Salesmanship In Print...

I once read that line in a book on copywriting. It still rings in my head today as being one of the most important lessons in marketing. Advertisers all to often forget that all important fact when creating their materials. Take a look through any magazine, look around at billboards you might see in a train station or on the highway. You might see a picture and the name of the company. What the hell is that? Oh yeah advertising agencies call it "image advertising" or "we are building your brand". I call it bullshit and a waste of time. Where are the benefits and features that help me make a buying decision? Where is the copy that makes me want, no wait a second where is the copy that makes me see in my minds eye that I am already using the product! That is what great advertising does, and is so much more important. Make people want your product or service. Make them believe that they need it. Every piece of marketing material that leaves your company should have a purpose. Whether that purpose is to generate leads for your sales team to make the sale, to have your phone lines ringing so you can take orders directly or to have people go to the store to buy something. MAKE YOUR MATERIALS COUNT! Another advantage of this is every ad is trackable, you can tell how well it did. You can test two ads at the same time to see which one pulls better results. Its just a much smarter way of doing business. I have worked for ad agencies plenty of times before, and it still makes me shake my head when they argue that the ad doesnt "look" good. Well yeah it might not win any art awards but I bet you ten bucks it sells the shit out of the product. Beware when your ad agency tells you its an award winning agency, alot of agencies I have run into use that to hide the fact that although they might have won some awards, the results can be lacking or not trackable at all. If you have any questions, email me I would love to cover them here. See you tomorrow!

Welcome! This is the inaugural post so excuse me if its a little rough. As a first topic I just want to expand on the power of marketing. Remember the Pet Rock? Yeah, I know I know but consider this. Within a few months of product launch there were over a million of these shipped at $3.95 each, do the math. Get the idea? Its not neccesarily what you sell but how you sell it and your offer needs to reach the right audience. I am sure you can give examples yourself of items you thought "who the hell is going to buy this" that ended up doing really really well. Think about this, start a website that does ok, maybe makes you $500 a month. Of course you could implement ideas that can easily drive that to $2000 a month if done right but lets say you just go out and start 3 more websites with the exact same business model behind it. Boom, now you are looking at $2,000 a month (and by the way I am sure you know you can make 30 times this on the web if done right). You already know it works so why not duplicate things to get things rolling. Implement some ideas like I said before to increase revenue and do that on every site and now you are on your way to an empire. Alot of people overthink things, they try to reinvent the wheel when all they really need to do is look around find something that works and duplicate it. I can go on and on but I will hold it there for now. What lies around that you can see that you can duplicate? I am not saying steal, I am saying duplicate. Go ahead look around, the world is full of ideas-make one yours now!