I’ve had the plea­sure of meet­ing Rus­sell Brun­son at var­i­ous sem­i­nars. Rus­sell is not only an Inter­net mar­keter, he’s also a bright guy.

And recently, he’s proven my assess­ment to be true.

When he told me I was nom­i­nated as part of his Mar­keter of The Year 2006 Awards, in the copy­writ­ing cat­e­gory, at first I was some­what ret­i­cent. But when I saw the list of those I’m up against, need­less to say, I was stunned.

Nom­i­nees include the likes of Dan Kennedy, Yanik Sil­ver, Armand Morin, Mike Fil­saime, Mark Joyner, Rich Schefren, Perry Mar­shall, Shawn Casey, Joel Comm, Ryan Deiss, and a ton of others!

But here’s Russell’s brilliance.

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With “user-​​driven copy,” the fact is, peo­ple can choose what they want, how they want it and when they want it. And that is what’s work­ing really well right now, not because it’s new but because it’s natural.

The pro­gres­sion of the web (regard­less if you call it Web 2.0 or not) is sim­ply an exten­sion of how peo­ple behave. Busi­nesses and web­sites are finally wak­ing up. And they’re giv­ing their users what they want, ask for and prefer.

Here’s an example.

In Web 1.0, we were lim­ited by text, graph­ics and links. When cook­ies came along, they helped to cus­tomize the user’s expe­ri­ence to a degree. But cook­ies are still lim­it­ing. They are sta­tic in nature, require more pageviews to make them use­ful if at all, and as we all know carry risks such as pri­vacy and secu­rity issues.

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There’s an inter­est­ing debate going on in my copy­writ­ing forum, about copy cos­met­ics and specif­i­cally the for­mat­ting of head­lines and subheadlines.

My post here is not to dis­cuss those issues directly. I’ll reserve that for another article.

How­ever, I do want to add my thoughts on one issue that seems to keep com­ing back in the forum — the issue of using long-​​winded, exces­sively wordy head­lines that are preva­lent on web­sites nowadays.

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As Eng­land was fight­ing it out in the World Cup, the “Fightin’ Fortins” were on stage in Lon­don, Eng­land, speak­ing at the World Inter­net Sum­mit. Sylvie and I both spoke on stage in front of 1,100 cheer­ing and eager attendees.

What a fab­u­lous experience!

Not only did we make a ton of new friends from the many, won­der­ful atten­dees, mostly all Brits and Euro­peans, we also had an oppor­tu­nity to meet long-​​time friends and copy­writ­ers extra­or­di­naire Alan For­rest Smith, Brett McFall, Tim Warnock, David Cavanagh, and a few others.

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My friend Armand Morin’s Big Sem­i­nar V was a blast!

As usual.

It was the biggest Big Sem­i­nar ever. The pic­ture on the left is the humon­gous stage and light­show. A mas­sive 36′ stage and a 16′ cat­walk. Pretty freakin’ amaz­ing, if you ask me. And with close to 400 peo­ple in atten­dance, it was indeed the biggest one ever. (Next time promises to be even big­ger, accord­ing to Armand.)

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