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  • 5 Ways To Avoid Overbooking Your Copywriting Schedule

    By Michael | June 11, 2010

    Greetings,

    Yes, I’ve overbooked myself before. I’ve done it more than once. You’d think I’d learned after the first time I did but I didn’t. It took my second round to accidently overbooking myself to learn my lesson.

    It started out innocently enough. I had two projects already on my schedule for the month. Two new clients wanted to hire me. I offered to start their projects the next month. They wanted it sooner. They asked if they paid more if I’d move them up in the line. I countered by asking for 50% more, figuring that they would say no. You can imagine my surprise when they both agreed to pay alot more money to get a quick start date.

    That month I worked my butt off. Every spare moment I could come up, I was writing copy for those clients. I didn’t have a day off the entire month. My family wound up having to do a number of family things without me because I needed the time to try to catch up on the projects.

    By the end of the month, I felt completely wiped out. Worse, partway through the month, one of my forearms cramped up. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to uncramp. About two months later, I finally was forced to take a week off from doing lots of typing just to break the pain/muscle cramping cycle.

    Since then, I’ve learned my mistakes. There’s only been one instance since where I was booked so tightly and those clients did so with the understanding that I would deliver the best possible sales copy I could but I would not guarantee the delivery date.

    Here’s my 5 quick tips that have made a world of difference.

    I use these every day to help give my schedule some sanity and structure. Feel free to try any or all of them in your copywriting business.

    1. Hire a part-time babysitter.

    I started out with a few hours each week and as my business grew, added more hours of babysitting. Now I have babysitting coverage 20-25 hours weekdays so I don’t have to work exclusively nights & weekends. Just factor your babysitting costs in to your project bids.

    2. A project isn’t booked on my schedule until I have received the client’s deposit.

    If it’s a check, I wait until it clears my bank to finalize the bookings. The longer they take to pay their deposit, the further in line they wind up.

    I once had a client send me an unsigned check. I sent it back to him with a note saying his project wouldn’t be booked or started until I received his payment. He sent me a new check and during that delay, 2 other clients booked with me. You can imagine his shock when I told him it would be a month later start time because two others had paid while I was waiting for his payment.

    After that, he paid in full upfront to ensure his booking spot.

    3. Overestimate the time you need to complete a project, then work on delivering it early without sacrificing the quality of your work.

    By overestimating the time I need, I’ve been able to work around deaths in the family, my son’s birth, my wife’s major car accident in 2008r, and countless other things that threw scheduling roadblocks in the way. I still meet the client’s deadline because I hadn’t lost time to the unexpected or unavoidable incidents in life.

    4. Guard your time against time vampires.

    That’s a Dan Kennedy term, not mine. I highly recommend you read his No B.S. book on Time Management. Case in point: I RARELY talk to prospects on the phone about their project. It’s WAY too easy for a 10 minute call to balloon into an hour if you’re not careful. Everything initially is done by email. Paying clients get my office phone number. VIPs get my mobile number as well.

    99% of the calls I take or do are by appointment. It’s a lot easily to manage that way.

    5. Put your own down time and personal projects into your schedule.

    Not only does it recharge your batteries, but it gives you something different to look forward to. All work and no play will make anybody a grumpy soul eventually.

    Hope that helps,

    Mike

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    Topics: Copywriting - Offline, Copywriting - Online, General Discussion | 2 Comments »

    Long Vs. Short Copy: The Debate Continues

    By Michael | June 11, 2010

    Greetings,

    It’s been awhile since I wrote something on this blog. I’ve been swamped between personal life and business commitments, so please accept my apologies.

    I’m going to make a stronger commitment to writing and posting more often on this blog in 2010, so stay tuned because I have some topics to cover and share!

    One of the most frequently questions I get asked by clients is the same basic one that stirs up raging public forum debates: Does sales letter size matter?

    Well, let me make a very public stand on this debate.

    Ready?

    My answer is… it depends.

    Some stand, huh?

    Let me explain before some readers send me flaming emails.

    Honestly, it depends on the media you are using. If you are writing a product description for a print catalog, space is at a premium. So you need to use very short, powerful copy to do this, often times less than 100 words of text.

    If you are writing a direct mail piece, then there are times where the mailing cost will dictate how much copy you can use. Case in point, I recently wrote an offline direct mail piece that I thought was killer.

    Except that it was 16 pages… 17 pages with the order form included. That would have bumped the mailing costs up by 50% for my client which they wouldn’t approve. I don’t blame them so it was back to the cutting board to get the mailer between 10-15 pages of even tighter copy.

