One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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If you played video arcade games in the late 80’s or early 90’s, you might remem­ber Zero Wing — a game in which a bat­tle takes place in the year 2101, where you must defend the planet Earth from an alien invasion.

Zero Wing may have been a favorite among teenagers, but like the Cab­bage Patch doll the fad faded… until Sega Gen­e­sis came out with their ver­sion of the pop­u­lar arcade game in ’98, giv­ing Zero Wing new breath.

But this time, one is offered an ani­mated intro­duc­tion in prepa­ra­tion for the space bat­tle, which started with: “In A.D. 2101, war was begin­ning.” And a dia­logue between the ship’s cap­tain and the dreaded war­rior Cats ensued, offer­ing these price­less gems:

• “You Have No Chance To Sur­vive Make Your Time.”
• “What you say!” “Some­one Set Up Us The Bomb!”
• “You know what you doing. Move ‘Zig’ For Great Justice!”
• And of course, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.”

The result became a viral phe­nom­ena that spread quickly, first among early adopt­ing geeks, then to main­stream media. It has become so per­va­sive that it inspired a new gen­er­a­tion of web­sites show­cas­ing bad trans­la­tions, and the explo­sion in fail blogs.

Now, what does a video game have to teach us about copywriting?

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Part of my job as a copy­writer is com­ing up with names. A while ago, I wrote a blog post on the power of names. I won’t repeat it here, except to reit­er­ate that brand­ing, albeit not a pri­or­ity for most, is still incred­i­bly important.

And it’s some­thing you mustn’t ignore.

Why? Because choos­ing a name for your busi­ness or prod­uct, even your domain name, is often the sin­gle, most impor­tant busi­ness deci­sion you’ll ever make.

To that end, let me share with you some nam­ing tips. In my expe­ri­ence, I have five char­ac­ter­is­tics of great brand names, which I call the five “S’s.” I encour­age you to fol­low when try­ing to come up with a solid, long-​​lasting, and highly prof­itable name.

For starters, let me point out that the best names are rel­a­tively short, easy to pro­nounce, and easy to remem­ber. They have con­sid­er­able mnemonic value.

And mnemonic value often trans­lates into finan­cial value.

A mnemonic is a device — such as a word, sym­bol, or sound — intended to assist in recall. If a name car­ries some mnemonic value, it will increase traf­fic, sales, and value to your busi­ness on its own. The more mnemonic a name is, the more valu­able it is.

There are var­i­ous rea­sons for this.

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Rant warn­ing: what fol­lows may offend some peo­ple. But I wanted to throw in my three cents on the topic of “forced con­ti­nu­ity,” which seems to be the sub­ject of a lot of debate these days.

Sev­eral well-​​known mar­keters have made offers of late with forced con­ti­nu­ity. What it means is, the intended prod­uct you want to buy can only be pur­chased when you buy another (often, a con­tin­u­ous sub­scrip­tion) billed to your account every month or so until you cancel.

Forced con­ti­nu­ity is noth­ing new. (In direct mar­ket­ing, they call these “Til For­bid” offers.) It’s another type of offer, pure and sim­ple. It’s mar­ket­ing. And there’s noth­ing wrong with that. What’s wrong is not the way the offer is made.

The real prob­lem is its lack of transparency.

But that’s not what I want to rant about today.

What a lot of peo­ple seem to be miss­ing here (and some­thing my bril­liant wife brought to my atten­tion, which makes per­fect sense to me), is that there is a deeper, much darker side to this whole thing.

Some­thing all mar­keters need to be aware of…

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With spam inces­santly inun­dat­ing our inboxes and people’s atten­tion spans con­stantly shrink­ing, some have claimed that email mar­ket­ing is on the way out.

I say “nonsense.”

In fact, it’s because of those very rea­sons that email mar­ket­ing is now stronger than ever before. I per­son­ally know of some mar­keters who have made lit­er­ally mil­lions of dol­lars with email mar­ket­ing alone in recent weeks.

I’m talk­ing about legit­i­mate, law-​​compliant, optin email.

Remem­ber, the most com­mon use of the Inter­net is still email — not instant mes­sen­g­ing, social net­work­ing, or brows­ing web­sites. It’s often the very first thing peo­ple do when they log onto the web.

Granted, the biggest stum­bling block is to increase your “open rate” (i.e., the per­cent­age of peo­ple who actu­ally open your emails). And to do so you first need to get your emails deliv­ered and over­come overzeal­ous spam fil­ters.

But once they do reach your read­ers’ inboxes, the most impor­tant step in get­ting your mes­sages through to your audi­ence is with good copy. And like a good head­line in sales copy, it all starts with the sub­ject line.

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What is it with peo­ple lately?

Brow­beat­ing, bash­ing, and bul­lyrag­ging. Flames, stains, and blames. Put downs, let downs and show­downs. On forums, blogs, and social net­work­ing sites.

Sure, I under­stand peo­ple are fed up with scam artists and snake oil sales­men. And sure, I also believe we need fire­brands and rebels. Each one helps to keep the other side in line.

I love good debates. They’re not only intel­lec­tu­ally stim­u­lat­ing, but also they help insti­gate change, or give oth­ers the impe­tus on how to deal with it. I always love a good argu­ment, when that argu­ment is based on fact and substance.

But lately, some of them are really get­ting out of hand.

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Nowa­days, it’s no longer a choice between the A and B piles. It’s no longer a choice between hun­dreds of sta­tions or chan­nels. It’s a choice between mil­lions if not bil­lions of options called “websites.”

But there’s some­thing else.

The Inter­net has mul­ti­plied not only the num­ber of options but also the num­ber of choices, too! (If you want a hint, think of those choices as “applications.”)

From mil­lions of web pages (as opposed to just hun­dreds of direct mail pieces, TV chan­nels or radio sta­tions), to var­i­ous deliv­ery meth­ods for each one (e.g., text, audio and video), to addi­tional appli­ca­tions that equally demand atten­tion (on the web as well as on a com­puter desk­top), a user’s choices have there­fore become expo­nen­tially more complex.

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