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Last Spring my PC started to die on me.

This led to a whole new philosophy for how I organize files and software on my PC.

I realized my laptop could suddenly stop working, so all files needed to be accessible via the web. Especially copy projects that I was working on.

I didn’t want to rely on expensive software that might be installed on my laptop, so I started using free and often very simple software programs that I could quickly download from any computer with an Internet connection.

These new changes give me a sense of independence that I didn’t have before. Someone could steal my laptop today and all it’d put me back is the $600 I spent on it. I could simply walk to the nearest computer and continue working on my business via the web.

A fire could destroy my laptop and I’d be OK. A tornado could carry my laptop to Kansas and I’d be OK. A gang of thieves could… let’s move on.

Here are the free programs that are easily accessible from any computer with an Internet connection, that completely run my business.

Notepad. If you run on a Windows platform, you likely have Notepad under “Accessories” in your “Programs” menu. I use this to write notes to myself, take notes for copy, copy and paste text into a .txt file to save for later… it has all kinds of uses while I’m working.

It has a big advantage over Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Writer: it barely uses any resources on your PC so your comp works very quickly.

Google Chrome. I use Google Chrome instead of Firefox or Internet Explorer. I really like the opening page that displays thumbnails of pages I regularly visit.

I also like the address bar, which automatically guesses and even selects what site you’re typing in. I can get to the Dashboard of my blog just by typing “s” then “enter.”

It also allows me to use the following programs.

GMail Previously I used Outlook Express for all my email. Then I switched to webmail on my server so that I could access my emails from any computer (which helps for independence). And then I switched to GMail because it’s the best webmail interface out there.

I love the “Archive” feature which doesn’t delete your emails but keeps them out of view. I love being able to easily search for past emails, sent or received. I love that if I get an email that’s part of a back-and-forth -email-conversation, all emails from that convo show up in my inbox with the new email (and in a very clean, non-obtrusive way).

And the GMail spam filter is amazing. I rarely see spam in my inbox. The other day I realized my Spam folder had caught 600 spam emails in one day, and not one made it to my inbox. Woah!

Google Calendar. I use this to plan my week in advance. Really easy way to outline my projects.

Google Notebook and Google Docs.

I find it easier to write in Notepad than Google Notebook. But by copying and pasting info from Notepad to Google Notebook, I can then easily access that information from any computer anywhere. Again, that’s important to me.

I use Google Docs ocassionally. It allows me to open Word .docs even though I don’t have Microsoft word.

iGoogle. I use iGoogle as a way to monitor all of the above Google tools. It’s set up to show me a glimpse of what’s in my inbox, list what’s on my calendar for that day, and allows me to quickly copy and paste info into Google Notepad… all from the same page.

WYSIWYG Killer. I stopped using Dreamweaver, Frontpage and other WYSIWYG editors because they frustrated me like crazy. So I wrote a piece of software that installs on your website and allows you to type in plain text… then click generate… and instantly have a web-ready .html sales letter that can be saved and sent to the client.

Because it’s on the web, I can write copy from anywhere I can access the Internet. It’s also set up to send backups to a free hotmail account that I signed up for, so I don’t have to worry about losing files. (This allowed me to get rid of my backup service.

It’s Your Turn.

Those are the free programs I use. How about you? Are there any free programs you use to run your business?

Michel Fortin tipped me off to this awesome headline writing formula by Perry Belcher:

When did you start your business?

There’s a guy at http://teeninternetmarketer.blogspot.com who’s working to get his business profitable at 16. That’s about the same age I got started. (10 years later…)

I saw he made a blog post about GTD, or “Getting Things Done.”

I decided to share some tips with him that took me years and years to learn. If only someone would have shared this with me back then…

Hey Montie.

One thing that’ll help you to GTD is to limit the hours in which you allow yourself to work on your IM biz.

I don’t know your schedule, but if you’re working after school you could give yourself between 3-6 to get your work done.

That means you don’t start before 3, and you don’t work after 6. Period.

If you have 4 hours of work to get done in that time… you don’t have time to procrastinate. You don’t have time to tell yourself GTD. You just have to GO.

And some people think that when you limit the time in which you have to work, you actually get more done.

