Written By Loren Woirhaye, September 27th, 2010
Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes
(part 5 of 5)
Learning direct response marketing gets you out of person-to-person selling. The only reason to do it is because it lends itself to automation and leverage because you can reach a lot of people with one effort. The internet is the most perfect medium for direct response marketing ever because people can pay on the spot with a few clicks. The internet makes buying deliriously easy for consumers.
The problem is the internet has matured a bit and now the selling environment online has become competitive. There’s no easy or straightforward path to internet riches these days (sorry to burst your bubble), but if you educate yourself about proven direct marketing principles.
Just because the internet is the perfect medium for direct marketing doesn’t mean it’s the best. That’s because the barrier to entry with internet marketing is low so there’s a lot of competition. With direct mail, your costs will be higher but the competition tends to be sparser.
Most of the best copywriter/marketers are also intense students of human nature and salesmanship. We read widely because you really cannot learn to be a great direct marketer at school – you have to teach yourself.
If 
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
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 6th, 2010
Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m not promoting this product, because I bought it and I did not find it useful to me. That doesn’t mean you won’t like it or shouldn’t buy it. What you get out of any program of this nature has a lot to do with your commitment to taking action and your own experience level. I would classify myself as a “seasoned” online marketer with mastery of many fundamental skills. A less experienced marketer than me might find this product meets their needs very well.
The salesletter and positioning of the product seem to be working awfully hard to convince us that these “scripts” product automated traffic. They don’t. They simplify some minor marketing tasks like adding meta tags to blogger blogs and searching Yahoo answers for keywords.
You might be dazzled by the spit and polish of how this program is promoted. Once you buy the upsell offer alone are dazzling in their quantity and pushiness. You’ll get many offers in your email for other products as well.
I tested the banner rotator on this blog (http://malibumentor.com)… and all I ever saw it display was a banner for the Automated Traffic
Written By Loren Woirhaye, July 21st, 2009
Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes
re: the myth of internet marketing
Bear with me, there’s a little back-story here, and you can skip it if you like – but I recommend you don’t because there is some valuable insight buried in it.
Ok… I am unabashed about calling myself an internet marketer and entrepreneur. I started selling stuff on eBay in 1999. In those days there was no PayPal. I didn’t have a digital camera so I shot my pictures on 35mm film and scanned them to upload to eBay. Digital cameras weren’t even close to film-quality at the time and they were silly-expensive to boot… big-boy toys really.
Even before 1999 I had been involved with the old BBS communities as a teenager. My brother and I ran a BBS on an Apple 2 computer using a phone line we put in. People who used the BBS were very supportive and sent donations, which helped cover costs (we were kids, remember, so we didn’t have much earning power ourselves).
So you could say I’ve grown-up with the internet. At 37 I remember having a rotary phone in the house…
The post author,
Written By Loren Woirhaye, May 31st, 2009
Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes
Despite having only recently hung-out my own shingle as a writer-for-hire, I’ve been writing copy for my own business ventures, and learning a thing or two, since at least 1999. Even though my businesses until 2005 or were mostly local concerns (aside from selling old tools on Ebay), I still used copy in ads and promotional materials.
I also learned some hard lessons about how many balls you need to juggle to make it in the hard goods business. Finally I threw in the towel and went into marketing and selling stuff only instead of what I had done before, which was design, customize, manufacture, maintain machinery, pick-up all manner of heavy and awkward materials, advertise, kiss clients’ butts, install stuff, work long hours for low pay, market, write copy, try to sell, network, and generally run myself ragged trying to do it all by myself.
Did someone call me a fool?
Actually I learned a lot. I learned that owning a small business is a lot more complicated than doing the same thing just for pleasure, especially if your business involves working with clients AND physical labor.
Call me stupid. Somehow I thought
