There’s a farmer’s market just down the road from me every Saturday. I go there to pick up food for the week. It’s a bit pricier than Tesco’s but a lot of the stuff’s better quality, and even when it isn’t I don’t mind paying a premium to buy food that’s locally-grown. It seems more than a bit ridiculous that food that was grown locally and driven 10 miles to market costs less than stuff flown in...

The first draft is pretty much done, so it seems a good time for a run-down of how I went about putting together the JV page. What’s often forgotten is that your JV page is still a sales page. You’re trying to sell your offer to potential affiliates, and convince them that your product is the one they want to promote to their list, because a) it’s an awesome product and b) they’ll make money when they do. Like any sales...

Starting a new project is always a good feeling. Uncharted territory, working out how you’re going to approach the product and the audience… In this case, the product is a sales funnel and the audience are affiliates. My job is to persuade as many of them that they want to promote this offer as possible. It’s a market I’m familiar with so I already have some idea of the target customer. And that means the first thing I...

Whenever you write advertising copy, you should be taking your prospect on a journey. Right now they’re at point A. You want to get them to point B. So before you do anything – and I grant you this seems obvious, but coming to writing copy for the first time a LOT of people seem to forget it – make sure you know what point B is. What action do you want them to take? And I don’t mean eventually… I mean right now,...

Got a bit of data for you. Good marketers test. You know this. They’ll try out lots of different approaches to see what works. In terms of e-mail marketing, this means splitting your list into random segments of equal-ish size, sending slightly different e-mails to each and tracking click data. From the results, you can tell which variation works best. There’s a neat little statistical tool called a T-test you can use to judge the...