I know just enough about Richard Armstrong to be, well, scared.

He’s got a black sense of humor and the mafia heavies in his book are a little too vivid for my taste.

Speaking of his book, I just finished reading it.

“God Doesn’t Shoot Craps” is a fast reading, most interesting broth of a book Richard has seasoned with Joe Karbo, The Sopranos, Dante Aligieri and the film, Atlantic City.

Anyway, a friend of mine, (no really he’s just a friend) Dr. Jack Booman, sent me a link to download Richard’s amazing free sample book, My First 40 Years In Junk Mail. You’ll be hard pressed to find a more oustanding example of how to make your advertising itself valuable to your prospects.

Besides this, Ricard offers a boatload of free gifts to copywriters who purchase his book. Amazing stuff.

Richard’s material is so good, some rightly wonder if they should be sharing it with the rest of the world or just keep it under their hats. Some also wondered if Richard would be displeased if everyone on the Internet started posting links to his stuff.

After all, why gain all that copywriting knowledge only to wind up swimming with the fishes?

Well, Richard has put these questions to rest so you can learn a bunch of his tricks while sleeping easy at night.

Several folks have written to me to ask if it would be okay if they posted a link to on their blogs, Tweeted it, mentioned it on Facebook, Linked-in, told their friends and colleagues about it, etc. etc. After much careful consideration, here’s my answer…  Well, gee, let me think about that, hmmm, I guess, well, I don’t know, er, um, ah … YES, OF COURSE YOU CAN!!!  Obviously, I’d be delighted if you did something like that.  And you’d be my best friend forever.  Which, judging by how I treat most of my friends, means I’ll never call, I’ll forget your birthday each year, and I’ll be way too busy to come to your funeral.   But I’ll still appreciate it!

I’ve got nothing against telemarketers. Heck, many blue moons ago I was one myself…and a piss poor one at that. During my college days, I did a brief telemarketing gig for New York Life. I worked with leads of small businesses and pitched them on cheaper health insurance plans.

The lists I was given were 2-4 years old, so it wasn’t uncomon to be told that the person I was trying to reach was dead. Usually this was a relative of the deceased.

Talk about a downer.

After several weeks of this  sort of misery, I finally made my first sale and anxiously awaited my commission check. The only problem (speaking of piss) was my prospect tested off the chart for opiates. No policy underwritten. No commission.

So nowadays, I empathize with cold callers.  In fact, I sometimes enjoy engaging them and finding out what they’re made of.  But because the vast portion of my day is blocked out, the telemarketers have to “tell it to the chip.”

Recently, I bought something online called “Launch Tree.” More megabytes of crap on a hard drive already loaded with it. I’m still a sucker for such things and I wouldn’t have even recalled purchasing this but for the dozen or so messages from a hard-sell telemarketing team.

Big, bossy voices spouting lines like: “Lawrence, do this, now” and “Lawrence, you need to call my office today before 5:00 pm.”

Doesn’t bother me. I need all the merriment I can get since giving up drinking and the Lauch Tree has paid in spades.

Actually, the impetus for this post came after I dialed a freind of mine last week and he pegged me as a Launch Tree trimmer.  My friend used to make a very lucrative living as a royalty copywriter until making an even more lucrative one doing high level licensing deals.  So it was a kick to hear him recap his Lauch Tree interchange.

Launchtree: “Do you wanna keep playin’ around online…or are you ready to make some real money?”

Friend: “No, I’m just a tire kicker, thank you very much!”

(Silence.)

(The following hails from guest blogger, Byrne Hobart)

Leo Burnett was never one to shy away from the branding iron. Why spend millions hounding your prospects to convince them they needed corn flakes, when you could have Tony the Tiger do it for you? Tony works 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and he doesn’t require health insurance.

But even though the Pillsbury Doughboy and the Jolly Green Giant don’t need to eat, you could starve to death trying to emulate them. Creating a character is expensive! You have to invent the character, of course, but a one-shot ad isn’t going to be enough: it takes a sustained campaign to lodge something like that in the public consciousness. It’s a big investment that only really makes sense on the national level.

But something has changed.

It’s possible to get the same kind of branding power that was previously only available to big-budget marketing brands. You can do it quickly, and more cheaply, through search engine optimization.

Think about the process in more depth. The consumer thinks: “I want some cereal. Which cereal do I like? I like Corn Flakes!”

Now, think about how they buy something that’s sold online: “I want blue plaid shorts. I’ll Google blue plaid shorts.” And what do they find? The first page is ranked #1 because of search engine optimization (and yes, full disclosure: I worked with them on that SEO campaign).

They could have spent far more money on branding their store and injecting themselves into the buyer’s thought process; they could have blanketed New York with flyers, radio ads, and direct mailings; but through SEO, they were able to make a small investment go a long way.

It’s the same trick the big, national brands pull off: slip into the consumer’s consciousness right as they’re getting ready to make the big purchase. But this time, it doesn’t require a massive budget. All it takes is a modest investment and a little patience.

Marketers are always finding ways to get closer to consumers at the Moment of Truth, when they make their purchasing decision. I’d like to suggest that search engine optimization is an essential part of the marketer’s toolkit. For more and more people, “reality” is defined as whatever ranks first on the first search they do—and for those of us who make a living getting things sold, let’s just say that’s GRRRRRREAT!

Byrne Hobart is a copywriter focused on SEO. He works for a web design firm in New York.