Month: June 2012

Think outside the cubicle – by Scott Young – is a short e-book dealing on ways to be more productive while working from home.

Here are a few suggestions covered:

• Work for your peak everyday length instead of wasting hours of low productivity. You can also let low creativity tasks that require less of you for later, after your peak.
• A system of Day/Weekly to-do lists. The goal being having an achievable to-do list every day (instead of mine which currently have several hundred items!). You don't add items if you are done before the end of the day – that would only punish your productivity.
• Take breaks when you need them. But real breaks – not just checking your e-mail or Facebook, or anything related to work.
• Exercise and eat well.
• Write your goals and leave them where you can see them for motivation.
• Increment your output level slowly
• To stop wasting time with the internet, only check e-mail/sites/facebook once per day (this is a tough one to follow!)
• Always empty your e-mail inbox every day (also a bit though).

Overall, it was an interesting little (I think it took me less than an hour to read it) e-book. You can get it Scott's site. I wouldn't have bought it at his price, however – I got it on an Appsumo bundle.

The Dark Art of Writing Long-Form Sales Pages is a book on writing long-form sales pages – you know, the usually really annoying ones, full of bullet points, bonus products and testimonials that just keep scrolling down forever.

The thing is – while they seem annoying, for certain markets, they convert very well. So you might want to learn how to write them, and test them on YOUR market.

The book covers a lot of material:

• The genres of the long-form pages.
• How to research your product and customers
• The right way to do headlines, crossheads and hooks
• Writing the body
• Using testimonials
• How to show incentives, discounts and bonuses
• Suggestions o nhow to design and format your page

There are also a few bonus videos and extra PDFs. These are somewhat useful. The videos had really low audio in the screencast parts, but not too bad.

The main e-book also had some weird formatting, such as beige backgrounds with white text. Fortunately this was only on a few text boxes in the beginning. Other than that, it was very readable on my iPad using Kindle and the MOBI version.

Overall, the book was very good, and I have a ridiculous amount of pages bookmarked and sections highlighted. Joanna says on the book and on the videos that you should read the book twice (not an uncommon claim), and I agree that this is probably a good idea in this case. It really is a lot of material to absorb, specially if (like me) you are not a full-time copywriter and just want to learn how to promote your own products.