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Copywriting Tips for Online Marketing Success From Copyblogger

Is Blogging Keeping You Poor?November 17

They’re laughing at us. Did you know that?

Right now, someone who refers to himself as an “Internet marketer” is sitting in his bedroom, dressed in nothing but his undies, laughing at how hard bloggers work for how little money we make.

We drive ourselves to creative exhaustion by expecting ourselves to pump out a never-ending stream of remarkable content — a stream that, even in the best of cases, only pulls in a couple hundred bucks a month in advertising revenue.

And the guy in his undies? He’s one of the thousands or even tens of thousands of people making six figures online every year. Sure, he worked hard in the beginning, but not anymore. Now he’s connected and focused on growing revenue, not creating an endless supply of free content.

Compare that story to that of most bloggers, and you have to laugh. To say we are overworked and underpaid is an understatement.

The guy in his undies thinks this is especially funny, and justifiably so. He’s only half as smart as you, but he’s making 10 times more money.

So he laughs, not just at you, but at all bloggers. All bloggers, that is, except a tiny handful that have figured out something that makes them wealthy.

One of those bloggers is Brian. Soon, I’ll be one too. We know something that most of

Why Strategic Collaboration is the Secret to 21st Century SuccessNovember 14

There are plenty of ways to succeed online, and plenty of advice for making it happen. But what’s the one thing that every successful entrepreneur can fall back on?

If I had to reduce my recipe for success to just three things, this is what those three would be:

• Content
• Copywriting
• Collaboration

And if I had to give up two of those, I’d keep collaboration.

That may come as a shock, given the subject matter of this blog. But it’s true.

Partnering Strategies For The Win

The thing is, even if I couldn’t write my way out of McDonald’s bag sopping with Big Mac grease, I could still make money. My knowledge of partnering strategies (joint ventures, strategic alliances, project collaboration) guarantees the ability to put together a deal that has all the necessary talent and assets to make a project happen.

And even if I were dead broke, I could do it without spending a dime, all while making everyone involved better off. Including me, of course.

Now, I’m not saying this because I’m some special hot shot. Even though I practiced business law and saw first hand that the real rich in the room were the business people who made the deals (not the lawyers who wrote them up), it still took me 5 years to apply partnering strategies

The Matrix Guide to Content MarketingNovember 13

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.

No, this is not going to be a post about what kind of bloggers Morpheus, Trinity and The Architect would be. That would be cute, but not terribly useful.

But I will use Neo, Agent Smith, Spoon Boy and Persephone as symbols of a different type of matrix. A matrix that allows you to see things for what they really are and become more effective.

I’m talking about the kind of communication matrix you build when you work with a pricy consulting firm. It’s abstract, but when you sit down to fill in the abstractions, you’ll find that this “30,000 foot view” helps keep you on track. It shows you exactly where to focus your attention to get the best payoff from the time and work you put into content marketing.

Before you can build your own matrix, you need to know two things: what you’re good at and what’s important to your customers. The best way to find both sets of answers is to ask your best current customers. Use an online survey, or just watch blog and forum comments coming from the people who are your biggest fans today. (Triple bonus points if those individuals currently buy something from yo

Twitter Writing Contest 2: Win a MacBook Air for a Clever HaikuNovember 12

Back in May, I launched the first ever @copyblogger Twitter Writing Contest. People seemed to have a lot of fun participating and reading the hundreds of submitted entries, so I’ve been looking forward to doing another one.

If you missed the first one, the Los Angeles Times did a nice write-up of the event. In a nutshell, contestants had to tell a story in exactly 140 characters, which is the maximum allowed for any tweet on Twitter.

This time we’re doing something a bit different.

Write a Killer Haiku for the Win

As you might have gleaned from the headline, this time we’re going to write Twitter haiku. There’s already a healthy group of people who tweet clever little haiku poems on Twitter due to the constrained size, so it seems a natural for Twitter Writing Contest 2.

If your memory is a little rusty on what haiku is, here’s a refresher:

Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry. It consists of 17 syllables broken up into three phrases of 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively.

Here are two quick examples found on Twitter Search with the tag #haiku:

Been up way too long / Need abo

3 Tips to Make Writing Less of a StruggleNovember 10

Let’s say you want to blow up a lab.
What do you do?
You take two explosive chemicals and mix them together, right?

But what if you took Na + Cl and mixed them together somehow.
What would you get? You’d get salt.
What’s worse is that the lab would not be “blown up.”

And you’d be a failure.
The more labs you tried to blow with Na + Cl, the more you’d fail.
And the more you fail, the more you’re going to fail.

And this slides us right into why most of us struggle to write.
You see we don’t struggle to write an email.
We don’t write, re-write, re-think and then write something boring.

Our emails are crisp. They have flow. And ebb.
They often have a storyline.
Drama creeps in inevitably.
And the email keeps the attention of the reader.

So if we examine the issue closer, it’s not that you can’t write.
It’s that when put in the spot to write something like an article or a sales letter…
That’s when you freeze.
The words get clumsy. And droopy. And inevitably, the fear of “past failures” kicks in.

Heck, even I find it hard to write under those conditions.

Because writing is mostly a factor of enthusiasm.
Or pathos.
Or fear.
Or anger.

It’s driven by emotion.