No, says Paul Pearsall in his book ?The Last Self-Help Book You?ll Ever Need? (Basic Books, 2005).

?Settle for second (or third or sixth) best,” advises Dr. Pearsall. “In any life endeavor, there can be only one number one. Relax and enjoy being one of the thousands who fall short ? misery is the ultimate result when we link our sense of achievement to other people?s failures.?

What do you think? Should we settle for our lot in life? Or never give up trying to improve and do better?

And here’s more of Pearsall’s somewhat negative advice: “Stop trying to live up to your full potential. You probably don’t have much more potential than you’re showing right now, and striving for more will only cause disappointment.”

Is it just me, or does it seem to you that yet another of the new crop of self-styled marketing gurus is announcing yet another “Marketing Boot Camp” just about every other week?

How many of these do you attend per year? Do you think there are too many?

And of the ones you attend, how many are worth the $2,000 to $5,000 tuition fee? Or could you have basically gotten the same info for free reading the promoter’s e-zine or blog?

Also, does it bother you when every speaker ends his talk by handing out an order sheet offering you an expensive bundle of his videos, DVDs, and coaching services — and spends the last 10 minutes of his one-hour talk hard-selling you on his offer? Or do you find that perfectly acceptable?

A Web designer sent me an email the other day criticizing a long-copy promo I sent to my list.

“Some authors have not really grasped onto The Hard Sell Will Not Work on the Intenet,” she scolded me.

But wait a minute. Take a look at the money-making sites on the Internet. They are a broad mix: some soft sell, some hard sell, some short copy, some long copy.

Given the hundreds of hard-sell, long-copy Web and email promos that are making money hand over fist, how can this Web designer or anyone else possibly state as if it were a law of online marketing that “the hard sell won’t work on the Internet”?

What’s your experience in all this? Does hard-sell, long-copy work online? Or does the Web require a totally different approach: soft sell, informative, non-selling?

In a shocking teleseminar today, superstar copywriter Clayton Makepeace told attendees that benefit headlines don’t work any more, for 3 reasons:

1. Yours is the 200th ?benefit? head your prospect has seen today.
2. Your benefit head screams, ?THIS IS ANOTHER AD!?
3. Benefit heads increasingly make customers think, ?Yeah, RIGHT!?

So what works?

One technique Clayton teaches: address the reader’s skepticism in the headline instead of promising a big benefit.

His example: a promotion for a nutritional supplement to improve vision that began with the headline, “Why Billberry and Lutein Don’t Work.”

What do you think? Is today’s customer too smart, sophisticated, and skeptical to respond to traditional benefit-oriented advertising? If so, what are you using instead?

In his latest e-newsletter, copywriter Alan Sharpe says: “In business-to-business direct mail lead generation, letters invariable outpull self-mailers, including postcards.”

Yet many b-to-b marketers I talk to favor postcards. They note that postcards eliminate the need to convince someone to open an envelope’ the sales message is right in plain sight.

What works best for generating leads in YOUR experience: a sales letter in an envelope — or a postcard? And why?

In an earlier post, I quoted top copywriter Richard Armstrong as saying that ?branding is just one of MANY credibility factors that go into an advertisement ? you CAN?T build your whole marketing campaign around it.?

Richard continues: ?The fact is that ?brand loyalty,? which is the Holy Grail of Madison Avenue, is really a mile wide and an inch deep for most customers.

?I have brands that I prefer among just about everything I buy … but virtually ever single one of them is negotiable. Show me that your product is cheaper and/or better than my current brand, and I’ll switch in a heartbeat.?

?I’m a big fan of Allen-Edmonds shoes, for example. For years, I was always telling people about how comfortable and well-made they are.

?A few weeks ago, I was telling this to a friend of mine, and he said, ?You should try Cole-Hahn, they’re better.? I said, ?No way!!? He said, ?Try them.?

?So I tried them. Guess what? I now wear Cole-Hahn shoes. So much for brand loyalty!?

The conclusion: brand loyalty is fleeting. Unless your advertising provides a compelling reason why the consumer should buy your product instead of competing products, you won?t be able to pull consumers away from those competitors. Right?

According to an article in InformationWeek (1/23/06, p. 17), the Justice Department wants Google to turn over records on millions of searches by people who look at porn online. The goal: protect children.

Google does not want to cooperate in that this violates people’s privacy. It also erodes their trust in Google, which could hurt the company’s market share.

I am torn. Being a parent, I put kids first. But the government has no business looking at what I look at on the Internet.

Do you think Google’s records should be kept confidential … or turned over to the Justice Department to shield kids from online porn?

There?s a growing movement among some folks to make all information in the world available to everyone on the planet at no charge.

But if information is free to consumers, that means the salaries of the subject matter experts, writers, and editors whose job it is to produce content must all be paid by advertising, rather than subscription and product sales. One can argue that all content producers would be then influenced by advertisers, who would hold their financial fate in their hands.

Content producers who produce objective, unbiased reporting because they accept no advertising, like traditional subscription newsletter publishers, cannot survive if they must give away everything they produce for free.

Consumers, by the way, don?t buy into this ?all information is free? crap: according to an article in BtoB (1/16/05, p. 10), the information industry will generate revenues of $306 billion in 2006.

That?s an increase of 8% over 2005 sales — an indicator that the growing presence of the Internet is stimulating rather than retarding the sale of paid content.