A new copywriting board that has emerged with the closing of Fortin’s copywriter’s board.  Started by Bruce Wedding, you’ll find a lot of very good direct response copywriters and IMers. Good marketing and selling information. If you want a sales letter written or want to be a sales letter writer, this is the spot.

http://copywritingboard.com/index.php

The forum below has more article and content writing references than actual copywriters but it’s a good resource for those in the business of writing on the internet.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=86
Michel Fortin closed this popular copywriter board. I can understand as forums can be a pain. People are petty and staying a step ahead of the spammers is exhausting. But I wish the posts were archived even if they were locked for further comment because there was so much good information on that board.

http://www.copywritersboard.com/

If you know of some good writing and marketing message boards, post the links. The warrior forum is known for it but I’ve found it hard to login that board and am tired of getting a new password on every visit.

After looking at stats for years, I’ve come to the conclusion that the dashes or hyphens are a good thing.

When to hyphen, when not to hyphen

If you are choosing a url that people will have to type in and you have more than one hyphen, you’re going to end up sending people to the competition’s website.  What I’m saying is that if you have a brick and mortar store and you expect customers to go from your ad to your website, brick-and-mortar-store.com is going to pose a cerebral challenge.

So in short, if your name is over 3 words, dashing is not a good idea if you are expecting people to type it in.  But it will do pretty well in the search engines. On the other hand, if you are just our-store.com with one hypen, they might just do that from a business card if you make the - large and obvious enough.

If you are mostly internet, and your traffic comes from the internet, then hyphens work better than underscores. People can click on a link instead of typing it in so you eliminate their human error.  However, if you used underscores in the past on html pages (i.e. yourstore.com/my_page.html) and you’re thinking of going back to change them, you risk losing rank you have established. It probably doesn’t hurt you if the page is established and been up a while. But you’ll want to go with dashes for new pages. But again, if your site is already indexed, this isn’t going to be a huge barrier. This is mostly advice for new sites and new pages to help push you up faster.

You could duplicate one page with underscores and make one with dashes just to experiment. Why not?

But the dashless .com is taken

Let’s face it, those urls get bought up fast and dashes must sometimes be used because you already have a company and an LLC and it’s the only thing available. You can get a doman registrar to send you an email if the dashless version of the domain name becomes available even if you’ve already bought the one with dashes. That way you can buy the dashless and redirect it to the one you purchased and have your site on. But no one wants to wait umpteen years to get a website up and running. So you go for the dashed to get it done.

Consider your marketing plan and objectives

If, for example, you are going to do XM radio, then you need to keep in mind the number of digits that will show on the display. You don’t want to have it be cut off so people go to brick-and-mortar-sto and be confused. (I will have to look on my xm to see how many digits can be displayed.) You want one short enough so that the whole url shows.

So you can do mystore.com/this-great-page.html. You don’t advertise this-great-page.html. If you run an ad and the information you mention in your ad is on that page, you drive them to your landing page and you make sure there is a visual device or element from your ad so they find it fast, click on it and get to that page.

These are just a few hyphen marketing considerations to think about when you are choosing a name or naming pages.  Do not expect to be catapulted to the top of Google for using dashes. It can merely give you a bit of a boost instead of underscores. It’s your content and links, <h1> and title tags that will give you the biggest boost.

 The following is a guest post by  Dan Massicotte, aka Mr. Positive.

Most e-books measure up to the sales letters that are written to sell them. 33 Days to Online Profits however takes it a step further. I followed the day-by-day guidelines expecting to make hundreds of dollars with my product.

Unfortunately I did not follow through with my e-book. Still, Yanik Silver’s book opened many doors regarding internet business and marketing that I never would have known about otherwise.

33 Days is at least 95% about marketing, which is a key component to internet business.

No traffic = No customers = No sales = No business

Ezines

Yanik’s approach to article marketing is very simple. Write one good quality article that informs the reader. Submit it to a few online ezine databases like ezinearticles, goarticles, articlebase and article dashboard and give them some time.
However upon taking his advice I discovered that some people write hundreds of articles to establish credibility online and create long-term traffic to their website. Robert Plank, a marketing PHP guru led me to his website from an article he wrote on ezinearticles.com about how to sell a written report. I’m probably one of thousands.

Auto Responders

Probably the most popular auto responder is Aweber. Aweber costs a mere $14/month allowing you to capture some of the readers who come to your site. If your sales letter has a conversion rate of 4.5%, then 95.5% of your customers could be leaving your site without any incentive to come back.

To increase your conversion rate, Yanik encourages you to install this e-mail capturing system so you can continue building a relationship with a prospect until they are ready to buy from you.

Ever hear someone say “I made $45,000 in three days!!”? This is usually because they had an e-mail address list of 2000 contacts they built a relationship with over time. The best time to set one of these auto-responders up is now.

(note: by blog owner. Other email reviews here at the bottom of the page.)

Value

The value you add to your product is what will make your customers decide whether they will ask for a refund or not. While this is a topic that is covered lightly, in proportio to everything else in ‘33 days’, it is vital for the long run. I did not make any profit with my ‘muse’ a few months ago. But I set the ground work for the next 100 projects I will be doing.

Yanik’s “34 Rules for Maverick Entrepreneurs” puts as his second point:
“Strive to create 10x – 100x in value for any price you charge. Your rewards are always proportionate to the value you provide.”

I’ve heard Tony Robbins say this many times before as well: The only way to get a lot of meaning out of life is to add more value to other peoples’ lives than everyone else is adding.

Yanik Silver’s blog can be found here.

Guest Author Bio: Dan Massicotte is perhaps the most positive oriented individual you will ever meet. You can learn more about him on his website: http://danmassicottespositiveliving.com/ Join his newsletter to be informed of new articles and major website developments.