    I think one of the reasons why many copywriters enjoy writing online sales copy so much is space is rarely an issue. Most online sales letters are just one long scrolling webpage and it can be as long as you feel it needs to be.

    Here’s a great example: In August 2004, John Reese’s Traffic Secrets launched using an 80 page sales letter written by Michel Fortin. Now I’ve never asked Michel this directly, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t sit down thinking to himself “I’m bored. Let me write 80 printable pages for this sales letter”.

    Not hardly.

    Michel sat down to write a sales letter to sell a $997 home study product (at the time an unheard of price for a home study info-product for the IM niche) and it took him 80 pages to tell everything that was in the product… include client testimonials… include video demos… and so on. It took him 80 pages to ethically make the sale and in that case, it was 1.08 million dollars in sales for the first 24 hours alone!

    I’ll paraphrase legendary marketer Dan Kennedy, who I think says it even better: “There isn’t too long. Only too boring.”

    If you bore your reader, then the copy is probably too long or need reworking.

    When I sit down to write a sales letter, I deliberately write more copy than I need to ethically sell the product or what the mailing budget is dictating. So if I need a 5 page direct mail letter, I’ll write 6-8 pages. If I think I need 12 pages to sell an ebook, I’ll write 14 or more pages.

    Then I edit ruthlessly to cut out any excess fat. Any text that isn’t carrying its weight or doesn’t help ethically move the prospect towards buying is cut. By the time I take that 6-8 page “draft” and edit it (usually several rounds of editing), it’s 5 pages of copy tighter than a military bootcamp private’s made bed.

    So that’s my take on it. The length of the letter rarely matters. It’s making the sale consistently that does.

    What do you think?

    Until next time,

    Mike

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    Topics: Copywriting - Offline, Copywriting - Online, Direct Response Marketing | No Comments »

    Here’s A Hot Topic: Google SideWiki

    By Michael | September 30, 2009

    Greetings.

    Last week, Google introduced a new toolbar.  In typical Google fashion, it’s made a huge splash… although it’s probably not the type of feedback that they were looking for.

    This new toolbar is called Sidewiki and it gives web browsers the ability to write comments on any website.  Now it doesn’t actually write the comments on the webpage. Instead, they are stored on one of Google’s databases somewhere.  To use an analogy, it’s like someone putting a big sign in front of a retail store without actually entering the store.

    According to Google, the idea is people can post their own “reviews” on different websites based on their experiences. In other words, if they have eaten at a local restaurant, then they can post their experiences on the restaurant’s website for everyone using the SideWiki toolbar to read.

    It’s another variation of social media… a portable interactive forum thread, if you will, on any website on the internet.  Sounds nice in theory but…

    … It creates far more problems than it solves.

    First, any comments posted on a webpage are not viewable by that website owner unless they use Google’s Toolbar.  Comments are open-ended and can be whatever people choose to post.  You can literally see anything from customer reviews to links to porn or spam sites.

    Second, website owners are not being given a choice to opt-out of their websites being “defaced”.  In addition, website owners are being asked to police their own websites to remove or rebuke any harmful, slanderous, or socially unacceptable statements.  That leads into an even bigger problem.

    Third, many online entrepreneurs own more than one website… sometimes it’s dozens of active websites with hundreds of webpages spread across all of them.  This adds a massive amount of work to moderate all of those pages… time-consuming work that would have to be done by the website owner or outsourced to a paid freelancer.

    I wish the bad news ended strictly with website owners… but it doesn’t.

    Since the SideWiki has no parental controls and can be installed on any computer, the opportunity for young children to be exposed to pornographic or spam messages and links, on any websites that they visit, is virtually endless.

    In my opinion, the amount of damage that could be caused by spammers and unethical folks is unlimited by this toolbar… damage to private website owners and to the general public who will be exposed to all types of spam and other junk.

    Think I’m biased? Maybe… but I’m not alone.

    Here are the comments already in Google’s forum about this new tool.  You’ll notice the majority of the commentary is very much against this tool being made available. http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?fid=65cd1ca77affd341000474c9a1a3a04d&hl=en

    Steve Diamond, a very sharp programmer pointed out another problem with SideWiki: Unless Google is paying strict attention to every site’s TOS and licensing, every time they create one of these special URLs they’re stealing an entire site’s content and displaying it under the google.com domain.
    http://www.google.com/sidewiki/entry/103503649576542905957/id/ca2rkl2nFEAHPhoimCLNWNodXI0

    Try the above link. Then click on some internal links in Wikipedia. Works fine, doesn’t it?

