If you’ve ever wanted to hear my dulcet tones, your lucky day has arrived. I sat down with Crucible reader and natural health copywriter Paul Buzan (who has the envied position of being one of Parris Lampropoulos’ copy cubs) to share my sage advice on how aspiring copywriters can avoid some of my near career ending […]
Blogger in chief at The Copywriter's Crucible. A blog focused on helping other copywriters to enhance their skillset and be of more value to clients, and thus push up their pay grade. Also dabbles in internet marketing, cycling and jaunts abroad, in no particular order.
Use Toll Free Numbers to Build a ‘Red Hot’ List of Prospects at Low Cost
Click costs are outta control. On Facebook they’ve rocketed from a reasonable $0.27 at the end of 2016 to a budget busting $1.72 today. And with 2 million advertisers (and rising) all fighting over that sweet Facebook traffic, the costs are only going one way amigo. And that is UP. Google stopped being profitable (in […]
7 Tactics Drayton Bird Told Me that Most Marketers Don’t Know About
It’s unbelievable. But the sad reality is that a lot of marketers don’t study. They create campaigns based on intuition, creativity and hope, instead of studying classic ads from the last fifty years to see how selling in print is really done. Ask a crowd of ad agency folks if they’ve read Caples, Hopkins and […]
Will I See You at Drayton Bird’s Last Hurrah?
“Drayton Bird knows more about Direct Marketing than anyone in the world … His talks are highly instructive and hilariously funny” – David Ogilvy Drayton Bird is an original Mad Man. In a career spanning nearly six decades, Drayton Bird has sold everything, from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig, for brands including American Express, Procter & […]
Why I Don’t Charge Per Hour
If you’re charging per hour, you’re undercharging. Why? Because in this madcap world of freelancing there are all manner of tasks beyond sitting down and writing copy. Try this for a week: Track everything you do on a spreadsheet. It doesn’t have to be complicated. Just write down what you do in hourly segments. I […]
Schwarzenegger on Marketing
Recently I’ve been reading the autobiography of the prior Governator Arnold Schwarzenegger. And it truly is a rags to riches story. His work ethic, ambition and promotional nous led to him amassing millions before he was even a movie star. His appointment to Governor of California was no fluke (whatever your opinions on his performance […]
What Separates Amateurs from the Pros
Research. That’s what makes the grizzled veterans standout and is the key to higher conversions. Within a few years (or months, in some cases) of hand copying sales letters and working from templates, you should be writing out decent sales letters that keep most clients happy. But to reach the creme de la creme of […]
Dealing with Failure
We all have to face this at some point in our working lives. We work our fingers to the bone to get a campaign launched, only to see it fizzle for a while before dying completely. The clickthrough rate is abysmal. We barely get a 1% conversion rate on the sales page and we start […]
3 Secrets to Writing ‘Winning’ Copywriting Proposals that Turn $100 Mini Projects into $10,000 Monster Gigs
You get an email from a potential client asking for a web page. You’re smart. You don’t instantly email back with a price and a delivery date. That would be stupid. Instead, you do some digging. You ask: …what action do you want visitors to take? …what’s the traffic source? …what’s your current conversion rate? […]
2 Easy Ways to Make Leads More Profitable (without Spending an Extra Cent on Traffic)
Advertising is getting darned expensive. If the rumours are true, heavyweights like Clickfunnels and Digital Marketer now spend $10 just on getting a LEAD. That’s right, a LEAD, not a sale. With millions of marketers ploughing their ad budget into Facebook and Instagram, click costs are getting out of control. This is why it is […]