing good copy Plot Summary: The main storyline is about Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a “career transition counselor” (aka hired hatchet man) who’s always jetting off to fire employees for companies who don’t want to do [...]

One way to make writing your own marketing materials easier to start creating a “swipe” file of things you like as you see them. Often people talk about using a swipe file to save examples of copy they can “borrow” ideas or words from later. (Of course, there’s is an art to swiping copy effectively–especially [...]

People often use dating analogies when they’re talking about getting clients and when you think about it, a ton of similarities exist. So here are some marketing lessons from an online dating site… 1. Whether it’s an online profile or your website, visitors usually don’t know a single thing about you–and they’re pretty skeptical. After [...]

I was reading Robert Plank’s Time Management on Crack 2.0 this past weekend and was thrilled to see a comment in the sales page section about remembering to include features in your bullet points. Because features have apparently become the Chucky doll of copywriting. It started out innocently enough. Well-meaning copywriters started spreading the word [...]