Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
May 28, 2009
Issue #483
Dear Business-Builder,
The great investor Warren Buffet has a net worth of about $62 billion. That’s sixty-two thousand million dollars.
If your net worth is $10 million, Warren is 6,200 times richer than you.
If you’re worth $1 million, he has 62,000 times more money than you do.
If your net worth is $100,000, Mr. Buffet is 620,000 times richer than you are.
There are people whose businesses grow a hundred, maybe even a thousand times or more faster than yours does. For every new customer you attract, they attract 100, 1,000, maybe even 10,000 or more.
There are people who look, feel and perform ten, twenty, even thirty years younger than you do …
Who have far greater success in love and relationships (OK – maybe just in sex) than you do …
Who live better for less, have greener lawns, clearer skin, more hair, thinner waists and smaller butts, better-behaved or more successful kids, more friends or are more successful in some other area of life than you are.
Sorry – but you know it’s true. And no, I’m not trying to depress you – just trying to make a very important point.
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
May 14, 2009
Issue #59
Two real life case histories that prove
only savvy marketers are fit
to run growth-oriented companies
Dear Business-Builder,
It’s so predictable, you can set your watch by it …
Armed with only a skeleton staff, meager resources and big dreams, an eager young entrepreneur slaves 60, 80, and often 100 hours every week for years to grow his business.
He does everything right: He develops or acquires top-notch products. Watches overhead like a hawk. Reinvests every penny of profit. Becomes a student of great marketing and sales copy strategies – and a past master at implementing winning campaigns.
When it comes to sales copy, he never pulls a punch. He goes for the jugular – as far as the law and his ethics will allow – demonstrating the value his products bring to customers’ lives with edgy, can’t-put-‘em-down promotions:
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
April 22, 2009
Issue #657
In this issue:
- Why almost everybody marketing online today has targeting wrong, wrong, wrong …
- An innocent little mistake that once corrected, instantly spikes the response to virtually any webpage …
- How to determine the intent of Web searchers who insist on using “ambiguous” keywords — so you can sharpen your message-to-market match and grow your business faster …
- And more!
Dear Web Business-Builder,
When Gene Schwartz wrote Breakthrough Advertising, back in the 60’s, the Internet was just a glimmer in some computer scientist’s eye.
Little could Gene have realized the massive implications this new media would have for the craft he loved so dearly and plied with such mastery.
Yet, most of what Gene wrote in that watershed book is just as applicable in today’s fast moving wired-world as it was then in the cumbersome days of typewriters and typesetting.
Some of what Gene had to say is even more applicable today than it was then. The chapters on market awareness and sophistication in particular …
Gene observed that different states of market awareness and sophistication required markedly different approaches to copywriting.
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Posted by:
Clayton Makepeace
March 16, 2009
Issue #630
Why polls and focus groups
may be the best way ever invented
to spring to the worst conclusions
about what your prospect wants …
And the ONLY way to get the answers
that will actually rocket your response.
Dear Business-Builder,
You’ve just helped me a great deal. You couldn’t have known you were helping me, but you did anyway and I’m grateful.
Over the past year or so, nine or ten of the more than 600 articles in our archives have addressed this economic crisis – a situation that was about to affect and still is impacting your ability to succeed.
At first, I simply offered advice to help you prepare your business and your family for the great economic crisis I saw brewing. Later, hoping that learning what caused this crisis might help us avoid repeating it, I tracked the blunders that put our nation and our world in this precarious situation.
That meant each of these articles had plenty of political content. I spared nobody in Washington; laying the blame for our current economic crisis squarely at the feet of villains in both parties.
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Posted by:
Daniel Levis
December 10, 2008
Issue #564
Dear Web Business-Builder,
Staying abreast of what’s happening in the world right now is a double-edged sword for us marketers.
On the one hand, keeping your finger on the pulse of your market is crucial to “operation money-suck.”
On the other, it can become a dangerous diversion that seeps poverty consciousness into your noggin.
You need to choose your perspective wisely …
And that means remaining a dispassionate observer, personally immune to the perverse mental masturbation that captivates the masses, in times like these.
In the foyer of the communal office space where I hatch my evil marketing plots to rule the world, hangs a huge flat screen TV tuned to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for you foreigners).
It’s all news, all of the time … one economic doomsday scenario after another. There is another TV in the interior of the complex tuned to the same channel. And all day long the banter rages on like a bad horror movie.
On the radio, bubble-heads babble nonstop. In my in-box, Chicken Littles’ galore accost me with their inane yak. Even the water cooler gossip is filled with idiotic blather about the economy.
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