Embrace your inner smartass

Don't believe what your high school principal told you. Being clever does pay.
In highly creative and competitive industries (have no doubt - this means us!), being clever is more trade than trait. How else will you stand out? Consider this. If you do a Google search for "copywriter" right now, you will find that there are 4,770,000 pages that matched your search. And you thought high school was hell. Try standing out in this crowd! It's a wonder every business isn't resorting to clever puns and plays on words.

Fact is, most are playing it safe. They are using cliches and phrases you've heard too often. Each individual listing becomes blurred into one big glob of who cares. What can make a person stand out in this crowd? Give me a 'C'. Give me an 'L'. Give me an 'E'. Give me a 'V'. Well, you get the point. ...

Amid all the empty promises (top search engine rankings now!) and cliches (outrank the competition), I found one site that distinguished itself by being really clever. Here's the listing:
Chris Custer - Copywriter
"How The Cousin Of A Famous Civil War General Can Help Your Website 'Lead ... Do NOT make the mistake of "writing this off" thinking you already know this. ...
www.custerwriter.com/ - 55k - Cached - Similar pages

The guy took something simple - his last name - and made a clever reference to an ill-fated general by the same name. This made me want to read more about this particular copywriter who appreciates the fact that sometimes, you have to be clever. This guy didn't have much to lose, either. He's listed so low in Google that the Custer reference works on many levels. Perhaps the lesson here is that if you can't beat them, outwit them.
So, don't be afraid to be clever. What used to cost you a trip to the principal's office can now be a way of attracting potential clients and partners.

It's elementary, my dears

When I was a wee lad studying journalism in college, my editing professor used to say that he was not prone to violence but that he should be able to hit us when we misused its/it's. He had a point. This is something we were taught back in grade school, yet I still see this misused all the time in advertisements, in e-mails and, yes, even in our own corporate communications.

Here's the deal.
Its without an apostrophe is the possessive form of it.
Example:
The lion flashed its enormous teeth.

It's with an apostrophe is a contaction of it is.
It is scary to see a lion's big teeth.

If you ever in doubt about this, try substituting the it in your sentence with it is. If it works in that case, you need an apostrophe. If it doesn't, do not.
Example 1:
It's a beautiful day. (Sentence is still correct if you wrote "It is a beautiful day." So, the apostrophe is correct in this case.)

Example 2:
Its teeth were as big as sabers. (Sentence doesn't make sense when you write "It is teeth were as big as sabers" so you are correct in not using the apostrophe here.)

You lost me at hello and other lessons in e-mail marketing

I received a fair amount of spam through my e-mail account this week, and I jotted down a few of the subject lines because they are such great examples of what NOT to do. From the subject lines alone it was clear that I didn't need to pay any attention to the messages, so one quick delete and they were zapped into the same oblivion where go all ineffective attempts to grab my attention.

Some of the subject lines were incomprehensible - such as "Your money, old bachelorish." So, what are they saying - I'm old, alone and because of that it's time to pay up? DELETE!

We all know that putting the word "money" in a subject is a definite no-no, yet I still get spam from outsiders like this one - "Your money, net plankton." Perhaps they thought they'd confuse me into reading this one. They only succeeded because I wanted to share the details with all of you. From the subject line I might have suspected that I was being offered a chance to work on one of those big shrimp boats off the coast of Maine. But no! This message was selling a product called "Perfect Erection." DELETE!

My favorite spam e-mail subject line of the week was "Hello, odd looking!" No sugar-coating or false flattery here. I've clearly earned my place on the "ugly person" mailing list at long last, and I couldn't be more ready to hit the delete key. This message, by the way, was also selling that erectile dysfuntion product. Yeah, like I'm going to buy something from somone who just called me "odd looking." DELETE!