Category Archives: Copywriting Heads Up

Copywriting Interview With Joseph Ratliff, Part II

Here’s part II of my interview with Joseph Ratliff.

What is the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your copywriting business?

That is an excellent question Stephen, and I’ve made only one (LOL, kidding). My biggest mistake was in my early days, I was an “order taker” for my clients. They had a project, and I wrote it…turned it in and got paid.

But if you want to survive as a copywriter, you have to be more than an “order taker.” You have to find a way to help a client in more ways than writing the project they are offering. In other words…

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Copywriting Interview With Joseph Ratliff, Part I

Local marketing is all the rage lately. Strangely enough, I’ve never written copy for someone in my city. The closest was across the river in Portland, OR a handful of times.

So when I got the chance to interview Joseph Ratliff I seized it. I know he has experience working both local and global. And this would give me a chance to share valuable information with you… and pick up a few nuggets myself!

Joseph did not disappoint. Here are my first 5 questions to Joseph and his answers.

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Happy St. Patricks Day, Get Your Pot Of Gold

Every now and then I sign up for one of those “Free Product” giveaways you might hear about.

It goes something like this… give us your email address and we’ll let you download $43,879 worth of Internet marketing training, free!

Most of the products are pretty basic. A lot of them aren’t worth the time it takes to download them much less the “value” arbitrarily given to them.

BUT – sometimes I do like to browse around and get a few different quality titles from amongst the weeds. Yes, they’re basic, but there are plenty of topics that I just want to know the basics before getting started. And these products can do that.

That’s why today I’m browsing around “The Pot Of Gold Gifts” giveaway.

I’m downloading products on the topic of Squidoo traffic, Facebook traffic, Facebook Fan pages, eBay marketing, article marketing and more. I expect the the content to be that of a dummies guide or less, but that’s OK, a quick introductory lesson is all I’m looking for.

I also saw a Wordpress Sales Page download – and I know those are popular.

And I know for a fact there’s at least one product worth getting.

I signed up my product “7 Copy Sins” for the giveaway. It’s a 7 part video series that will help you massage the kinks out of your sales copy and turn it profitable.

It’s free when you sign up for the giveaway and find my product among the others. Click the link below and check it out! Cheers!

The Pot Of Gold Giveaway –>

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A Clever Copywriting Business

Ryan Healy writes about business growth and copywriting at his blog. We first ran in to each other many years ago when I was publishing something called the “Green Watermelon Digest.” Here’s a snap shot:

Ryan left a comment yesterday and I promised to feature it in a blog post. That’s all it took to get his main keyword inside the content of a blog post (which I hear is one of the most valuable links, yes?)

The comment addressed his first copywriting business…

When I went to school in Ardmore, Alabama, it was a new experience for me. I was in the deep south at a K-12 school.

One of my classmates was Brad. He was 16 years old, but was in my 6th grade class. His plan was to flunk each grade twice so he could drop out and work with his dad.

You could drop out at age 16, but the only catch was you had to complete 6th grade. After flunking any grade twice, you were automatically passed to the next grade. Brad was my classmate in 5th grade and 6th grade.

I was a straight-A student, and I began letting Brad copy my homework for $1 a page. He’d just copy my answers down first thing each morning and his grades started to go up. :-)

After that, I began to engage in more legitimate ways of making money.

Sounds like that really was Ryan’s first “copy” and “write” business. Ba da bing!

Of course now 8-9 years after our first “green watermelon” encounter, Ryan is a top-notch copywriter maintaining an awesome blog at RyanHealy.com.

His interview with me is still one of his most popular posts: “12 Questions With Copywriter Stephen Dean.” Check it out!

(Now… who else will I find in the comments to feature?)

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SecretSalesWeapon.com Has A New Owner!

Looks like the Green Bay Packers aren’t the only ones celebrating today, we’ve got a winner!

And it was close. I stated last Monday we needed to have 20 comments. And this morning we were at 19.

It’s important when you run a contest that you stick to your guns.

