Copywriting is not rocket science. If you speak fluent English, chances are you can learn to write great copy soon. Here’s how.

Read the Gary Halbert Letters

Gary Halbert was one of the greatest copywriters to ever live. In fact, he’s the writer who wrote the one piece of copy that’s been mailed more than any other piece of copy on the planet.

Though he recently passed away, all his previous works and teachings are still freely available online. Reading through all his previous works and newsletters will give you a very strong start in learning how to copywrite.

Visit www.thegaryhalbertletter.com

Study Everything You Can

Study everything you can about the various parts of the sales process. Learn how to …

* Write a good headline
* Direct people’s attention
* Intensify the problem and create a solution
* Ask for the sale
* Build proof
* Use power words

Study everything you can from different teachers about everything it takes to make a sale online.

Start a Swipe File

One of the best ways to learn is to study people who are already great. One way to do so is to create a swipe file.

Sign up to as many newsletters or magazines as you can. You’ll immediately start getting letters in the mail trying to pitch to you.

Any that catch your attention, keep them in a folder. This is your swipe file.

Similarly, create a separate email account online. Sign up for as many newsletters as you can. Save any email or favorite, or “star” any email that catches your attention.

In just a few weeks, you’ll have access to tons of great sales material to learn from and draw inspiration from.

Start Writing

Writing copy isn’t something you can learn in theory. You have to actually start writing to really get the hang of it.

After you feel like you’ve got the basics, write your first sales letter. Even if it’s just for someone else’s product or your own product and you have no idea how you’re going to drive traffic to it, just write the letter anyway.

Alternatively, offer to write one for free on a marketing forum online, just for the sake of having a sample (if you want to freelance) and to get experience.

Whatever it’s going to take to get some experience, just do it to get started. Then aim to write at least one sales letter every six weeks or so to build up your skill.

Learning to write great copy is one of the highest paid skills you can possibly learn. It’s not difficult, though it does take effort to start. Learn this skill and it will pay off handsomely for you for the rest of your life.

You don’t want to fail. You want to succeed. When you know why entrepreneurs fail, you can properly prepare for success. Here are the top reasons why entrepreneurs fail.

1. Lack of research – It’s vitally important to make sure there’s a market for your business before you launch. You have to research both demand and supply. Who is providing the same products or service? What problem are you solving for people? Who are your prospects?The research phase of launching a business is one of the most critical. Without proper research into supply and demand, you’re not going to be able to position your business successfully. Very few businesses succeed without solid initial research.If you’re unsure how to research your business idea, talk to an expert. Get help. Speak to other entrepreneurs you trust. You don’t have to share your idea with others, but rather learn how to research your idea.
2. They don’t understand their market – This also relates to research but it’s a different kind of research. Before you launch your business, it’s vital that you know exactly who you’re marketing to. Why? Because you need to position your product or service to meet their needs. If you don’t understand their needs, you may miss out on profits.
3. They don’t understand cash flow – Cash flow is essential to survival. Actually, poor cash management is perhaps the most common reason for business failure. Entrepreneurs must create a budget. They have to be realistic about how much they expect to earn. And they must have a tight rein on their expenses. In order to pay the bills, you need to have cash coming in on a regular basis. Cash flow is essential to survival.
4. An inability to market – Not everyone is a marketing genius. It’s important to realize that marketing is essential to success. If you don’t have a solid marketing plan, your business will not thrive. In business, the old “if you build it they will come” mentality just doesn’t work. If you don’t like or understand marketing, then hire someone who does.
5. No business plan – Many people believe that a business plan is only necessary if you’re seeking funding. This is not true. In order to achieve your goals, it’s important to plan how you’re going to succeed. Your business plan is your road map to success. Don’t skip this important step.

Take heart and think positively. While one in five businesses fail, the others succeed. Research, plan, and understand your market. Commit to marketing and manage your accounts with solid accounting and cash flow management. You’re destined for success!

According to current Alexa rankings, YouTube is the number three most visited website on all of the Internet, surpassed only by Google and Yahoo. Millions and millions of users flock to YouTube every day to indulge in viewing and commenting on videos, spending what, for some, can often turn into hours staring at the monitor.

In this article we’ll look at 5 key points that can help lead to success, should you decide to give YouTube a run as your next big marketing medium.

1) Know your target demographics.

That goes without saying when we talk about marketing, but let’s just explain why it applies here. YouTube users, while varied and diverse, can generally be narrowed down enough to speak about generally. While everyone from four year olds to Grandma spend time on YouTube, the people who live and breath YouTube are going to be your 18-35 males.

While females in the same age group do also use YouTube quite a lot, and there are many users older and younger, the 18-35 male demographic are the people that are going to spend hours a day surfing YouTube and sending videos back and forth between their friends (this is important!)

Sure, this demographic tends to be the most desirable one anyways in many cases, but if your target audience sit outside this range, there are likely much better ways to spend your time and money than YouTube.

2) Go viral or go home.

A video of me feeding my dog or taking my garbage out might be entertaining to me (“look how well I poured that cat food! Not a bit spilled”), but that’s probably the extent of it. If you’re going to try and use YouTube to get your message out, your ultimate goal should be for your video to grow virally.

That word, viral, is said so much these days that it’s going out of style, but there’s a reason, it’s important! You want your video to spread around, as quickly as possible, and to be seen by as many people in your demographic (and in general) as possible. Otherwise, why are you even using this medium in the first place? When you sit down to plan your campaign, always have this in mind.

