I’m an idiot. I’ve had my suspicions for a long time. But now I know for sure. You’re probably an idiot too. Sorry. It’s just the way it goes with us copywriters. Yes, I’m suggesting most of us copywriters are idiots. “Hold on, Glenn. Not so fast. Don’t you know I’ve got a top level IQ and I always win the local pub’s quiz night?” Yep. Yep. I know all that, but if you’re a…
Working in the world of direct response is great. Why? Because it’s cold, hard and emotionless. Wait. That doesn’t sound good. But it is. Trust me. Of course, we copywriters spend the majority of our time desperately trying to inject emotion into our writing and into our readers… But in the true light of day, the market is truly cold and emotionless. It doesn’t care about your feelings. It doesn’t care about the work you’ve…
The local shop in my village has finally figured out the perfect marriage of impulse purchase and value. There I am… Waiting for the assistant to pack my stuff and ring it through the register… And I notice them… Four Kit Kats for £1. I know I shouldn’t. But four… FOUR… for just £1. That’s damn good value. Especially when you look across the counter and realise one Kit Kat alone costs nearly 70p these…
You can’t prove that your exciting new product works before you’ve proved that it’s exciting in the first place. Think about that. Because it’s a flaw with long direct response copy that I see over and over. Too soon a copywriter will start trying to prove a product works before they’ve proved to the reader that they should be excited about the product at all. It’s a bad habit I see – particularly in new…
Imagine you’re living a roguish life as a bank robber in the Wild West… You drift from town to town ‘sticking-up’ the local bank… You’re damn good at it too. Just yesterday you moseyed on in, stuck your gun in the bank teller’s face and delivered your usual “this is a stick-up” line. The teller knew the score straight away and handed over the bag of swag. You moseyed on out. But you have a…
I’m a huge fan of the Glove and Boots blog. There are very few sites on the web that I actively visit to check for updates, but Glove and Boots is one of them. If you’ve been reading for a while, you’ll remember I first featured them in my 15 other things to do if you don’t get Buzzfeed article. Reason I’m writing about them today is that in their latest video, they very wisely…
One of my mentors, the American entrepreneur and writer Mark Ford, once taught me a simple way to improve problematic headlines using ‘the Four Us’. I’ve written about the idea many times before, but today I thought I’d put it to the test LIVE. Or rather, as I write this article. Why not, eh? Indeed, I’m going to pluck three promotions at random from the Clickbank marketplace and see if we can’t use this old school…
“Live. Die. Repeat.” That’s the tagline of Tom Cruise’s new movie, Edge of Tomorrow. Have you seen it? Basically Tom Cruise gets the blood of an alien on him, which means that whenever he’s killed he returns to the day he got the alien blood on him. He meets Emily Blunt and then he has to save the world. A regular day at the office for Cruise. To be fair though, it’s actually OK. In…
Where did the 30-day trial period come from? Seriously – if you know, please comment below and tell me. If you’ve written copy for online products or services, no doubt you know the 30-day trial well. Or maybe, if you’ve written for a product or service that’s being sold on Clickbank or some other joint venture website, you’ve probably come across its older brother: the 60-day trial. To be honest, I’m fed up of both.…
At last count, it was estimated around 300 billion emails are sent on a daily basis. 300. Billion. A day. That’s a damn lot of emails. So, with so much other email copy competing with yours, it hardly seems worth spending much time on it, right? Wrong. Even a small improvement in your email copy can make a huge difference to the bottom line. But as copywriters, we forget this sometimes. We think of email…
