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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One of my favorite shows on TV of late is Shark Tank.

The show cen­ters on aspir­ing, brave, and some­times down­right idi­otic inven­tors and entre­pre­neurs who pitch their ideas in front of a group of mer­ci­less, seem­ingly heart­less mul­ti­mil­lion­aires, beg­ging for invest­ment capital.

Some of the advice that come from these “sharks” are pretty obvi­ous and com­mon­sen­si­cal, espe­cially to peo­ple who’s been in busi­ness for as long as I have.

But a lot of it is bril­liant. Bril­liant, but also brazen, unabashed, and bru­tally hon­est. It’s not for the faint of heart. If you don’t like see­ing peo­ple, along with their hopes, dreams, and busi­ness ideas being shred to pieces on TV, then this show is cer­tainly not for you.

The more I watch that show, the more I learn. It’s not just a fas­ci­nat­ing pro­gram, it’s a million-​​dollar edu­ca­tion in just one hour a week. And for free to boot. If you ever get a chance to watch that show, do it. You’re going to learn so much. It’s an amaz­ing show.

If an idea or busi­ness is dumb, dead, or down­right dread­ful, they will say it. Often, in no uncer­tain terms. They have to. After all, their money is on the line.

But then again, so should it be with you.

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One of the things I love about new year’s is read­ing about year-​​end pre­dic­tions. I don’t know why. Per­haps it’s my curi­ous nature.

But I’m fas­ci­nated when I see where some peo­ple think we’re headed. There are some blog­gers whose pre­dic­tions fas­ci­nate me. Two have cap­tured my atten­tion: Read­WriteWeb and the Man­hat­tan Mar­ket­ing Maven.

And yes, even yours truly loves mak­ing them, too.

As with all pre­dic­tions, it’s no dif­fer­ent than flip­ping a coin. The law of aver­ages kicks in. But it’s not a 50–50 ratio. A third will come true, usu­ally dead on the money. Another third won’t at all. And the final third may come true, but not exactly as predicted.

I’m sub­jected to that same law, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

Nev­er­the­less, in keep­ing with that sacred tra­di­tion of new-​​year pro­jec­tions, prog­nos­ti­ca­tions, and picayune pon­tif­i­ca­tions, here are two major areas I believe we will see hap­pen­ing in the new year, if not the near future. Are you ready? Here goes…

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After read­ing some of my arti­cles on how to find copy­writ­ing clients, one of my stu­dents, Jeff, asked me an inter­est­ing question.

He’s an aspir­ing copy­writer and wants to build his own free­lance copy­writ­ing busi­ness. When he read that I wrote copy for free when I started my career as a copy­writer, he told me he was think­ing about doing the same.

How­ever, he won­dered if he should ask for some­thing, any­thing, in return. In fact, here was his question…

“Mike, my friends have a very small busi­ness, and they have asked me to do copy for them. They say they can’t really pay me that much. I have told them I will do it for free as long as I get rights to the copy and can use it for a ref­er­ence and in my port­fo­lio. I think this is a won­der­ful oppor­tu­nity to get more expe­ri­ence, but my wife wants to see some money on the table.

“I value your opin­ion. Can you help?”

Here was my answer.

Ask­ing for a con­ces­sion in exchange for offer­ing one is always the way to do it. While I believe your trade-​​off is good in prin­ci­ple, it’s still mea­ger. I would con­sider some money — or some larger con­ces­sion on the part of the client. Here’s why…

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Lately, I’m see­ing a lot of posts in pub­lic forums and blogs these days about peo­ple get­ting sick and tired of see­ing “crappy,” “hypey,” used-​​car, Ginsu-​​like, looooong copy.

Some of them come from guru-​​bashing naysay­ers who hate mar­ket­ing, which I always take with a grain of salt.

But some are intel­li­gent, mature, and com­mon­sen­si­cal. They are inter­est­ing because I believe that, while neg­a­tive feed­back does have its place, it’s often misplaced.

Here’s why. They blame long copy when all too often it’s not the copy’s fault. More impor­tantly, it’s not because of the length. Let’s get some­thing clear off the bat: long, Ginsu-​​like copy does work. It has always worked. It will always work. And it’s here to stay.

But (and it’s a big “but”)…

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I wrote this arti­cle way back in 1998. It seems to have made a resur­gence, espe­cially with today’s econ­omy. So I said to myself, “Why not repub­lish it?” So here it is. Enjoy!

If there is some­thing about which I’m pretty adamant, it’s the idea of attract­ing qual­i­fied prospects who are will­ing to do busi­ness with you. And this involves many dif­fer­ent things.

Posi­tion­ing is one of them. In fact, it has been one of my favorite mar­ket­ing con­cepts for this very reason.

How­ever, this fun­da­men­tal mag­net­ism is not only based on pure mar­ket­ing prac­tices or strate­gies. It also involves some­thing at a much deeper level that is far more effec­tive than any other mar­ket­ing tool or process in existence.

This “thing” to which I am refer­ring is, I believe, the most impor­tant mar­ket­ing secret I can ever teach you — and it’s far from being a secret at all. It is con­sid­ered as one sim­ply because it is often neglected or ignored by many mar­keters and businesspeople.

What is this “secret” that’s so elusive?

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If you ever won­dered how to out­source your work using new and cre­ative ways that get it done faster, cheaper, bet­ter, and eth­i­cally, too, then you need to watch this video.

Called “crowd­sourc­ing,” this rel­a­tively new out­sourc­ing tech­nique — I say “rel­a­tively,” as the term may be new but the tech­nique is as old as out­sourc­ing itself — enables you to cull spe­cific skills from the pub­lic at large.

Often, for lit­tle to no cost.

Whether you’re out­sourc­ing already, plan­ning on doing so, or just want to save time and money, this is for you. Crowd­sourc­ing also allows you to bypass free­lance bid­ding sites that can turn out to be expen­sive and risky, often with less than desir­able results.

This two-​​hour train­ing video is com­pletely free.

In it, Sylvie exposes some of the best-​​kept secrets to get stuff done. Some of which have never been revealed until now. It was orig­i­nally recorded from a pri­vate online webi­nar to our Suc­cess Chef stu­dents, but we’re mak­ing it avail­able for the first time.

The video might be free, but you must reg­is­ter to watch it, as we high­light Suc­cess Chef Uni­ver­sity in the back­end because that’s where the video comes from. How­ever, you get imme­di­ate access to this video on the next page. You can unsub­scribe eas­ily, anytime.

Click here to watch this amaz­ing video.