After read­ing some of my arti­cles on how to find copy­writ­ing clients, one of my stu­dents, Jeff, asked me an inter­est­ing question.

He’s an aspir­ing copy­writer and wants to build his own free­lance copy­writ­ing busi­ness. When he read that I wrote copy for free when I started my career as a copy­writer, he told me he was think­ing about doing the same.

How­ever, he won­dered if he should ask for some­thing, any­thing, in return. In fact, here was his question…

“Mike, my friends have a very small busi­ness, and they have asked me to do copy for them. They say they can’t really pay me that much. I have told them I will do it for free as long as I get rights to the copy and can use it for a ref­er­ence and in my port­fo­lio. I think this is a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to get more expe­ri­ence, but my wife wants to see some money on the table.

“I value your opin­ion. Can you help?”

Here was my answer.

Ask­ing for a con­ces­sion in exchange for offer­ing one is always the way to do it. While I believe your trade-​​off is good in prin­ci­ple, it’s still mea­ger. I would con­sider some money — or some larger con­ces­sion on the part of the client. Here’s why…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Today, mar­keters are scram­bling to find ways to increase cash­flow. Some will try to find new prod­ucts to sell. Oth­ers will try to drive more traf­fic to their exist­ing sales pages.

How­ever, one area most peo­ple tend to over­look is the abil­ity to increase their cur­rent sales by upselling their cus­tomers the moment they checkout.

But I’m not refer­ring to one-​​time offers or addi­tional prod­ucts offered in the same sales fun­nel. I’m talk­ing about offer­ing cus­tomers the abil­ity to upgrade their purchases.

I pre­fer “upgrade” rather than “upsell” because the lat­ter has received a bad rap of late due to a few overzeal­ous or unscrupu­lous marketers.

Sell­ing “upgrades” is an area that can become prof­itable for many busi­nesses in increas­ing their exist­ing sales. It’s by sell­ing extended ser­vices or ben­e­fits pack­ages before or at the time of check­out, also known as the “extended warranty.”

There are numer­ous ways to sell extended war­ranties (or what I pre­fer to call “extended ben­e­fits”). These silent profit cen­ters exist in almost any busi­ness, which can increase the size of a customer’s pur­chase by 50%, 100%, even 200% or more.

Very often, the sale of these extended ben­e­fits have higher profit mar­gins, too.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

It’s Thanks­giv­ing in Canada, so it’s time to give thanks. It’s also my birth­day. That’s why I’m the one who’s going to give you a gift (there’s only one con­di­tion, so read on).

I want to give thanks to all my loyal sub­scribers and read­ers. But there’s another per­fectly good and more impor­tant reason.

I need to make some room!

You see, I have 3,000 copies of one of my books in stor­age, and I need to get rid of them. Fast! So I’m fully pre­pared to give them away. For free. Let me give you some back­ground first…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

A recent coach­ing ses­sion touched upon the grow­ing trend that some mar­keters have adopted to squeeze out sales from exit­ing traffic.

In other words, you visit a web­site and read the saleslet­ter. You decide it’s not for you, so you leave. But when you try leave (either as you close your browser or sim­ply hover your mouse out­side of it), the web­site attempts to make a last-​​ditch offer.

The com­mon prac­tice is to offer a dis­count, and a recent trend is to make it through vir­tual sales assis­tant just before the prospect clicks away from the screen.

(Vir­tual assis­tant or not, it is no dif­fer­ent than a one-​​time offer appear­ing in an exit pop-​​up or spawned browser win­dow once the vis­i­tor leaves.)

Not only is the prac­tice annoy­ing, it can be detri­men­tal to your sales efforts.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

EDITED: The spe­cial has been extended, pos­si­bly a day or so, since I made a mis­take. (Read below for the details.)

Did you miss out on the 10th anniver­sary spe­cial I did last year, where I offered life­time mem­ber­ships to my pri­vate copy­writ­ing how-​​to site, “The Copy Doc­tor,” for just a frac­tion of the cost?

Since that time (and even to this day), I get hun­dreds of emails from peo­ple who missed out and want to know if I’ll ever do it again. I wasn’t plan­ning on it since 10th anniver­saries don’t come often.

How­ever, with so many peo­ple clam­or­ing for it, I thought about it for a while and made a deci­sion. (If you missed out, then you’re going to like this!)

I’m ready to pro­mote Life­time Mem­ber­ships of Copy Doc­tor for just $397 to a few select peo­ple, one more time, until the end of March, 2008 (end­ing in a few days). And pos­si­bly for the last time, too.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

I have been crazy-​​busy get­ting our newest prod­uct ready. It’s an all-​​in-​​one mem­ber­ship site that shows you how to cre­ate a mon­ey­mak­ing busi­ness online in just four steps.

We call it “Suc­cess Chef University.”

It cov­ers every­thing. Every busi­ness model, traf­fic type, and mar­ket­ing strat­egy. But do you know which ones you really need and why? What about out­sourc­ing any of it?

Like fol­low­ing a recipe, you need to use the right ingre­di­ents in the right order. Suc­cess Chef sim­pli­fies it all for you with step-​​by-​​step video tutorials.

Suc­cess Chef is still in the pre-​​launch phase. How­ever, we decided to invite you to join right now — long before we do launch — with a mas­sive dis­count.

Lim­ited to the next 50 indi­vid­u­als only.

The saleslet­ter is also inter­ac­tive, too. We’ve also recorded a spe­cial hour-​​long video to help you. That video is an edu­ca­tion in itself! In it, we share those four sim­ple steps to gen­er­at­ing income on the Internet.

Check it out if just for the learn­ing experience.

At the begin­ning of my career, I spe­cial­ized in work­ing pri­mar­ily with cos­metic sur­geons. I wrote their direct mail copy, pro­duced their infomer­cials, trained their sales staff, and con­sulted them on marketing.

As a big believer in brand­ing and niche mar­ket­ing, I decided to focus pri­mar­ily on doc­tors. I dubbed myself as “The Suc­cess Doc­tor” since my aim was to help doc­tors become successful.

Up until a decade ago, how­ever, I was just a self-​​employed free­lancer. For years my clients came to me by word of mouth. But since my busi­ness was grow­ing quite rapidly, I decided to incorporate.

So on August 17, 1997, I reg­is­tered “The Suc­cess Doc­tor, Inc.” (In fact, it was only a few months later that I cre­ated a web­site and “hung out my dig­i­tal shin­gle” at Suc​cess​Doc​tor​.com! And the rest, as they say, is history.)

Nev­er­the­less, this means that, on August 17, 2007, it will be the 10th anniver­sary of my com­pany. And to cel­e­brate, I want to do some­thing spe­cial for you. Some­thing I’ve never done before. So here’s the deal…

Read the rest of this post or share it »