This is best written blog I have ever read. I just bought your 3rd edition of The Copywriter’s Handbook. I skimming for the overview before reading and saw your website and pulled it up. Everyone’s comments are though provoking. I agree with Elizabeth’s opinon about consumers looking for other’s opinion on a particular product before buying or continuing to do more research. Thank you. I am looking forward to reading your book.

Best Wishes,

Ken Jansen

Sorry, Bob … I didn’t know you’d responded. I *wish* you would install that WordPress plugin that would let a gurl subscribe to a post so she knows when things have been added to it!

Anyway, I have a darling little gem to share with you on the subject of “content.”

It’s an essay by Paul McHenry Roberts …

“How to Say Nothing in 500 Words”

It’s wonderful!

Enjoy!

Warmest Regards …

Elizabeth

And incidentally, crappy elance content works about as well as crappy elance copywriting does. Which isn’t to say it can never work. If you have a crummy sales letter for a fantastic product and an incredible offer, it can work pretty well, especially if there’s no competition.

Similarly, crummy content can work for a topic users are dying to know about, and for which there’s no source of good content. But that is scenario that never lasts very long.

I do think content is easier to write than sales copy, but weak writing is weak writing.

I don’t know if you work for yourself or for a company, but if you do work for a company and the president told all employees that you all would no longer receive paychecks because the company had given everything away for free, would you still consider that a cool way of doing business?

I used to work for a small manufacturing company. One day, a customer who owned a company that made biscotti came in to pay for work we had done for him.

He said, “I am broke. Can we do a trade? I’ll give you a year’s supply of biscotti.”

My boss (the owner) said, “I can’t pay my employees with biscotti.”

I’ve never forgotten that.

eeek!

Maybe I misspoke myself?

Many of the marketing techniques and approaches that used to work only just “yesterday” don’t seem to be working very well today, right?

It’s getting harder and harder to get people’s attention, right?

Even Mike reports that his friend just canceled his cable TV, right?

So I find myself wondering … okay, well, so what *is* working? Who *is* getting attention? What are they doing? How are they doing it?

Or, to put it another way, where do *I* go to get what *I* want? As a Regular Person?

Just so you know, I *never* go to YouTube! Not of my own volition, anyway. I’ve got too much to do! But if a trusted friend or colleague sends me an email or mentions it in a post, I’ll generally go check it out.

Now, that’s the viral thing, right?

My friend tells me about it, I tell you about it, you tell your friend about it, and so on.

So okay:

For us adults “who have to work for a living” and “businesses that need to make money,” here’s the deal:

Nobody cares.

And that’s per Seth Godin. Nobody cares that you have to work for a living, or that you need to make money.

Nobody is interested in the information you’re “hoarding” (aka charging money for) because anybody can go out on the internet and get it — or something very like it — for nothing because a lot of smart marketers have figured out that, if they give away all their information for free, then people will be more inclined to trust them and sign up for their membership sites where they can, in effect, apprentice themselves to a master tradesman and thus learn the trade and so on and so forth.

Enter Stephen Covey and “The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything”.

“Covey convincingly validates our experience at Dell — that trust has a bottom-line impact on results and that when trust goes up, speed goes up while costs come down. This principle applies not only in our professional relationships with customers, business partners, and team members but also in our personal relationships, which makes this insightful book all the more valuable.” — Kevin Rollins, President and CEO, Dell Inc.

And broken trust …

Marketers I haven’t heard from in months started sending me emails when John Reese released his Traffic Secrets 2.0.

They don’t have anything of any interest to say — not even $25 worth — they just want me to buy that product, so they send me a message that’s nothing more than a thinly-veiled sales pitch.

One marketer even sent a second message with a subject line that read “I just don’t get it …” and then proceeded to talk about how he sent me a message about TS2 and I didn’t buy and he doesn’t understand how come!

I have an email folder down at the bottom of my inbox entitled “Possibly Maybe Look At Someday” and those who never send me anything but pitches get their mail routed down to that nethermost hole.

And now, with the release of TS2, I have a whole bunch more marketers to route down there because if I didn’t I wouldn’t be able to see my regular correspondence !!!

I’m considering a wholesale unsubscribe. I am so tired of it all …

Bob … Diana … just so you know, I’m on your side !!!

I’m 100% persuaded as to the value of excellent content.

Only … well, if nobody sees it, then what?

I mean, Mike’s friend isn’t seeing any of the marketing messages on cable now, right?

And I don’t see 99% of the marketing messages directed to my email, right?

At least a few people we know are reading blogs like this one, right?

And millions more — MILLIONS more — are watching videos on YouTube and communicating with each other vociferously behind closed doors on social networking sites, right?

And here’s the thing:

They spend money — A LOT of money — on the stuff they want when they want it.

Word travels at the speed of light along those grapevines about the cool stuff.

As for us …

Well, we’re steeped in direct-response-marketing theory and the universe online is trending toward *indirect* marketing.

The shortest distance between two marketing points is no longer a straight line.

It’s a curve.

And we’ve got to retool or die.

Warmest Regards …

Elizabeth

P.S. Just my 2¢.

Great post. Interestingly enough, I wrote about this topic today on my blog.

Why The World is Tuning Out (and why you need to change)

http://www.writingwhitepapers.com/blog/2008/07/15/why-the-world-is-tuning-out-and-why-you-need-to-change/

I welcome your comments.

Mike

The ability to write persuasive ad copy using just 130 characters is a big challenge. Especially if you’re up against significant competition.

Your words must not only persuade; they must stand out from a page full of words all shouting for your customer’s attention. And after your words have convinced the searcher to click through to your site, it’s persuasive words (augmented by graphics) that convince the visitor to become a customer.

No $25 article is going to accomplish that.