The Copywriter Underground

Selling anything to anyone is an apt description of the modern copywriter’s job — but it won’t happen unless the writer keeps current with the latest digital media channels. Here’s how to do that.

Matthew Stibbe’s “Ten free marketing tactics” post offers invaluable advice to copywriters — the kind of hard-earned, real-world tips and tricks that go way, way beyond the obvious. Always worth a read.

When you’re selling a corporate product that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, you need to reach executive buyers (Directors and VPs).
The bad news? There’s no shortage of gatekeepers and roadblocks between you and your quarry, and you’ve got to put your sales rep in the office of a qualified executive, and do it quickly.
So [...]

I just wrote an online marketing plan for a client. Five years ago, half of the plan’s elements didn’t exist in any real marketing sense. And not only have the media channels changed, my client’s goals have too.
With consumers facing a constant barrage of marketing messages — and marketers struggling to make even a wisp [...]

Many, many years ago, I was the sole copywriter for an ad/PR agency that touted its “synergistic” approach to marketing (not my word for it). In fact, we repeatedly pitched ourselves as “print, broadcast, PR, events and direct mail experts.”
Which was fine… except we weren’t.
Direct mail? I was the agency “expert” and what I knew [...]

Roberta Rosenberg of the Copywriting Maven tagged me as one of the five blogs that make her think (if only a little).
I got a little rush from that; I read Roberta’s posts religiously (at her own blog and her guest posts on the Copyblogger site). We’ve both been around a long time, and frankly, she [...]

Were you expecting a comic strip? This is better.

Scott Adams spells out the lessons he learned in a one-day business writing class. And just so you don’t waste a day learning it, he gives us the short course:

I went from being a bad writer to a good writer after taking a one-day course in “business [...]

The freelance copywriting market is in a odd state. Fees to copywriters at the low end have never been less tenable, yet demand for copywriters is at an alltime high.
This snippet from the end of Anne Holland’s Chief Marketer article suggests what awaits copywriters who can prove their value, especially in revenue-generating fields (direct response [...]

Is the Home Page dead? Are copywriters wasting their time writing them?
That’s the question posed by Matt Ambrose of the Copywriter’s Crucible (to be fair, plenty of others are asking the same thing).
The idea that every page is now potentially a landing page is generating some heavy, Russian-novel-level brooding in the marketing world, and certainly [...]

I remember when E-mail was going to become the marketer’s new best friend. It was far, far cheaper than print, and — as we were told by the pundits of the time — people were going to beg us to send them e-mail.
Then came spam.
In a few years, e-mail went from fab to forgotten (Spam [...]