Thoughts on Marketing…

Readability and communication are more important than proper grammar in marketing copy. And yet, amateur marketers still pay too much attention to the rules their High School English teacher taught. The result is dry as a bone, stiff copy. And you know, nobody reads dry words until they’re required to do so. At the same [...]

Copywriting has plenty of rules for you to follow, and maybe even more than one that’s labeled “Rule #1,” but this one is too important to ignore. The rule is: Remember that it isn’t about you. Your marketing, if it’s to be effective, HAS to be about your prospective customers/clients and what they want or [...]

Copywriters are always on a search for words that will persuade the readers. Just yesterday I spent nearly an hour on the phone with a client who was trying to decide on the best word to describe an offer he was making. It can be a long process, pondering each word and trying to decide [...]

When you write marketing copy, you hope to persuade. But as it turns out, some of the more popular words that marketers choose have the opposite effect – they ANNOY. A recent Active Rain post posed the question: “Which words make you disregard a marketing message?” Here are some of the replies: Paradigm shift hard-worker [...]

This message was originally posted on Active Rain, a little over two years ago. It was intended for real estate agents, but the principles apply no matter what business you’re in. So here is the question: Is writing your own marketing materials the highest and best use of your time? You as a real estate [...]

Now that the boom times in real estate are over, agents need to market aggressively if they wish to succeed. Here’s how.

If you own a home, you’ve probably received real estate letters suggesting that you list it for sale. And in all probability, most of them began with one of two words: “I” or “We.” This is the number one mistake made by marketers of all kinds, and real estate agents are at the top of [...]

Have you noticed? Lately, on many websites, you can’t go and read an entire article on one page. You get a teaser to get you interested in what they’re going to say, and then have to click forward, sometimes as many as 8 or 9 times, to get the entire article. I suppose the point [...]

A copywriter charges as much to write a simple postcard as he or she charges to write a two-page letter. It doesn’t seem right, does it? But there’s a reason for that. The reason is that it can sometimes take longer to write a postcard than it does to write a letter – even a [...]

This is a marketing ploy you don’t know about unless you visit a web page and say “no” to the offer. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen this, but every time I do it makes me take a mental note to delete everything from that marketer in the future. What’s the practice? It’s [...]