Content marketing tools and training.
There will never be another Nirvana.
Or Coca Cola. Or Stephen King.
Apart from a very few anomalies, no band, brand, or author will ever achieve the level of cultural penetration that Generation X was the last to witness happen in real time.
Our culture has broken apart into millions of little tribal pieces.
It’s not because kids these days aren’t heading down to the crossroads with their guitars and web dev tools to do a deal with the devil.
It’s something much weirder than that.
I started blogging in 2007 because I’d just signed my first book deal with Random House and I realized that social media was about to become a huge tool in any author’s marketing arsenal.
What I didn’t realize was how huge.
It’s become the core of my marketing outreach not just for books, but for everything I do.
But with the launch of my new book, Uncertainty: Turning Fear and Doubt Into Fuel for Brilliance, I decided to take things to an entirely different level, test a bunch of new strategies, and bring video strongly into the picture.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about the black swan — the impossible-to-predict event that changes everything. The terrorist attack, the earthquake, the worldwide economic meltdown.
But in the world we live in now, it’s the white swan — the ordinary, predictable event — that’s becoming rare.
Black swans show up every day. Storms and disasters … and positive black swans, too, like world-changing technology.
Unpredictability is the new predictability, and the only thing we can be sure of is that the world will look almost unrecognizably different — even just a few years from today.
I’m going to tell you a secret.
It’s a copywriting secret that the immortals — from Aristotle to Ogilvy to Draper — have known, but few have stated as directly as I’m about to.
By now, you know the standards of effective copywriting …
Know your audience. Know your product cold. Research. Nail the headline. Write plainly, in the language of your audience. Research more. Write fascinating bullets. Craft a great offer. Include a strong call to action. Et cetera.
These elements are the standard for good reason. They get the job done.
This little truth I’m about to tell you is the foundation that makes all the rest of it work.
Imagine you’re having a discussion with a talkative, hyperactive teenager.
The conversation goes something like this …
We went to the mall, and like, there was this fire in the mall. And we went from there to the movies, but we didn’t have any money and anyway the popcorn machine was broken, and so we didn’t really want to go to the movies without popcorn. But right after that we went to have some pizza and there was this creepy guy outside the store. But listen to this — because that’s not the best part. The best part is that Sylvie dumped Josh, and like, they ran into each other in the street …
Annoying right? Then why do we so often write our web copy just like that teenager talks?
I think there comes a time in every person’s life when he has to ask himself, “Am I most effectively doing what Copyblogger tells me to do, to the point of abdicating my free will and possibly granting its editors power of attorney?” So this week, I took inventory and decided that I wasn’t spreading my words widely enough.
To remedy the situation, I finally put some stuff up on Kindle as several people keep telling me I should do — my 2008 humor collection, two manifesto-weight posts to disseminate amongst the Kindle users of the world, and a short story from over a decade ago that I was shocked to discover I still really liked.
