Just a lit­tle note to let you know that I’m in Raleigh, North Car­olina all week, as I’m record­ing a new prod­uct with my friend Armand Morin on blogging.

We lit­er­ally go step by step through the process of set­ting up a blog, adding all the plu­g­ins, tweak­ing it, dri­ving traf­fic to it, and of course, mon­e­tiz­ing it properly.

I will return next week, and have a few new arti­cles for you. In the mean­time, did you check out my coach­ing pro­gram? A few open­ings are left. At least take a moment to read it. There are some great copy lessons in there, too!

(I also added a few extra pic­tures, includ­ing one of me play­ing my new drum­set — like the photo at top of this post, which was taken at my 40th birth­day party gig in a local water­ing hole in Ottawa, Ontario.)

Click here for the com­plete details.

One of my coach­ing stu­dents, Dave Mar­tin, asked me to quickly cri­tique a sales page he will be work­ing on. The site is for “Gourmet Sweet Nuts” by Lady Betsy, which, accord­ing to David, are “Gawd-​​awful good!”

The prob­lem is, this page sells the prod­uct directly but was orig­i­nally intended as an intro­duc­tion let­ter to candy stores and deal­ers. (That explains why it isn’t sell­ing as well as it can.)

Just like try­ing to mix SEO with good sales copy, it’s a hard thing to do when your page has more than one goal. It requires skill. But in this par­tic­u­lar case, it’s best to focus only on one core mes­sage. In fact, I always try to stick to the “rule of focus” in copy, which means…

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When I was approached by Dr. Mike Woo-​​Ming about his lat­est endeavor, which is to help and cre­ate aware­ness for an impor­tant cause that’s also affect­ing him at a very per­sonal level, I wanted to do my part.

I could sim­ply write about it and tell you what’s going on. I cer­tainly couldn’t write about the issue specif­i­cally because, for­tu­nately, it doesn’t affect my family.

But I recently dis­cov­ered that this issue hits very close to home for one of my coach­ing stu­dents, Mila Sid­man. Mila is also a great writer. So rather than writ­ing a blog post myself on a topic I know lit­tle about, I decided to ask her to write today’s blog post as a guest blog­ger, instead.

You’ll soon real­ize why…

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A cou­ple of notes. First off, my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram has room for three more stu­dents. As a mem­ber, you can ask me unlim­ited ques­tions, one ques­tion at a time, which I will answer. This is a great oppor­tu­nity to be men­tored by me, personally.

Sec­ond, one of my stu­dents in my per­sonal coach­ing pro­gram, asked: “Michel, I’m start­ing a blog using Word­Press. Do you have any gen­eral tips on things like lay­out, plu­g­ins, design, etc?”

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(You’re in for a real treat. In this post, I’m pub­lish­ing an answer I gave to one of my coach­ing clients, in which I describe one of my mon­ey­mak­ing strate­gies. I won’t do this often. So sit back and get ready to take notes.)

Some peo­ple, how­ever, wanted a “taste” of what kind of answers I give. Fair ques­tion. So I’ve decided to reprint an answer from a ques­tion I received the other day from a coach­ing student.

Ques­tion: “Michel, I don’t have a proven prod­uct, and I don’t have my own list. What should I do?”

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Last night was an awe­some call! Some of you who are not on our list may not know this. But we had David Garfinkel, known as the world’s great­est copy­writ­ing coach …

… Craig Per­rine, known as the relationship-​​building copy­writer, famous for being instru­men­tal in build­ing lists com­prised of over 7,000,000 sub­scribers (that’s seven mil­lion!) in an incred­i­bly short period of time …

… And, last but not least, mas­ter copy­writer and my dear friend, Peter Stone, who joined us as an impromptu spe­cial guest.

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