(Grammarians, please click away, there’s nothing to see here…)
Copywriter and email marketer Ben Settle makes the case that typos will rarely (if ever) hurt your cause—and may actually help it. Here is Ben describing his writing “process”:
I crank the email out (usually in about 4-5 minutes) and then let ‘er rip. No editing (unless the URL is wrong) or even thinking about it.
Just sit, pound, send.
And it doesn’t hurt sales at all.
I’ve noticed it even HELPS sales sometimes.
That’s probably why old school copywriters used to purposely misspell things in their ads
It made their letters look genuine.
Like personal letters.
And not “sales pitches.”
It’s hard to resist Ben Settle. Settle is a guy who makes a living—a pretty decent living, it seems—sending daily emails about email marketing (yes, it’s all very meta). He spends a lot of time looking at his numbers, and since he’s been emailing to his list daily for several years, he can pull from a lot of data. His opinions (which are plentiful, colorful, strident and often profane) are based on real evidence.
So what makes Settle hard to resist? For one thing, he’s got a great conversational writing style, and he’s not afraid to piss people off. (In fact, he maintains that making people angry is an indicator that you’re doing something right.)
He’s a bit like your favorite radio personality: brash, smart and welcoming of controversy. His post on typos prompted a deluge of hate-mail from “spelling nazis,” who (whom?) he declares are either “anal retentive writers, editors or loser intellectuals who can’t sell their way out of a paper bag.”
But what makes Settle’s voice unique is his unlikely combination of braggadocio and integrity. The former makes him entertaining, and the latter makes him trustworthy.
2
Maybe you thought they were the same thing? Not so!
From MastersInIt.org (via Coudal.org)
Here are the latest articles we’ve saved to our Instapaper* account:
- The 3 Incentives That Get People to Read Content and Buy Products | DIYThemes.com
- The Problem with SOPA (And How to Stop It) | Copyblogger.com
- Google’s Social Move Attracts Critics | NYTimes.com
- Top 12 Social Media Blunders of 2011 | Inc.com
- Data Reveals a Social Media Success Formula | Copyblogger.com
- 5 Tricks from a LinkedIn Jedi | Inc.com
- 5 Tips To Build An Amazing Personal Twitter Brand | FreelanceSwitch.com
- Your Local SEO Checklist For 2012! | SearchEngineGuide.com
- How to make your shopping cart suck less | TheOatmeal.com
- The Coming Prosperity: How Entrepreneurs Are Transforming the Global Economy | Amazon.com
- What’s better? A Fancy HTML Email or a Simple Text-Based Email? (Survey Results) | DIYThemes.com
- Filter bubbles burst, blind spots shrunk, curation over SEO: Rachel Sklar’s predictions for 2012 | NiemanLab.org
- 2011: A Huge Year for Social Media | TheNextWeb.com
*Do you use Instapaper? It’s a great (and free) tool for saving online content for later. The way it works: create an account here and drag the bookmarklet to your web browser’s toolbar. When you find content you like and want to save, just click the Instapaper bookmarklet and the page will be added to your reading list, accessible on any device that has an Internet connection. Bonus: Instapaper also lets you strip pages down to just the text, so you can dig into a good article without any distracting visual clutter.
Do you know what a meme is? According to Websters, a meme is “an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” Coined by the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the word is a shortening of the Ancient Greek mimeme, ”something imitated.” Dawkins observed that memes act like genes—their success or failure dependent on the Darwinian processes of variation, mutation, competition and inheritance.
An Internet meme is a subcategory that includes all manner of silly, stupid, whimsical, bizarre, and cringeworthy things (videos, songs, phrases, words) that somehow float above the rest and become a part, however briefly, of the collective conscience. (Examples: planking, “winning,” lolcats, “fail.”) Check out the video above for an entertaining look back at the memes that metastasized in 2011.
See also:
- Know Your Meme: Internet phenomena: viral videos, image macros, catchphrases, web celebs and more.
- BuzzFeed: Breaking buzz and the kinds of things you’d want to pass along to your friends.
Thx, Liz
We’ve got good news and bad news…
The bad news is we are at capacity, so we’re not accepting any more telesales accounts at this time.
The good news is you can easily add your name to our waitlist for the next spot that opens up.
Click here to get on the waitlist for Kutenda’s telesales program
Why a waitlist? For one thing, we had no idea this program would be so popular. For another, we want to ensure complete service delivery to our existing telesales accounts before we add more. Add your name to the telesales waitlist now.
- The Kutenda Team
P.S. Not familiar with our telesales program? It’s an appointment-setting service that works in conjunction with our email marketing program. Click here to get on the waitlist and we’ll reach out with more information should a spot become available.
*If you are currently signed up for the telesales program please know that your services will continue as usual.