No matter how much I wanted to reward 19 awesome comments with giving away a domain name… no matter how tempted I was to ask everyone at my Superbowl party to leave a comment (didn’t happen)… I knew I had to stick to my guns and let people know my word means something.

I was regrettably about to write the “A deal is a deal” blog post and announce we only had 19 entries…

…when the 20th and 21st comments came in. YES!

Thank you everyone. You made for a great contest. Some of you tweeted multiple times for me. You guys are AWESOME, thank you.

I’m very happy to give this domain name away and cap off an awesome contest.

I brought up Random.ORG and asked it to pick a number between 1 and 21. The number came back 19.

That makes Shashank Kumar our winner. Congratulations! I’ll attempt to contact you and see which extra you’d like.

To everyone else, thanks for experiencing this with me. I’m humbled and honored to have had so much help.

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Win A Free Domain Name

Update: We’ve got 14 comments with about 36 hours to go. We need to hit 20 for me to give away the domain, so lets add to the pot.

The winner will also get his choice of either copywritingden.com (aged 4 years, expires in April) or 7copysins.com (aged 4 years, expires in March), OR these digital products free:

The 2 Hour Sales Letter
The 7 Deadly Copy Sins
Copy Breeze

I know some people may not be commenting because they have no use for the domain or don’t want to renew it. That’s fine, if you win I’ll just let the domain expire or sell it for a small amount to someone else. We need 20 comments for anyone to win, so please leave a comment anyway. Cheers!


Let’s try something different today.

I’ve owned the domain SecretSalesWeapon.com since February 9th of 2006, but I’ve never really done anything with it. It expires in 9 days and I don’t plan to renew it.

If you’d like a chance to pick up a decent domain name that’s well-aged, here’s your chance. Enter to win the domain free by leaving one comment on this post. If I get 20 comments to this post by Monday the 7th (not including my own comments), I’ll use a random number generator to choose one of the commenters as the winner of the domain.

I’ll announce the winner on Monday the 7th and attempt to contact you. You must contact me that day for me to start the transfer in time. And also, you should know I believe you’ll need to renew the domain on the 9th like I would if I chose to keep it. But still, you’re getting a pretty decent domain that’s well-aged for the price of a brand new terrible domain name.

Again, we need to get to 20 commenters for me to pick a winner. Otherwise I’ll just let it expire, so feel free to RT my announcement of the contest on Twitter or simply tweet something like this:

Win SecretSalesWeapon.com free. Aged 5 years. Leave a comment to enter. http://bit.ly/go5oQL Please RT @CopywritingDean

Cheers and good luck!

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Happy Hour Friday 10/15/10

Still feels like I got a ways to go before it’s the weekend for me. Gotta finish a project and do my last workout of p90x week 10.

So still work for me, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get started. Here’s your Friday Happy Hour.

Great Twitter Follow:
Keith Baxter (@KeithBaxter) – Keith Baxter is not a rock star guru, because he’s happy being Keith. He’s been at the forefront of Internet marketing trends for close to a decade, and tends to discover what works before the masses. He often shares (quietly) what works at his blog and on Twitter.

Meaningful Forum Thread:
I shared my copywriting research tools with the Warrior Forum and got several responses with awesome tools from other copwriters. They definitely compliment mine and I’ll be using them.

“Nailed-It” Blog Post:
5 Questions with Tim Schmidt – Invaluable advice in a very short blog post. I hope people will take it to heart despite it’s length.

From My Life

Lately I’ve been reading How An Economy Grows And Why It Crashes. It’s actually a very quick read but I seem to only pick it up for a few minutes at a time. If you want to relearn economics the right way, this book is it.

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Copywriting Research Tools For Any Market

Recently I was privy to a conversation from a perspective client who had some questions about hiring a copywriter. They asked…

“Will he know how to write specifically for my audience?”

The answer is almost always “Yes.”

My job as a copywriter is to find out who your ideal customer is and discover what makes them tick. The Internet makes this fairly easy to find out.

