Just a quick note to let you know this blog is under­go­ing some ren­o­va­tions. I’ve just installed Dis­qus (pro­nounced “dis­cuss”) com­ment sys­tem, which will replace the native Word­Press com­ment­ing system.

It takes a while for the sys­tem to import all the com­ments from Word­Press — it’s about 70% done, now — and it should be all back to nor­mal soon. Fin­gers crossed.

Why am I doing this?

I’ve been inves­ti­gat­ing sev­eral com­ment­ing sys­tems, includ­ing Word­Press’ own, Intense Debate. And Dis­qus appears to be the win­ner in many of the reviews I’ve read. I’ve tested it on some of my non-​​public blogs and it works quite well.

This sys­tem allows you to track com­ments, con­verse using threaded replies, rate com­ments, add links to com­men­ta­tor pro­files, and com­ment by log­ging into Twit­ter, Face­book, or Dis­qus Con­nect, or sim­ply as a guest.

Com­ments are still mod­er­ated as before, so your com­ment won’t show up auto­mat­i­cally. If you notice any­thing “wiggy,” please com­ment here. The com­plete tran­si­tion, Dis­qus advises me, should be com­pleted by day’s end. Thanks for bear­ing with me.

Writ­ing copy usu­ally involves two major things: fig­ur­ing out what to say and then how to say it.

The sec­ond part is usu­ally the eas­i­est part of my work. Why? Because fig­ur­ing out what to say is often a whole lot harder than how to say it.

Find­ing the right thing to say requires a lot of research, cre­ativ­ity, time, and, of course, “sales detec­tive work,” as my friend and top copy­writer John Carl­ton calls it.

But when I know what to write, when I fig­ured out what I’m going to say, the ques­tion I’m often asked is, “Do you start with the head­line, or do you work the head­line last?”

Let me share with you a for­mula I use. First, when I write new copy, I tend to start with the copy itself, then cre­ate the head­line and head­ers (some peo­ple call them “subheads”).

With exist­ing copy how­ever, it’s the other way around: I start with a bet­ter head­line — after read­ing the copy and ques­tion­naire replies from my clients — and then the rest.

Why? Because…

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