Copywriting is using words to get people to give up their money in exchange for services or products. In other words, it is “salesmanship in print.” as defined by John E. Kennedy back in 1904.

The copywriting should be all about the consumers so the copywriter have to talk about them, talk about the problem, the promise, the proof, and the proposal to solve the problem. The copy must be useful and valuable. No copy is too long, too short, only too boring. Write about the preponderance of proof so the consumer have to make a decision.

Here's a six-part framework (PASTOR) for writing better sales copy that Ray Edwards mentioned:

P = person, problem, pain.
A = amplify the consequence of not solving the problem.
S = story, solution , system.
T = transformation, testimony
O = offer
​R = response

You want to stand out when the competition is already there when entering a market. Think about three things:

1. Form your own personality for your identity: Clone a service offer by a guru won't make you a guru. You want to have the content come out your personality, yourself. Clients respond to what you like. It's too risky to be a me-too.
2. Find out from the customers to identify the REAL problems.
3. Create a single superpower to tackle one of most identified problem.

Once the company is positioned, then, move on to design irresistible products. 

​Getting traction is hard.  In the Bullseye Framework, the outer ring is what's possible, the middle ring is what's probably, the inner ring is what's working. Getting traction is finding the inner ring.

There are 19 channels you can use to gain traction. According to Law of Shitty Clickthrough, all marketing strategies eventually result in shitty clickthrough rates. However, some may works well, others not so well. It's hard to predict which channel will work the best. Therefore, do not only consider those channels you're comfortable with.

Asking your potential customers to email someone they know with your product information is difficult. In order to provide an incentive for them to do so, you can promise a free gift to the one sending out the email to one of his/her friend. The friend who gets to know your product that his/her friend suggests, and the products mentioned in the email get promoted.

The all-win situation is a great way of marketing your product. Make sure your product is good enough so you won't let the sender down. Also, make sure the gift is worth the sender's effort while you minimize the work of composing the email for the sender to send out.

How?

Use "mailto:" HTML tag to pre-compose the email, set the b.c.c. to yourself so you also get a copy every time the email gets sent out. Then, you process one email a time to deliver the gift to the sender.

Here's an real case example I just received using this approach:

This post is a case study of my latest project. The resultant product is a pair of websites designed for new Bitcoin (a crypto-currency) users. I laid the ground work of inbound marketing in September (3 months ago) along with market research and planning. It is not until recently I started the design and development in anticipation of a full rollout planned in the coming year 2014. The websites, bitcoin-tw and bitcoin-en, are partially live and open to the public as of this writing.

This post is about what I learned a good "lead magnet" (the free offer you make to get visitors’ email addresses) idea for building an opt-in email list. If you believe opt-in email-list is valuable to your business, but you're short of idea building up the list effectively, this marketing idea is it.

If you're bootstrapping a company and looking to name your brand or business, you need to do some brand name research so that you can have a brand name of yours to work on. Brand name research is to make sure the brand name you choose is available for you to own. If the name is already owned by someone else but you don't know, you might get a cease and desist letter from the trademark owner. The purpose of brand name is to be unique, so you don't want to accidentally step on other's toe.