Pazzardous Material Vol 27  – the week’s posts on a single page (most recent at the bottom):

Hideaway

One Amazon trick that shoppers on the site often talk about is the different prices that are given for the same product from one visit to the next.

How might you be able to get round that?

You could browse privately, go incognito, using your favourite browser’s private mode, or try Epicbrowser.com, Duck Duck Go or a tool such as Camelcamelcamel.com, which can be useful to learn the prices that Amazon has displayed on a product at different times.

 

Square One

I saw a post on Instagram recently that said:

Don’t compare your chapter 1 to someone else’s chapter 20

That line was above this photo:

My problem in 2007 and for some time beyond was my stupid habit of collecting enough training material to last a lifetime, and frequently comparing myself with people with far more experience and resources than I had.

As Theodore Roosevelt said:

Do what you can, with what you have, right where you are.

Even if that’s square one.

 

You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me

Thinking about which professional copywriting tips I could share got me listing (I love a list).

Then I had an email from Brian Dean, one of my go-to teachers when I want to learn about SEO (Heather Loyd-Martin is another).

And this email from Brian was promoting a new post he’d written: Copywriting: The Definitive Guide. It’s a great resource and I recommend it.

So why’s this post called You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me? Because when copy is good, it draws you in. The job of the first line is to get you to read the next line. And the job of the second line is to get you to read the next line. And so on.

The best sales copy really speaks to you. It answers your questions, touches on the emotions that drive you, and demonstrates an understanding of your hopes, fears, desires and ‘pain points.. Then, ultimately, it persuades you to take action.

 

Make It Easy On Yourself

As well as the sad new news today of Scott Walker’s death, there’s also coverage of research by the Office for National Statistics that suggests that 1.5 million people in England are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation.

That screams to me that young people – now more than ever – need to understand technology at both a specific, micro level (how stuff works/how to accomplish tasks with tech) and also from a general, overview to get some idea of where it’s going.

And that means understanding automation, and reports like those from today, as it’s easy to view such news as dark.

But there’s a more positive flip side:

A report published by Deloitte in 2015 said:

• Technology has created more jobs than it has destroyed in the last 144 years

• It has been saving us from dull, repetitive and dangerous work

• Technology has boosted employment in knowledge-intensive sectors such as medicine, accounting and professional services

• Technology has lowered the cost of essentials, raising disposable incomes and creating new demand and jobs

   

Children Of The Revolution

Ed Petrie is a CBBC presenter, actor and comedian. I asked him if he believes internet education is important and what he regards as the most important related subject.

He told me:

We’re currently going through a period in history that is as important as the Industrial Revolution, and that brought about great change and difficulty. 
 
The sooner we all start getting our heads around it, the better.
 
The most important aspect is teaching children about credible information, and how to judge how much trust you should place in something that’s being reported as a fact.

As I’ve written before, I think 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 and think critically.

 

Mirror in the Bathroom

The music world has lost another great: Ranking Roger, vocalist with The Beat.

Here’s a shortened version of the Mirror in the Bathroom chapter from my book for young teens, Mr Lizard*:

Before the internet, everyone read newspapers.

Kids would get a job at a paper shop delivering newspapers in the morning before school to all the houses down a road or two.

Papers were (and still are) either broadsheets’ (because the sheets of paper they’re printed on are broad, such as The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian in the UK) or tabloids (aka ‘red tops’), like The Sun, The Daily
Star and The Daily Mirror.

Broadsheets and tabloids are written in very different styles and people would read them while eating breakfast, sitting in the bath, sitting on the bus, during their lunch break at work, in the pub after work, on the way to football on a Saturday. Everywhere.

Everywhere you take your phone, in fact.

They’d read the Mirror in the bathroom.

*affiliate link
 

Cars

How much money does a car insurance company make on a policy for a young, male driver? None.

They make their money on such policies by taking their insured drivers’ premiums and investing on the money markets.

But some some young, innovative insurance companies, including Carrot, Ingenie and Coverbox, insure drivers who are willing to drive with a ‘black box’ in their car.

These drivers are more likely to be careful whether there’s a black box in their car or not, and they’re more likely to drive  carefully because they’ve got a black box in their car.

The black box enables the insurance company to track the car, how it’s driven, and when.

Crucially, they can find out even more – by communicating with mobile phone masts, for example, to provide the exact time that an accident happened.

The result of this technology is drivers with lower premiums and insurance companies with higher profits.

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