In the Harry Potter books there’s something called an invisibility cloak.

Harry uses it to sneak around and spy or just to hide.

In the Harry Potter world, invisibility cloaks are pretty cool.

In the real world, not so much.

The problem is, in the real world, the invisibility cloak is always there when you don’t want it.

And it’s never there when you want it.

Just ask any introvert you know.

In a large group setting, sometimes it’s like we’re wearing an invisibility cloak and no one notices us.

Or else we’re cornered by a talkaholic and wish we had an invisibility cloak.

Or ask any parent.

When you want your kid to pay close attention to what you’re saying, his mind is on the latest free game app he’s just downloaded on his iPod Touch, so it’s like you’re wearing an invsibility cloak.

But when you lie down to take a nap, all of a sudden you’re the most fascinating person on earth to the child. She wakes you up to ask you when dinner will be ready and you wish your blanket was an invisibility cloak.

Every business has their invisibility cloak moments too.

Let’s face it, no matter how successful you are, there are times there aren’t a lot of orders. Your email is deathly quiet and you wish you could shed the invisibility cloak.

Other times you’re working hell for leather around the clock and wish you could put on your invisibility cloak for a while.

The best way to ditch your invisibility cloak and be consistently visible to your customers is through email.

Using email in this way requires a certain touch, however. So contact me today and see if we can work together to build an email campaign that turns your prospects into customers.

A good copywriter isn’t in love with his words, he’s in love with his people, all kinds of people, anywhere and everywhere.

He is intensely interested in people, watching them closely, listening to them talk, living with their bad moments with them and rejoicing in their victories.

He is so interested in people that he forgets his own needs and wants, and after time he knows why they think as they do and he realizes himself in them, and he knows that what they do, he is capable of doing , whether it is good or bad.

The way to write believable copy, or believable words, is to love people.

Know that every living person fears, hates, loves, and rejoices just as you do. Let everything you write to the reader say this:  I understand you. I’ve been in your shoes. I can help you.  Please let me try.

All stories needs a beginning, middle and end. Any form of written communication, from blog posts to email copy to stories, should have those three pieces.

If you’re wondering what to actually write about in the beginning, middle and end, this post by Nick Usbourne outlines the three elements:

1. The challenge.

2. The struggle.

3. The resolution.

If, for example, you sell a weight loss product, the challenge is losing a certain number of pounds. The struggle would be the difficulties you faced in losing weight and finding an effective weight loss method. The resolution would be the solution that finally worked.

Quite often a story will be missing one of these three elements. Usually it’s the case where the story is all middle and missing a beginning or ending.

Be sure to use recent stories too. People long for authenticity and respond better if they know you’re a real human being. If you’re a size two with a successful weight loss product, don’t be afraid to write the occasional story that talks about a current struggle. Don’t always rehash the story about how you lost 50 pounds five years ago and kept it off.

Keep in mind a good ending/resolution will cause a beginning in the reader. You’ve done your work in delivering your story. Now it’s up to the reader to take the message and run with it, and, in the case of a selling story, purchase your product. Your story will create a new story within the reader.

A lot of people like to hate on Walmart. Just like a lot of online entrepreneurs diss marketing “gurus.”

Here’s a fact about Walmart that isn’t widely circulated: according to reason.tv, a 2008 study revealed that the states with more Walmarts have more small businesses.

The small businesses that go out of business when Walmart comes to town are replaced by small businesses that do a better job of appealing to customers.

The small mom and pop shops have to keep their stores clean, treat their customers as they are their only customer, and offer the best possible prices. Then they can hold their own against Walmart.

Every online niche has Walmart equivalents.

You can either hate on their practices, crappy products, or whatever. You can give up and close up shop.

Or you can stand out by providing superior customer service and products in ways the big guys can’t.

These “gurus” are actually making it easier for you to succeed, not harder.

Imagine how would you feel if you were in one of the most successful rock bands of all time.

You and your band mates have been together for more than 30 years and you have more money than you could ever need. Every concert is a sell out.

You also have money invested in real estate and have your hand in many other businesses, including one that owns a piece of Facebook.

Apple even names an iPod after you.

You’d feel pretty secure, wouldn’t you?

Or would you?

Bono of the band U2 fits the scenario I just described yet in an interview a couple of years ago he said, “insecurity is your best security.” He doesn’t take their success for granted and never assumes that the next album will be a success.

Barbara Corcoran is a venture capitalist on the show The Shark Tank and only has several minutes to decide whether or not to invest in an entrepreneur’s business.

The product is secondary to her and she first evaluates the person. One of her criteria is: “do they have enough insecurity where they are going to be be scared every day?”

If they have enough insecurity then she knows they will have the wherewithal to see the business through difficult times and make it to the finish line. If the product is only 70% good but the entrepreneur is 150% good, she’s in.

How about you? Are you insecure enough?

Even though I’ve been a copywriter for four years, I still feel both excitement and anxiety when facing that blank page at the beginning of a copywriting project.

Learning to befriend anxiety and even view it as an elixir has been one of the most important things I’ve learned as an entrepreneur.

If one of your insecurities is your own copywriting ability, then I’d be glad to help you out. The other day a client told me, “When I send out my own emails, I don’t get any sales because my emails suck. When I send out your emails, I get sales.”  Just email me and see if I can do the same for you.

I finally wrote a free report about email copywriting.

If you sign up for my list over on the right sidebar you can get a copy.

If you’re already on my list then you’ll soon receive an email with the download link.

Here’s what you’ll find in the report:

• My formula for writing an email.

• What you should…and shouldn’t…broadcast in a broadcast email.

• The most overlooked part of email marketing.

• Emails for your affiliates to use that stand out from the crowd.

• Subject line do’s and don’ts (including the one subject line mistake you never want to make).

• How to structure a 7 part email series for prospects.

Enjoy!

A client recently said to me, “good copy is like fine wine – it’s ready when it’s ready.”

He wasn’t in a rush for me to finish his project. This gave me such a sense of relief that I was able to write the copy very quickly.

Like most writers, however, I don’t usually have the luxury of time. No matter what type of writing you do, it requires a significant amount of mental energy and sometimes you just aren’t in the “zone.”

Salon has an interesting article called A cure for writer’s block.

An excerpt:

First proposed by two psychologists in 1908, this principle holds that the more “aroused” (i.e., engaged and challenged) a person is by a task, the better he or she performs, up to the point that the arousal becomes anxiety or worry, at which point performance declines.

In other words, beyond a certain point, the more difficult a writing task, and the more you think it matters, the more likely you are to become blocked. This may explain why journalists with, say, two deadlines per week almost never get blocked: no individual story ever has to carry that much weight. (The paycheck helps a lot, too. Not long ago, a woman sitting next to me on a plane asked if I had a trick for getting past writer’s block, and I replied, “Yes. It’s called a mortgage.”)

I can relate to that to an extent because I have deadlines every week and juggle more than one client project at any given time.  Although I’m certainly familiar with when “engaged and challenged” morphs into “anxiety or worry.”

Here’s the cure according to the article:

That’s what every blocked writer really needs: something more significant they should be doing instead, an earth-shaking, life-changing project you’re stealing time from to work on this little novel. Or the great novel you ought to be drafting while you knock off your memoir just for fun. Granted, inventing such a decoy project and convincing yourself that you may actually get around to it someday requires a bold and sustained act of imagination.

So true. Whenever I’m in procrastination mode due to feeling overwhelmed, I will often write a blog post on my personal blog. I don’t get paid for this writing and it steals time away from my client work. Yet doing this usually refuels me and I’m able to focus on my client projects with more energy afterwards. It sounds absurd to say that I often take a break from writing by doing other writing but it works somehow.

Also, if I just step away from the computer and stop thinking about the writing project, then the ideas start flowing, of course. Ideas often have to incubate far away from the computer before they sprout.

I’ve read several books about running lately, including Born to Run, which mentions a tribe in Mexico whose members often run 50-100 miles at a time, and a couple of Dean Karnazes’s books. He’s an ultramarathon runner.

As you may know, an ultramarathon is a race of 50 miles or more.

At first glance it would seem that an ultramarathon is a near-impossible feat.

Yet if these books are any indication, the human body was originally designed for running. With the proper motivation and techniques that work with, not against, your body, an ultramarathon is doable.

