Questions? Comments? Please call: 610-642-1000

Marketing

Direct Marketing Articles at Their Best.

By Jeffrey Dobkin

Jeffrey Dobkin

Jeffrey Dobkin

Links to all our Direct Marketing Articles.  Read marketing articles and learn from the heavy direct marketing experience of Jeffrey Dobkin. Dobkin’s direct marketing articles are fast-paced lessons in effective marketing methods. His direct marketing techniques took him a lifetime to learn and perfect — you can learn his direct marketing strategies in just a few nights of easy reading.

Learn how to market most anything, at the lowest possible cost.  You won’t find this level of effective direct marketing methods on other websites,  in books, or courses.  Dobkin’s direct marketing articles are deeply technical… and yet easy to understand and a great read in Jeffrey’s own breezy conversational style of writing.

Follow this direct marketing article series to learn the practical “How-To” side of low cost marketing.  Then use these simple and proven techniques to fine tune your own marketing.  Our guarantee: follow our marketing campaigns and you’ll generate the greatest response you’ve ever seen, or your money back.  If you’re marketing a product or service you’d be crazy not to read these technical direct marketing articles and apply Dobkin’s low cost direct marketing strategies to increase the success of any marketing campaign.

Enjoy the many direct marketing articles found throughout this website….  Your comments are most welcome.  Well, the good ones anyhow. This is the first of 5 pages of marketing articles.

Trending: Our most popular article: Insurance Sales Letters – How To Write Highly Responsive Sales Letters

The Lost Art of a Direct Mail Letter

How to design your direct mail letter.  How to make your direct mail letter look easy to read — even if it isn’t!

THIS IS A TECHNICAL ARTICLE ON LETTER DESIGN.  Because you can keep readers reading longer – by using all the techniques found in this article on letter design.

Learn how to use all the letter design elements available to you and still keep your sales letter looking like a letter: Bold, italics, short paragraphs, bulletted lists, white space, Johnson Box, marginal writing, centered copy, indented paragraphs – you know, stuff like dat dere.  A technical article for those that like specifics.  Increases readership.

How To Write The World’s Greatest Sales Letter

A companion article to The Lost Art of a Direct Mail Letter.  A How-To articles that covers copywriting a great letter.  If you need clients and prospects to call you, this direct marketing article is simply amazing!  Easy to understand, but technical as well.

Dobkin puts it like this: “Frankly, I use typographical errors and misspellings to make sure people read my letters – because when I have a spelling error deep in the copy everyone seems to find it and point it out to me.”  OK, maybe that’s not the best way to increase response, but there are plenty of other ways and this focused lead acquisition direct marketing article by Dobkin on writing a highly responsive letter shows you how.

How To Get Your Product In Catalogs

As the President of the Philadelphia Inventors Alliance I see and speak with a lot of inventors.  Most inventors ask me the same questions – where can I sell my invention.  The FIRST place I generally recommend to inventors to sell their product is into the catalog industry.  Some catalogs have hugh circulations – 20, 40, 60 million catalogs a year.  Imagine if your product was offered in 20 million catalogs?  Wow, home run!  No easy task, but it can happen.  This article shows you in six steps where to find catalogs that might be interested in your products, and what it takes to get your product included in their catalog.

The Simple Objective of a Marketing Plan

This is a  highly technical article  showing the wide margins of a marketing plan, then distilling it into its essence.  If you want your eyes to glaze over with marketing and direct marketing technology-speak, this is the marketing article for you.  It’s also good for putting your kids to bed.

However… for technical marketing geeks like Dobkin, this is Nirvana. For the rest of us, it’s just technical and geeky, with a few typos thrown in so the picky bastards out there will have something to show their friends.  Into marketing?  Go ahead, read it…

The Strategic Use of Letters

So what else can a well written and well placed letter do?  You mean besides increasing response, doubling – tripling customer loyalty, and keeping you in your customer’s mind when he or she needs to make a referral?  Read this article to find out.

Magazine Publishers Hate Me

How To Buy Ad Space at Discount!  Learn the secrets of how to get huge discounts when placing ads in media – sometimes discounts as much as 70%, 80% even 90% off of your advertising rates when placing advertisements in magazines and newspapers.  This is an explicit no bullshit article that shows you exactly how to buy ad space at a discount.  Read this article to learn the entire negotiation process for magazine discounts.

If you’re placing a lot of print ads in newspaper campaigns, you won’t want to miss Dobkin’s in-depth, even more technical article:

Buying newspaper ads at steep discount.

Learn how to buy newspaper space like a pro – at a discount of 70%, 80%, even 90% off list.  This article is about “remnant space” buys in newspapers and magazines: buying advertising space at even steeper discounts.  This is the second of two great articles showing you how to negotiate like a pro when buying ad space.  Plan your media buys carefully, and read these articles on remnant space and negotiating ad rates first.

