CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

If we track back to see how any kind of writing begins, it’s fairly obvious that before the pen touches the page, or the finger touches the keyboard, there must be an idea .   If we accept that as our starting point, then it must also be reasonably clear that, based on the strength of that idea, writing will either occur or not, and also will be of a certain character or not. If the idea is weak - and it is possible to define more or less precisely what we mean by ‘weakness’,

If you are in any way an entrepreneur or are hoping to make an online business work for you and your customers, you will know the scenario - you are scrolling through your newsfeed and up pops an ‘exciting new webinar’ on a topic that you’re interested in. You have to sign up for it; you’re presented with a number of ‘time zone options’; and you get bombarded with messages like ‘Reserve your seat now!’, ‘Only a Few Places Left!’ and so on. At this webinar, you’re assured by a

In putting together a wholly new approach to creative writing, fiction and literature, I have tried not to invent an entirely new nomenclature for the subject. Where possible, I have used ordinary words which communicate independently, without necessarily requiring any knowledge of the wider framework of the subject - so, for example, the word ‘vacuum’ conveys something to the reader quite apart from its specialist meaning in relation to what makes up character or a plot. The

Marketing is commonly seen in two ways.   Both are highly damaging to any business.   Radical statement?   Well, let’s take a look at the two ways:   1. Most business people see marketing as an activity in which the products or services of the business are pumped out into the marketplace in the hope of attracting customers. To do this, businesses run ad campaigns, social media campaigns, have billboards, work on branding and basically try every way they can think of of gettin

If you’ve been following along each part of this course so far, you will have learned a number of almost magical things:   1. You now know that there are five basic mechanisms at work in any good business, attracting potential customers, compelling those potential customers forward, sticking prospects to your business, involving and engaging them by asking them to make moral choices, until they are captivated completely by your main message and driven forward to the conclusio

Most businesses feature a classic prospect and following a classic pattern, much of which we covered earlier when discussing prospects.   It’s worth noting what this basic pattern is, so that we can then go on to discuss slight variations of it. So what exactly happens to bring about a successful transition from prospect to happy and fulfilled customer?   In the beginning, you just have traffic. In that volume of traffic, you have people who, because of their basic needs, are

Traditional marketing says that you have a product or service and that you have to try to get that product or service into the possession or use of as many people as possible, so that you can make as much money as possible. So you have to go out into the world and put up billboards, and place ads in newspapers and on Facebook, and appear in videos on YouTube, and get interviewed on radio and television, all with the aim of contacting, persuading, and conquering the resistive

We saw in the last article that the things that we have become accustomed to calling 'customers' are actually almost vacuums disguised as people. A prospect is someone with a vacuum (a need, a desire, a gap, something missing); a customer is someone who has decided that you can fill that vacuum, enough to have made a monetary commitment to you - they buy something. You don’t need to ‘develop a product’ to make it convincing or attractive - you need to develop your understandi

So far in this little course we have learned about a range of things including what a customer really is and how he or she is attracted to a product or service. ‘Conversion’, we have learned, is about transforming one type of prospect into another, the type that becomes a customer. And we have learned that all of this has much to do with something that we have termed a ‘vacuum’.   Please remember that whenever we use the word 'vacuum' we are talking about need . The point of