    Not exactly. Take a look at your browser’s location bar. It still says http://www.google.com.

    This is a far cry from the short excerpts Google scrapes for display on their search pages. That’s arguably “fair use” and it’s possible for webmasters to opt out via robots.txt placed in their website’s main directory. But this new practice looks awfully like wholesale theft of entire websites to me.

    Personally, as someone who considers himself an ethical online marketer, this toolbar represents a serious threat to my personal and family’s livelihood.  I also view it as potentially harmful to the general public at large.

    Here’s what I suggest: Tell Google what YOU think:
    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Toolbar/thread?fid=65cd1ca77affd341000474c9a1a3a04d&hl=en

    With enough constructive feedback, maybe Google will modify their SideWiki so that no one comes out on the losing end.

    Until next time,

    Mike

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    Topics: General Discussion | No Comments »

    Here’s A Great Success Story

    By Michael | August 15, 2009

    Greetings,

    I want to share with you a story.  It’s a story that is a really great example of where networking and developing relationships can really help open doors for your career.

    It was May of 2007 when I saw a post in an online marketing forum. It was a post for somebody that had an extra ticket for an Internet marketing seminar called JV Alert that they were looking to sell.  Since JV Alert was in the Philadelphia area that year and I live in the Philly suburbs, I was already planning to attend.

    It turns out that jvAlert was running a promotion then that if you signed up early, they’d give you two tickets for the price of one. The problem was, this gentleman wasn’t planning on bringing a guest with him.

    So he had an extra ticket that he couldn’t use. If somebody else could use the other ticket, that would be great.  If he could make back a few bucks that he paid for the tickets initially, that would be even better because money was a bit tight for him at the time.

    So I mentioned to him about a copywriting forum that might be of interest to him, and where he might want to mention the extra ticket for sale.

    The reason being was Michel Fortin, a very famous copywriter, was speaking at JV Alert that year.  I figured there was a good chance that some copywriter would want to see Fortin’s presentation.

    Sure enough, someone on the copywriting forum board saw his note and bought the ticket.

    That guy whose ticket I helped sell, he bought me a beer on the first night of the seminar.  We talked for awhile and the next day I invited him to join a few other friends for a cheesesteak run to the world famous Pat’s Steaks.

    Over lunch, he revealed that he was living in a tiny apartment in Spanish Harlem, and trying to survive on a just as tiny monthly stipend. Before that, he had spent a year in Haiti doing volunteer and humanitarian work.

    Right away, I could tell he was different.  He had a real passion when he talked about copywriting and creating his own infoproducts.  He talked about using his infoproducts sales to help worthy charities get the funds they needed to keep up their great work.

    I started getting a strong gut feeling that this guy might be onto something.  Here was a guy who had a burning desire for success… and still wanted to help those who were less fortunate than him to enjoy a better life.

    Turns out, I was right.

    About a month later, I start hearing that he’s really opening the eyes of the top dogs in the internet marketing field.  He’s got created some great products that are selling like hotcakes.  He’s getting quite a buzz as a copywriter too.

    So we continue to stay in touch by e-mail, even talk by phone at times too. In 2008, he interviewed me for one of his infoproducts… an interview that has generated alot of free publicity for my business.

    He’s continued to do even bigger and more amazing things, to the point where now, I’m happy to tell people that I’m glad I became friends with Brian McElroy long before many people started calling him one of the fastest up-and-coming stars in the online information marketing arena.

    Here are some of the results Brian produced in less than 2 years:

    - Raised $3000 for a local charity simply by running a special offer in the Warrior Forum

    - Generated over half a million dollars in revenue in his FIRST YEAR as a copywriter

    - Made over $34,000 on a product launch from the Amazon rainforest… without internet access!

    - Helped raise over $100,000 for the village where he lived in Haiti

    - Created $156,598.00 in revenue from a brand new niche business… in just 3 months!

    If it sounds like Brian is an amazing person, you would be right.

    In fact, he decided to give back to the online marketing field that has helped him so much… and he’s doing it by offering some free training.

    You can get Brian’s free training here:

    http://michaelhumphreys.com/recommends/BrianInfo

    You’ll discover things like…

    - How Brian went from learning HTML by candlelight to generating over $500,000 in sales in his first year
    as a copywriter

    - How to get paid for everything you do, anytime you want, faster and easier than you ever thought possible!