Learn the advertising rate game from someone who has purchased advertising from all kinds of large and small publishers for the past 30 years. This article reprinted from the chapter on space advertising in his book, How To Market a Product for Under $500!.

Marketing with Post Cards

Post cards are an awesome form of print media to use in your marketing. You can send just a few, or hundreds of thousands and still run an effective campaign.

This is the first in a series of half a dozen explicit articles on post cards found on our websites (yes, we have more than one website).  Learn how to create effective post cards and use them to create successful, easy to run low cost marketing campaigns.  Post cards are easy to use and cheap to print. There are a lot of ways to increase your response – you can learn the easy to implement writing and design techniques in this article to make your post cards highly responsive.

The Top 14 Questions In Marketing Answered

The top questions I’m most often asked about the different phases of marketing. For example, in direct mail: what’s best way to get your direct mail package opened, what’s a good response to a mailing?

Questions in PR – what’s the easiest and fastest way to increase the number of magazines that publish your press releases?

This article has the no bullshit easy to read and quick-to-employ answers.  Lean and fast, a good technical article on direct marketing.

The 10 Worst Mistakes in Direct Mail

A more serious technical article exploring what can cripple response in a direct mail campaign. Do you make these mistakes?  Yea, we bet you do… Read this article and at least you won’t make these mistakes again.  Don’t worry – you’ll make new ones.

Marketing Audit Questions

63 Marketing Audit Questions I ask every firm owner about their marketing campaign.

But what the heck is marketing, anyhow?  Read this brief marketing article and quickly bring clarity and vision to your marketing team… and marketing campaign. Learn more about your own marketing plan – in 1,412 words – than you ever thought possible.  A short and extraordinarily valuable course in marketing, condensed into a 5 minute read.

You Emailed What!!!?

A seriously fun article on why you should use email in a pinch or for a brief note, and why you should send a letter for important matters.  This email article brings to light the lasting ability of a letter while email communications are so fleeting and get deleted carelessly, unless of course you say something you’ll regret. Then they stick around forever.  A good read. Fun in places, and serious when it needs to be.

The Simple Objective of a Marketing Plan

For you technical, geeky kind of marketing people – this one’s for you!  A technical marketing article just so you can see Jeffrey isn’t all fun and games.  While his spelling sucks and his proofreading skills are sometimes less than spectacular, his knowledge about marketing and direct marketing runs pretty deep.  You can see that in this very technical direct marketing article.

Trade Show Mailers

Some clients not only like trade shows, they thrive on trade shows as a lifeblood of their marketing. Ridiculous as this may seem trade shows are the successful marketing method of choice for many firms.

Direct marketing can make trade shows even more effective: Use a Pre-show mailer.

A pre-show letter is fine, so is a post card. Mail two weeks before the first day of the show, to arrive in your prospects’ hands a week before the show. Mail first class. Don’t use a label, they look cheap. Always have. And you know that cheap suit you bought a few years ago and said “maybe no one will notice?” They do. It looks cheap, too. Get a new one.

But almost seriously, this is a ‘funnier than all get-out’ trade show article but very informative.  All about how to increase your booth traffic at trade shows.

Sales Letters: How to Write Highly Responsive Sales Letters

Everyone has their own sales letter template for increasing response. Our sales letter format is very different: you don’t sell your products in the letter. You show your biggest benefits, then ask the reader call – several times. When someone calls, YOU sell your product. That’s our sales letter template. Here’s how to write a perfect sales letter to get the highest response possible.

Continue Reading
More Marketing Articles

These are just a few of the many marketing articles available on this site written just for you – the entrepreneur, inventor, product developer and business owner. Enjoy the marketing and PR articles with our compliments.  We hope they help you succeed.  If you ever get stuck, always feel free to call us with questions – 610-642-1000.

Hey – don’t forget to buy something here!  Your purchases support our research and writing team and allow us to continue to bring you accurate and timely marketing articles.  All of our successful, low cost marketing methods are written to help you succeed in your own business.  

For a full page of links to more
of our favorite articles – please click here!

The top 17 press release tips for creating effective press releases

Everything you need to know about press releases in a compact article.  A fast-paced and highly informative article on PR.

Includes the basics of how to write an effective press release; progresses through the 11 most valuable words in all of PR (Hint: they’re not “Yes I’ll love you forever and I swear I’m not married!”) and you’ll learn Dobkin’s secret of exactly how – in under one minute – how to increase the chance of having your press release published by over 80%.   Even professional press agencies have learned this insider technique developed by Dobkin in his 30 year career of building media relations.

A 19-Point Lead Generation Plan

Yea, yea I know your marketing is great!  But sales are down and new clients are harder to find than a politician who hasn’t been charged with sexual harassment.  Here are seven ways your lead generation plan is broken and more impotently 12 easy ways to fix it.  I meant importantly.

12 Tips for writing more responsive letters

Short and succinct, this is a great 6 minute read if you’re in a hurry.  Contains Dobkin’s Number One writing tip of all time, say hallelujah.