Too many information marketers are making the same stupid mistake. Seconds after you arrive at their site, a pop-up (or slide-in) window appears, asking you to fork over your precious contact information. Hey man, I don’t even know you.

Just like in comedy, the secret is… (one, two, three) timing. Why would I be willing to fill out your form when you haven’t even given me a chance to read anything yet! I don’t know you, how good you are, or whether your expertise is even relevant to the problem I’m trying to solve. Back off, Jack.

Imagine a guy walking up to a good looking woman at a party or bar. Instead of saying hello and getting acquainted, he immediately says, “Please give me your name, e-mail address, and maybe your phone number too, while you’re at it.” The fact that you would even ask for that kind of intimate information before you’ve established any kind of relationship makes you seem a little, well… creepy. It’s annoying and off-putting.

Business owners and marketers: Don’t be a victim of “premature e-POP-ulation.” Get to know your website visitors a little before you ask them if you can contact them. Otherwise they’re going to look for someone who’s not so pushy.

It will be the hottest marketing promotion of the summer — until it runs out of gas. Companies of all kinds are giving away tankfuls of free gas as long as you buy something: a new car, hotel room, even Calloway golf clubs. With $4 a gallon fuel prices and $50-75 fill-ups becoming part of our auto-oriented lifestyle, gasoline giveaways are a real attention-getting promotional idea.

Expect to see it a lot of them this summer, before they fade away by Labor Day, says a marketing professor at at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business.

But why bother with gas cards at all? Why not just take $50 off the product price, or give customers the cash as a rebate instead? After all, money is money, right? Shouldn’t consumers be just as excited about a $50 discount as a $50 gas card?

Aha, that’s where the psychology of marketing comes in! Any copywriter worth his thesaurus knows that buying decisions are primarily driven by emotion, not logic, no matter how we try to convince ourselves otherwise. Suzanne Shu, a marketing professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, says:

“The more (a) purchase feels discretionary, like staying at a luxury hotel, the more the gas cards have impact because people can use them to justify something they might not do otherwise.”

So if you’re thinking of going down the “free gas” road for your next promotion, just remember those roads are going to get pretty congested. Link

photo credit: pixelnaiad

Well, for the search term “b2b sales letters” anyway.

It’s true. Of all the millions of copywriters in all the gin joints in all the world, my modest copywriting site shows up first when you Google that term. That’s way cool, I gotta admit. Even cooler is how I found out.

I got a call the other day from a guy in Austin. He’s seen my work and liked it, and wanted to hire me to write a couple of direct response sales letters for a new financial product his company was introducing in Austin. OK, great.

Like any good businessman, I always ask new clients, how’d you find me? A referral, perhaps? My blog? That outstanding warrant?

No, he said, Google. Do you remember what search term you used, I asked. I didn’t really expect him to remember. Half the prospects who find me via search can’t remember which search engine they used, much less what words they typed in the little box.

But he remembered: “B2b sales letters.”

I was a bit surprised. It’s one of my favorite kinds of copywriting — I love all forms of direct response — but I hadn’t optimized my site for that term. So I tried it myself, wondering how far down the listings I’d appear.

OMG, that’s me in first place, right at the very top of the results page! Whoa. That is very cool.

So remember what they say, folks: Don’t settle for anything less than #1. At least not when you need a sales letter or any kind of direct response copywriting.

(Unless you’re searching on Yahoo. Then you want to demand #3.)

PS: Not to brag, but (ahem) I also show up #1 in both Google and Yahoo for “Maine copywriter.” (SEO? I’ll show you SEO…)

Seth reminds us of the first rule of b2b selling:

“If it gets to the RFP (Request for Proposals) stage, you lost.”

In other words, you should already have dazzled the prospect with your knowledge and ideas and closed the deal — long before it ever reached that point. As Godin put it:

“The RFP is an organizational punt, it’s a way of saying, ‘it’s all a commodity, we can’t decide, cheap guy wins.’”

And who wants to compete on price?

Lawyers are the latest professionals to use their written work as marketing tools to attract clients.

JD Supra is a Web site that gives consumers legal information while helping lawyers raise their profile. The site hosts its members’ articles, court papers, legal briefs and other tidbits of their craft. Along with each document is a profile of the lawyer who wrote it. Thus, if you have a legal problem and want to do some online research, you’ll presumably find not only the information you want — but a lawyer who can help.

Says the New York Times:

Contributing lawyers get publicity and credit for the socially useful act of adding to a public database, and visitors get free information, said Aviva Cuyler, a former litigator in Marshall, Calif., who founded the business. “People will still need attorneys,” Ms. Cuyler said. “We are not encouraging people to do it themselves, but to find the right people to help them.”

It also levels the playing field in a competitive field. “The site puts solo practitioners like me on an equal footing with huge law firms, providing exposure that would otherwise be nearly impossible to get,” said Mitchell J. Matorin, a lawyer in Needham, MA, who launched his own practice last summer.

Business can be a lot simpler than the consultants and MBAs claim. Craigslist, for example, just listens to its customers, then gives them what they want. No wonder they’ve been profitable since day one.

Wait, that can’t be all there is to it, can it? It must be more complicated than that. Nope, not according to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster. In a recent Marketplace interview, he said:

“Like a lot of stuff we do, we’ve found it to be very effective and basically fool-proof to just prioritize our activities according to what users are asking for.”

Ryssdal: Seems bizarre in this economy to be so democratic.

Buckmaster: Well, it certainly makes our lives simpler since we just have the one criterion to go on. We don’t have to sit in rooms trying to figure out how to conquer the world because basically we are not trying to achieve any particular market share or world dominance. We’re just trying to follow up on requests that we get from users.

Ryssdal: And yet you have enormous market share and very nearly world dominance.

Buckmaster: … what better way to operate is there than to just follow up on what your customers or users are asking for, and to just block out everything else.”

Via The Consumerist

Well, duh. Porn, of course. Well, at least it costs more if you want it as your Web domain.

Yahoo’s Christopher Null reports that domain name pizza.com just sold for a cool $2.6 million — a lot of dough. (Sorry.)

But it didn’t even crack the top ten most expensive domain names ever sold. The uh, “winners” and their selling prices, according to Null:

1. Sex.com, $12.5 million
2. Porn.com, $9.5 million
3. Diamond.com, $7.5 million
4. Business.com, $7.5 million
5. Casino.com, $5.5 million
6. Asseenontv.com, $5 million
7. Korea.com, $5 million
8. Wine.com, $3.3 million
9. Creditcheck.com, $3 million
10. Vodka.com, $3 million

Wait — somebody actually spent $5 million on #7, “Asseenontv.com?” It took me a couple of minutes to suss out what it meant. (Ass… eeno… wha?) That’s one domain that might actually be better (or clearer, at least) hyphenated: “as-seen-on-tv.com.” Hmmm…

No, too late. It’s already taken. I just checked.