    - How one successful offer can literally change your life!

    - How to create VALUABLE information products in 24 hours or less… even if you’re NOT an expert!

    This training is still available as I type this email…

    … but I know it’s coming down soon!

    To get access to Brian’s free training, make sure you go
    here now:

    http://michaelhumphreys.com/recommends/BrianInfo

    Enjoy!

    To Your Success,

    Mike

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    Topics: General Discussion, Mental Food | 1 Comment »

    How To Set The Stage For Your Opening Headline

    By Michael | July 31, 2009

    Greetings,

    Many different copywriting experts claim that the most important part of any sales letter is the opening headline. That’s because it is often the first thing that a prospect reads when they see your marketing piece.

    Studies have shown that 70-80% of all readers will decide if they want to read the rest of the sales letter after reading the opening headline.

    Grab their interest with a compelling headline or killer hook and there’s a real good chance that they will keep reading.

    Well, what if there was a way to improve the chances of success for the opening headline?  What if there was a way to literally set the stage so the reader is even more attentive to the opening headline?

    The good news is you can do exactly that using a copywriting element called a pre-headline.

    You see, a pre-headline, or prehead for short, is found before the opening headline.  Its job is to set the stage for the opening headline. To use a football analogy, it’s like a perfectly thrown pass by the quarterback to a receiver standing the end zone: right into the receiver’s hands for the touchdown.

    You can use your preheadline as a lesser opening headline that leads into the opening headline. That takes some practice and usually a good amount of headline brainstorming to get it right.

    So I’m going to share with you an easy way to craft a prehead to do exactly what you want and that’s to lead into the opening headline.

    The easiest way is to use your opening headline to identify who your target prospect or prospects might be.

    Let me give you an example.  Here’s the preheadline for a sales letter I wrote selling a How To Get Government Grants product:

    Attention Students, Loan Seekers, and Entrepreneurs who need more money for their personal (or business) projects…

    Notice how I’ve identified the ideal prospects for this product.  I’ve also identified one of their biggest reasons for being interested in government grants — they need more money for their personal or business projects.

    I use an ellipse (3 dots closely set together in a row or ALT 0133 on your keyboard) to subtly tell the reader that the message continues.

    Let’s see what I used for an opening headline:

    Free Money Expert Swears Under Oath
    That His Never Revealed Before Secrets
    Lets Almost Anyone Legally Steal* Money!

    My opening headline then tells my targeted and identified prospect a big benefit: an insider’s scoop on how to get the grants they want.

    Try adding a prehead to your salesletters. I’m sure you’ll be happy with the results.

    To Your Success,

    Mike

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    Topics: Copywriting - Offline, Copywriting - Online | 4 Comments »

    Your Mid-Year Business Check-up

    By Michael | June 30, 2009

    Greetings,

    I was straightening up my desk today and happened to look at my desk calendar.  That was when I realized that 2009 is almost halfway over.

    I quickly did a mental review of the goals I set for this year.  A few of them I had already achieved.  I’m on pace to meet some additional ones before years-end.  There’s also a few goals that I’m miles away from reaching this year.

    The goals that you have already achieved can be a tremendous confidence booster. So can the ones that you can honestly say you’re on track to reaching.

    It’s the ones that you set the bar too high that can really squash your spirits… if you let them.

    Many people will automatically put themselves down for missing the mark… that’s why the cliche “I am my own worst enemy” holds a lot of truth for them.

    That’s a huge mistake!

    Tearing yourself down will only knock your self-confidence even lower and make it much more difficult to achieve all of your goals.

    Instead, take the time to reassess each goal that looks like you won’t meet this year.

    Ask yourself these questions:

    1) Did I set an unrealistic goal? If so, readjusting the goal to a more realistic level could be a great decision to make.

    2) Did something happen that was out of my control and prevented me from reaching my goal? Don’t put the blame on yourself for missing a goal if it wasn’t your fault.  Sometimes life truly does hand us lemons.  It’s best to acknowledge that something happened that was out of your control.

    Let me give you a great example.

    When 2008 started, I had set a big goal for my personal income.  My consulting and info-product businesses were doing very well, so I honestly felt I had a really good chance to have my best year ever financially.

    That was before my then-pregnant wife was in a really bad car accident in March. Then she gave birth to our son in May.  The good news is both of them are completely fine.

