The Michel Fortin Blog

The greater portion of my career has been in copywriting, selling, and direct marketing. And one of the common denominators I've found in any successful piece of copy is the power of risk reversal. That is, taking more of a risk from the sale...

One of the things I do is spend about 30 minutes a day reading my RSS feed reader -- which is Google Reader. And I have it set so that, when I share a feed I like, FriendFeed picks it up and reshares it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and many...

Lately, I'm seeing a lot of posts in public forums and blogs these days about people getting sick and tired of seeing "crappy," "hypey," used-car, Ginsu-like, looooong copy. Some of them come from guru-bashing naysayers who hate marketing, which...

I covered headlines many times already. You can find posts about headlines here. But here are some additional tips. There are two huge mistakes people make when they write headlines. Either they are too bland and don't say enough (such as when...

In an earlier blog post, I talked about the fact that lately I've been leaning a lot more towards testing the reduction in bottlenecks. Some of the results are staggering! In short, the more I increase the sense of security and trust, better...

A recent study found that 65% of online shoppers are "window shoppers," and take on average up to 33 hours to make a purchase -- often over security concerns. Some interesting findings show that most people who abandon their shopping carts don't...

I used to teach marketing and selling part-time at a local college. One day, one of my students made me realize something important. During my lecture, he offered an example to illustrate his understanding of a concept I was teaching. While it...

If you played video arcade games in the late 80's or early 90's, you might remember Zero Wing -- a game in which a battle takes place in the year 2101, where you must defend the planet Earth from an alien invasion. Zero Wing may have been a...

In my critique consulting services, I've found the most common mistake clients make is the ignorance of, or indifference to, split-testing. Little do they know this underutilized marketing practice can be one of the most profitable. Split-testing...