Online marketing that works
Time for a quick pop quiz …
What percentage of online shoppers are from the United States?
Better yet, what percentage of online shoppers speak English?
90%? 80%?
Surely at least 75%, right? Nope.
This might shock you, but according to J.P. Morgan — reporting for the Department of Commerce — only 27% of online shoppers speak English.
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You’ve built a beautiful dream around having a successful business, making a living at your passion. You’re fired up. You’re ready to make your own decisions, be captain of your own fate.
You’re building an audience and boosting your credibility with great content.
Maybe you’re even savvy enough to capture that audience with an exceptional email autoresponder, to keep building loyalty and authority.
The problem is, you gathered your courage and tried selling your wonderful product or service … and there doesn’t seem to be anybody who wants to buy it.
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What’s the scariest Halloween costume you can imagine this year?
The villain from this year’s hot horror movie?
Zombies, vampires, the devil? Fat Elvis?
Not for me.
The most terrifying specter that might show up on my doorstep begging for a Snickers bar is …
The aggressive, pushy salesman.
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Welcome to The Lede.
Every week I’ll be digging up and linking to stories, news, and opinion relevant to online marketing and copywriting.
Email, social media, innovation, SEO, productivity, mobile, conversion, publishing, and everything in between.
No commentary, just a fast, single page of headlines that you can grab, scan, and squeeze for all they may (or may not) be worth.
All right then, on with it …
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Every writer who has ever lived has lusted after ideas.
Where are they, how do I get them, and how do I keep them coming?
If you’ve been writing long enough, you know that — like Solomon — there is nothing new under the sun.
Try as you might to sweat them out of your head or pull them gently from the stars above, there are no new ideas.
So, relax.
But the page is not going to write itself, is it? Where then do we turn for ideas that work, ideas that move, ideas that persuade?
In short, we steal them.
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If there’s an art to email marketing, it’s being able to write messages that are simultaneously:
Unfortunately, most emails are either pure content or pure pitch.
But when you merge those two elements, you can see a large (and long term) increase in sales.
I’m going to give you precise examples of what I mean.
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