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Questionable Practices - Can You Have A Newsletter Without A Website?
“I’m not going to wind up on your damn blog, am I?” 
What an unusual way to open a phone call, I thought. He has an interesting way of winning friends and influencing people. Hmmm, he’s at least piqued my curiosity.
Me: “I don’t know. Depends. How interesting or wacky are you intending to be today?”
I’m just going with the flow at this point. I have no idea where this is going. But my audience loves either extreme, though they tend to skew towards really disastrous examples, like this guy.
He’s certainly shaping up to be blog-worthy (it’s like being “sponge-worthy,” only different).
He didn’t say anything.
Me (helpfully): “Are you wanting to be on ‘my damn blog?’”
Now, the only reason I took his call was this — he was a referral from someone I interviewed during a client case study a couple of years ago. Apparently I made quite an impression with that interviewee. Using incisive questions during those interviews, I pried out the juicy bits from the man’s mind, then used my copywriting skills to forge an effective sales piece for the client while talking about one of the client’s clients.
In his words, the interviewee said, “You made me sound like a @#$%$ genius!”
So this gentlemen on the other end of the phone, the one who’s giving me attitude — let’s call him Mr. Referral . . . Mr. Referral wanted to know if I could help him sell his newsletter — design the strategy and write the copy, the usual.
Or so I thought.
I rattled off some things off the top of my head that anyone with a newsletter should implement like it was yesterday:
- How to SEO the website to boost the newsletter subscribes
- How to strategically place his opt-in box
- How to leverage Article Marketing to his advantage
- How to produce a blog that drives more traffic to his opt-in and subscription page
- And how to cross-pollinate all those elements — the website, the blog, the articles and the newsletter for a massive, conclusive boost in response and revenues
See, when prospects call, whether we work together or not, I like for them to walk away with value that can produce tangible results.
But there was one small problem with Mr. Referral. Several actually . . .
- He didn’t have a website.
- Nor a blog.
- Nor did he write articles.
But the creme de la creme . . . the coup de grace . . . the maraschino cherry on top of this Worst Practices sundae was what he said next. The jaw-dropping, mind-numbingly STUPID thing he said was that he wasn’t interested in “any of that crap.”
WTF?!, I thought. Checking to see if I’m on Candid Camera. What the hell did I just walked into the middle of?
Next Up . . .
What happened next? Why was he dismissing Best Practices? Why was he disinterested in anything that worked? Was I able to reach his thinking brain and reason with him? Did I take the gig?
Stay tuned to find out.
Technorati tags: worst practices, best practices, newsletter subscriptions, copywriter, marketing strategist, provocateur, ROI Copywriting, Walter Terry
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Marketing Mishaps, Pro Analysis |
December 16th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
I have a different take: He was outlining a ‘Best Practices’ approach to making 2008 a yearlong vacation.
(still laughing my ass off from the post).