Monday Spark: To do your best work, turn everything upside down.

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best work upside down mona lisaTo explain what I mean by this, let me tell you a story.

Back in the late 70s I was a student at the City and Guilds of London Art School, in England.

Back then the school took a pretty traditional approach to teaching art, and as first-year students we had to do a lot of drawing. In particular, we did a lot of life drawing.

We had a teacher, whose name I unfortunately forget, who used to make sure we didn’t become too “precious” with our drawings.

What is being “precious” when you are drawing? It’s when, instead of seeing the entire form, and drawing the figure as one whole, you start fussing over the eyebrows or toes. In other words, it’s when you play around with the details before you have penciled in a working drawing of the entire form of the figure.

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14 Ways to Make Money as an Online Writer or Copywriter [SLIDESHOW]

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online copywriting opportunitiesThe great thing about writing for the web is the incredible variety it offers.

Back when I was writing direct mail, that’s all I did all day, every day, for about 15 years. And the other copywriters I knew did the same. We were one-trick ponies. Very good at what we did, but more than a little limited in our scope.

That’s probably why I finally burned out and jumped over to writing for the web full time in 1998.

Here I am, 14 years later, and a million miles away for any sense of burnout.

Why did I burn out after 15 years writing direct mail, but not after 14 years writing for the web? Because of the incredible variety.

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Monday Spark: Watch how kids create stuff, and learn from them.

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kids createConsider the young child who completes his or her first drawing or painting. If you are the parent, you think it’s the work of a genius. If you are anyone else, you think it’s a charming blob.

But is the child embarrassed by the drawing? Do they feel a moment of low self-esteem or anxiety before they show it to you? No. They haven’t yet grasped the concept of good and bad, or good and better. They have simply created something.

It’s the same with the group of older boys who build their first fort out of scrap wood, cardboard and anything else they lay their hands on.

To most observers their finished fort looks like a total mess. To them, it’s a magical and utterly perfect fort.

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It’s not about the details, it’s about the overall customer experience.

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stuck on detailsAfter you have read a hundred articles by various people about how in the world of ecommerce it’s all about the details, step back and ignore them for a few minutes.

Yes, the details can make a difference.

But they won’t do you a lick of good unless you get the big picture right first. In fact, all the details should point in the same direction – towards optimizing the customer experience.

Whatever your online business, you won’t be remembered for moving that image from the right side of the page to the left side. You won’t be remembered for the size or font of your headlines either.

But what every visitor and customer will remember is the quality of the experience they had at your site, whether they have made a purchase yet or not.

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Monday Spark: Say yes to nimble neurons!

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exercise and intelligenceFor a long time self-improvement gurus have been telling us that a healthy body leads to a healthy mind.

Naturally, many of us dismiss that particular piece of advice, because taking exercise sounds like hard work. So we come up with plenty of good reasons why our brains work just fine without having to take a walk or go for a cycle ride.

Unfortunately for the natural sloths among us, science has now confirmed the connection between exercise and intelligence.

It seems that taking exercise has two important effects on our brains.

First, it stimulates the creation of new brain cells.

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How the Easy Button is killing your freelance copywriting business.

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fast easy successImagine launching and building your freelance copywriting business back in the 1980s.

Perhaps you would have spent a few years working in an ad agency, and then made the decision to go freelance.

If you didn’t take the agency route, then you would seek out the small number of books that had been written about copywriting and freelancing.

Either way, you would continue to learn – about both your craft and freelancing – at a fairly slow pace. You would learn from a very small handful of authors. You would learn from your clients. You would learn by reading the occasional article in a trade magazine. And you would learn by studying the successful work of your peers.

As for taking in-depth courses to speed things along, no such luck. As far as I recall, there were no courses or programs devoted to copywriting or freelancing back then. Just books and an occasional magazine article.

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