The Michel Fortin Blog

A student, who is an upcoming copywriter, recently asked where he could find clients willing to pay higher rates for his skills. Having built a client base through networking on Internet forums geared towards start-up business owners, he now...

The other day I was asked the following question: "Should I use active or passive voice in sales copy?" My answer may surprise you. The premise behind this question is simple. Traditional rules of good writing state that we should use active...

Dan Kennedy often says clunky copy outsells clean copy. I somewhat agree with him, but not all the time. In fact, clunkiness can work against you. And a recent university study proves this. People have a tendency to forge not only a lasting...

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...

I test constantly in an effort to boost my response rates. So it's no wonder why some people have asked me about multivariate testing. Specifically, they want to know what is it, how does it work, and what's "Taguchi." First of all, Taguchi is...

Back in late 2006, what started out as a New Year's series of predictions of sorts ostensibly became one of the most downloaded, most controversial, and most talked about documents in the history of my career. It was in keeping with that annual...

An interesting debate is raging among copywriters and content developers about the differences, if any, between writing copy for the web versus writing content. Prolific copywriter Nick Usborne conducted a survey with his newsletter readers to...

In the competitive marketplace of the new millennium, the demand for specialized products or services will increase. If your site sells everything or to everyone, chances are that your audience will not perceive any greater value in shopping from...

Some people tend to tweet, blog, post, and status-update their little hearts out. Be it on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, their own blog, or whatever. They say it's all about transparency, and transparency is good. But I think we need to...