Written By Loren Woirhaye, August 2nd, 2010
Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes
It’s hard to believe everybody doesn’t have a PayPal account, but some people don’t, and many with good reasons. Many people starting online businesses may have been buying stuff for years online without having a PayPal account. Since PayPal allows purchasing through it with a credit card but without an account login, many people will just do that when presented with PayPal as the only payment option.
I can relate, because I am account-creation averse myself and for a time had a running dispute with PayPal that prevented me from using my account but did not prevent me from buying stuff with PayPal by paying without an account login.
You can earn commissions when people sign-up for merchant accounts through your referral link. The commission has limits, but it’s probably worth setting it up if you market, as I do, to people who want to start or grow online businesses.
PayPal has a referral program that pays commissions but they make it really hard to find your link.
I had a PayPal account with a referral link a while back, but I closed it and stopped using it and opened another… Continue reading Earn Easy Affiliate Commissions With The Weird Paypal Merchant Bonus Referral Program
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.
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 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: Continue reading Marketing For Freelancers and Entrepreneurs – How To Start Selling Your Skills In The New Economy
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.
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 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.
The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog.