“Diego Norte” describes it well in this post at the Warrior Forum: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-internet-marketing-discussion-forum/28621-spending-less-time-online-earn-more-how-i-move-onto-4-hours-work-week.html#post256366

As for music, I couldn’t work to Lil’ Wayne either. I usually listen to slower music… like a mix I would listen to if I were going to sleep.

Songs like “Mad World” by Michael Andrews, “Whistle For The Choir” by The Fratelli’s, or “Pieces” by Sum 41.

And even then I’ll also just listen to the same song on repeat because that tends to keep me less distracted but happy.

I also listen to Beethoven or Mozart every now and then. Ever use Pandora.com? Just type Beethoven in there and you’re set.

Limiting the hours I work is very important to my productivity.

It used to be that I’d dilly dally doing small tasks around the house and online until finally I’d get around to working late in the day. Which resulted in an unproductive day.

Now I set a time range before the day starts. Usually from about 10-6pm. And those hours don’t move.

It’s not about limiting myself to 8 hours, it’s about having a set deadline when I must be finished. That way I don’t have time to procrastinate, I must get started now to get my work done before the deadline.

And it’s important to stick to these hours. Sometimes I really have the urge to work at 10pm. But I DON’T. It’s not within my time frame.

Instead I transfer that energy in to being excited to start working in the morning.

It works. Try it. Best productivity technique I’ve ever used.

Michel Fortin has answered Edward’s question! Here
it is…

Question: “How do you get inside the head of the
prospect?” And I’ll try and make it more specific
by saying, what’s a quick overview of your
methodology for discovering the conversation in
the prospect’s mind?

I just posted a blog post today, “How to Target
Your Perfect Customer,” that specifically deals
with this. (What a coincidence!) Here’s the link:

Michel Fortin’s Blog

Generally, this involves doing a lot of detective
work. Market research is key. Getting to know the
prospect as intimately as possible is even better,
and a step beyond typical market research.
Sometimes, I conduct phone interviews with
clients, record the conversation and get the call
transcribed. And often, they practically write the
copy for me!

I try to pull out their passion. Get them to
expand. Ask open-ended questions. Ask questions
(like the questions I posted in my blog post) and
let them take over the conversation. Really.

I also sometimes browse related or
industry-specific forums. Just watching some of
the conversations going on is very telling. People
are posting their desires, their fears, their
concerns, their appreciation (or disklike) of
certain products, both competing and non-competing
products, etc.

Sometimes, I join these forums under a pseudonym
and pose questions, as if I was “one of them.” I
then carefully watch what kind of answers they
give me. And blogs and social networking sites,
which have now exploded, are perfect locations to
discover what kind of conversations are going on
in specific niches or about specific topics.

For example, let’s say you’re writing copy for a
“fly fishing” infoproduct. Then you could browse
forums like:

http://www.flyfishingforum.com/
http://www.theflyfishingforum.com/
http://troutunderground.com/

Sometimes, and if the client hasn’t done so, I
also create a blog or information site, where I
post articles on the topic at hand. If I have
enough time, I tend to wait it out a bit, see what
kind of traffic it generates, what kind of
comments it gets, and what kind of keywords they
find me under.

There are tons of market research tools out there
to help you. You can use them to do keyword
research, lateral analyses — meaning, other
topics, concepts of discussions going on in the
marketplace you target, including locations they
find you under. For example, if a blog on fishing
links to you, what was the conversation? What are
the comments on that blog post in which you were
linked from? What other sites are they linking to,
and what do THEY say?

(There are many new tools to help you, like
www.hittail.com that lists some of the
less-than-targeted keywords they find you under,
but are popular enough on the Internet to warrant
more research. Hittail is specifically designed to
help you know what to post. You can post articles
with more of those keywords in them to attract
more traffic. But I like to use it to find out the
frame-of-mind of the visitor.)

David Garfinkel said it best: don’t just learn who
your market is and what their problem is. Find out
“how they talk about it.” That’s important. How
they talk about their problem is not just a
language thing (meaning, what the problem means to
them).