Any ideas that come up that don’t reek of potential to spread quickly likely aren’t of any value. While you never know exactly what will go viral (I’m sure the parents that posted a video of their baby laughing didn’t expect almost 74 million views to date), you can generally tell whether something has the potential, as there are some aspects that essentially all the videos that really take off.

3) Make it funny, make it weird, make it shocking, or don’t make it.

Going viral happens because someone sees a video and deems it so awesome that they simply have to email it to their friends, their mom, their boss and their priest. As stated above, mundane videos won’t do this. If you want to ensure that your video has the potential to spread like wild-fire, you pretty much have to make sure that it’s funny, weird, shocking, or some other form of general awesomeness.

If you look at the top 25 most watched YouTube videos you’ll notice that while some may be cute, some may be cool, the aspect that you see most represented is comedy. Whether it be comedians or little kids being bitten by their brothers, things that make people keel over laughing tend to spread the fastest and widest. Whatever method you choose to go down to give your video the legs it needs to run across the net, there are certain warnings to heed!

4) Know your brand and know what it means to your customers.

There is a certain danger with viral video marketing, namely that many of the things that tend to go viral can also have a tendency to be on the edge of cleanliness, and certain brands may end up being hurt more than they stand to benefit.

Take the “Landlord” video, made famous by starring Will Ferrell and available on FunnyorDie.com. 61 million views for a video that isn’t on YouTube is a massive success. As viral as they come. However, the real star of this video isn’t Ferrell, it’s the landlord, who is a cursing, beer drinking…little girl. Funny? Sure. Viral? Sure. But does your brand want to be associated with swearing, boozing toddlers?

Maybe it does. Maybe your brand is edgy and your customers won’t look at such an association negatively. But maybe not. Always make sure that whatever your video is portraying isn’t going to conflict in someway with the core values of your brand.

5) Figure out what you want from the video and design it to deliver on that goal.

What do you want your video to do for you? Do you want it to build brand awareness? Do you want it to help sell something? Do you want it to drive traffic to your website? It’s very important that you recognize exactly what your goals for the campaign are, and that you realize a few truths about YouTube and it’s viewers.

Firstly, people aren’t on YouTube to watch commercials. If your video is plastered with your products, logo and marketing messages, it’s probably worthless to bother going any further. A good example of tasteful branding is Seth McFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy, sponsored by Burger King. People watch the videos to see the funny stuff, not to see the BK stuff, so Burger King does a very short intro, which is in itself comical, and then a little bit of branding at the end. That’s it.

The next thing to realize is that it’s very unlikely people will leave YouTube to go to your website, unless you somehow entice them to. People on YouTube may love your video, and they’re happy you made it, but they don’t care about you enough to go check out your website just out of the goodness of their hearts.

Offer them something at the end of the video or in the description at the side that they can only get through your website, or they’ll never get their, especially not with so many other hilarious related videos being suggested to them by YouTube at the end of yours!

Finally, if you’re trying to directly sell something, you’d better find a way of featuring your product and making people crack up or say “wow” at the same time. Blendtec is the perfect example of this. They use video to help sell blenders by posting clips of them blending up ridiculous items like golf clubs and bricks (and people love it). Whatever your goal, define it ahead of time and make sure YouTube is a viable medium to deliver on what you’re looking for.

Making videos doesn’t have to be expensive, but it can be. That being said, money is the easy part, a great idea with an almost certain chance of success  is the hard part. It takes planning and time. The key is to analyze beforehand whether YouTube is a good medium for your business to get it’s message across.

If it’s not, don’t bother wasting all that time and money on something that won’t work for you. If it is, follow these five rules and you’ll be far better off than if you just wing it and post something up on a hope and a prayer.

Entrepreneurs succeed all the time, and it’s always fun to read about, and it’s always the part that gets publicized. What doesn’t get quite as much press though is the failures. Which, as anyone who’s been in business for themselves probably understands, are much more common.

The good part though is that the failures, or if you prefer, the lesser successes, are worth their weight in gold. In his The E-Myth book, Michael Gerber presented a graph that has stuck with me since the day I first read it. The graph showed success versus attempts for entrepreneurs. What is showed was that most people failed on their first or second attempts, but as they failed and learned, each successive attempt would bring more success.

This is why I’ve always believed in experimentation. I can vouch for this concept myself personally. My initial attempts at doing things on my own resulted in losses. Nothing back breaking, but I definitely pulled out less than I put on. The key though is each failure teaches a new lesson, and with each attempt, the return is a little better than the last.

This is especially important for young entrepreneurs. If you’re a high school or college student with aspirations of going out on your own and conquering the world, don’t sit on your hands and wait until you graduate, or until you have the right connections, or until you have huge amounts of capital. Try things now.

You don’t need to make a billion. You don’t need to make a million. If you don’t make a dollar it doesn’t matter. The key is that every time you test out that next idea, you’ll learn a lesson that will help ensure you do better the next time. Constant experimentation is absolutely key, and with the web only a click away and still very much a vast field of opportunities to make a buck or two, there is really no excuse not to test the waters.

You might not have time to fully invest yourself in your experiments, and you might not have the capital to take on any really serious projects, but that’s ok. A website here, a concept there, a business plan or two, and before you realize it, the amount of knowledge that you’ve gained will shock you. And this knowledge is the best kind. It will be knowledge gained from experience. It won’t be theory in a text book that you’ll read and forget. It won’t be something your Professor mentioned while you were half asleep.

Entrepreneurship can only be taught in textbooks to a limited extent. Experience is king, and the only way to get it is to give it a go. Experiment furiously and by the time you graduate, the knowledge and wisdom you’ve gained from experience will set you miles ahead of your peers who stuck to books and lectures the entire time.