OK, this post has been a long time coming.

For over a decade, peo­ple keep ask­ing me, “So, what is it: Michel? Michael? Mike? What?” (I pre­fer “Mas­ter,” but I digress.)

My won­der­ful wife calls me “Mish.” (Short for “Michel,” pro­nounced “Mish-​​al.”) In turn, I call her “Rish,” which is short for “Licorice.” The story behind it is, when we first met, a friend told us we were love­birds, always together, insep­a­ra­ble. Like licorice.

(We still are! In fact, we even merged our busi­nesses and cre­ated a new umbrella com­pany, called “The Licorice Group, LLC.” Now there’s a twist!)

Any­way, here’s the thing.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

This arti­cle was writ­ten by one of my junior copy­writ­ers, Joe Valente, as an intro­duc­tion to one of my arti­cles — which I will be pub­lish­ing on this blog later this week. But Joe’s arti­cle is so good, I decided to reprint it here. Take it away, Joe!

There’s an old say­ing: “Depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances, any tool that comes to hand becomes a hammer.”

Now, let’s start with a basic premise: When you write copy, you build knowl­edge, trust, and sales, and lan­guage is your ham­mer. Some might take that a step fur­ther and say that the point of your writ­ing is to “nail” your prospects, but I don’t think I want to go down that road today.

Instead, I want to talk a bit about your main tool of the trade, your prover­bial hammer…

Read the rest of this post or share it »