Copywriting
The Nonsense Gap
It is impossible for me to watch Particle Fever without crying. Particle Fever is my favorite documentary about the discovery of the Higgs Boson particle. You can watch it on Netflix. Peter Higgs is a theoretical physicist who published his theory predicting the existence of the Higgs particle in 1967. It took 45 years before (…)
Write Copy You’re Proud Of
There’s a category of businesses I call “cookie-cutter” because they all look the same. You can tell who runs a cookie-cutter business because they’re obsessed with business “formulas” for scaling. And they do it quite well. If you want to run a cookie-cutter business it will probably work, at least for a little while. Books (…)
Copy Lessons From Ski School
When I was 5 my parents put me in ski school to learn how to ski. Five hours later they returned and I was a pile of tears. Not only could I not ski, I now HATED skiing. I had (and still have) terrible spatial awareness and my body doesn’t listen to my instructions. When (…)
The Right Words Can’t Fix The Wrong Strategy
A colleague keeps asking for my thoughts on promoting his book and I haven’t had the courage to tell him I could not get past the first chapter. In my defense, the book is already published, so my feedback at this point isn’t mission-critical. If the man wanted true feedback he’d have sent it when (…)
Pretension is Optional: What Wine and Writing Have In Common
We were in a cave. They call it a wine cellar, but it was a cave. Parts of it were charming and other parts were super creepy and you could tell that if the walls could talk they’d have had stories because they looked like they’d seen some shit since 1422. The thing I remember (…)
How to Improve When You’re Not “Naturally” Talented
PSA: The Copy Workshop is open for enrollment for our January 2022 session. The workshop is $1,200 but for the next week, Akimbo is offering it for $800 in celebration of something I’ll tell you about later. For now, what you need to know is the price for the workshop will increase in one week. If you’d (…)
What The Inner Game of Tennis Can Teach You About Copywriting
We recently moved to a new city in which I have approximately two IRL friends. Those two friends thought it would be fun to play tennis. I did not. I do not play tennis nor am I interested in learning tennis. At my spouse’s urging to invest in new relationships (also peer pressure) I accepted (…)
How To Write Cold Emails That Get Opened
The latest bro marketing trend, which you will recognize from your spam folder, is offering business owners a “chance to be featured” in a bogus media outlet for the low low price of $2,500. That pitch isn’t the problem. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’m willing to bet there is a market for (…)