One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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The new year is around the cor­ner. It’s a time for res­o­lu­tions. A time for change. And some­times, those changes need to be drastic.

On Decem­ber 16, 2009, while we con­duct our reg­u­lar weekly webi­nar for our Suc­cess Chef stu­dents, we will be mak­ing a major announce­ment about rad­i­cal changes we’re mak­ing to our cur­rent busi­ness model…

… Changes that not only affect our stu­dents but also might affect the Inter­net mar­ket­ing train­ing indus­try as a whole.

So we’re open­ing up this live class to the pub­lic for the first time. For this one time, we’re invit­ing every­one who wants to join us on this webi­nar, and not just our pay­ing students.

These changes might sur­prise you. Or shock you. They even might make some peo­ple mad. But they must be made. And together with Sylvie Fortin, author of the con­tro­ver­sial Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins, we will be announc­ing those changes on that spe­cial webinar.

The rea­son is sim­ple — but it’s not what you think. We’re not sell­ing any­thing new. This is not a typ­i­cal pro­mo­tional or sales pitch webi­nar. It’s a spe­cial announce­ment, one we’ve been itch­ing to make for a very long time. All I can say is, “It’s about time!”

We recorded this very brief video and wrote this open let­ter to explain.

When my wife released her con­tro­ver­sial report, Inter­net Mar­ket­ing Sins, we received mixed reac­tions. As expected, of course.

Some peo­ple thought it was about time some­one spoke out on these under­handed tac­tics and stu­pid mar­ket­ing tricks. Oth­ers praised Sylvie’s efforts and gushed her with appreciation.

Oth­ers, on the other hand, didn’t feel as… appreciative.

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Sad day. I’m speechless.

In case you haven’t heard, the infa­mous Gary Hal­bert, the Alpha Shitweasel, the Prince of Print, died in his sleep on Easter Sunday.

All I can say is, the copy­writ­ing world has lost one of its biggest icons. There will NEVER be another Gary Hal­bert, that’s for sure.

John Reese left the mes­sage on my copywriter’s board just after mid­night. John Carl­ton, who was Gary’s best friend in this biz, wrote a blog post that says it all. (It lit­er­ally brought tears to my eyes.)

I remem­ber two years ago when I did a sem­i­nar with him, John Carl­ton, and Mark Joyner, called the “Fusion Sem­i­nar.” (There are some incred­i­bly funny sto­ries from that sem­i­nar, which I will share with you some time soon!)

Rest in peace, brother. You can also lis­ten to two inter­views I’ve done with Gary Hal­bert, and one with John Carlton.

Click here to lis­ten to four hours with me and Gary Halbert.

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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