Rebecca Dean, aka Miss Copy, got married in December.

She just posted about it at her blog. Please congratulate her and feel free to check out her wedding photos.

Remember when I had Click2Mail send me a test postcard for ad campaign? I wrote about it here: Sending Postcards To Advertise Your Product Or Services.

Well it finally showed up yesterday. It took a LONG time…

…because of user error. My fault. I accidentally picked “standard mail” instead of “first class.” Instead of 4-5 days it took 9-15. (And I saved a whopping 11 cents!)

So that’s one mistake I noticed. The other is the graphics program I used to create the postcard.

Microsoft Paint just isn’t going to work! I saved the image I made in paint as a .jpg file, which looked fine until it showed up on a printed postcard. There’s too much noise surrounding the words… as a result of Paint not saving the .jpg at a high enough quality.

It’s possible that Paint might be able to work if I save it with another image format. But whatever…

Instead I’m going with Gimp. This is a free software program that acts a lot like Adobe Photoshop (a great program, but very expensive).

Gimp will be able to make a high quality screenshot and fix my postcard.

One more note. I took the advice to keep all of my content an inch up from the bottom in case the post office put a sticker on the bottom. The postcard did not get a sticker. In fact, I think the “sticker” was printed on the card.

However, I don’t want to risk it unless I need the extra space. So I’ll continue to heed that advice for a while.

The other day I asked you to leave a comment if you had a blog. 15 of you said you did. Awesome!

I use Google Reader as my RSS feed. I recently deleted all of my rss subscriptions because there were simply too many!

But now I’ve started over.

I’ve added all 15 of you to my RSS reader. So know that I’ll be watching the next time you post! Looking forward to what you guys have for me.

I just noticed Perry Belcher created a site based on his order button… a button he says is the most tested order button in Internet history. Check it out…

The Belcher Button

Now compare that to Eric Graham’s Ultimate Submit Button.

The Ultimate Submit Button

Can you see the similarities? What are the differences?

Ok, so we got a few questions. Thanks Tony and Ron!

I’ll be sending both of you guys “The 2 Hour Sales Letter,” “7 Copy Sins,” “Digital Scarcity,” “Tapping Michel Fortin’s Brain,” “Tapping Michel Fortin’s Brain 2,” and a series of videos on increasing email sign-ups from your blog.

Let’s start with the first question…

“Let’s say i want to have a video on my page instead of lots of copy- would you advise this, and would you script it any differently?”

My opinion is to have a bit of both. Because I skim copy when I read it, I’m not a big fan of video-only (because you can’t skim it).

But that’s only my opinion, because I don’t have data on video-only sales pages.

A master copywriter who is a big fan of video-only sales pages is Dr. Harlan Kilstein. Follow him on Twitter and you’ll likely learn more about it: http://twitter.com/drkilstein

“Are there any shortcuts to learning (Muvar 2009)?”

For some stupid reason I haven’t purchased Muvar 2009 yet. I have several copies of 2007 and 2008 so I’ve been using these.

So I don’t know the difference between ‘09 and ‘08. I’ve heard the training videos didn’t change from ‘08 to ‘09, which has left some people confused.

That said, I’m pretty dang good at using ‘08.

Probably the best thing you can do when learning the software is to get familiar with the files inside that “data” folder and how to modify them.

James advises against doing this for an understandable reason. But there are times when I want to have that option. For example, if the variable version is larger than a certain number of kilobytes, Muvar can’t save it via the admin section. You must upload the content via FTP.

“Glyphius is I suspect a good basis for learning copywriting but I still need to ensure that the flow between the paragraphs are natural. It tends to push me into stringing together sentences that don’t sound right when read aloud. Have you any tips for using it?”

Simple, if it sounds awkward throw it out. Don’t sacrifice readability for a higher score, it won’t work.

“OK now for the big one I have tried to raise the price for a product but found the drop in sales meant I was losing money. Obviously I am about to drop them again blaming the credit squeeze and currency variations. Is this a good idea or should I just drop them without a hint of reason to stop people thinking I was desperate for sales.”

I wouldn’t use the credit squeeze as a reason for lowering your prices. That does imply that less people are buying your product… and that’s not good social proof.

Instead give a positive reason. Come up with a reason for a special sale, special offer, anything. Is your birthday coming up? There’s your reason. Anything can work.

But, do you have a lot of repeat visitors to your sales page? Are people going to notice you drop or raise your prices? You may not have to mention it at all.

And I’d recommend testing your prices using Muvar. Put several different price points in there, make sure you give the proper credit to each sale, and see which price is the most profitable.

Shoot, guess we weren’t ready yet.

No questions for the copywriting Q&A. I tried to prime you guys up by asking you to leave more comments this week. We got 60 comments in 5 posts!

But no questions have come in yet for the copywriting Q&A. I guess I didn’t talk much about copywriting last week, maybe that’s something to learn from.

Listen, I’m going to answer copywriting questions on Monday even if I have to write them myself. LOL. But I’d love for you to submit a question to me.

Just look at the last copywriting Q&A session, it was great!

http://www.stephensblog.com/copywriting-qa-answer-time/

I’ll be sending out a prize to the best question, by my judgment, worth more than a $100. Let’s have ‘em!

Some of my favorite posts in the past have been Q&A sessions. And it’s been a long, long time since we’ve done that.

Let’s do it.

Leave a comment with your question(s). 2 at the most please. They can be on any topic, but my specialty is copywriting and if I don’t know the answer to your question, I’ll tell you that.

Suggested topics might include writing headlines, writing bullets, creating a great offer, testing your copy with split tests or multivariate testing, etc…

The best question, picked subjectively by me, will get a free gift.

I’ll answer the questions on Monday and post them.

Zazzu. The random number generator chose the number 6, which happened to be Zazzu.

Congrats! Will you leave a comment to this post with your mailing address and I’ll get it shipped out to you next week? (I won’t approve the comment so no one will see it but me.)

I’m wondering how many of my readers have a blog. If you’re reading this and you do have a blog, will you leave a comment?

If you don’t have a blog, consider starting one. Blogs are a great way to start a business or generate traffic.

A great way to establish yourself as an authority is to have dozens and dozens of blog posts published to the web for visitors to read.

Plus Google loves content, so they love blogs. The more content you have the more search engine traffic you’ll get.

Whenever I start a new hobby, I start a blog with it. That way I can track my progress with the hobby, and I have a ton of content if I ever get to the point where I want to monetize that hobby.

Right now, in addition to this blog, I have a music blog and a wine blog. I keep both of them secret and don’t talk about them too much.

And I haven’t posted to either one in quite a while. But that’s OK, the content is there waiting for me when I come back. One day all that content I’ve compiled will be very useful. And if not, I’ll still have a personal record of the hobby if I ever want to go back and look.

I think I have some DVD’s that show how to set up a blog. Maybe I’ll give one away next week. In the meantime, it’s not hard. Buy a domain name, get a web host that uses cPanel, point the domain at the webhost and use cPanel’s auto-install to install Wordpress. Done!

So recently I noticed that I purchased the same book twice. WHOOPS!

The book was Dan Kennedy’s “The Ultimate Marketing Plan” and it’s an older edition. I’d like to send it to someone who wants it.

If you’d like to be considered for the free gift, leave a comment to this post. I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winner.