To me, a Know-It-All is someone who feels compelled to tell you his opinion — except he states it as fact.

Example: I recently sent an e-mail to my list announcing a tele-seminar I was leading.

TB, a reader, quickly e-mailed me back to let me know his displeasure with my choice of a tele-seminar as a way to convey my content: “Put it in print. Nobody wants to sit and listen to blather.”

Hey, TB: if “no one” wants to listen, and everybody wants to read, why do thousands of people attend tele-seminars, Webinars, and live lectures every day of the year?

What TB is missing is that HE might prefer reading, but others may not. He SHOULD have said: “Is there a print version available? I like to read, not listen.”

TB, people learn in 4 different ways:

1. Reading.
2. Listening (audio).
3. Seeing (video).
4. Experiencing (workshops and training).

Most of us learn through multiple modalities, and most of us have one or two we prefer.

JF seems to think so.

He was one of the people on my list who received my e-mail with the subject line: “Do you know these response-boosting secrets?”

The e-mail linked to a page where I was selling an audio learning program titled “Ultimate Direct Response Secrets.”

“When I was starting out, you were one of the people I admired and touted as a great source of information on marketing,” complained JF. “Recently, you’ve become a tireless shill for products purporting to show how to make money on the Internet.”

JF says that in my e-mail, you “offer to reveal the answers … and then direct me to a Web site that offers no answers other than to shill for yet another of your products that will contain the answers.”

He then asks: “What happened to giving some stuff away for free?”

JF is of the school that says all information on the Internet should be free.

He also seems to think that selling information products online is inherently sleazy.

What do YOU think? Am I a scum-bucket like JF says? Or is it perfectly OK for me to e-mail people on my opt-in lists notifying them of my new information products?

P.S. Had JF Googled “Bob Bly,” he would have come to my main Web site with about 50 free articles on all aspects of marketing. He also gets my monthly e-newsletter packed with marketing tips, for which he pays nothing.

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, says: “For companies to survive, they will have to become experts at confusing the public into thinking their generic products are better than their competitors’ generic products.”

In this statement, Adams implies that (1) the goal of advertising is obfuscation rather than education and (2) your product is really no better than your competitors’ products.

Do you think he’s right? Or does your marketing operate on a higher level?

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?