Written By Loren Woirhaye, July 29th, 2010
Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes
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 
Written By Loren Woirhaye, July 22nd, 2010
Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes
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
