Pop quiz for ya! Which Black Friday sale strategy will make more sales: Short and urgent 36-hour sale. Set a tight “open cart” window to crank up the scarcity. Send one email to announce the sale, and 2 on the second day as the clock ticks down. The idea here is to really play up […]
Continue readingThe turkeys on the turkey farm really have it made, don’t they? At least it looks that way… I recently read a quote about this from Nassim Nicholas Taleb (author of “The Black Swan”): “Consider a turkey that is fed every day,” Taleb writes. “Every single feeding will firm up the bird’s belief that it […]
Continue readingEmail autoresponders are a great “hack.” You write the messages once, queue them up… And now anyone who joins your list hears from you regularly. No more “Dang I haven’t emailed my list in two weeks” hamster wheel guilt. This is autopilot marketing at its best. Sometimes making the transition can get a little messy […]
Continue readingRight now I’m hip-deep in a major client project. This particular client sells marketing software for “loan officers.” Remember the reams of paperwork you signed when you got your mortgage? Loan officers are the fearless guys and gals who turned all those documents into the money you needed for your house. Like a lot of […]
Continue readingLately I’m binge-watching Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice.” When the shows originally aired, I was spending the evenings teaching myself web programming. So I have some catching up to do. Yesterday I watched the second episode of season 1, and my reactions ranged from amused to horrified. Mostly horrified. If you missed it, here’s how it […]
Continue readingOnce in a while a client will ask me, “So can you offer a guarantee of results?” And I’d love to say “Yes!” But the reality is that there are just too many variables in any marketing project to know exactly how it’s going to play out. Here’s an example: This was launch week for […]
Continue readingThe other night I tucked my two oldest boys in to bed and popped down to my office in the basement for a couple of minutes. I’m plowing through a few emails, when suddenly I hear the boys start making noise. Now their bedroom is all the way across the house, so at first the […]
Continue readingYesterday I was doing some research for a client, and I stumbled across this “pearl of wisdom”: “For 2014, it’s important to remember two things: 1) everything is online and 2) people are smarter than they used to be.” This was in an article about marketing for mortgage brokers. And I literally busted out laughing […]
Continue readingA few days ago I wrote about a Polish entrepreneur who started a business helping people who need a safe place to “hulk out” and smash things. And I said that the genius of his idea is how it taps into an existing mass desire. Which prompts a question from Felix: +++ I love this […]
Continue readingComes a question from subscriber Aadeeti: “I really enjoy the way you write. I have always wanted to be a compelling writer but I can’t bring myself to write long prose. I can write poetry but prose does not come easily to me. What do you suggest to improve my content writing skills.” Ask a […]
Continue readingMy youngest son is a beast. He’s just hitting 7 months old now, and he’s already wearing 18-month clothes. (No idea where he gets it—my build is… let’s just call it slight and leave it at that.) A few weeks ago he figured out how to haul his huge frame up into a standing position, […]
Continue readingMy all-time favorite Internet meme is: “You had ONE job!” If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check out http://imgur.com/gallery/TbagF I could spend all day looking at those photos. A few that made me laugh this morning include: A hunk of beef labeled “USDA inspected”… and marked on the package as “chicken.” An ad […]
Continue readingA few days ago Naomi Dunford from IttyBiz got me all riled up with a quote from Stephen Pressfield’s “War of Art.” Says Pressfield: +++ I learned this from Robert McKee. A hack, he says, is a writer who second-guesses his audience. When the hack sits down to work, he doesn’t ask himself what’s in […]
Continue readingMy #1 goal for 2016 is growing my email list to 10,000 subscribers. That’s a 7X increase—pretty ambitious. And my new “weapon of choice” that’s going to help me get there is a suite email marketing powertools from a startup called Thrive. Here’s the problem I’ve always had in the past: There are TONS of […]
Continue readingEver feel like you just need to SMASH something? I’m usually a pretty mild mannered guy, but I’ll confess that I can come pretty close to “hulking out” sometimes. My last job as a programmer brought this side of me out. I’d spend all day developing an iPhone app, and let me tell you… After […]
Continue readingReader Yurii writes: +++ I’m only starting with email marketing and the most frustrating question for me at the moment is “Why people don’t answer my emails?” I’ve got only about 30 people on my mailing list, but all of them seem absolutely unresponsive and not even willing to respond with a simple yes or […]
Continue readingIn college my dream was to be a journalist. Specifically, I wanted to write the kind of brilliant, “long-form” feature stories published by magazines like The New Yorker and Harper’s Weekly. My heroes were the old-school “gonzo” journalists like George Plimpton and Tom Wolfe. (Plimpton once spent months training as a football player with the […]
Continue readingTwenty years ago, the Internet was a very different place. If you wanted to “go online,” you’d plug a phone cable into your computer, then sit there listening to the busy signal as you dialed up your local AOL number over and over… (I’d get giddy when I finally heard R2D2 pick up on the […]
Continue readingMy story last week about donnie smacked a raw nerve with subscriber Spencer Goldade of Monkeyslunch: +++ Totally understand this. I get way too many Donnies. 🙁 I’ve been sharing many of your daily newsletter pieces with the office and convincing them that when we’re ready we should ask and see if you’ll help us […]
Continue readingThe other day we got this coupon book in the mail. You’ve probably seen something similar: It’s formatted like a magazine, but every page is an offer from a different company. My wife was flipping through it while I sorted through my junk mail, and I glanced over when I heard her say “Oh!” She […]
Continue readingAround this time last year, I decided I to get a portrait taken. I was getting ready to launch my copywriting biz at the time, and I wanted to look professional. The photographer I chose was a guy named Kevin. I met Kevin when I was working my first job as a writer and graphic […]
Continue readingI belong to a couple of paid forums for marketers and copywriters. There’s this one topic that seems to set everyone off. It’s weird, because this concept is covered in almost every course or book on direct marketing, and it’s one most of the “gurus” seem to agree on. But bring this up in the […]
Continue readingBack in college, I caught a lot of flak from my “underlings” on the student newspaper. It was my job as editor to sniff around campus and come up with a list of stories for the little weekly tabloid I oversaw. The same scene would play out every week. The staff would gather around the […]
Continue readingRight now I’m climbing the steep learning curve of Facebook advertising. Now personally I hate Facebook. I’ve managed to avoid it for almost entirely for the past 7-8 years. But there’s no denying that Facebook is the best platform in the world for reaching new customers (at least for my business and a lot of […]
Continue readingOne question I get asked a lot is like this one from Srdjan in Toronto: === Hey Josh, just wanted to say I really enjoy your style of writing. I see that you’ve put a lot of work into honing your craft and I’d love to know what you would consider the one or two […]
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