Marketing Experts Exposed

As we’re getting ready to speak at the next Big Seminar, and share the stage with none other than Jay Abraham, my wife Sylvie and I have been working furiously on our upcoming product, Success Chef, which we are launching at Big.

But as busy as I am these days, and with the added stress of writing copy, dealing with clients and raising three teenagers, I sometimes find myself dipping into a few books as a distraction for some solace and quietude — and to give me some fresh ideas.

Last week, I bought four books, and devoured them in a single week!

I’m nothing short of amazed at how great these books are. And I want to share them with you and encourage you to grab a copy. (Audio versions of the books are also available, too.) They are…

1. The 4-Hour Workweek

“The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferris is a pretty big phenomenon these days.

Ferris, who is also an Internet marketer selling supplements online, wrote a stunning look at ways to make your life easier, simpler and more effective, all the while working less.

From outsourcing to reducing your workload (while increasing your output), Ferris touches on a nerve that resonates with a lot of people.

Particularly Internet marketers who may have escaped their 9-to-5, soul-sucking corporate cubicles for a better life as an entrepreneur, but still find themselves working harder and longer hours than most employees.

It’s a refreshing, interesting and easy read. Not everything is applicable to everyone. But if you can pull at least one tip from this book, it would be worth 10 times the price of it.

Also, check out Tim Ferris’ blog.

2. The Tipping Point

I was amazed by this book.

Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” takes a hard look at why little, sometimes seemingly insignificant things, can spread like wildfire, and become massively popular.

For example, what makes an outdated fashion (like a shoe) come back in style without any prompting or advertising by the maker?

How can one person create hugely popular viral campaigns when the same campaign, launched by another, falls dead in the water along the way (and sometimes even before it starts)?

Those questions and more are explored in “Tipping Point.”

Gladwell covers a great deal of ground in this book. If you’re a fan of viral marketing or want to learn more about how it works (and why it works so well in some cases), get a copy of this book.

Just like Tim Ferris, you can also check out Malcolm Gladwell’s blog.

3. Blink

Another delightful surprise.

In his second tome, Gladwell explores why the way we think, make choices and take action, often unconsciously without any real thinking at all, can be more powerful than its converse.

For example, why are some snap judgments more informed, intelligent or appropriate than choices made after a great deal of research, information gathering and rationalization?

“Blink” offers an insightful and in-depth look at this process, which people often mistakenly attribute to “intuition” or “gut feeling.”

According to Gladwell, that “sixth sense” is not some metaphysical thing but, in actuality, a cerebral function called “rapid cognition.”

And rapid cognition, he surmises, can often be more potent than due diligence.

Grab a copy if you want to learn what makes people decide why they buy more from one piece of copy or website than another, when their choices seem to be illogical or wrong.

4. Made to Stick

This book seems to continue where Gladwell’s “Tipping Point” left off. (And it does a great job doing so, too.)

Chip and Dan Heath’s “Made to Stick” explores what makes some ideas or stories stick.

That is, what makes certain ideas more memorable, emotional, motivational and, above all, compelling than others — from newspaper stories to urban legends, and from political speeches to conspiracy theories.

For example, there’s an interesting chapter where the authors talk about a journalism assignment, where aspiring reporters were given a set of facts and the task of transforming them into a story.

Most were bland regurgitations or reordering of facts.

But one student’s story, in this particular example, stood out of like a sore thumb. It was far more interesting and easy to remember than the others.

This book discusses several key principles of “stickiness,” along with actual examples and strategies you can apply to your own communications.

If you’re a copywriter or marketer, the above books are highly recommended. But “Made to Stick” is a must-read, especially if you’re a copywriter.

You can also browse the Heath brothers’ blog.

A few final notes worthy of mention.

Blog desginer Cory Miller did something with my free WordPress theme that you might like. He converted the Clean Copy WordPress Theme into a blog with sales page templates. Three of them, in fact…

Go take a look and get them while they’re available.

Finally, I want to wish happy birthday to my copywriting friends Ray Edwards (whose birthday is tomorrow), and Dr. Harlan Kilstein, who turns 50 today.

Yup, the big 5-0.

(Harlan, I may be turning 40 next month. But with your recent achievements in fitness and weightloss, you look not only great but also younger than me! I feel like I’m the one who’s turning 50 and you’re the one who’s 40 30!)

Anyway, happy birthday to both!

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• Free! The Internet Business Manifesto
• Want A Sticky Site? Forget Content!
• This Ageless Classic Is A Must-Read
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KaChing Tank is kicking off in just a few days and these guys are in for some crazy times.