I’ve always been afraid of running but, using the free 8 week Couch to 5K program, I can actually run in 5 minute intervals now without stopping (a miracle for me). My goal is to be able to run 30 minutes (a 5K).

Although I have zero intention of running in an ultramarathon, I can’t help but notice some parallels to email copywriting.

An email message can be like an ultramarathon runner. With the right approach, an email to prospects can be sent again and again to prospects for several years, without wearing out.

Emails to current customers sent out as broadcast messages at regular intervals are also like ultramarathon runners. This is the type of email most marketers neglect to send (like those of us runners who can’t imagine ever running in an ultramarathon). The tendency is to send a set number of emails to prospects and maybe crank out an email to customers at holidays or when there’s a sale and leave it at that.

But those that do go the distance and send emails to current customers week after week, month after month, year after year, are building an ultramarathon business with true endurance.

Just like an ultramarathon runner can’t do it alone and needs outside support, it’s hard to put together an ongoing email campaign without help.

To that end, I have two options for you.

One is my pre-written emails. If you sign up for the list on this website you’ll get access to all 67 pre-written email series I have available.

Or you can hire me to write custom emails.

My favorite quote from Born to Run is: “You don’t stop running because you get old. You get old because you stop running.”

On the same note, your business slows down because you stop sending email. If you don’t send email you don’t have a business at all.

A screenwriter and film professor put together some guidelines about about communication/messaging and I think it applies to copywriting and every other type of writing too.

Some salient bits from her post:

What follows here is an outline for a communications strategy based on a few oft-repeated Hollywood principles.

I. The “Big Idea” of Entertainment/Messaging

There is a fail-proof ancient Greek formula for getting and holding an audience’s attention. Every communication should have what Aristotle called: Logos, pathos, and ethos. That is, there needs to be something for the mind, something for the emotions, and finally, something for the imagination.

a) Something for the mind – some facts to learn; half of holding people’s attention is in feeding their instinctive desire to know; Every message needs to teach something that the audience can take away and integrate into their framework and conversations. A message is meant to be carried on the winds. Hence, the speaker needs to be focused on helping the hearers become teachers. Give them examples, power ideals and metaphors to share.

b) Something for the heart/emotions – a reason to care; Aristotle says that every effective drama either leads the audience to weep or to feel fear of evil. A message needs to be clear in its emotional tone – either sadness, or wonder, or fear or joy or terror. Then, the emotion can be heightened until the audience responds physically – with tears, or frowns or goose-bumps or laughter. The audience that is feeling these things will be attentive and fully engaged.

c) Something for the imagination – something to dream about; A good message ends by causing a beginning in the hearer. A good message is a launch in the hearer. The speaker does their work and then sends the hearer off to do theirs – to brood over the full implications of the message – to apply it to their own world – to begin to foment a plan as a response.

A few other helpful principles of communication are:

1) Production value matters. Things like working microphones, a well-lit and attractive set, good hair and make-up, costuming, etc. all matter. Attention must be given to these so that they complement the message as opposed from distracting from it.

2) Rehearse. No matter how well a speaker or writer knows a topic, every message opportunity should be thoroughly strategized, structured and rehearsed so that it looks effortless. This is a service to the audience, but also will allow the same basic message to be reframed according to the needs and situation of the hearers.

3) There is a definite hierarchy of elements in any piece of entertainment. Aristotle lists the hierarchy as: Plot first, then characters, then theme, then dialogue, then music and lastly, spectacle. When applying this to messaging, we can say that the story is the main thing. What is the story that this message needs to tell? Then, immediately move to characters – who will be affected by this? How? Then, give attention to theme – what is the overall ideological principle underlying this communication? Then, give attention to specific wording. Then, ask yourself, what is the icing on the cake of this message? What is the entertainment value for the hearers?

I especially like this:

II. The Two Key Rules of Hollywood/Messaging

The two biggest rules of Hollywood meetings, and also movies, are:

A) Don’t bore me.

B) Don’t waste my time

It is possible to construct the foundation of a whole communication strategy from these two rules.

I couldn’t agree more.

You can read the whole thing here.