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By Gary, September 16, 2009

Let’s be very clear on this: Whether you’re talking about life insurance, health insurance, car insurance, house insurance, etc., there is probably a part of you buried down deep (or maybe not even so deeply?) that thinks, “Insurance sucks. It’s like stuffing money down a deep hole, never to see it again and never even to hear it hit the bottom of the hole.”

Isn’t that about right? All the hassle of getting a good insurance quote usually starts the process. (Although the Internet has perhaps lessened some of that pain.) Then once an agreement is reached and paperwork taken care of, the real fun begins. You throw away your money on monthly, semi-annual, or annual premium payments.

Of course you realize most of those premiums you’ll never see again or get any benefit from. If that were not true, insurance companies would go broke. I can tell you from working at a property and casualty company that homeowners insurance and auto insurance work basically on one principle: Do everything you can do deny a claim; if you must pay a claim then low-ball the payout as much as you can possibly get away with.

All this is to say one thing if you are a copywriter or aspire to write sales copy of any sort: Watch or read lots of insurance ad copy if you want to learn how to make silk purses out of pigs’ ears. Think about the last insurance commercial you saw on television. It probably focused on how that company can 1) protect and defend you/your property/your loved ones/your health, whatever, 2) happiness and humor, 3) pride of ownership, and 4) all sorts of other positive, upbeat stuff.

You want to write ad copy? Learn from the best. Learn from the insurance companies.

Then take a deep breath and pay those insurance premiums anyway.

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By Gary, September 16, 2009

Sometimes you make a decision and you just feel downright good and RIGHT about it. I did that about 10 minutes ago when I deleted my Twitter account, freeing up some time and getting untangled from a horrifically sp*mmy mess.

I have to stand up and take the blame: I stepped into one of those “see how many thousand followers you can get on Twitter” ideas and ran with it. But soon I found myself unable to run away from the results of that step (or perhaps better called a stumble) — and I was getting billions of tweets every day from every MLM nut and sp*mmer on the Internet. (Okay, not all of ‘em, I’m sure, and not really “billions.”)

As I explained awhile ago on another of my blogs, I was always sort of “interface challenged” about Twitter and frequently found myself looking at screens full of idiotic little tweets by idiotic Twitter devotees, and not really understanding whether they were my followers or someone I was actually following.

I think the final straw came when I found I was being followed by (or following? or both??) some people interested in helping me find a successful dating life, and by some nice young ladies who were in bikinis or less and filled them out, I must admit, rather nicely.

My wife, who has a wonderful sense of humor (she’s been married to me more than 42 years, proving she can enjoy a good laugh and is filled with great compassion), got a real kick out of that.

So, former fellow tweeters, you won’t have me to twitter at any longer. If I do decide to jump back into Twitter, I’ll be sure and let you know where you might find me there.

Meanwhile, if you REALLY want to reach me, why not leave a comment here at the old blog and we can engage in some civilized discussion and debate about interesting stuff — not just twit (I mean tweet) at each other 140 characters at a time.

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By Gary, September 14, 2009

A couple of days ago I warned all you WordPress bloggers out there to be aware of possible plugin conflicts and other strange glitches that might happen to your blog. I’m not sure I made myself clear in that discussion about issues I had on some of my blogs, so let me repeat this: We did have a problem when people tried to leave comments on a couple of my blogs — including this one — but it’s fixed now.

I thought I should state that clearly because at least a couple of people are regular readers of my blogs via my Twitter reposting. And I want to make sure they get the word. If you tried to comment here or on any of my other blogs in recent months, you may have had your comment disappear when you hit “Submit.”

It shouldn’t be happening now. I found the plugin that wasn’t playing nicely with the others and made it go sit in the corner for a little time out. Or booted it off the bus. Or stopped and abandoned the thing alongside the road on the blogging highway. Whatever cheesy analogy you’d like to hear — that’s what I did with that plugin, and it will never block comments again. So now it’s back to vigilantly watching for the next plugin tantrum.

Many years ago, we made a move from one part of the country to another, and we did it without the help of any cross country moving companies, choosing simply to rent a large truck and do it all ourselves. As you know if you’ve done anything like that, it was a memorable adventure which I thankfully never hope to do again. I said all that to say this: Running multiple blogs and trying to add some value to them is filled with unexpected adventures and sudden problems that pop up, much like that long ago cross country move.

But, what the heck, blogging is STILL more fun. As a writer, I encourage you to start a blog if you haven’t started one yet. If you already blog, what can I say? Keep up the good work.