I think I’ve found a gold mine here.

I’m a long-time computer consultant who is transitioning to marketing and much of the time I feel like I’m stumbling in the dark.

I know there must be better ways to do what I want to do, but with no training in direct sales, salesmanship, or the technical aspects of marketing, it is a hard nut to crack.

If anyone can recommend good books or resources that will help me understand how to identify and plan a real marketing campaign, I would be very grateful.

I know I can learn it if I can find the best resources.

Today is the first time I’ve been here and I’ll be looking into your other sites and products.

I really enjoyed reading this post.

Act on your dream!

JD

Then I met you for the first time.

It was in San Fransico with Garfinkel and Kilstein in January of this year and I have yet to recover.

I’m not sure exactly what happend over those few days. I don’t know what I THOUGHT I was doing back then, but reality has given me a whole new view.

Since that time I have downloaded every issue of the Rant I can get my hands on - and have read most more than once. I have read nearly every blog post here - I could “listen” to you endlessly, taking pages and pages of notes in the middle of the night. I have joined your Coaching Forum (thank you for that BTW), and I plan to take full advantage of the opportunity.

In short, you seriously have my attention. Kind of like a teacher’s slap up the side of the head.

You can be sure I am grateful for the wake-up call.

Thanks again!

Donna

When I checked out the site — that was worth 30 minutes of laughter and crying it was so funny!

And this post just rocks!
You’ve crammed so many nuggets of good information here you should be charging people to read it. Seriously, there’s more advanced material for copywriters in this single post than in most programs for $197+!

Now if I could only find the Print button… (when are you adding that feature?)

As always, thanks for your insights and sharing the truth for those of us who WANT it and can handle it.

Would you mind putting together a movie, or maybe a cartoon, with like a polar bear… maybe a penguin on a unicycle or something… that’ll really give me the essence of this post in about 20 seconds?

That way I wouldn’t have to read it all… but I could understand exactly what you’re trying to say.

As always, absolutely great post John.

You wrote:

“Apple orchestrated a tsumani of planned articles for a year in advance. Very much the equivalent of a stretched-out long copy ad… using every salesmanship trick in the book.”

Finding the post is synchronicity in action…

Having come back a few weeks ago from Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula workshop in Denver, Heidi and I learned the very same thing by osmosis. Didn’t mean we could articulate it CLEARLY immediately either. But we will be doing so in a testimonial video we’ll be sending him…AND we’ll be referencing the above quote from your post.

Jeff’s examples and explanations triggered the connection between using your sales copy as the template for integrating your storyline, conducting your ASK campaign to find and answer all objections and weave them into the sales letter and storyline (Using “the equivalent of a stretched-out long copy ad” or your web sites planned sales letter) as the basis for a Product Launch Sequence…

It gave a lot of “meat” to the MindJet mindmaps he supplied us, and the amazing one I created during the weekend.

Jeff shared the use of storyline, archetypes (Jeff’s “Reluctant Hero” for example…) and matching the “twists, turns and pivotal moments” of your sales letter to the “”twists, turns and pivotal moments”" of the storyline in your product launch.

It was a real “AHA” moment, but one that has taken time to “metabolize” and “crystalize” into an action plan when writing sales copy, planning a PR campaign, advertising etc when launching a product and/or service.

Your post has helped us to crystalize, confirm and articulate it at a higher level as we transition our off-line legal services for divorced dads business on line at

http://www.fathers-resources.com

as we prepare launching a teleseminar course for those fathers.

It also has helped crystalize what needs to happen as we launch several products and services in another unrelated business - Podcast Marketing at:

http://www.podcast-marketing-center.com

Which is in pre-pre launch, which is why we went to Jeff’s workshop. We’ve decided that this site needs to be our main blog/hub as opposed to what we have so far.

We’ve been fortunate to work with Mike Filsaime on his podcast at

http://www.PodcastwithMike.com

The next installment (Episode 14) utilizes remote recording which we taught Mike who is in Long Island, while we are in Waterford, Ontario Canada. The podcast sounds like we are together in the studio. It comes out next week.

This site is still in the early days of development as we work with our outsourcing team to put the systems in place to fine-tune the site so we can clone it gain again with several others such as Jeff Walker, Ken McArthur, Sylvie Fortin in the initial run. There’s a VERY special pre-sales WEB 2.0 / Podcast Marketing product coming from each of these marketers beginning this fall…

And a big part of that will be creating a system to ” orchestrate a tsumani of planned articles in advance…” as part of our launch systems.

So your post comes at a GREAT time. Thanks so much for sharing your hard earned your wisdom!

Danny Guspie
http://www.podcast-marketing-center.com

Funny thing is, I used to be one of those geeks a long time ago until I finally saw the light.

And until I read your first post (and checked out what those guys were saying), I had totally forgotten what it felt like to hold those old beliefs. Wow.

I think you should do a post on “hate mail” and the like because I remember back when I first started, I wrote a good sales pitch and almost right away started to get an influx of hate mail.

Some examples?

Well, people pretending to be doctors e-mailing me trying to shut me down, people e-mailing me all the time just to tell me how much of a scam they think I am, people calling my house at 3am only to hang up (I later learned never to answer a call that had caller ID blocked), and so on and so on.

All that almost made me want to quit… but I was making more money than I ever had so I pressed on… and I’m glad I did.

I think you should talk about hate mail and stuff like that to give the new people a fresh look at what to expect and how to deal with it.

Now I’m starting a new project and its even more ambitious so I expect the hate mail to come faster and more furious than ever before.