The biggest small day in my copywriting career…

Change of plans to make room for 2 big announcements.

Today, I was going to bring you entry #5 in my 21-part series on the marketing goldmine chapters in a very small, very old must-read for marketers: Scientific Advertising, by Claude Hopkins. I may get to it tonight, but more likely you’ll see it post here some time tomorrow. Before I go tackle some offline chores I neglected this morning…

I want to share two very interesting things that both happened today (and WHY they are interesting for me, and maybe even for you):

1. I became an EzineArticles.com “Expert Author.”

As a new blogger, I want to learn all I can about the unseen work of getting quality traffic to this site (SEO, search marketing, pinging/tracking, etc). One of the colleagues whose blog I now read faithfully gave me one of my first great tips (great for noobs like me, anyway)–

“Syndicate your best articles to other sites,” he said, and handed me a list of several good places I could start. One of those he suggested is EzineArticles.com, and now–just days later–I’ve had my first article approved and published there. It’s a draft of the baseball swing metaphor piece you can read here, but you may still want to go check out their site.

Will you get any new traffic doing this? I don’t know yet, for myself, but chew on some highly relevant factoids:

• Last month (April 2009) EzineArticles.com had over 30 million visits.

• Over 15 million of those (more than half) were unique visitors.

• Almost 5.5 million visitors clicked through from an article to the author’s own site.

• Average author/members get a 2-12% click-through rate.

I expect I won’t get heavy click-through yet, since I have ONE measly article published (the more you write, the more they read, the more they click). Stay tuned for my future analysis on this effort. Meanwhile, it’s a “caveman-easy” step to build exposure and linkage. Happily, those EzineArticles.com folks are happy to take your work if it meets some fairly basic rules. Still it’s fun to have this nifty badge now!

2. You can now hire me directly, or… through my agent, Lisa.

Represented by Lisa Vaughn-Olstad 858.453.2800 lvolstad@aquent.com

Yep, I’ve gone all rockstar. Okay, not really. I just picked up a nice freelance opportunity taking projects from an agency, which helps even out workflow while I either keep hunting a new full-time job or maybe even land one through them. But it’s fun to say, “you’ll need to talk with my agent on that.”

Anyway. AQUENT is the world’s largest “creative services consultancy,” with a truly global presence–over 70 offices in 17 countries across 4 continents. And actually, I guess you can’t really hire me through them unless you are an AQUENT client. Makes you want to hire me real, real bad, don’t it?

Leave a comment if you’d like to talk about a project.

Again, watch for Hopkins Science post #5 tomorrow. Therein, we shall wrestle with my all-time favorite marketing copy topic, the one you absolutely MUST grip firmly to succeed: headlines. Until then…

Write what’s Right,

Ken

P.S. My new AQUENT agent, Lisa Vaughn-Olstad, does live and work in Los Angeles… does THAT get me any “rockstar” points?