The trick is finding and using copywriting research tools…

Many of your prospects will have already searched Google for more information about your marketplace. You can check out the top results to see what your market is likely to be reading currently. (Also pay attention to the ads on the first page.)

You can also copy and paste the URL of these top sites in to Quantcast.com to get an accurate demographic profile of your ideal customer. Also enter the URLs of other known popular sites for your market.

You can go to Yahoo Answers to find out what questions your ideal customer might have about your marketplace and products.

You can go to eBay or Amazon.com to find out what people are buying in your marketplace.

You can go to Clickbank’s Marketplace for affiliates to discover which sales letters are working… and then analyzing them to see why they work. (Look for sales letters with a high gravity, they’re doing the best.)

Those are a few of my most used copywriting research tools. They make it extremely easy to narrow down your target audience and begin to understand them.

I also have a few tricks up my sleeve from reading the great copywriters, mentoring with Michel Fortin, and nearly 7 years of my experience. Maybe I’ll let out some of these tricks in related blog posts soon :)

If you have any copywriting research tools of your own, please leave it as a comment.

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Buy My Business

I hope I don’t regret this. It’s spring fall cleaning time and your chance to catch a bargain.

Over the last few months I’ve been busy writing copy and writing software. The software is taking my business in a slightly new direction. So I want to shed a few parts of my business that no longer apply.

Time to put them on the auction block. If you’d like to purchase any of these properties from me, leave me a comment and we can discuss payment and transfer.

For Sale:

WebVideoCopy.com (Domain Name Only)

I purchased this domain with great foresight many years ago but never put it to use… and don’t plan to. Now it could be a hot property for the person ready to take it over. I’ll accept $500 or best offer, as long as it stays above my private reserve price.

Leave a comment to discuss purchase of WebVideoCopy.com

StephensBlog.com (Domain Name and Blog Posts)

This site has over 2,200 inbound links and ranks well for many keywords. It currently is #3 for “Internet copywriting” and #1 for “Internet copywriter.” I’ll transfer the domain name and blog content in a database. I also reserve the rights to the blog content.

The site has been dormant for quite some time and gets about 800 uniques a month. When I posted regularly we reached 2,500 uniques per month often. I’ll accept $1,500 or best offer, as long as it stays above my private reserve price.

Leave a comment to discuss purchase of StephensBlog.com

EasySplitTest.com (Domain Name and Software Rights)

With zero effort this site ranks #5 for “Free Split Test” and #1 for “Easy Split Test.” The domain is a few years old and consistently trickles in new leads. The squeeze page converts quite high, around 50% last time I tracked it. You get the domain, squeeze page, shared rights to the software (shared with me), and all the help files that go along with it. I’ll accept $750 or best offer, as long as it stays above my private reserve price.

Leave a comment to discuss purchase of EasySplitTest.com

In the case that I may have extremely undervalued one of these properties, I reserve the right to change my offering price.

Also posted in Housekeeping, Traffic | View Comments

Copywriting FEVER

Ever had copywriting fever? That’s what I’ve had over the last several months as I’ve been putting out a ton of copy, both for myself and multiple clients.

My keyboard is Hot, HOt, HOT!

Not only have I been writing like crazy, I’ve also been plugging away at some new software projects that will be available in the future.

Right now my software offerings are…

Easy Split Test (Free, Opt-in required)

Copy Breeze

…and my new projects are just as exciting (or dare I say, MORE exciting.)

In the midst of all this, I’ve discovered an awesome new site to hone your copywriting instincts. I should give credit to Michel Fortin for pointing it out to me:

Which Test Won

Check out the archives and you’ll find tons of A/B split test results.

The site lets you check out each version first, then guess, and then see which version really won out.

It can be both very humbling AND reaffirming.

Even more valuable, it teaches you to have the proper respect for opinions. Something forum junkies could definitely benefit from.

Check it out and have a great day!

Also posted in Copywriting Resources, Copywriting Tips | View Comments
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