Honest Marketing Secrets

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So I seem to have contracted a cold and have been out of commission this week, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking. In fact, getting sick creates a nice big time space for me to catch up on the backlog of books that tower around the place and it sure makes me happy to be reading while I drift in and out of consciousness.

I have been reading a number of great resources recently and today I thought I’d share a couple of them. If you haven’t heard of these I think you’ll be well-served to have a look. If you have them, I’d love to hear your comments and any suggestions for further reading.

Writing ad copy is the mainstay of marketing. I wanted to learn all I could about marketing and the one thing I heard more than any other was, learn copywriting, or at least learn to recognize good copy so that when you need to hire someone to write it for you, you won’t be taken for a ride. So, to that end, I’ve found a couple books on writing ad copy that are recommended across the board as best-of-breed and I’m reading them right now.

The first is, Advertising Secrets of the Written Word: The Ultimate Resource on How to Write Powerful Advertising Copy from One of America’s Top Copywriters and Mail Order Entrepreneurs by Joseph Sugarman. What a mouthful; and what a price!

If you search for that on Amazon you will quickly realize that this book is out of print and sells for about $95 used. However, I did a little looking around and discovered that Adweek republished this as, The Adweek Copywriting Handbook and you can pick it up for a much more reasonable price.

The other copywriting book is, Tested Advertising Methods by John Capleswhich is also a classic and required reading in many marketing classes.

The most enlightening thing about reading these books is the way it changes how you look at all the ads and blogs out there. As you compare everything, the good stuff suddenly pops right out at you. It saves you a lot of time, in fact, when you don’t bother with stuff that’s quickly identifiable as sub-par.

Of course, I’m also an advocate of a number of plain old, traditional books on writing. The number one book in my library that will profoundly change and improve your writing, whether for ad copy, for writing a masterpiece of short fiction, or for the greatest blog post of all time is certainly, On Writing Well by William Zinsser. Granted, I still don’t follow all of his suggestions. I tend to have nightmare sentences that run on for days so you can imagine how rough my writing was before I read it.

And lastly, if you’re just looking for some assistance with grammar and usage, check out the Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation blog. I’m particularly interested in the Blue Book post on commas, semicolons and colons as I still have a bear of a time with those bits.

I hope you find some enlightening reading in the resources above. Until next time, don’t get sick. Or maybe DO get sick if that will help you catch up on some reading. But just a little sick; nothing dreadful, please.

-Zack