(So are you, dear reader. Stay tuned …)

If you create Killer Marketing Tools (software, etc.), we want it.

Here’s the deal: you provide the tool and the Tankers will kick it around.  If it works well, they’ll give you a ton of free publicity.  If it doesn’t, we’ll just keep our mouths shut (so no risk to you).

The “how” of the free publicity will be apparent quite quickly once the Tank launches.

If it becomes something the Tankers use on a regular basis, you just have to promise to provide a copy for each of the new tankers that come in.  A small price to pay for a mountain of free publicity.

So, post your shameless self-promotion in the comments section below, Mr. Wizard.

And if you’re not Mr. Wizard, but know him, feel free to make a recommendation for him in the comments as well and pass this post on to him.

Many copywriters, both new and experienced, struggle with how much to charge their clients. In fact, it is a problem that many in the service industry face.

The dilemma?

Charge too little and you risk losing credibility in the eyes of your customers and potential clients. Additionally, the quality of your work, even if it is worth 100 times what they paid for it, will be seen as having diminished value.

Worst of all, when you charge too little, you may begin to resent the project, the client, or even your chosen profession.

In short, charging too little doesn???t do anyone any good, least of all you.

On the other hand, if you charge too much you run the risk of losing a potential client. You may lose out on opportunities to work with clients who could open doors and provide you and your business with an abundance of work.

The solution?

Olympic Factor Pricing

Athletes in the Olympics have the opportunity to win one of three awards: the bronze medal, the silver medal, and the coveted gold medal.

That???s how your pricing should work, too. When a customer requests a quote, you present them with a comprehensive package that includes three levels of pricing.

Here’s an example (and it’s only one example, so change it to fit your skillsets and services):

The Gold Level

This level includes all the bells and whistles. The “premium package,” if you will. You offer everything they???re asking for and more.

If they want a salesletter written from scratch, you write it but also provide them with the optin copy, order form copy, and confirmation page copy. You can also provide design elements, layout suggestions, and formatting, too.

(Make sure to denominate all these elements in your package, even add estimated values for each one. The object is to make the client understand that these add-ons are extras, have intrinsic value on their own, and are included in the Gold package only.)

This Gold Level pricing also includes the highest quoted fee of your three offers.

The Silver Level

This level includes basically what the customer has asked for and generally fits into your “standard copywriting package.” You also charge a bit less than the Gold level pricing but still more than the bronze level quote.

For example, it can be writing the salesletter copy (and only the salesletter), with some formatting and basic design suggestions. And just as with the Gold, you denominate each element in this package.

The Bronze Level

This is your barebones and least expensive offer. Perhaps it’s writing just the main copy and that’s it. Perhaps it’s rewriting existing copy. Or perhaps it’s critiquing it and giving the client a list of actionable suggestions to improve it.

No bells. No whistles. No extras.

However, don’t underquote, here. There is a possibility that your client will choose this level and you don???t want to be in a situation where you???re resenting the work and the client.

Why Three Levels Of Pricing?

When you educate your client on the value of your work, you give them something to compare to. Something concrete. Something they can chew on.

Instead of just having a dollar amount, he now has a concept of what that value is worth. Because he’s not comparing your price against another copywriter’s price. He’s comparing one of your services against another.

In reality, you are creating not only higher perceived value but also higher intrinsic value. In other words, you’re boosting the perceived value not only of your services but also of the Gold package itself.

A good example is the price of gasoline.

If you tell me to choose which gas to put into my car with the following options (and since I’m Canadian, I’m using metric examples, here):

Premium Gas: $1.10 a liter
Better Gas: $1.03 a liter
Regular: $0.99 a liter

The only logical choice is to choose the cheapest solution because price is my only metric. However, if you tell me I have the choice of:

Premium Gas: $1.10 a liter
Has 94 octane (which means it burns better and more efficiently), cleans the engine as it burns, contains less pollutants, includes gasline antifreeze for the winter months, and perhaps includes a discount on car wash with 25 liters purchased.

Better Gas: $1.03 a liter
Has 89 octane, less pollutants, comes with free coffee at coffee bar with a minimum of 15 liters purchased.

Regular: $0.99 a liter
Has 85 octane.

This way, I know why the higher one has more value (not just higher price), and why the cheaper one is, well, cheap. You???ve given me more information to appreciate the value, as well as more information to compare each other with.

The same holds true for your copywriting services.

