Last year, a bunch of copy­writ­ers who also blog — like yours truly — shot the breeze on the Nuts and Blog­bolts talk radio show.

It was an inter­est­ing and at times spir­ited discussion.

After some talk about con­tent and copy (or should I say, writ­ing con­tent ver­sus writ­ing copy), the show’s host, Mike San­sone, asked each pan­elist if we would indi­vid­u­ally respond on our blogs to this question:

“Writ­ing for the vis­i­tor is more impor­tant than writ­ing for the search engines. Can both be met with­out sac­ri­fic­ing quality?”

Ryan Healy posted his answer on the sub­ject. Good answer. I agree with him, because he makes some great points. But I also dis­agree as I think there are ways around it.

So I guess my answer is both “yes” and “no.” Here’s why.

First off, I’m not a search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO) expert by any stretch. How­ever, I do know enough about SEO to know that it’s pri­mar­ily based on three major factors:

Code, links, and content.

Let’s take a look at each one…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

In The Death of The Saleslet­ter, I talked about hid­ing con­tent so it could open up based on a user’s actions and thereby per­son­al­iz­ing the saleslet­ter, dynam­i­cally, on the fly.

You can hide con­tent on the same sales page, mak­ing the page look shorter and less intim­i­dat­ing. And only desired con­tent appears depend­ing on a user’s choices.

What does using this tac­tic help to do?

In some cases, peo­ple break saleslet­ters down into var­i­ous pages, and add links to them in the let­ter. I don’t rec­om­mend this with long-​​copy saleslet­ters. Tra­di­tion­ally, I rec­om­mend that the extra con­tent opens up in a pop-​​up win­dow instead, as to not distract.

But with this tac­tic, and other than the poten­tial for per­son­al­iza­tion, which is its biggest ben­e­fit, it means that peo­ple read­ing a saleslet­ter don’t have to be both­ered by…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

A stu­dent, who is an upcom­ing copy­writer, recently asked where he could find clients will­ing to pay higher rates for his skills.

Hav­ing built a client base through net­work­ing on Inter­net forums geared towards start-​​up busi­ness own­ers, he now wanted to find oppor­tu­ni­ties that would allow for upward mobil­ity within his craft.

This is a com­mon sce­nario, because local and espe­cially start-​​up busi­nesses are easy to find, and pro­vide plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to prac­tice your emerg­ing copy­writ­ing skills.

In a pre­vi­ous arti­cle, I talked about three tips for aspir­ing copy­writ­ers. I rec­om­mend any new copy­writer to fol­low these three tips to start build­ing a track record and get to a level that makes them appeal­ing to higher-​​paying clients.

But after your copy­writ­ing skills are devel­oped, how­ever, it becomes desir­able if not nec­es­sary to seek out clients — bet­ter, more lucra­tive clients — who are estab­lished enough to pay a fair wage for your skills and, above all, your results.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Some peo­ple tend to tweet, blog, post, and status-​​update their lit­tle hearts out. Be it on Twit­ter, Face­book, LinkedIn, MySpace, their own blog, or what­ever. They say it’s all about trans­parency, and trans­parency is good.

But I think we need to be careful.

While we may be open­ing our­selves up for the world to see, we may be open­ing our­selves up a world of trou­ble, too.

Trans­parency may seem like the lat­est fash­ion. But it can also become dan­ger­ous on many lev­els. Some dan­gers are obvi­ous, like being robbed after pub­li­ciz­ing you were out. Oth­ers, not as much, like being rep­ri­manded for say­ing some­thing you shouldn’t have said, or even being fired for insult­ing your customers.

My con­tention is, too much trans­parency can hurt you in many ways.

I agree that social media is great for devel­op­ing and nur­tur­ing rela­tion­ships. That’s what the word “social” in social media means. Or what it should mean, anyway.

But as with all rela­tion­ships, even when con­tin­u­ous, open com­mu­ni­ca­tion is an impor­tant com­po­nent, there should be a lit­tle mys­tique to keep the flame alive. A lit­tle room to allow for explo­ration and dis­cov­ery over a period of time instead of all at once.

In today’s open, Web 2.0 world, pri­vacy is more cru­cial than ever before. Why? Because trans­par­ent or not, every­thing you say online is per­ma­nent, can be found, and can be eas­ily mis­in­ter­preted. Espe­cially when taken out of context.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Recently, I was tagged on Face­book by a few friends on this new topic, “25 ran­dom things about me.” The rules on Face­book are dif­fer­ent. I’ve changed the rules slightly for the blogosphere…

Here are the rules.

Once you’ve been tagged, you are sup­posed to write a post with 25 ran­dom things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose five more peo­ple to be tagged. You also have to tag the per­son who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you. To do this, you sim­ply link to their blogs so that they know you responded to their tag.

(You may include the above rules in your post so that the per­son being tagged knows them, too. You may also want to tweet your post to notify them on Twit­ter, too.)

Let’s start with things you may already know…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Sci­en­tific Adver­tis­ing by Claude C. Hop­kins is a time­less clas­sic writ­ten many years ago but a book whose pow­er­ful prin­ci­ples still ring true to this day.

It con­tains 21 chap­ters of time­less strate­gies you don’t want to ignore in your adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing efforts.

In fact, David Ogilvy once said: “Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have any­thing to do with adver­tis­ing until he has read this book seven times.”

I highly rec­om­mend that your read this book, which is brought to you free, before you spend any money on other copy­writ­ing books.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

A mem­ber on my copy­writ­ers forum (now my blog) started a thread on what makes my forum so pop­u­lar. Every­one chimed in with some great answers, and I appre­ci­ate the feedback.

(The cool thing about it is, that very thread also reached an impor­tant mile­stone. It was the 10,000th one! Talk about a coin­ci­dence, eh?)

But then some­one asked:

“Michel, can I ask how you ini­tially got the word out about your forum?”

My answer revealed a bit more than what the mem­ber antic­i­pated. Instead of talk­ing about how my forum became so pop­u­lar, I went on a tan­gent and explained the step-​​by-​​step process I used to book copy­writ­ing projects.

The answer was so well received that I decided to reprint it here.

Now, you may be won­der­ing what pro­mot­ing a forum (or a blog, for that mat­ter) has to do with pro­mot­ing my copy­writ­ing ser­vices. Keep read­ing because you’ll soon under­stand why…

Read the rest of this post or share it »