Articles by Clear-Writing

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Clear-Writing has written 54 articles for AdTalk

Clear-Writing

Don’t even acknowledge ridiculous, cut-rate pricing

by Clear-Writing

In my business (which is copywriting), there is a subset of copywriting services that offer ridiculous pricing on copywriting. Prices that are hard to believe, quite honestly. Like “$5 for a 500 word article” pricing. To be clear, I’m not talking about “regular” competition. We all have competition – I understand that. But certain businesses, especially creative [...]

Sometimes, spam just works

by Clear-Writing

I find myself thinking about “good spam” today, and this was written for my old website, so I’m bumping it up here now. Sometime last year, I found myself at the beer advocate website. I like beer a lot, and signed up so I could post on the forum. I made a post or two, [...]

Business Karma and Web-Based Businesses

by Clear-Writing

I believe in Karma. Not in some mystical way, mind you, but more like ”if you’re a jerk, people will be jerks to you”, or “if you’re dishonest, people will be dishonest to you”. This probably stems from a “this is your values and the company you keep” aspect – e.g.: people who are dishonest usually hang [...]

Article Writing – Dan’s e-mail exchange w/ a potential client

by Clear-Writing

There’s no type of copywriting that has more price differentiation than writing articles / SEO articles. Because there are writing services out there that will literally write 500-word articles for $5. I’m not kidding. A five hundred word article (2-3 hours work), for $5. Amazing. (an aside… no chance that’s an original article, my friend. [...]

Business phone alternatives that aren’t very good

by Clear-Writing

Nothing about copywriting today – this has more to do with business communications. One of the things I have noticed in this blink-a-minute internet culture is how much mediocrity is tolerated – and even accepted as the norm – in terms of business communication. I first started thinking about this last year, when I got [...]

Online, you have to have quality leads

by Clear-Writing

I recall some website writing I did for this one company. They advertised on Google adwords, and had a budget of $2 a day. For their business, that meant 2 clicks. Two whole clicks a day, and they were done. And they complained after 3 days that my writing wasn’t bringing in business… well, it’s kinda hard [...]

Home Business Musings – I don’t miss this boss at all.

by Clear-Writing

I love owning a home based business. And I love working for myself. One reason is I only had few bosses that I really liked – the rest were idiots. Here’s a quick story about one of the idiots, and a sneaky little thing he once tried to pull: Years ago, I worked as a tech support [...]

A quick story showing the power of website conversion

by Clear-Writing

This is excerpted from Do the Web Write (which I wrote), and shows the awesome power of website conversion. Truthfully, raising your website conversion rate even one to two percentage points can be huge for your business. ****** A client once came to me and wanted me to help him write a few Google Adword ads – [...]

Envision your life…

by Clear-Writing

I want to get all “Zen” on you for a moment and talk about the power of vision. Or perhaps I should say “ENvision”. It’s a very powerful thing – if you can envision something, I mean REALLY envision it, well, that’s the first step to making it happen. Now I’m not going to get outrageous here [...]

How to watch a movie

by Clear-Writing

I’m not all business here – today I’m going to teach you how to watch a movie (this is a post from my old blog updated for 2012 – I do that every so often when I have an old thought I want to revive.) Anyway, I’m a big movie buff / borderline film snob, [...]

Don Lapre, Honesty in Business, and other New Year’s Thoughts

by Clear-Writing

Usually when a year ends, some website or TV show will do a short  retrospective of famous people who died during the year. For me, the October passing of TV Pitchman extraordinaire Don Lapre was noteworthy, because Don was/is somewhat responsible for  my own entrepreneurial business philosophy, both in good and bad ways. If you don’t know who [...]

Copywriting 101 – How long does Copywriting take?

by Clear-Writing

I always have a lot of people e-mailing me about copywriting: “I want to be a copywriter, how do I do it?”… “I’m starting a copywriting business – do you have any advice?”… How much do I charge for copywriting? Etc etc. So I figured it might be useful to post some thoughts on copywriting, [...]

I’m all business… sort of

by Clear-Writing

Tell me you’re not grinning… (I can’t get this stupid blogger to embed the video… just click it – you won’t be sorry. Very safe for work.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yon2YuXssvo    

A Thanksgiving Post about King Kong

by Clear-Writing

This post will be a Thanksgiving tradition. You’ll see it every year here. Lots of businesses give nice heartfelt messages on Thanksgiving, and that’s good. But instead of repeating what others have said, here’s something fun I remember about Thanksgiving. —– It’s the Holiday season (Thanksgiving, to be exact), and that means the 1930’s version [...]

The difference between a contractor and an employee

by Clear-Writing

Contractor vs. employee… which is which? This is something that I’ve been thinking about, because I’ve been on both sides of the contractor equation. Years ago, every now and again I was hired as a contractor copywriter by companies, and I’ve hired contract copywriters from time to time to help with overflow (sadly, there hasn’t been much overflow [...]

My Thoughts on Occupy Wall Street

by Clear-Writing

I’m sure most of you are dying to know my thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street protests that don’t seem to be going away. I have to be honest in saying that my own thoughts are somewhat unclear on the matter. However, there are a few things I want to be clear about right up front: [...]

Money never sleeps

by Clear-Writing

“Money never sleeps” is an old saying – it essentially means that money is made around the clock. And while I’m not a huge fan of a “business 24/7″ mentality, there is a definite truth to the thought, especially for businesses like mine (copywriting / website writing / etc), and similar (web design, marketing, graphic [...]

What are you passionate about?

by Clear-Writing

Was on another message forum the other day, and in this one thread about entrepreneurship, someone who’s spent nine years in a corporate job asked something like “how do you get that passion for something that you start a business with it?” I thought about it for a bit, because I’ve been in business three [...]

A tale of two clerks

by Clear-Writing

Well, two service people (one clerk, and one waiter.) The other day, Maryellen and I went to the diner. We love the local diner here – really good food, very reasonable, and usually good service. So we go in, get seated and then… nothing. We had menus, and were ready to order, but a server never [...]

Small businesses… you get a day to be out of touch

by Clear-Writing

We’re now almost two weeks from our Northeast weather event (Hurricane Irene). It was bad for a lot of people – lot of flooding, lots of damage, etc. I know you Florida people are laughing that a CAT 1 hurriucane was such a big deal, and I do understand. It’s the way I laugh when [...]

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