The Olympic factor gives your customers not only a choice but also a basis for comparison, and it increases the perceived value of your offer overall. Your Gold offer has the highest perceived value, and your Bronze offer, the lowest.

Which offer will your client choose?

When I used to teach marketing at a local college, I taught my students about a concept called the “price-quality continuum.” Meaning, people will either choose a product based on where it is in this continuum.

Whether it’s the low-end of the continuum (i.e., lowest price), the high-end (i.e., the highest quality), or somewhere in between, people buy according to what they feel is aligned with their values, desires, and goals.

With only one option, you serve only one type of customer at the expense of the other. But offer more than one, and you have the ability to cater to a wider spectrum of buying behaviors.

Doing so, you???ll likely find that the majority will go for the Silver (middle) option. These folks want the best of both worlds: good quality at a reasonable price.

However, many will choose the Gold level because a lot of people will want the best there is. Those are the quality seekers on the price-quality continuum.

Yet some people will, without a doubt, go for the cheapest solution. They are the deal seekers. But if they do, they do so with the full knowledge that they are getting less.

And that’s the key!

The real beauty of the Olympic factor pricing strategy is that it also stops the grinding away process after your service has been rendered.

Your customers won’t complain (most won’t, anyway) because, buttressed with the higher one when they made the choice, they know that, if they didn’t get more, they should have chosen the higher one to begin with.

It puts the onus and the responsibility of the decision — and the end result — firmly in their hands. Not yours.

The End Result

By incorporating this Olympic Factor Pricing strategy into your business, you???ll find a number of clients choose your Silver level package and be quite happy with it because you???ve educated them on the value of your work.

You will sell more of the Silver package, which is your standard offer anyway, because they don’t need to shop around. You’ve done that for them.

Plus, you???ll be able to demand and justify higher fees, and your clients will be more content with their decision and the price they paid for your work.

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Related Articles at The Michel Fortin Blog:

• Break Through Writer’s Block
• I’m Deeply Saddened
• No Such Thing As A Starving Copywriter
• Is Copywriting a Masculine Skill?
• Studying Roots? Or Picking Fruits?
• Lowball Puts You Behind The Eight Ball
• Gary Halbert And Michel Fortin… Part Deux
• Email Mini-Makeover Case Study
• The Success Doctor is 10 Years Old!
• Slapping Salesletters Together Slaps Back

Thanks for being patient with me. I haven’t posted in a while because of something that happened last week.

You see, my blog was hacked (not by a person but with malicious code that creeped into my blog), and as a result I was blocked by Google. I’m sure you’ve heard about it, as people talked about the news.

How did it get blocked?

Whenever my site(s) came up in Google, there was a “this site may harm your computer” warning. And when people clicked on my link, it lead them to a Google error page preventing people from accessing my site.

Apparently, Google checks its indexed pages against a database of “known offenders” (at StopBadware.org, which is similar to many IP blacklists for spam), and turned all my listings on Google to unreachable.

So my site wasn’t banned. But the worse part was, Google not only blocked my site but also displayed a dire warning that my site was malicious! (You can only imagine what kind of damage this can cause to someone’s reputation.)

But that’s not all…

To fix this, I had to jump through several hoops. Of course, the first of which was to remove the hacked or “malicious” code.

But this wasn’t an easy task.

The problem was, since I used a plugin called “Bad Behavior” with my WordPress blog, the plugin, which identified it on IP blacklists as well, prevented me from accessing my own site — including my admin control panel!

So, not only I couldn’t make the changes I had to make to get reinstated, but also I couldn’t disable the bad behavior plugin to allow myself access to my own admin panel.

It’s all straightened out now, thank goodness! But it took me and my staff several days, and a lot of back and forth with the powers that be, to get unlisted from IP blacklists and such.

(Thanks for waiting for me.)

Here’s how I resolved it.

First of all, I had to disable the plugins using phpMyAdmin, which gave me direct access to my database. Then, I had to manually upload via FTP the files that were “cleaned” of the malicious code.

After that, I had to upgrade my blog to the latest version of WordPress (i.e., version 2.3.1), and update and reactivate all my plugins, too. (I also had to re-customize a lot of the code that was tailored for my blog.)

Next, I had to submit a manual review request to StopBadware.org. Problem is, it doesn’t block entire domains like Google does. I had to manually submit a review request for each and every page that was blacklisted!

(Since the code appeared on my sidebar, well, you can do the math.)

