Things were going pretty well until I bit into my hamburger.
Ow.
Something was really wrong.
“Are you okay?” asked my date.
My eyes started watering. I was so confused, but I nodded.
I bit down harder and suddenly the hamburger flew out of my hands. I’ve never been so bewildered in my life. Only when I held my hand up did the sorry truth stare us in the face.
I spent most of 2007 hanging out with Curtis Jackson, better known as Fifty Cent. Together we wrote a bestselling book about hustling, fearlessness, and power.
I’d like to share a couple of insights that arose from that collaboration.
After the remarkable success of his first two commercial albums, Fifty Cent stood on top of the music world. But his very success was starting to corrode his musical ability.
His sense of connection, so vital on the streets, was fading in this new environment he now inhabited.
If you hang out here on Copyblogger, you’re probably trying to figure out how to expand your readership and make your blog popular.
You’re here because Brian Clark is a pretty cool guy, and he seems to know what’s up.
He has this shiny blog, a rockin’ team, billions of subscribers, good hair, a nice car and a pretty wife.
You remember the last time you channel surfed? We all do it when there’s nothing good on TV — nothing that holds our attention.
Well, you can’t channel surf with a book. You can skip pages, put the book down, or stare off into space, but that book isn’t changing (unless you have something to write with or a pair of scissors in hand).
That gives the book power. The book controls how you pay attention to it, in a way television can’t.
Because of the links in hypertext, web content is vulnerable, just like television, to channel surfing.
If you’re anything like most bloggers, there comes a certain point when you simply run out of inspiration for your blog.
You’ve been writing blog posts about web design, or cooking, or whale-watching off the coast of Norway for way too long.
You’ve exhausted the topic, and yourself.
You just don’t know what to write anymore.
How’d you like to learn how to get a massive amount of comments on one blog post?
Better yet, what if you could use those comments to convince your readers to buy your products or services?
Because you can. In this post, I’m going to take you behind the scenes of a strategy Laura Roeder showed me to pull in 294 comments on my post and eventually attract more than 30 consulting clients.
It uses all of the copywriting techniques and psychological triggers that we promote here at Copyblogger, but it combines them in a unique way that generates a lot of buzz.
