Let’s digress a bit here. Advertising has been around for 100 years (unless one argues that caveman paintings are really a form of advertising, in disguise). What is true for advertising psychology 100 years back is true today. One of the pioneers of modern advertising is Claude Hopkins, with his classic Scientific Advertising. David Ogilvy, another advertising guru, said that no one should be in advertising, unless he has read scientific advertising at least 7 times. If you really listen to modern advertising gurus, who are really successful, they mostly repackage what pioneers like Claude Hopkins have done. In fact, the basis of writing sales letters for the Internet is the same as writing for print. As John Kennedy, a famous copywriter said, advertising is “Salesmanship in Print.” While it is true that HTML (and dynamic tools like PHP, MYSQL, POSTGRESQL, Flash, and JavaScript) can format differently for the Internet, the basis of writing the copy is the same. As the old saying goes, “there is nothing new under the sun, except what has been forgotten”.
Randy Kemp
