Pazzardous Material Vol 22 (trying something new) – the week’s posts on a single page:

Turn the Page

A note to advertisers:

You might manage to position yourself right in front of me from time to time but…

I ignore you.

In print.

On the radio (I turn you down or I turn you off).

Online.

In apps.

On the telly (I turn you down or I turn you off).

At the football.

In the pub.

No, actually, those last two places are different: I’m able, for five minutes, to switch off from my daily business and routine and give you a couple of seconds of my attention.

But generally, because you haven’t earned two seconds of my attention, I won’t give you that time.

And I’m not alone.

You interrupt and we’re busy.

So we ignore you (especially on TV).

The last time I bought via a Facebook ad, I was disappointed with the product.

And I’ve never bought because I saw your ad on TV.

Alternatively, this is how I buy:

Habit (the same products from the same supermarket, which just happens to be the closest to our house)
Beginning with a search on Google or Amazon
A recommendation from someone I trust online or off
As a result of effective content marketing

Take Me I’m Yours

Yesterday, I moaned about adverts interrupting me and mentioned that I’ve sometimes bought as a result of effective content marketing.

“Content marketing? What does that mean, Pazza?”

I thought you’d never ask.

It’s when I’ve come across someone online and looked a bit more closely at who they are, what they do and what they offer.

Then, deciding that I like that person, I read their emails (that they’ve sent to me as a subscriber – I’m not hacking into their inbox) and blog posts, or listen to their podcasts.

For weeks.

And before I know it, I’m in, trusting them and giving them my attention.

Then sooner or later they present an offer, a product they’ve created that solves a problem I have in my efforts to create a successful online business (like ‘how do I really get to know SEO and how can I use it to improve my Google rankings?’ or ‘how do I build the business I’ve wanted for years?’).

And because I know them, like them and trust them, and consider their offering to be good, I take a punt and click ‘buy now’.

And even though I recognise all the tried and trusted copywriting devices they’ve used, I’m in.

Away From Here

By the end of my time working in TV transmission, I was a very tired boy. Definitely not tired of the great friends I’d made during the 16 years I was in the job at various places in and around London, but absolutely knackered from the night shifts, doing work that no longer interested me, and corporate nonsense that was allowed to get in the way of more positive and constructive stuff, such as appraisals for people (like me) whose jobs barely changed from one year to the next

“Paul, you don’t under-perform and you don’t over-perform,” I was told in one such a meeting.

“You’re right,” I replied.

I wish I’d added: “That’s because you don’t under-pay me and you don’t over-pay me. I do what you pay me to do.”

Bit of a shame that I came up with my witty response years after I needed it.

So by the end, I was ready to go. I’d decided years before that when an opportunity came up, I’d grab it and say my goodbyes. I needed a change and didn’t want a rest.

Know How

I’ve already written about Brian Dean, who’s well worth a listen if you want really in-depth and up-to-date knowledge of SEO, the practice of trying to improve a webpage’s ranking in the search engines.

And I’ve also explained what content marketing is.

After following Brian for a while and reading his emails, he presented an offer. He’d created a course and I already liked him and trusted him.

And I had a problem.

In fact, I had more than one:

As a freelancer, I needed more clients
With a website, I needed greater visibility: more potential clients to find me online and decide if I was the copywriter or editor they were looking for

Reading about Brian’s course – SEO That Works – was perfectly timed so I took the plunge and invested a bit of money to buy it.

On first look, I wanted to run away: the sheer amount of work needed in order to get positive results was enormous, then I remembered my bills that needed paying and lack of clients at the time, so I got stuck in.

To get work as a freelancer you need leads and to get leads you need to work:

Either get on the phone, knock on doors, email prospects or ask people around you, online and off, if they know people who might want to hire you.

What’s the best method of generating leads?

That was the question I’d been asking myself so could now form the basis of the content I was going to write (the best way to learn is to teach, as I heard once).

I followed the course and learned how to create content that could do well in the search engines, and how to promote it, and at the same time got smarter about generating leads for my business.

Proof to me that the training was good was seeing my content shared 184 times without me even dipping a toe in the promotion pond:

(Note: it’s never simple, is it? That post is now showing that it’s been shared 25 times. Bit of a difference, so I’ve emailed the plugin’s support team).

Plus of course I had all the knowledge I needed to get more clients. See the post here.

Debaser

With more than 1.9 billion logged-in users visiting YouTube each month, and 2.32 billion monthly active users on Facebook, there’s room for a million agendas and a veritable smorgasbord of information that’s either worthy of our trust or utter nonsense.

YouTube, it’s been found, is “the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat”.

Meanwhile, “companies like Facebook should not be allowed to behave like ‘digital gangsters’ in the online world, considering themselves to be ahead of and beyond the law,” the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee (who might have had their collective back put up because Mark Zuckerberg refused to give evidence to parliament) said in their final report on Disinformation and ‘fake news’.

“TV,” reported Ofcom, “is still the first port of call for news but people go to social media first for an alternative viewpoint on the news, despite users being less likely to see views they disagree with on social media.”

In 2017, Facebook and Google – owner of YouTube – generated more than a hundred billion dollars, about half of all the money spent on online advertising worldwide.

That’s a lot of power.

There isn’t time to explore every link on abyznewslinks.com every day but maybe we should be encouraging kids to:

Pay attention to the language used in the news they consume
Compare stories that matter across at least two news outlets
Be wary of anonymous sources
Think critically

Thanks to my mate Andy who told me about the recent 5 Live Breakfast phone-in on fake news which inspired this post.

W.F.L. – Think About the Future Mix

The book. My next book. Always on my mind.

Trouble is, it’s not writing itself.

Given that making money from writing books is very hard, I’ve not beaten that idea into submission but I have opted for an alternative goal: to make it as useful as possible, regardless of money. A book that will actually benefit people, including subjects like:

Why I’m writing this now
The best online training I’ve ever bought
A brief, plain-English guide to setting up a website
What I’d do if I was changing career and starting out as a freelancer in a new industry (and what I wouldn’t do)
Finding jobs that most other people won’t find
How I used the internet to get a mobile deal I was happy with
How to automatically support your favourite charity when you shop at Amazon
Some professional copywriting tips
Saving cash when you send, spend or receive money in a foreign currency
My virtual reality story
Selling on eBay
A quick guide to creating and selling digital products
Content marketing explained
How to send sensitive info via email (which I’ve heard likened to posting a letter without sealing the envelope)
Recommended companies and services I always go back to

Even though it’s not writing itself, I have already written parts of it. Organisation is the key.

If there’s a particular topic that isn’t mentioned above and that I might be able to help you with, or that you’d like to know more about, please get in touch.

Straight from the Heart

Creativity, as I’ve written before, is our greatest differentiator.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe our greatest differentiator is authenticity. Being true to yourself.

In Simon Sinek’s book, Start With Why, he says:

People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

That message, he says, is grounded not in psychology but in biology: the reason people buy why we do something rather than what we’re doing is because we relate to it with the most primitive part of our brain, the limbic system, the bit that supports functions including emotion, behaviour, motivation, long-term memory and our sense of smell. The bit I wrote about in Mr Lizard.

Why do we do what we do? Because, hopefully, we’re being authentic: true to ourselves and human – and highly relatable to those we’re trying to reach.

Why am I writing this blog, and my books and the stories I often tell?

Because I care deeply about people – especially young people – and want them to be able to make the most of their lives and opportunities, and want to share some of the things I’ve picked up over the years.

Here’s Simon explaining his idea in a Ted talk: