Written By Loren Woirhaye, July 29th, 2010
The new economy is a competitive place and you’ll have to be a marketer in order not to be marginalized by the marketplace.
In brief: If you cannot market and sell your ideas to your employers and colleagues, you’ll be exploited and under-paid.
Fifty years ago, giant corporations offered a lifetime of job security and upward mobility. Today you’ll have to be more flexible in your working skills because chances are the jobs you are doing today will not be the ones you are doing in 5 or ten years.
In our current 2010 economic meltdown in the United States, we have a chorus of workers demanding the government create jobs. I’m not too astute about politics or economics, but it seems to me that the workers should be busting their buns to get new skills with more value in the new economy instead grousing about the loss of the obsolete jobs they lost.
In the news, a factory worker who for 25 years has put in his hours and spent his off-time watching television rather than bettering himself cries angrily at the government to replace his lost job. I ask this: how many books has he read in the last year about improving his earning capacity by learning new skills?
I am not being political here. As I see it, this is a very practical matter. If your skills are no longer valued where you are, you have two basic options to improve your standard of living:
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Written By Loren Woirhaye, July 22nd, 2010
There are a bunch of lists out there of the best books on writing copy. I’ve read a whole bunch of books on copywriting, many several times. My opinion is that different books may help you at different stages of skill development.
For example – “Breakthrough Advertising” will probably be over your head if you are just starting out but if you’ve got the basics under your belt and you are really serious about understanding how persuasion in advertising works, you must read it. It is a watershed work.
I recommend starting with the easy stuff. Then you won’t be stuck slogging through advanced books you aren’t ready for yet.
THE CORE TRIO
The trio are the basic books just about anybody can read and comprehend at the beginning of your copywriting journey – and they are worth re-reading if you are more experienced since they deal with the fundamentals of writing copy.
1. “Scientific Advertising” and “My Life in Advertising” by Claude C. Hopkins. The first you should read several times. It’s short but very potent. Everybody who writes advertising should internalize Claude Hopkins’s stuff.
2. “How To Write A Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab. Subtitled “A Short Course in Copywriting” it is just that. It walks you through Schwab’s 5-step sequence of what every ad needs to accomplish in the first half, and in the second half are observations about direct mail, ad layout and so forth. If you advertise online only you’ll find the first half valuable, since the second half of the book pertains largely to the problems of print advertising.
3. “Tested Advertising Methods” by John C. Caples. I have the fifth edition, but some folks say the 4th is superior. All I can say is the book is packed with good information and insight, but I find reading it front to back a little dry. The book has examples from catalogs and brands we are familiar with today. Allegedly the 4th and earlier editions are more fun to read, but less contemporary.
Do get these books as soon as possible, and read them. If you just read internet ebooks you are missing-out on the proven fundamentals of advertising. Between the 3 of them, the authors of the above books had over 120 years experience when they wrote their books. That’s a lot of wisdom.
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Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 20th, 2010
Good News… that sounds like bad news…
(this post was updated July 25, 2010)
If you haven’t started your internet business yet, you may be too late… if you’re an average person.
Average people would like to be rich and successful – but they won’t take the kind of rigorous action getting what they want requires. 95% of people are pretty average in terms of how ambitious they are, which means they don’t have the fire in the belly entrepreneurial success requires. Most of the people you know are average in this way – and thus are poor role models for the budding entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurs and business owners pay themselves, on average, about 500% what they would make with their same skills as employees. Thus a $100,000 a year skill becomes a $500,000 a year skill. Most people surveyed would like to own their own businesses, yet most lack the aggressiveness to do so and remain employees for life.
Factoid
The word “employee” incidentally, has the same Scottish root as the words “ploy” and “exploit”. That should tell you something.
But If YOU Are Tired Of Working For Average Rewards And Want To Boost Your Income By 500% Here’s Some Advice To Help You Get There…
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Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 18th, 2010
In the next few minutes you’ll discover:
- 3 easy ways to start attracting the right kind of visitors to your blog
- How to start growing your email list immediately
- The secret ingredient (that skyrockets sales) you must deliver in all your content
First some bad news: in today’s web marketplace just having a blog won’t get you any real traffic at all. In fact, the market is savagely competitive and crowded, so if you aren’t super-focused you probably won’t get far in marketing your site.
The good news: people are super busy these days and what they need and want when they look for information online is clarity. When you create focused information that is easy for people to understand and explore, you win.
Some of the best, most friendly traffic is free. Friendly traffic is the kind of visitors who
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Approved comments result in "Do-Follow" link-backs to your website - which helps you get traffic from Google. Making the links here do-follow is my way of thanking you for participating. (most blogs are" no-follow") Please read The Policies Page if you are unsure of how to appropriately comment on this blog. Thank you.
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