What are the challenges in writing good copy that not only educates prospects and customers but also draws them in as leads for your business? asks ClickInsights in Mistakes to avoid in copy used for lead generation. This is a great survey of some smart people, and there are some really good tips in there. I picked up quite a few, including being reminded how powerful it is to "Write a headline or subject line in the form of a question requiring a Yes or No answer".

If you use Google Analytics, one of the best tools you have at your disposal is the rather low-profile URL Builder (so obscure it doesn't even appear to have a nice URL to call its own). What this tool does is to enable you to create URLs for all your promotional campaigns, such as advertising, emails, etc, which then allows you to track the visitors they create to a fine degree. This is the sort of thing I regularly find myself helping out our Insider Programme members with, but once you've started using this sort of tracking, you never look back.

When I do my introductory seminar on effective Google AdWords advertising, I do my best to convince people that although managing an AdWords account is intricate and takes a lot of time, it's not conceptually difficult. I show how it's important to measure conversions (the number of responders to the adverts who take actions), rather than just the number of responses. "Cost per conversion" becomes an extremely important measurement, and is what usually makes Google AdWords so much better value than other forms of advertising.

But is the better advert the one with the lowest cost per conversion? You might think so, but it may not be the case. It's all about profitability. Supposing you run one advert which gets you 10 conversions (let's say brochure requests) and costs you £250. That's £25 per conversion, obviously. Now you take out a much more expensive advert, which costs £2,000, and it gets 20 enquiries. That's a massive £100 per conversion; not nearly as good, right?

Well, it depends on how much you value the conversion at. If you find that you typically eventually sell products to 10% of enquirers, at an average profitability of £5,000, then the lower-cost advert will have found you one customer, and the return is £5,000 less £250, which is £4,750. The expensive advert's return is £10,000 less £2,000, which is £8,000. The moral of the story is not to lose your marketing instincts when confronted with pages of daunting statistics.

There are two great things to learn from the blog post I'm going to point you towards today. It's called 10 Essential Rules to Help You Create “Ready-to-Buy” Customers With White Papers and it's on Michael Stelzner's Writing White Papers site.

The first thing to note is the rules themselves. Producing one or more White Papers is an excellent marketing tool for almost every business. And the tips listed in this article are really good ones, from not holding back with your secrets, to embracing the reader's issues.

The second thing to note, however, is that there are only five rules, not ten. Isn't that the most compelling way of getting us to read more about the author's offerings? If he'd said "send for my ten rules" without letting you see any, or shown you all ten and then asked you to do something unrelated, he'd have got a far smaller response. Come on, think about it, we can all do this sort of exercise.

It seems like ages since we had one of Seth Godin's pearls of wisdom here. So I'll refer you to his recent post Why are you apologizing? for some of the usual food for thought. In summary, he says that if you're sending out something with an apology for sending it, then don't send it in the first place. He's right.

I've described all this week how the mobile phone system of "apps" is a far superior way of interacting with a PC than the present one, where the operating system rules all.

But who's going to design the computer that makes the giant leap of dispensing with the conventional operating system interface? It's already happening. Step forward the Apple iPad, which is everything I'm describing. Future iPads may well take on the form factor of current laptops and desktops – who knows? – but the key to this new gadget is, I believe, the way it works, not the shape of the hardware. That's why I predict we'll look back in 5 years' time to the iPhone and iPad as being the first steps in the evolution of the computers which we'll be using then. And, of course, this progression won't be limited to Apple.

Your customers' computer desktop of the future will, I believe, consist of things like an email app, a document app and a web app, amongst others, just as they do now in a less elegant way. But in addition, there'll be the What's new in Widgets app, the Blue Widget Company's app, the Red Widget Company's app, the Online Widget Exhibition app, and lots of other dedicated apps which will take the place of information currently presented as websites.

And what does it mean for us as marketers and information providers? We'll need to package up our information into apps, for sure, but there are opportunities to be really creative with what we provide. The web will still be a great promotional resource, but mainly to attract customers into our little worlds. As the price of hardware falls, don't be surprised if the best way to get your app into customers' hands turns out to be to give them the computer with the app pre-installed.