It’s also very insightful into the mindset of the
market, the behaviors of your market, buying
patterns, lifestyle choices, etc. For example, if
your product is about how to cure insomnia, people
don’t talk about insomnia. They talk about
lethargy, lack of productivity, loss of job or
relationships, feeling sluggish, absenteeism, lack
of clarity and focus, low self-esteem, etc.

So the copy shouldn’t talk about how to cure
insomnia. It should talk about all the “problems”
and “end-results” people suffer and talk about as
a result of insomnia. See the difference?

Michel Fortin, CEO
The Success Doctor, Inc.
http://SuccessDoctor.com

My sister stayed with me last week to work on copywriting 1v1.

I watched her as she wrote copy and noticed that she was doing several things to make things harder for her. She was…

• using the backspace key WAY too much, constantly deleting her progress because in her words, “It wasn’t good.”
• staring at the screen wondering to herself if she was good enough to write what she was writing.
• writing aimlessly without a Template.

Just those three bad habits were enough to understand why she had to put in dozens of hours to complete a project that would take me just a handful.

So I gave her a challenge. I wanted her to write a sales letter in ONE day. From start to finish. Here’s how I told her to go about it…

1. Outline the major sections, making a Template for yourself. Headline here, opening here, bullets here, guarantee here and so forth.

2. Write the letter from top to bottom without stopping, and NO deleting. If you don’t like a paragraph, write an “improved” paragraph below it, but don’t delete the previous one.

3. Take a break.

4. Go back and fix the sections that truly don’t work.

5. Tweak the sections that almost work.

6. Take a break.

7. Polish.

Guess what, she finished that letter in 6 and a half hours. A record for her and dang good in anyone’s book. Plus, it was a pretty good letter. I don’t think it would have been any better if she had taken twice as long. And I won’t have to tweak it much before it goes into Muvar.

That’s the power of setting deadlines and breaking a big task into smaller tasks.

Just about any money-makin’ plan you might pick online requires that you start a web site. And if you’re like me, you’re starting new sites all the time.

So I wanted to share with you how I, as a copywriter, find the perfect domain name.

You know that “Save The World” project me and “Madison” are working on? Without telling you too much, finding a domain name for this project is harder than finding Steve Urkel a date.

Pretty much every word in the dictionary is taken. There are plenty of two word combinations available… but the most obvious ones are usually taken. A lot of what’s left over doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense without good marketing.

MySpace.com and YouTube.com might seem like self explanatory domains to you now… but if you didn’t know what the sites were. They’d be a mystery.

Those two domains are a good example of what’s left.

BUT… those domain names aren’t bad at all. I just helped a client find the perfect domain name for his new product. It’s two words. Easy to remember. Easy to spell…

Well, why don’t I just go ahead and tell you my rules for selecting domain names.

1. They must be extremely easy to spell. Short words like… cat, hat, free are great. Stuff like “genius” isn’t good. You may think it’s easy to spell, but you’d be surprised how easy it is to mess up.

2. I like to avoid double vowels between words, and sometimes double constonants. For example, giveeasy.com is a domain name that could have been an option for me and “Madison.” But that double “e” in the middle. It’s a little confusing. This can happen with constonants when double l’s or t’s get involved.

3. Less than 3 words. You can get away with breaking this rule every now and then. But in general, keep working ’til you find something that doesn’t take an hour to type in.

4. Benefit-laden. IF POSSIBLE, it’s great to have a domain name that states the benefit of your product or service. Why? Because the domain name can act like an ad for your site. It’s almost like a headline!

I bought a domain name a while back called snackawaypounds.com. Check out that benefit. Putting a benefit in the domain ALSO helps people remember the name.

Those are the 4 biggies I use. I believe I told you earlier that I use Dotster.com to search for domains. Because they let you type in up to 50 at a time when performing a search. So I just sit there and type in domains off the top of my head and hit “go.” Makes it real simple compared to searching for one domain at a time.

Ok, those are my 4 biggest tips for selecting domain names. I could have said, always go for a .com. But you should know that.

I’m sure there are a few more, so I might add a part II to this article as time goes on.

I’m making some more switches to my business to make it more mobile.

Coinciding with the death of my laptop, I’ve decided to make an extra effort to make all of my business files accessible from the web. And preferably in more than one place.

This way if my laptop suddenly shuts down on me, is stolen, or some other tragedy… not much time will be lost.

