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The Two Vital Attributes of
Quality Content

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“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful” ~William Morris, poet and designer

Imagine the household you would have if you got rid of every item that was neither useful or beautiful.

Gone would be the plastic doodad with no known purpose, the ugly frame your great-aunt gave you, the Special Free Offer™ you never opened, the collection of someday-useful peanut butter jars . . .

Every room would be so much more pleasant to be in, and every tool so much easier to find.

What if you applied the same rule to the content you wrote? Every email, sales letter, blog post, and comment you wrote would have to be useful or beautiful. Or both.

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Question the Rules to Create a
More Remarkable Business (and Life)

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Every once in awhile, someone asks me why I have pink hair.

(You ever notice that no one asks why anyone has blonde hair, or red hair? But pink, it seems, requires a good reason.)

There are a lot of ways I could answer that question, but the simplest is probably that I don’t really buy into the standard set of rules about what “success” or “professionalism” look like.

As it turns out, there are a lot of things I don’t buy into.

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Creative Content Recycling:
Are You Wasting Your Garbage?

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You see it done all the time, and it’s just so wasteful.

People take a bunch of perfectly good trash, and they just toss it in the garbage can.

Unbelievable.

The thing is, any time you create something, you’re going to end up with a lot of odds and ends, scraps that end up on the metaphorical cutting room floor.

What if you could sell your product . . . but then find a way to repurpose and sell the by-products of your product too?

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The Copyblogger Guide to
Zombie-Free Product Launches

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These days, a lot of online product launches are like zombie attacks.

One day, everything is fine. The next day, there’s a legion of crazy people banging on your virtual doors and windows, wanting to feed on you.

Who the hell are these zombies and how did they get my address? Time to break out the shotgun, or in this case, the Delete All button.

And it gets worse. That group of friends you hang out with from time to time? Yeah . . . they’re zombies too.

“Wait dude, I thought we were cool . . . why are you . . . Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!”

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Landing Page Makeover Clinic #25:
LeTrip.org

Landing Page Makeover

This is another addition to our ongoing series of tutorials and case studies on landing pages that work.

Jill Mitchell wants to increase awareness and sales of her one-of-a-kind French vintage objects that she sells on Etsy and Ebay. She also wants more visiblity and sales for her buying tours of Provence.

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Johnny’s Copyblogger Wrap-Up:
Week of April 19, 2010

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If you read Copyblogger and dream of striking out on your own, you need to know that independent business isn’t always good. Bad things do happen.

For instance, I’m writing this in a bookstore cafe. Two tables down from me, there’s a guy with his headphones on belting out “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon. (You’re an old person in the blogosphere if you know who Carly Simon is. Hint: She’s kind of like the Jonas Brothers, except she’s female and not like them in any way whatsoever.)

See, people think that being an entrepreneur means freedom and independence, but nobody stops to consider the perils of the Singing Cafe Guy.

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