Nuts & Bolts: Book Club

Bly on … Just About Everything

March 2007

multipage

“In this book, you get dozens of suggestions, strategies, recommendations and rules of thumb with the potential to double or triple your response rates, writes Robert Bly in the introduction to his 2006 book “Bly on Direct Marketing: 258 ways to double your response—based on a quarter century of proven results” (Merit Direct Press, $49). As the subhead suggests and reading the book will attest, the term “dozens” is a bit of an understatement. Indeed, this is 293 pages packed with the kind of actionable ideas that marketers, especially those on the creative side of the business, clamor for.

Touching on such varied topics as how to get more money for your product/service, unique selling propositions, driving Web traffic, creating trade show displays, testing strategies, and how to gauge your marketing competence, this book covers a wide swath of the marketing discipline, but the real focus is copywriting, which makes sense coming from Bly, who is arguably one of the industry’s most successful copywriters.

A solid primer filled with valuable ideas, this book is a great read for any marketing professional, but especially aspiring copywriters, who could gain
particular benefit from Bly’s from-the-trenches accounts of not only how to sell any product or service, but yourself as well.

—Tracy A. Gill