Marketing — and especially copywriting — is the awesomest job in the world. (Well, unless you suck. In which case, you’ll be really poor.)

In marketing and copywriting, you can change the future. You can alter people’s perceptions, change their behaviour, and make them do things they had no intention of doing before being in contact with you or your words. (Kind of like a cult leader in that way, come to think about it. I’m changing my passport occupation to “cult leader”. So much cooler.)

Anyway, I was on IM with another copywriter I know. She’s working on a campaign right now for a company that makes confections. She’s working on taglines. What kind of confections, you ask?

Whipped cream, baby. Read More

August 8th Update: As of today, SEO School is no longer available for purchase. Read about legitimizing scarcity in marketing for why.

So, yeah. Hi.

There’s this guy called Brian Clark. He writes a blog called Copyblogger. You might have heard of it.

He wrote a review of Ninja SEO School. Um, I’m pretty stoked.

Since everybody knows that everything you read on A-List blogs is true, now you can safely buy my book and know it’s not shit. If it’s good enough for Copyblogger, it’s good enough for you.

In related news, the aforementioned Ninja SEO School is going off the shelves tomorrow night at midnight EST. (OK, fine. Who am I kidding? Nobody in this house is going to be in any condition to be taking down sales pages tomorrow night at midnight. You’ve probably got till at least 3 AM. Count your lucky stars we’re alcoholics.) Read More

Right now, Jamie is playing a PlayStation game called Black. Judging by the cover — and honey, when it comes to video games, you can ALWAYS judge by the cover — I’m going to assume it has to do with shooting stuff.

Black is rated M-17, which means it’s only for adults. Since it involves shooting stuff, we can also assume males would be the primary players of this game. Therefore, on paper anyway, Black’s rough target demographic is adult men who own video game consoles. My husband is an adult. He is a man. He owns a video game console. Cool, huh?

(To be fair, their target demographic is a lot more detailed than that and Jamie is probably about ten years older than Black’s perfect customer, but three out of four ain’t bad. )

Black, like many combat style video games, is arranged by mission. A mission is similar to a level. When you get to the end of the mission — as in, you got through it and didn’t die — you save. Then you can either continue playing or quit until next time.

Unlike many video games, though, in Black, you can ONLY save when you’re done your mission. Not a moment before. And the missions are an hour and a half long. Let me tell you how much I love this. Read More

Once upon a time, I wrote a post about the monetary benefits of having a financial cushion. And I agree with myself. From a purely money standpoint, you’re an idiot if you don’t have at least something tucked away for when all your clients die of smallpox.

But that’s the money part of it. What about business wise? As in, business growth-wise? From that angle, I don’t know if it’s the best idea. Here’s why. Read More