Raise your hand if you know who Gary Vaynerchuk is.
For those of you with non-elevated arms, Gary Vaynerchuk is the host of Wine Library TV, a daily online video show on wine that serves a promotional tool for the local and ecommerce wine business he’s involved in. Gary’s web fame has landed him in The [...]

Source:The Gary Vaynerchuk Guide to Enthusiastic Copy

How do you take basic, boring facts and turn them into compelling content that attracts and holds attention? Content so compelling that it also sparks a social media conversation?
Ira Glass is the host of NPR’s This American Life, and in this video he lays out how to produce compelling video, audio, and text content. Notice [...]

Source:The Ira Glass Guide to Link Bait

Testimonials add power to your copy. How? Let me answer that question by telling you a little story about a rabble of bladder-challenged teenagers whizzing in the bushes along an Interstate near my home.
Trust me. There’s a connection.
You see, some time ago, my wife and I were on our way to a party when traffic [...]

Source:Testimonials and Teenagers Whizzing in the Bushes: The Power of Social Proof

Are you a victim of narcissistic marketing?
That’s when a marketing and copywriting strategy is based on how the marketer prefers to be marketed to, rather than exploring what works with the target audience. This happens all the time with entrepreneurs and small-business owners who create their own promotions, but it’s even worse when professional marketers [...]

Source:Warning: Narcissistic Marketing Can Be Dangerous to Your Business Health

Last week’s post talked about why emotional benefits are critical to persuasive copy. But it’s one thing to talk about general concepts like “connection” or “fear,” and another to actually get these ideas into your writing.
In honor of Friday the 13th, I thought I’d give you 13 actual examples of emotional benefits you can use [...]

Source:13 Emotion-Based Headlines That Work

I just finished reading this free report from the Clayton Makepeace camp, and it’s really solid. In fact, I’m a little miffed I didn’t write it.
Of course, Clayton has over 20 years of experience on me, and it shows in the report. Clayton and his right-hand man Tony Flores understand the fundamentals of copywriting better [...]

Source:Free Report: The Great Copywriting Conspiracy

Want to become an unbelievable headline writer?
Well, taken literally, that’s not a good thing.
If your headline isn’t believable, it’s not credible. In which case, your response rate goes down, not up, no matter how fantastic a promise your headline makes.
See, making outlandish claims with your headline in order to attract attention is a sucker’s game. [...]

Source:Can You Write an (Almost) Unbelievable Headline?

I read a lot of books, but I rarely do book reviews. I get a lot more enjoyment out of reading books across a broad spectrum of topics and mashing them up in my head to develop new ideas than I do talking about individual titles.
But that’s not very nice of me, now is it?
Many [...]

Source:Two Great Books for Internet Entrepreneurs

There’s an action that almost every blogger wants his or her users to take. Most of these bloggers use a single word to convince readers to take this action. They use this word because other bloggers use it.
Do you know what that word is?
Subscribe.
A week and a half ago I had a sudden realization. [...]

Source:How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254%

We humans like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. Intellectual curiosity took us to the moon and back, beat smallpox and polio, and invented the Internet.
But when you come down to it, emotion always wins. The most powerful man in the world can be humbled by a buxom girl in a blue dress. We [...]

Source:Why Emotional Benefits Are the Key to Reader Response