    Unfortunately, I had to massively cut down my work load for almost 5 months to help my wife care for our children and assist her recovery.  That meant I had literally no shot of reaching my big yearly goal.  While I felt “bad” about missing my big goal, I quickly dismissed the bad feelings because I knew I did the right thing by being there for my wife and children during their time of need.  After all, it wasn’t my fault that some idiot slid his car across the highway and in front of my wife’s Honda Odyssey.  It wasn’t my fault that his recklessness caused a major accident that totaled both vehicles and could have killed several people, including the idiot driver.

    This was truly something that happened that was 100% out of my control so I made the best of a bad situation.  Truth be told, my family means more to me than making any amount of money in the world.  I was actually more upset about my loved ones being hurt by someone else than my big goal being placed out of my reach.

    3) What can I do or do differently to reach that goal? Ask yourself: is it a matter of needing more information or a better strategy to reach your goal?  If it’s needing more information, then start looking for that information.

    If it’s a matter of strategy, then take 30 minutes and sit down in a quiet place and brainstorm.  You’ll be surprised by the number of great ideas or even a step-by-step plan your mind will produce.

    In closing, I’d like to encourage you to use the last “half” of 2009 to do your best and reach even more of your goals. Because if you do, it’s a massive confidence builder and a great way to begin 2010!

    Until next time,

    Mike

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    Topics: General Discussion, Mental Food | No Comments »

    Tired of not getting a good conversion rate? Give your sales letter CPR!

    By Michael | May 8, 2009

    If you’re like many online entrepreneurs and small business owners, writing sales copy that converts is not your strong suit.

    To be honest, it’s a skill that I have spent many years studying, learning, practicing, and refining just to get to my current level of expertise.

    Frequently, I find that there’s enough ‘good enough’ copy in an online sales letter to make a good sales letter if certain holes in the copy or layout mistakes are corrected.   While it may not converted as well as something written by a pro copywriter, there’s strong potential to improve the current response rate to a more respectable level.

    Unfortunately, not everyone can afford the four or five figure fee to hire a pro.  That’s why I created a video training series called Sales Letter CPR.

    It’s a complete video training series of a number of quick sales letter “tweaks” you can do to improve your own sales letters.  Best of all, it’s training designed to be reviewed and put into action very quickly.  In fact, most people can make the changes I suggest in each video in less than an hour (some in less than 15 minutes!)

    There’s also a number of six-figure (or more) marketers who I’ve interviewed for this program.

    You can get the full scoop by going here: http://www.saleslettercpr.com

    To Your Success,

    Mike Humphreys

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    Topics: Copywriting - Offline, Testing & Tracking/Conversion Rates | No Comments »

    A simple technique that boosted my conversion rate by 296.73%

    By Michael | April 20, 2009

    One of my secrets to success is that I’m a fairly serious tester of my marketing. During my years as a massage therapy center owner, I started out with doing simple A/B split tests.

    At first, it was just testing different headlines on the same marketing piece. Many times, there was little or no difference but when I did find a new version that converted better, it was often a 25% or more improvement in conversion rates.

    In fact, one headline change on a postcard mailer improved the response rate from approximately 1% to a solid 5% — an awesome 5000% improvement!

    When I started online in 2004, it didn’t take me long to figure out that you could do even more elaborate testing.

    Eventually I discovered multi-variate (sometimes called multi-variable) testing which would allow you to test more than one element on a web page at once.

    That led to a series of blood boiling adventures with different testing tools to find one that I liked and actually worked as advertised.

    Eventually I got so annoyed with it that I hired a programmer to build my own multi-variate testing tool called Easy Multi Tracking. http://www.easymultitracking.com

    Fast forward to the present day. I’ve decided to share one of my recent testing results done on a squeeze page of mine. I’m not going to reveal the location of the squeeze page because I don’t want a bunch of non-targeted prospects hitting the site and causing the current testing I’m doing to become skewed.

    For those of you who might be familiar with the term, a squeeze page is a web page where site visitors can either choose to give you their name & email address to progress further into the site or just leave the site instead.

    It’s an effective way to build an email list of targeted prospects.

    So one of my squeeze pages started out around 10% opt-in rate which is pretty bad but then I started running some tests on it. I tested things like different headlines, graphic signatures, headline colors and so on. Within 6 months, the opt-in rate was up to approximately 55% which is a significant improvement.

    One of my tests on that squeeze page involved graphic callouts. I tested using a graphic callout by the opt-in box versus no graphic callout.

