Recently, a coaching client asked me about dealing with prospective clients over the phone.

This copywriter understood the importance of communicating with prospects and answering their pre-sale questions. However, like me, he preferred to avoid the telephone and asked me if his strategy was sound.

Free consultations are often a necessary step in securing clients in your early days as a copywriter before you’ve established your expertise and developed a reputation.

It’s natural that potential clients want to get a feel for your style and standards with a “getting to know you session.” Quite often, they will want to do this via a phone consultation with you.

I’m a big believer in opening the lines of communication, and I also like to pick up the phone to speak with a client when writing copy.

But before a client hires me, I prefer to remain off the phone. Why? Because the telephone can be counterproductive and even hurt your business.

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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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Scarcity is a tactic often used in copywriting to create a sense of urgency and convince the “on-the-fence” customer to make a purchase decision. Above all, the goal is to prevent prospects from procrastinating.

As online consumers become wise to these direct-response copywriting tactics, one question often arises:

“What about digital products and electronic downloads, like ebooks and software? How can you create a sense of urgency for something that, in itself, is limitless (or perceived as such)?”

Here’s how to use scarcity selling effectively with digital products:

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I’m up for a challenge.

Just recently, my friend and SEO blogging expert Andy Beard posted an article about an interesting case study.

After simply rewording the headline of a blog post, John Wesley literally multiplied his traffic to one of his blog posts by 10 times.

With the same post!

In other words, nothing was changed except for the headline. The article was exactly the same, word for word. But by changing the headline slightly, the blog post drew a ton of traffic, particularly from social networking sites.

Well, now’s your chance to have me do the same thing for you — and learn a thing or two, too. Here’s how. Let me rewire one of your own headlines for maximum selling power. But there’s a catch…

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A rapid stream ran by the writer’s boyhood home. The stream turned a wooden wheel and the wheel ran a mill. Under that primitive method, all but a fraction of the streams potentiality went to waste.

Then someone applied scientific methods to that stream — put in a turbine and dynamos. Now, with no more water, no more power, it runs a large manufacturing plant.

We think of that stream when we see wasted advertising power. And we see it everywhere — hundreds of examples. Enormous potentialities — millions of circulation — used to turn a mill wheel. While others use that same power with manifold effect.

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My wife and I are shopping for a new home. We’re quite excited as one house has caught our eye, and we’re making an offer on it as I type this.

With the excitement comes a bit of trepidation, however, since we know we’ll have to start packing, making moving preparations and, of course, go furniture shopping in order to fill some of the “extra space.” (Our new home is double the size of our current one.)

This reminds of the last time I went shopping for furniture when I bought my previous house. Why? Because something strange occurred that reminded me of the power of applying pressure in copywriting.

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If you played video arcade games in the late 80’s, even 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 led by the dreaded warrior Cats.

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…

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