The Michel Fortin Blog

I once took a media communications course in which I discovered an interesting example of the way the mind works. I soon realized how this applies to copywriting as well. As part of a given lesson, they showed a videotape of a televised newscast...

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...

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...

The other day, one of my readers asked me the following question, which I found rather interesting: "Why should the author of a product be included in their sales copy?" Seems like a pretty redundant question, right? Especially to any veteran...

In a recent critique for a coaching client, the issue of "gap analysis" arose. Gap Analysis is something I learned in sales, and it was heavily taught by sales trainers like Brian Tracy, such as in his course "The Psychology of Selling." Gap...

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...

Some people don't mind hard-hitting copy, while others prefer newsy copy. Some people prefer long copy to get as much information as possible, others prefer short, brief, to-the-point copy. Some like drama, stories, and testimonials; others data,...

A few years ago, something happened that provided incontrovertible proof of the importance of an infallible rule in copywriting. I knew it all along but never saw it proven to me in such a personal and direct way. What am I talking about? No,...

If you have been living under a rock in the past few weeks, then you might have missed one of the biggest kerfuffles in Internet history. Or so it seems. No, I'm not talking about the contested elections in Iran. I'm talking about the recent...