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Imagine an online resource where you can instantly search thousands of the winningest space ads, magalogs and direct mail pieces from past to present.

Well, there’s no need to imagine it because it’s almost here

Writer’s block and idea block can be faint memories because you’ll be one click away from a mountain of tested and proven copy, winning design and inspiring ideas from the world’s foremost direct response companies.

Gary Bencivenga, who many consider the world’s greatest copywriter said of the original version: “I would gladly have paid…ten times, even 100 times its price.”

This version will be what a sports car is to a horse and buggy.

Here’s why.

See the little search box above and to the right?

Let’s say you’re looking for successful promotions where diabetes is the subject.

All you have to do is enter the term “diabetes” in the search box and out pops magalogs, direct mail and space ads related to diabetes.

Go ahead and try it.

This ad is for an Eberly artisanal turkey.

Unlike a Butterball at the local supermarket, this one has a $142 price tag.

Bon Appetit and Happy Thanksgiving.

Fatherhood again.

At last…a girl!

Elated…exhausted…overwhelmed…overjoyed.

Be back in a while.

If you’re an even average Google user, the Mountainview, California company already possesses gigabytes full of your emails, your web search history, your financial portfolio and your websites’ traffic and conversion info.

I’m sure I’m leaving much out.

Anonymity was something our parents enjoyed with no special effort.

Here’s a nice little upshot for all the leverage they have on us. It’s called Google Flu Trends and the claim is Google can use search queries, in conjunction with C.D.C. data, to determine the precise level of influenza activity in your locale (in the United States) several weeks earlier than conventional methods.

As the queries creep up, you’ll know it’s time to head to your doctor for a flu shot.

Here’s the billion dollar advertising collection that turbocharges the money making power of the world’s most stolen advertising book.

Because this collection is now part of a larger (and far more expensive) archive, it will soon be put out to pasture.

100 Money Blueprints has never been offered for $47 and it never will again… so if you’ve held back before, now is your chance to grab it.

On top of that, it’s RISK FREE for 31 days if you meet the two easy conditions spelled out when you click through to the page below.

But you must enter the coupon code… “copy” (without quotes) on the checkout page and click “apply”…. to instantly save $100… till Friday at midnight.

Get 100 Money Blueprints here.

“Your manual has been instrumental in me writing an ad that generated over $20,000 in just two weeks, so cudos to you Lawrence.” (Dr. Carney, Temecula, CA)

It’s been about two decades since I’ve been a “true” sports fan.

I like Winston Churchill’s definition of a fan or fanatic:

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

I’m also partial to Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements.

Well, on Sunday, my wife told me it was high time to come down from the Ivory Tower and melt into the Red Sea of beer-swilling, trash-talking Arizona Cardinals fans, even though her allegiance is to the New York Jets.

And it was fun, not just from a marketer’s perspective.

The legendary copywriter, Gene Schwartz advocated reading junk, like The National Enquirer, as well as watching the explosion-dialogue-explosion-dialogue cadence of the Lethal Weapon film series to hone one’s ability to communicate with the mass market.

For my part, I attempted to count the number of advertising messages during the game.

There were so many inane ones, I gave up mid-way through the first quarter. The only one that seemed to stick was FreeCreditReport.com. Perhaps, because it’s an easy, three-word URL and appeared four or five times during the game.

Obama or McCain?

If you’re a serious entrepreneur, it’s time to get off the fence and take a stand.

And it doesn’t even matter if you live in the United States. In fact, it may be even more vital to those who live in the United Kingdom or Italy.

At last, the issue is crystal-clear thanks to the guiding light of this U.S. Presidential Candidate’s 16-word-quote. [Read more…] about Obama Or McCain?

(From Lawrence: the following is guest published by a friend and ingenious marketer who once beat Jay Abraham in a head-to-head direct mail contest. I’m not sure he wants his name published and I couldn’t think of a suitable nom de plume. Certainly not the now exhausted Mr. X. There’s a link to DL the inspiration for this piece at the bottom of this post.)

The Murky Backwaters of Direct Mail…Where the Suckers Moon

The term “list” is a pleasant synonym for a nasty two-word phrase that indoctrinated me into the world of selling/influence peddling.

In my younger and more vulnerable years what we call a customer list was actually a “Sucker List” [Read more…] about Guest Post: “Where the Suckers Moon”

One of the smartest direct response advertisers I know of is far from being a typical direct response publication: The Economist.

The Economist is one of those magazines that takes a half-dozen nudges to get me to renew my subscription.

And they’re usually successful because they keep nudging.

After sending several envelopes with “subscription expiration” as the teaser copy, they waited several weeks before recently sending this “Reinstatement Notice.”

What a great idea. It’s something all small business owners can mimic for reactivating fallen away customers.

Instead of upbraiding the subscriber for leaving, they reach out and welcome him back into the fold. As far as I can tell, the offer is the same as the expiration notice: a fat discount off the newsstand price and a few typical goodies like “The Pocket World In Figures.”

As opposed to most of their counterparts, it’s always educational to observe how The Economist approaches renewals as well as customer acquisition.

Here is the first page of a letter written in 1981 which was a control for 15 years. (Use the magnifier icon over the image to enlarge it, once opened in a new window.)

Even mere hours after its release, there are over 1700 pages in Google News on the new web browser, Chrome.

My terse and non-techie take on it is, it’s a very intuitive transition from FireFox. I’ve noticed some pages loading many multiples faster than FireFox, so much so, it makes the load time on FireFox feel like dial-up service.

