Sunday, 4:24pm
Reno, NV
“… keep your hands offa my stash…” (Pink Floyd)

Howdy…

Let’s talk about money.

Do you have enough?

Do you know how much “enough” is, for you?

Most folks are pretty clueless about moolah.  They desire it, they fear it, they respect and hate and love it… and they assign all kinds of magical powers to it.

So here are a couple of observations… from a dude who’s been broke, been rich, and seen the awesome potential as well as the destructive nightmares that money can wield:

Big Damn Observation #1: Money really can’t buy you happiness.

But you know what?  It’s still more fun to find this out for yourself, rather than take someone’s word for it.

For me, it was well worth keeping this nugget of wisdom on a note tacked to my office wall.  Because happiness was definitely on my wish list of life-long goals… but so was success.

So I kept track as I moved up the socio-economic ladder from slacker, to decently-paid freelance writer, to obscenely-paid “A List” professional.

And guess what?

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Monday, 7:55pm
Reno, NV
“But it’s all right… in fact it’s a gas…” (The Stones, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash“)

Howdy…

Nobody’s ever asked me to give the commencement speech for a graduating class.

That’s probably a good thing.  I’m pretty pissed off at the education system these days, and I might cause a small riot with the rant I’d surely deliver.

See, I have a university “education”.  A BA in psychology.  (The BA stands for, I believe, “bullshit amassed”.)  I earned it several decades ago…

… and while I had a good time in college (height of the sex revolution, you know, with a soundtrack that is now called “classic rock”), made some lifelong friends, and got a good look at higher learning from the inside…

… that degree provided zilch preparation for the real world.  Didn’t beef me up for any job, didn’t give me insight to how things worked, didn’t do squat for me as an adult.

I waltzed off-campus and straight into the teeth of the worst recession since the Depression (Nixon’s post-Vietnam wage-freeze, record unemployment, gas-lines, near-total economic turmoil)…

… so, hey, I should have a little empathy for today’s grads, right?

Naw.

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Thursday, 11:49pm
Reno, NV
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?” (Talking Heads,”Psycho Killer”, ca. 1979)

Howdy.

Quick lesson today, which should help you understand one of the fundamental truths of kick-ass marketing.

That truth: There is almost always a way to fix or solve a marketing problem.

Actually, that truth is also functional in every-day life…

… but that’s a much longer lesson.

Here’s the quickie version, for marketers: I was just delivering this story in one of the Simple Writing System classrooms, and thought I’d share with you here, too.

As any decent marketer knows, the Prime Directive of a sales process is to discover your best possible prospect… and “reach” him with your sales message.

Seems simple enough.  Sometimes, it is.  If you’re selling hamburgers near a starving crowd, you’re set. Just open your doors and tell folks to line up.

For a while (back in the Good Old Days of Internet marketing), all you had to do was:

Step One: Be the first into a hot niche…

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Thursday, 8:06pm
Reno, NV
“Here come Johnny Yen again…” (Iggy Pop, “Lust For Life”)

Howdy…

Oh, my God!

They killed the sales letter again!

Will this horror never stop?

Actually, you can relax.  Just like Kenny in South Park, the traditional sales letter is on some kind of perverse “Permanent Hit List”…

… where every marketer trying to claim he just invented a new fad stands astride the image of a quaking letter…

… and slays it.

Huzzah! Death to you, vile long-copy sales letter!  Take that… and that…

… and that.

This latest round is clever as hell, too.  The new trend is putting your sales letter in a video, and reading along with it.

The irony:  The dude selling you the “Magic Box” product that kills the sales letter forever…

… uses a sales letter to do the killing.

Hey — don’t get me wrong.  I love video.  Been using it in marketing since… well, since it was actual videotape on reels.  (Yeah, shocking, I know.  We were so backward in the last century.)

In fact, the “Magic Box” product I’m talking about is, I’m guessing, an excellent solution for many marketers who can’t figure out how to make a video sales letter work.

And all’s fair in love, war and advertising.  So all the dudes out there telling you the sales letter is dead, and you can sell without selling, and the Web has changed everything…

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Monday, 3:29pm
Reno, NV
“You’re either on the bus, or off the bus…” (Ken Kesey)

Howdy…

Quick lesson here I thought you’d enjoy.

The phrase “there are two kinds of people” is used by comics, politicians, and just-plain-folks trying to set up a point with an easily-understood little story.

It’s an over-simplification, most of the time, of course.  Life is too nuanced and complex to fit into just two tidy categories.

However, sometimes you can make a damn good argument behind the two-groups thing.

In selling, this is what we’ve called “the dichotomy of futures”…

… meaning, you can make two distinctly clear divisions:

1.) The “in” group, which is your target market…

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