Some people put this type of planning off because it will “never happen to them.” Well, I know I’m not the only one who has lost plenty of cash because of system failure.

And having a “mobile” system will help me to be more independent and more free.

Here are some of the most recent changes.

1) The email address associated with my domain now forwards all mail to my GMail account. I’ve had all mail routed through this account to take advantage of Google’s spam filters in the past… but now that I’ve started using Web Mail exclusively I’ve decided to trust Google more than my web host’s shared server.

I may have all mail sent to this email address also forwarded to another free account on Yahoo or MSN to keep backups.

2) If you’ve followed me on Twitter you know that I’m fed up with WYSIWYG editors like Dreamweaver and NVU. They make me curse loud enough for the neighbors to hear and I need to make sure I don’t get any more notes put on my door.

I’ve created my own text-based editor that allows me to type my sales letter at the speed of thought… and then hit “Generate” to create a web-ready HTML document. Talk about simple.

It’s set up to keep a draft on hand from every saving point to be quickly recalled if needed.

Also, the editor runs on one of my websites so I can work on copy from any computer in the world, at any time. And each saving point is saved to the web-host for easy recall if I need to go back… but it’s also emailed to another free address for instant back up.

This means I’ll be able to get rid of my “First Back Up” service that’s really been annoying me anyway.

3) I’ve started drifting away from applications that need to be saved to my computer. The text-based editor is an example. But I’m also using Google’s calendar to manage my schedule… basecampHQ to manage my projects… and more.

In all, it makes my business very mobile and not tied to just one laptop that could die at any moment (the new one will be here shortly).

Hope these tips will help your business.

Lately I’ve been focusing on increasing the sign up rate for my announcement list. And I’ve been less interested in getting people to subscribe to my RSS feed.

James Brausch gave me the idea when he had to switch domains for his blog. He moved from “.com” to a “.org.”

With RSS subscribers, you wouldn’t be able to continue updating your subscribers of new posts at your new domain. But if you have their email address, it doesn’t matter which domain you’re on.

So one thing I’ve done is added a pop-up to the blog. I’ve heard numerous people report that this has a large effect on increasing the sign up rate.

Another thing I did was to change the “What Would Seth Godin Do?” plugin to promote my announcement list instead of the RSS feed. I’ve even included a picture of the free software you get when you sign up.

These two things together have probably doubled or tripled my sign ups.

If you want to see either of these two elements, delete your cookies and hit refresh. Both elements should appear.

 I recently asked Michel Fortin for some advice on testing sales pages. His advice was great, as always:

When I think about elements to test and that convert the best, the two most important ones are the headline and the offer.

But other than that, I think of the AIDA formula. That is, anything that helps to draw attention, create interest, increase desire and drive action are elements I want to test.

For example, when it comes to attention, think of the things that help stop people from scanning/surfing, and forces them to start reading. From headlines to pictures, from pop-ups to video, from different colored backgrounds to different colored headlines.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever come up with a product that was a dud…

If you’ve ever created a product, there’s a good chance you’ve made one that couldn’t sell. People who are just beginning their business pursuits often forget to check if there’s a market for their “hot idea” before they create the product. This can lead to a waste of time, energy and a lot of money.

While there are more thorough ways of checking if your product has an audience, here are 3 quick ways to get a general idea of the demand.

1. Spyfu.com. This site lets you analyze pay-per-click data similar to what the old Overture tools used to do. Just type in your keyword and you’ll instantly see how many people are placing ads for that keyword, how many clicks they’re getting on average, and what it costs to run an ad.

If you see a website is running ads for a few months at a $1.00 click, you can be nearly 100% sure they’re making a profit from that market.

2. Amazon.com’s Magazine Section If you can find a magazine that’s focused on your market, chances are there’s enough people out there to support a product for this business. After all, there’s enough to support the magazine…

3. http://www.clickbank.com/marketplace.htm. The Clickbank marketplace lists tons and tons of information products. Search for your keyword and look at the results.

If you see products similar to your idea, check out the “Gravity” number. The higher the number, the better the product is selling. Compare the number to other known hot sellers and you’ll get a decent idea of how popular that market is.