AeNews

Is failure an option or a requirement?

For many of us it feels like a requirement.
Today's guiding words come from Coke's former CEO. A man that has experienced his share of both success and failure.

"If you take risks,
you may still fail.

But if you do not take risks,
you will surely fail.

The greatest risk of all is to do nothing."

Roberto C. Goizueta (1931-1997)

It's Time to Get Started!
Andrew

Bullets, Bullets, Bullets.....

Have you ever been to those freeware clipart sites that have all kinds of web graphic stuff? And to add insult to injury they are horribly organized. Page after page of silly stupid, insipid stuff that your kids wouldn't dare to put on their site.

But wait a minute! copywriting is about getting attention.... so you need something to grab the reader's eye

You need something that stands out.....

You need something that lets them know this is an important point in the presentation

By now you're getting the point. Stop using those regular simple bullets you find in the regular web or text editor. Standard Bullets don't work nearly as well as using somthing with some interest in it. Find an image with a Different color, shape or visual texture to give any bullet the eyecatching effect you are after.

Long ago I started capturing all kinds of images to use as bullets and saved them in a special place so I could go back to them easliy. So start grabbing all the great bullets you see and save them in your own bullets directory for later use.

Next time I"ll have some ideas on those breakout boxes called "Johnson Boxes". You know the ones used to highlight testamonials, guarantees and the like.

Until then,,,,
It's time to Get Started (using bullets)
Andrew

P.S. dont forget to use the RSS feed so you get AeNews as soon as you login

The following is a guest article I thought you would find useful and interesting. Seems people will thieve just about anything.

Andrew

** Copyright Thieves Beware **
Jim Daniels

A free service at www.copyscape.com allows you to see if anyone out on the Web has copied the text from your website and to what degree.

Just enter the url of your webpage, article, or blog post, hit the submit button and the site will show you if another website contains substantially the same text as your page.

If you get a hit, then click the links provided to go to the sites that may have copied you and see highlighted text that matches your site.

The free service on the home page only displays 10 results, and if you want to see more, you can pay $10-20 a month and the service will monitor your web pages and let you know of everyone who copies them.

A positive use for this tool I thought of for anyone who operates an online business: put in your competitors' url where they display the ads, articles, and other tools they give their affiliates, and see who links to them.

They may have active affiliates posting their content (with permission of course) and you may find some great potential partners to help you promote your business.

Another way you can watch for this type of activity is by
signing up for alerts at Google.

Go to http://www.google.com/alerts/ and enter in your name, product title, article title, or some specific keyword
combination that would tip you off that someone had taken your stuff (or was posting your competitors' material).

You can then receive an update with links any time Google finds a new reference to your keyword phrase.

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We continue our series on unusual web copywriting visual techniques. As I mentioned earlier, all of these are stolen directly from examples in the hardcopy print world.

Today I are going to show you the circled text emphasis. This is kind of crude way to highlight, but it is dynamic and effective. It only works with text you present as a graphic. You won't get this to work on text that is just floating in the html format. You editor must allow you to either insert transparent images with text, or to send graphic images behind text input. I have also use layered editors that also allow the order of layers to control this effect.

If you are presenting your copy in the form of a PDF file then the formatting of your original source document will allow you to insert the scan of the hand circle as an image and then impose text on top of it. The following example was taken from such a document.



A couple of points to use this. Make sure you change the color of the hand drawn circle to red, blue, purple, yellow. Use a color that works with the rest of the color pallet. I often use either Red or Orange. They are two of the most powerful colors that can read well on a white page.

Tomorrow I show you bullets. Not those simple dots, but bold, beautiful, bodacious bullets.
Andrew

It's been a while since I presented something to you as a software product. I know you are thinking 'here it comes. he's going to ask for money.....' And you know, your are right. It's what makes this all possible. I don't have a rich uncle giving me a bucket of money each month to do this, just because I like to. Nope I rely on the kindness of my friends to help support me while I provide them with something they can use.

Back early last year there was a big buzz about using the Public Domain as a source for material you can use to create new products. Well the big hype has pretty much died down, but the market for Public Domain products is still just as strong as it ever was.

A lot of it is available through the web, even more is lying all around you. How many of you like to go to garage sales? I"ll bet many of you do. Do you ever take the time to sift through the piles of books? No? Shame on you! There is gold in those old stacks of hard backs.If you know what to look for, those stacks could be Public Domain Source Books.

A marketing friend and mentor, David Valleries has written one of the best guides to learning about and using Public Domain source material. I negotiated a package from him that I can pass along to you. It includes the resale rights to the package, so you can make some spending change with it two ways -- Personal use and reselling the package.

You need to take the time to check out the information site and think about the possibilities this quietly growing niche market can provide.

And thanks for the time.

Andrew

Yesterday I showed you DropCaps. I forgot to give you a resource on DropCaps. If you want to get some of these special graphic alphabets you should visit www.dropcapitals.com
they have a collection of these available for purchase. But the one I used yesterday was one from an alphabet I created and use on the Put It iN Thought web page. they aren't hard to create if you have a simple graphics package.

But I digress..... Today we are looking at the highlight. You used this one in college. In fact a whole line of products was introduced in the marker industry back in the 70's when those water-soluable transparent markers first made it to the shelves of the stationary and art stores. Pretty soon they were everywhere. It was a hit and everyone wanted to use a "highlighter" to emphasise text.

Copywriters in the hard copy world followed suit very soon after and you have been seeing this technique ever since. Today, it is a little more difficult to get this effect. I have done it by limiting it to areas where I can completely control the text appearance, such as in emphasis boxes or teadings and inserting these as graphic inserts. Usually you can control how the page reads well enough to make this work well.

or the next few days I'll be sharing with you a few techniques that you are probably seeing more and more in web based copy. A lot of them are being copied from hard copy mailer pieces you have been seeing for a long time. As web copywriters, we are still playing catchup.

I just used the first one - the DropCap. Newspapers and book publishers have been using this eye-catching effect for ages. Go back to the illustrated hand made copies from the second century and you will see the height of this method. Monks took hours of care highlighting the handwritten text for effect and instruction. They did it for a reason. focus attention. You should too.