A lot of people will make you think it is some mysterious process. And while it’s not a top secret process guarded by guys named Lug Nut and Knuckles, it is not all that easy to pull together. However knowing what it means will help you move toward that goal.

Basically, branding is creating your blog, website, stationary, business card, direct mail, ads, web mails, brochures so they all work together to send the same marketing message. All of those elements also need to have a consistent look; meaning the same logo, design and colors.

Branding makes your product/service recognizable. People are comfortable with what they know and that’s what branding does for you. If people are more comfortable with something, they are more likely to buy/pay for it. They are less likely to be comfortable with the unknown and they are harder to bring to the point of sale.

It’s a very simplified  explanation, but there it is in a nutshell.

I know you are thinking, “Easy for you to say”.  Well, I say, “Quit making excuses”.

Advertising icon David Ogilvy did some research on the success of companies in post-recession eras. No surprise to me but maybe to you, just about all the companies that continued to market through a recession emerged stronger with improved revenue and market share. Those that cut back went belly up or at least had a ton of ground to make up.

The two ways to create money is to utilize marketing and innovation. So use your leverage to take advantage of better rates. Someone in ad sales today called and told me he had an 8/10 ad for the FRONT page in COLOR for only $375.  An effective ad in that kind of position is likely to pay for itself. So ask. Negotiate. Or go somewhere that will. You also need to get creative.

I made business cards with a movie star’s picture (she won’t ever know it was handed to 50 people), I’ve made pens with headlines taped on them and told everyone they were ‘personalized pens’. And today some guy had a cookie shaped like a phone with a business card attached which sold his telecommunications business. This is the time to get creative folks. Push yourself. Look around. You are not going down in the sinking ship without a fight. You may have to be out there more, advertise smarter, try strategies you’ve never tried before. But the cool part is that you’ll do things you remember later that worked.

And keep this in mind. This from Gordon at the copywriter’s board. Said so succinctly and it is paraphrased.

For your ad, online sales letter or eBay listing, you need to do EVERYTHING in  your power to interest your target market.

Not just the headline and copy, but all the way through to the point of sale.

What are people interested in?

1. Themselves
2. How your product/service will benefit them
3. The importance of those benefits
4. Not being ripped off

Then you need to make sure you have worked up to the point of purchase and stated a reason why they should buy NOW. Maybe you make it irresistible by adding things or offering a deal with an expiration. But you don’t do all that work and then not push them over the edge. Then there is the fine line between being pushy and knowing when to stop and let it marinate so they come back to you. The boomerang sale. That can work, too.

The key to a better economy is for you to be proactive instead of desperate or depressed. Funnel that wasted energy on depression and desperation into something productive. Inspiration. Innovation. Persistence. Creativity.  Now get to it and quit moping or hyperventilating.

TGIM? I woke up and read the newspaper which was not loaded with dismal, mood-dragging economic woes but rather a front page story on the Folk Festival. That’s because Monday follows a weekend. And thankfully, no Wall Street trading happens on Saturday or Sunday. I felt lighter and had more spring in my step than on Mondays in the recent past.

Monday’s internet news feeds are more about 5 wardrobe must-haves, football victories and upsets and what movie stars wore to what start-studded event. It was the vacuous, empty headed drivel that I have been craving. Who knew this roller coaster economy could turn me against Fridays and into a Monday lover? Thank God it’s Monday.

How bold? Well, not impulsive bold. John McCain’s vice presidential running mate nomination was bold. And impulsive. While it may turn out to be a great move,  impulsive bold moves have a 50/50 chance and usually have a sink or swim result.

A planned bold branding campaign is something that you can own.

Take the naked plumber in Florida. He’s booked weeks in advance. And he does plumbing in the nude. He simply likes working nude. It’s also something that makes him stand out and get noticed. Obviously. Now, you might not want to be THIS bold.

It’s typically a position that no one can steal simply because it’s too obvious to do so. Perhaps you’ve been swimming against the current with your marketing position. So don’t. Admit a weakness, turn it into a positive.

What do I mean?

Let’s say you are a notoriously sloppy decorative painter but you try to keep this nugget of information under wraps. For years in going through the creative process, you just get really messy, spill paint on you, your ladder and everything.

The point is, nothing is EVER uncovered. You have a meticulous assistant who tapes every inch of the room so not a drop of paint seeps through to carpeting. Other structures are moved out of your precious way in preparation for one of your creative frenzies.

Why not take this and make it your selling persona? By telling everyone about this sloppiness in a fit of creativity, you might just become more desirable as a painter. Don’t people want the person creating wall art to be a little quirky, a little off center, messy and wildly creative? So that’s what you sell. You are so into the work, you can’t be bothered with worrying about what others consider typical work habits. If they want super neat, suggest that your customers call some standard-issue stenciler instead of a wall mural creator like yourself. Do you see what I’m getting at?

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Branding. You hear the word all the time. But you may not know what it means.

I look at some websites and they are a total departure from  the communications and marketing materials the same business produces offline. So the key to branding your blog or website is to make sure they also match the look and strategic message of your printed materials and broadcast messages if you have them.

Pay per click advertising should also carry your message as it will likely attract the people you’ve designed your website to appeal to. For instance, if you are selling high end dog food you would not run a ppc ad that says, ’super cheap dog food’. You might get traffic but you would not be bringing in your target market and conversions would be miserable. You would have the Walmart types totally perplexed at your outrageously-priced frou frou dog food when what they came to the site looking for is cheap dog food. (We are going to ignore the fact that someone looking for cheap dog food is not likely to shop for it on the internet.)

So basically branding is consistency of design, message and tone of the copy that should be a motif throughout all communications from your stationary and business cards to your website,  email campaigns, ppc and print ads as well as any broadcast messages, bags and POP (point of purchase signage).

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