Undoubtedly, there are some kinks to be worked out, like the lack of a spell checker while composing this post. But being able to zip around on a new browser, right out of the starting block and after a grinding 18 hour day, seems promising.

Here’s the link to Download Google Chrome

If you’re a serious direct marketer, you already know what a swipe file is.

Beyond the conventional definition of a collection of winning ads, every master marketer I know of uses a swipe file not just for inspiration for writing advertising copy but for:

• Product creation
• Advertising and business strategy
• Creating entire business models

The world’s most successful direct response ad writer said of it, it’s:

“The best source I have ever found.”

If you’re a serious direct response marketer or copywriter, here are the details:

ResearchMagnet.com

Two summers ago, one of the big name I.M. gurus rang me up.

We talked about several things and then wound up on the topic of website analytics. When I asked him some basic questions about his sites’ metrics, I was stunned when he revealed he didn’t know because he didn’t use any.

Since then, I must have encountered a dozen marketers who would define themselves as professionals, yet use no form of analytics.

By now, there’s no excuse for anyone with even a fledgling website to not use Google Analytics. And for serious marketers, Website Optimizer is a must.

The loudest mantra for salesman has been A.B.C. “Always be closing.”

For marketers, it’s A.B.T. “Always be testing.”

Here’s a website which can turn even a novice into a proficient tester. It’s called:“Google Website Optimizer 101 – a quick-start guide to improving your website’s effectiveness — includes a list of 108 ways to improve your website’s profits.”

There were a lot of whispers at a Chicago conference I attended two years ago about two fellow attendees from the U.K. and the founders of the above site. Karl Blanks is a Cambridge Ph.D. and a former rocket scientist (really) and Ben Jesson is a veteran Internet marketing specialist.

The fact that their page ranks just under Google’s for the search term, “website optimizer,” speaks volumes about the quality of the content.

Some (not entirely) random ramblings from my trip around Europe

Last week, I met an American friend who’s been living in Rome for a while.

He still has a lot of assets in dollars and complains about how expensive it is paying for everything in Euros. He’s got a point. I spent 31 Euros ($49) for a so-so plate of tagliatelle in Venice the week before. No mere bagatelle. It would’ve cost about ten bucks during the good old days of the lira.

For all our sakes, one hopes the spread between euro and dollar won’t widen but since that’s out of our hands, I propose the same plan of action which elicited a strange stare from my now Roman friend: just get a lot more dollars. (I’ll have some concrete suggestions next week.)

There are few places an American can go nowadays without saying “ouch,” when compared with a few years ago. Even a country like Croatia has Americans holding onto their wallets.

Recently, near the city of Split, Croatia, I was frivolously intent on carrying out a split run direct mail test. I abandoned this notion when my wife threatened her own version of a split test, so I waited till I was back in Rome.

Though I didn’t send a statistically significant batch of mail and was only testing deliverability, it was fascinating what I discovered. Delivery of a post card or letter from the world’s smallest country, Vatican City, to the U.S. and Canada is between 50% and 100% faster than it is from the Roman post office four minutes down the block. I wish someone could explain how this is so. Since Vatican City is only 0.2 square miles and has no airport anyone knows of, its mail must be flown out of Rome Fiumicino Airport and sorted with the same mail dropped off at Roman P.O.’s

Whatever the reason, there’s a positive correlation between speed of delivery and response rates, so the sight of a sack-laden direct mail marketer waiting in line behind an Archbishop at the Vatican Post Office is not out of the question.

I had a reason for doing this test.

Because of the economic turmoil taking place, I’m looking into the viability of some sort of safe haven report or newsletter targeted toward frazzled U.S. investors a la Joel Nadel’s Royal Society of Lichtenstein (sold to Agora) or the Zurich Report from the 1980’s.

Speaking of Americans, there are far fewer of them wandering the streets of major European cities. During the summer months, one usually hears English spoken as freely as the local language. Now, due to the ascendance of the Russian middle class, one is just as likely to hear Russian. And the Russians are voracious consumers of luxury items. My brother-in-law who’s new Russian in most respects (read conspicuous consumer) gave me a bottle of Louis XIII cognac before returning home. I’ve never seen anything so outrageous. For a thousand Euros, it comes in a baccarat crystal decanter and is contained within a red leather presentation case, replete with a 14 carat gold label. I insisted I don’t drink cognac and preferred a 50 euro bottle of single malt, yet I wound up schlepping the box back to Arizona.

As prosperous as the Russians now are, I wouldn’t count on them displacing Americans for too long. Since all of their newfound prosperity depends on high energy prices, when prices recede — and it’s just a question of when — the Russian middle class may vaporize as fast as it appeared.

On the Italian School of Copywriting

Many Italians don’t waste time with letters to the editor. A can of spray paint and a barren wall let them carry on the time honored sport of political commentary popularized by a 16^th Century tailor named Pasquino and dating back to the ancient city of Pompeii.

A worthy descendent of Pasquino is credited with the following lines, carved in a loaf of bread and hung on a statue of Caesar. The backdrop was the fascist rule, when Italians were urged to sacrifice for the greater good of empire while finding their daily bread increasingly inedible by the day.

Cesare!

Tu che ci hai lo stommico di fero,

Mangete sto pane di l’Impero!

(Caesar! You who have a stomach of iron, eat this bread of the Empire!)