In part one of this blog series, I detailed the “conversion importance” of discovering what really makes your potential client or customer deliriously happy. It’s vital for conversion to determine what happiness really means in the mind of your website visitor. For that article, I dipped into the worlds of…

Andrew Wood, the marketer who introduced me to direct response copywriting always said (and still says): you must always be selling happiness. Andrew can market pretty much anything but one area of specialization is golf. In golf, it’s not hugely difficult to sell happiness. You can tell golfers they will…

What’s the different between success and failure? Or being the “best-of-the-best” and the dreaded somewhere in the middle? In my experience, it’s a combination of hard work and attention to detail. In a variation of the 80/20 rule, an extra 20% effort often places you in to the hallowed ground…

Whether you’re a copywriter or a marketer, conversion is ultimately your business. My goal as a direct response copywriter is to persuade as many readers/viewers/listeners to take the next step in the buying process. Your job as a marketer is to maximize ROI for your company or client. And that…

On occasion, I like to visit a local establishment called Sir Edmond Halley’s in my adopted home town of Charlotte, North Carolina. It’s a restaurant/pub and a favorite among locals. Look closely at the menu and you’ll find, under burgers and sandwiches, “The Award Winning Sir Edmond Halley’s Bacon Cheeseburger.”…

If you really want your marketing to rock, the last thing you should do is get a degree in marketing from a university. Yes, what I just wrote may lead to vitriolic hate mail and comments from university admissions offices around the world. But, based on my real-world experience, I…

“The problem with most copywriters is they don’t think in terms of selling,” says David Ogilvy in his video titled We Sell or Else. “They’ve never written direct response. They’ve never tasted blood.” When Ogilvy says, almost enthusiastically, “they’ve never tasted blood,” he’s talking about failure. Ogilvy founded one of the…

As a direct response copywriter, my job is to persuade people to buy a product or use a service. More specifically, I want the reader to provide their email, buy something on the spot, pick up the phone, or contact the company. Fortunately, there’s more than just one way to…

On the “most difficult tasks on the planet” scale, I place marketing toward the top. It’s not as difficult as brain surgery or growing grass in Phoenix in July. But successful marketing is certainly more difficult than memorizing entire Shakespeare sonnets or contemplating the origin of the solar system. Marketing—specifically…