“If you like to gam­ble, I tell you I’m your man. You win some, you lose some, it’s all the same to me.” — Motorhead’s “Ace of Spades”

I’m get­ting fed up.

It seems to me that prod­uct launches of late have less to do with sub­stance and strat­egy, and more to do with tricks and tac­tics. Blame it on the econ­omy. But I think we need to blame it on some­thing else. Some­thing more sinister.

In fact, have you not noticed that a grow­ing num­ber of mar­keters are urg­ing you to join their “club,” as if it’s some secret, back-​​of-​​the-​​room, clan­des­tine poker game?

Speak­ing of poker, busi­ness is some­what of a gam­ble. And admit­tedly, gam­bling can be prof­itable. Very prof­itable. After all, the more you gam­ble, the greater you win, right?

But do we really need to gam­ble with our customers?

What about the long-​​term? What about build­ing busi­nesses rather than just mak­ing money? What about invest­ing instead? What about invest­ing in your cus­tomers that can pay some­times 10 to 100 times more over the long run?

For exam­ple, some­one men­tioned a new pay-​​per-​​follower pro­gram on Twit­ter. (Ugh. How is that any dif­fer­ent than from spam­mers buy­ing bulk email lists?) I responded, and this pretty much sums up my phi­los­o­phy — it should be yours, too — with:

“I’d hate to treat my cus­tomers like pris­on­ers or prostitutes.”

Read the rest of this post or share it »

One prob­lem in copy­writ­ing I often see is the fact that the audi­ence is not tar­geted for the offer. An untar­geted, unqual­i­fied prospect won’t buy, no mat­ter how good the copy is.

Or at least, they will ask for a refund once they smell the cof­fee. But that’s not the topic I want to discuss…

It’s the sec­ond biggest copy­writ­ing prob­lem. Which is the fact that the copy doesn’t speak to the cus­tomer at the stage of aware­ness at which they hap­pen to be.

This is absolutely essen­tial to ensure that the copy is long enough, and strong enough, to appeal to, qual­ify, edu­cate, and sell the prospect. It’s about con­nect­ing with them.

What are these “stages of aware­ness?” There are four.

Read the rest of this post or share it »