Then, I went to Google’s Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster Tools is a fantastic service, which allows you to manually submit sitemaps to be crawled. What’s neat, though, is the fact that this service comes with tutorials, and, of course, displays any warnings about your site.

In fact, there’s a feature that allows webmasters to request manual reviews by Google. In my case, I used it to ask Google to verify that my site was clean, to unblock it from its search engine results, and to remove the warnings.

In about 48 hours, everything went back to normal. Whew!

Now, some people have told me there’s quite some controversy about this, including talk on a blog by Google’s own Matt Cutts, where a lot of people are complaining of false positives.

Personally, I think this is a great feature because I hate visiting blackhat sites that cause havoc on my computer. Problem is, it’s still relatively new (about a year now).

Perhaps my site was a false positive, too. I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.

But here’s what seems weird in all this…

The code that had any semblance of being malicious (according to some examples on Matt Cutt’s blog) was javascript code for displaying ads with links.

(I wasn’t selling links. The links were from a non-PPC ad network, which I’m told did not violate Google’s guidelines.)

What I’m not sure about is, was the code itself the culprit or frowned upon by Google? Or was the code used to hack the blog and ended up being truly malicious after all?

I’ll probably never know.

But since the code was from an ad vendor, which displayed paid links on my blog, the question is, was the violation based on the presumption that I was selling links?

Here’s why I ask myself this question.

When I checked with StopBadware.org, the blacklist site against which Google made its determination, the manual review process asked that you enter a statement, which said something to the effect of…

“I have removed the code, and links to other sites, that violate StopBadware’s guidelines. I believe that my site no longer hosts malware or links to sites that violate these guidelines.”

What caught me by surprise was the statement, “links to other sites.”

What surprised me even more was that I received a warning about my site being blocked, directly from Google, only 24 hours later. Funny though, because once I could access my site, and while I was still being blocked by Google, my blog was still displaying Google AdSense ads.

(Again, I don’t know. Perhaps my friend blog expert Andy Beard may have some clues or something to say about this.)

For now, here’s my suggestion to you…

If you’re running any older versions of WordPress, upgrade to 2.3.1 as soon as possible. Second, if you’re going to use javascript in your blog, try to make it pull from an external file — like a .js file — instead of actual script code.

And don’t use Bad Behavior. Stick with Akismet or SpamKarma plugins. According to my host engineer, the Bad Behavior script is still very buggy.

To be candid, this disappointed me, because I loved Bad Behavior. It stopped spam and hack attempts from bots. And I virtually had any comment spam or spammers trying to register as blog users.

But apparently, the script has its flaws, too.

Finally, do have a Google Webmaster Tools account to submit your sitemaps. Sure, you don’t really need it. But it’s good to have, even if it’s just to know when errors are preventing the Googlebot from crawling your site.

Above all, don’t be shy to ask for a manual review when you need to.

By the way, a HUGE “thank you!” to all the people who notified me about this, helped me with screenshots and such, and given me some of the pointers and steps I listed above. You know who you are.

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Related Articles at The Michel Fortin Blog:

• Bye Movable Type! Hello WordPress…
• Web 2.0 Copywriting Workshop Pre-Announcement
• RSS Feed And MyBlogLog Community
• Five Things You Don’t Know About Me
• Boost Exposure With These Tips And Plugins
• Break Through Writer’s Block
• Should I Merge My Newsletter And Blog?
• Helpful Hints for Writing
• Turn Your Multimedia Into Money Machines
• Copywriting Productivity Tools

Just a little note to let you know that I’m in Raleigh, North Carolina all week, as I’m recording a new product with my friend Armand Morin on blogging.

We literally go step by step through the process of setting up a blog, adding all the plugins, tweaking it, driving traffic to it, and of course, monetizing it properly.

I will return next week, and have a few new articles for you. In the meantime, did you check out my coaching program? A few openings are left. At least take a moment to read it. There are some great copy lessons in there, too!

(I also added a few extra pictures, including one of me playing my new drumset — like the photo at top of this post, which was taken at my 40th birthday party gig in a local watering hole in Ottawa, Ontario.)

Click here for the complete details.

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Related Articles at The Michel Fortin Blog:

• How to Craft Cash-Creating Climactic Copy
• Killing Time Can Be Therapeutic
• John Carlton And Michel Fortin
• Rotting The Basket
• My Name is Michael, I Got a Nickel…
• Nothing Can Take The Place of Persistence
• If Long Copy Stinks, Think Soap
• Answers To Questions, As Promised
• Email Mini-Makeover Case Study
• Risk-Reversal’s Role Reversal