    Here’s an example of using the graphic callout by the opt-in box:

    Callout Test

    My gut feeling was that the graphic callout would produce a higher conversion rate simply because it drew more attention to the opt-in box.

    Of course, relying on your gut feeling is a poor predictor so that’s why I rely on doing multi-variate testing instead.

    I set up a test on the squeeze page where Callout #1A was the control (the opt-in box with a graphic callout) and Callout #1B was the same opt-in box without any graphic callout.

    Well, the results were mind-blowing. I didn’t believe them at first, so I re-ran the test a second time. Rather than tell you what they were… I’m going to show you.

    Callout Test Results

    The graphic callout smoked the non-graphic call-out by a cool 296.73%!

    Now when it comes to graphic design, I’m terrible at it. I’ve hardly ever used the graphic design software that came with Dreamweaver MX2004 and it’s considered one of the better ones out there (Fireworks). So I frequently rely on hiring graphic designers or using ‘out of the box’ graphics, especially for things like testimonial boxes or bullet point graphics.

    That’s why I absolutely love the response-boosting graphics that Mike Capuzzi offers and I frequently recommend to other copywriters & marketers to use them.

    Adding a hand-drawn graphic is an easy response booster and adds a “personal” touch to the copy, almost as if you wrote the words in after the sales letter was finished.

    The good news is, every hand-drawn graphic has been tested by Mike or his customers and proven to boost response rates in both offline and online marketing pieces.

    There’s no guesswork involved. Simply choose the hand-drawn graphics you need and insert them into your offline or online marketing piece.

    If you’re like me, you might do some tweaking to change the size of the graphics or where it’s positioned on the piece but that takes about 30 seconds to do.

    The graphic callout I created and used for the test are part of Mike’s product and they produced almost a 300% increase in response rate for my squeeze page. Each time I’ve used them in my copy for my products or my clients, I’ve seen an increase in response rate too.

    You can get the full scoop on Mike Capuzzi’s product here:

    http://michaelhumphreys.com/recommends/OnlineDoodles

    Until next time,

    Michael

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    Topics: Copywriting - Online, Testing & Tracking/Conversion Rates | 1 Comment »

    Getting Stuff Done Quicker

    By Michael | February 28, 2009

    One of the cool things about my business is that I can work practically anywhere in the world. Sometimes I’m working in my home office. Other times I’m hanging out in my local coffee shop using my laptop.

    For the longest time, I used to carry a paper and pencil daytimer. Then I tried using email to send needed tasks lists to myself from one computer to another.

    I’m happy to say that I found a much better system. Best of all, it’s a web-based one which I can access anywhere called GTD Agenda.

    It’s based on David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done” and it gives you a ton of powerful features like To-Do List, Goals, and more which can be modified in mere mouse clicks fast.

    Best of all, you can try it out for free. Or if you’re like me, I used the free system for about 10 minutes and then immediately grabbed a paid membership for a year. Even that’s a great deal – about $3 per month as I type this.

    Check it out :


    This tool should help simplify things for you and your business.

    Until next time,

    Michael

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    Topics: General Discussion | No Comments »

    Winners of Clayton Makepeace’s Holiday Contest

    By Michael | January 16, 2009

    Last month, Clayton Makepeace ran a contest to help promote his site. Each contestant could choose to create an email, online video (YouTube was recommended), or blog post that told in their own words why people should check out the great free resources on Clayton’s site.

    Just by entering the contest, everyone was given a free prize. I wrote up my entry in about 2 hours and entered the email division. I was happy to help promote Clayton’s site because he offers a ton of great copywriting and marketing information free which has helped many people, including me.

    You can imagine my surprise when I got the email from Clayton’s ezine that I had won the Grand Prize in the email division! Here’s a link to that email which I’ve uploaded on my copywriting site:

    http://www.superbcopywriting.com/Contest%20winners%20revealed!.htm

    Here’s a link to my entry:

    http://www.makepeacetotalpackage.com/wendy-makepeace/urgent-deadline-midnight-tonight.html#comment-8591

    Congrats to the other winners of the contest: Tim and Jen, Dean Kennedy, Jim Rodante, Dan Curriden, and Tian Yan.

    Finally, I want to thank Clayton and his entire staff for doing this contest. They took something that can be hard work (writing copy) and made it fun and for a cause that I’m happy to support (Clayton’s site).

    Until next time,

    Mike

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    Topics: General Discussion | No Comments »

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