Written By Loren Woirhaye, October 28th, 2009
Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes
Hi,
It’s my birthday today.
I’ve been a bit inactive for a while in terms of emailing all my friends and subscribers. That doesn’t mean I’m not doing stuff – I’ve just been laying low, and in fact, laying plans for the coming months and years.
Together, I believe, we can achieve great things. Great things in terms of building authentic businesses using the power of the internet media, and great things in terms of leading the way towards making the world a better place in the future.
I’m turning 38 today – and a lot of things that I’ve been knocking about in my head for the last couple of years are starting to gel. I’m working on a lot of projects – and one thing that really interests me is the idea of a sort of video show about how you can succeed in the “reality marketplace” of today and tomorrow.
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 
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, June 13th, 2009
Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes
I have what you might call a flair for writing copy – I don’t think I’m the world’s greatest by any measure but some of it comes more easily to me than it might come to you.
The ability to write and communicate well is a fine thing, however it is trumped by the king of all marketing skills: Conversion.
Copywriting of course plays a big roll in conversion but it is far from the whole enchilada – there’s the skill of getting traffic in a cost-effective way, there’s knowing how to structure a back-end offer, or two, or three.
Then there is coming up with the angle that gets people to act immediately. Sometimes it’s making the price so low compared to the value on offer that the decision is a “no-brainer”, but often it’s a matter of creating scarcity of some kind: threatening to run-out of the item or close the doors on the offer when all seats are filled.
I once bought a ticket to 1000-seat seminar… and then when I got there I saw were 2500 seats in the house. I felt mildly gyped but still got a lot of value – and
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 4th, 2009
Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes
There is a lot of ballyhoo about the importance of headlines in copywriting. If you are just getting started it is easy to take this stuff out of context.
The importance of the headline IS paramount in several different formats of copy – in situations where the headline MUST grab the readers attention an effective headline is the difference between success and failure for the ad.
One of my pet peeves is super-long headlines that try to cram a detailed description of what the product is or does into the headline itself. This is usually not a good thing, but of course in the hands of a skilled copywriter a long headline can work well indeed.
Most writers doing online marketing these days cranking-out verbose headlines are not particularly skilled however – their headlines are like the desperate guy trying to get a date from every girl who walks by; rattling off a meandering list of benefits hoping she’ll hear one she likes and stop and talk to the guy.
Does that sound like a good way to get a date?
No. It doesn’t
It’s fairly easy to find examples of this kind of headline writing in copy ebook authors and
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 2nd, 2009
Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes
I don’t know about you, but in school I got by pretty well churning out reports and written tests using big words and self-important academic grammar.
For writing about ideas those stuff can be appropriate – and in the University environment readers are accustomed to such puffery. Ideas are abstract, which is why when we write about ideas in school papers the language gets complicated.
For advertising copy, chuck the write-to-impress model and get down with the common words we all use every day. If people don’t understand the word you use, you will lose them.
Write short sentences. Break up long sentences into shorter ones. Sometime this is easy. Sometimes it is not, but simplicity in communication is worth reaching for.
Try to write in concrete terms. Not abstract terms. Objects and people are concrete. Rudolph Flesch discovered that comprehension of written text increased when people were the subject matter and when their names were used.
For example: “John drove to Mary’s house and met Mary’s parents.”
The John and Mary story is boring but you know instantly what it means. Comprehension is easy because the words are common and short.
