STEPHEN J. CARTER | Direct Response Copywriter

One fairly effective approach to writing engaging Facebook advertisements is to tell a story.

By engaging I mean the advertisement succeeds at getting the reader to click through to your offer to learn more about it.

By story I just mean some narrative which attempts to disguise the fact that, first and foremost, this is a direct response Facebook ad – meaning that the primary goal is to have the reader click through.… read the full article

This article is for anyone who loathes the idea of having to provide email support to customers. In particular, because one or more expected email messages has failed to turn up in the customer’s email inbox and they need the missing message(s) resent.

Let’s suppose, for instance, that you have built a membership program. To guide your members through the program you send them one pre-written message every week.… read the full article

Every once in a while I end up doing something a little crazy.

At the very least, I tend to have a hard time convincing others that there is any need at all to devote time to my newly-prioritized task.

The latest had me writing a program to parse a list of 65,534 domains names in order to determine which ones were registered, and therefore perhaps were being used to host a website.… read the full article

Years ago I was involved in helping to prepare copy for an online summit. The event turned out to be poorly attended, and basically a disaster, which is not atypical for online summits.

As a reminder, or in case this type of event has managed to pass you by, a summit is a hosted series of “talks” with supposedly distinguished personalities who all share some common interest.… read the full article

Once in a while you will be unexpectedly reminded of an email you wrote because a reader hits the reply button and brings an issue to your attention.

Like a broken link.

That’s how I rediscovered the following email written to promote an anti-aging product. After pondering the message contained within the reader desperately wanted to get a look at the sales letter but the poor fellow could not get the sales page to load.… read the full article

I would say it is almost impossible to avoid having to promote weight loss products if you are involved in any kind of personal health business.

This is because body weight, especially too much of it, plays an important role in general health and in particular with respect to the progression of disease.

People already know what to do to lose weight in terms of eating better and spending more time being physically active.… read the full article

Lead generation typically involves giving a prospect a free resource in exchange for their email address and the chance to ply them with arguments as to why they should become a customer of yours.

For the Ageless Brain promotion I ended up creating three of the resources we use as lead magnets.

Of those three, only the last one I am about to discuss directly focused on an aspect of brain health that would be immediately recognizable as such.… read the full article

As part of the discovery process for promotional angles for the Ageless Brain program I do end up checking out my fair share of brain science studies. Especially those publications dealing with the results of small-scale human clinical trials.

In particular, I pay attention to studies which look at the mitigating effects of certain natural foods or extracts on age-related cognitive impairment.… read the full article

How do you convince complete strangers that you’re the kind of person who can trusted to sell them something?

Something that won’t make them regret their decision to take a chance on you?

Simple. You get them to know, like, and trust you. Then you pitch them.

This is standard direct response doctrine. And one of the best ways to go about it is to get these complete strangers onto your newsletter and send them a sequence of messages containing the kind of material that will help them to gradually come to “know, like, and trust” you.… read the full article

Recently I set out to write a short series of emails to promote the fish oil supplement from Real Dose Nutrition.

As always, that means I do research to find what is unique about the product and what is essential about it from the point of view of the prospect.

Likewise, I am always on the lookout for the story I am unfamiliar with because it is likely to be a story the prospect is also unfamiliar with.… read the full article