Pazzardous Material Vol 29 – the week’s posts on a single page (most recent at the bottom):
Promised Land
In about 2007, I was heavily in debt and learning about lots of the different types of writing that I could do to make a living.
One of the most lucrative forms of copywriting, I discovered, is writing sales copy. And back then, long – really long – sales letters would make writers thousands of pounds.
A 3,000-word sales letter was how many products were sold online, and I saw them as my way of reaching the promised land, which was out of the red and into the black.
They’d follow a formulaic structure that typically would include:
- A headline
- An introduction of the seller
- An introduction of a common problem
- A section to introduce the product that promised to solve the problem
- Social proof – ie, you could trust the seller and the product because all these people have said all these wonderful things about it/them
- A guarantee
- Something about at least one bonus
- A bit about the price, often discounted for a limited period
- A ‘buy now’ button
- More testimonials
- Another look at the guarantee
- Another ‘buy now’ button
I bought a book – it cost hundreds – to learn the art of writing sales letters and earn my fortune. It suggested copying, by hand, at least one letter several times to get used to the structure and language.
Did I do it? No. Turned out I didn’t enjoy enjoy writing sales copy.
I ended up selling that book* (currently available for more than £1,000) and found other types of copywriting that I enjoyed more.
*affiliate link
What Difference Does It Make?
When there are so many places to buy followers for your social media account, why shouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t just dive in and grab yourself extra likes, views and comments?
What difference does it make?
You can easily buy a thousand followers for less than a tenner, and having a large following can lead to high earnings as an influencer and provide social proof (“if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for me”).
But you really shouldn’t buy followers. Here’s why:
- Many of those ‘followers’ might actually be bots or inactive accounts, so you won’t get any engagement (which is what Instagram’s algorithm uses to display posts, rather than simple chronology)
- Loads of fake followers could damage your credibility
- You won’t earn a penny from a fake follower
- If you’re caught, your account might be purged or suspended
Need Your Love So Bad
Just as in copywriting, where the job of the first line is simply to get the reader to read the second line, it’s important to understand that when marketing your product or service you don’t expect too much too soon. Talk of marriage on a first date might just scare rather than seduce.
I found a screenshot that I saved a few years ago that sums it up:
Paint It Black
Jonathan Cooksley is a phenomenon. The most creative person I know, he’s a dad, a designer, an artist and a successful business owner.
He designed the covers of my books, Pazzabaijan and Mr Lizard, the Amp Media logo, and has drawn 13 free tourist maps of Cornwall – a third of a million copies of which are used throughout the county every summer.
I’m very lucky because he’s also a lifelong friend of mine.
I asked Jon to share his thoughts about internet education. This is what he said:
Education really doesn’t focus enough on the internet and, unfortunately, we’re leaving it up to our young people to find their own way, and that’s not ideal.
If I’m not educating my son on a smartphone, the school’s not educating him on a smartphone, then who is? He’s finding his own way, and that obviously impacts our internet safety.
Saying that, we don’t want to stifle creativity. To me, one of the most fundamental parts of the internet is creativity, and the way that we can use new technologies with old ideas…is where the exciting bits happen, and we want to encourage that as much as possible.
Art is my background. I have no objection to teaching people to use traditional materials – (young artists) need to learn those skills but why can’t we be downloading graphics and editing them on online software and calling that art as well?
If art hadn’t progressed, we’d still be painting with blood on cave walls. It sounds comical but we would. We’ve developed acrylic paints, oil paints, watercolour paints. Is this (digital design and editing) part of the next stage? We need to focus on that.
Criticize
Sometimes it’s hard not to criticise but this Instagram post tested me:
So much wrong with this.
Obviously I visited their website and bought two grand’s worth of likes and followers.
Keep the Fire Burning
Today’s been a big day for development of the book. I got up extra early and pushed on with its organisation, before dragging it back on course after a few weeks when family and other work commitments had taken over, as they rightly should’ve done.
To reflect on what I’ve done so far, understand what stage I’d reached, then work out what I needed to do next, I referred back to a blog post written by Seth Godin in February 2016.
In How to talk about your project, he suggests asking a range of important questions, including fundamentals such as:
- What is it for?
- How will you know if it’s working?
- What part that isn’t under your control has to happen for this to work? (Do you need to be lucky?)
- What’s the difficult part?
One of the difficult parts for me was the realisation that I’d been hiding from those very questions and lost a bit of direction as a result.
Back on it now.
Copycat
If you Google the phrase using other people’s content you’ll see close to 14.5 billion search results, of which two types strike me immediately:
- Those talking about content curation
- Those warning against using other people’s content without the owner’s permission
That’s a lot of information to sift through so I make it easy and play by a couple of simple rules:
- If I’m going to use someone else’s content, I’ll get permission or credit them wherever possible
- If I want to use an image (maybe for an Instagram/blog post, or for some marketing), I’ll get one from Pixabay or Pexels
>>>Playlist<<<
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