If your company management has struggled with the internet, I think things are about to get a lot harder. But if you've always embraced the possibilities it has provided, I think you'll have the right mindset to be even more of a presence than before.

Yesterday I showed how dedicated apps on mobile devices are easier to use than websites and browser-based applications on the PC. So if you want the latest news on your football team on the PC, you find their website and once again, there's a daunting, inconsistently designed nightmare of options to put you off. But download their app on your iPhone and it's a vastly more pleasant and efficient experience.

More importantly to the content provider, on the iPhone you're enclosed in the football club's own little ecosystem, whereas on the PC/website version, you're only a click away from, well, anywhere really. But as it happens, this option to leave easily is not one which we want anyway, and that's why we're prepared to pay for a nice iPhone app even though we're not that interested in paying to visit the club website.

So where does this leave us? I think the future of computing is app-shaped. That won't mean a huge difference to what we currently have on our PCs as applications. We'll still want Microsoft Word, or whatever. But they'll be joined by more information-based applications, which are effectively mini-browsers containing what's currently presented as websites. I've already got this on my iPhone, and I find it surprising that more people aren't predicting this as the future of personal computing. Do I visit a website to get my news fix on the iPhone? No, I fire up The Guardian's iPhone app, which has been designed from the ground up as a news resource for that device, and is a hundred times better to use than browsing that newspaper's website. And I paid for it too, which is why what I'm describing may save publishing as we know it.

Tomorrow I'll round things up and look at what this might mean for your company.

Yesterday I looked at how a simple screenful of applications would be a better way for PCs to work. What would that mean?

Well, each of these applications runs in their own little world. When an app is launched, the computer becomes a dedicated device for that purpose. It throws away thirty years of PC development, which has been organised around a prominent operating system (such as Windows) keeping as many plates spinning as possible, and often failing to do so. Applications on a PC today are all designed to match the operating system style, and are all fatally compromised in their usability by doing so. Apps on a mobile device are designed to do what they do in the most efficient way possible, with only minimal deference to other apps, and the operating system.

Let's take a random "app" on the iPhone, such as Facebook's, and compare it with the PC. On the iPhone, you touch the app to start it. You then have a screen of icons representing what you might want to do next (news feed, inbox, requests, etc). And when you go to any of these, the interface is dedicated to that function, and a joy to use.

Meanwhile, on the PC, you fire up a browser and are presented with a screen full of inconsistent options which are only usable because we've grown up with this stuff. And that's before you look at all the drop-down menus across the top of the screen which your browser gives you. It's quite frightening in comparison.

Tomorrow we'll see why the future of computing might be app-shaped.

Yesterday I mentioned that football clubs making their own iPhone apps is more significant than you'd think. I promise to explain why. But first, here's something else. For many years I've wondered why nobody's devised a good computer interface which, at startup, just offers us giant icons representing the applications we usually use, and nothing else. It would be a joy to use, and not just for my Mum, who only ever needs a web browser and iPhoto. Me, I'd have the screen divided into four: Safari, iTunes, Tweetdeck and a link to "other applications". Your mileage will vary.

Yes, I know that it's straightforward right now to put icons on your Windows desktop, but, well, they're a bit poky, aren't they? And the desktop always gets cluttered up with so much other rubbish. Then, a couple of years ago, I realised that interface was available and I was already using it …on my mobile phone. This just had a screen full of icons representing all the things it could do. The interface was taken a step further with the Apple iPhone, which allowed you to select the icons (and subsequently control the applications) through a touch screen.

And now it all comes together. The next step is for this interface to move up to the computer. Imagine a PC where you're completely isolated from the operating system, just like an iPhone. When you buy it, you have a blank screen, except for the icon which starts the application which takes you to the store where you buy and download all the other applications ("apps") you need. You download them as and when, and you can operate them by poking them with your finger.

Who cares? I'll explain why I think this is important tomorrow.

All this week I'm going to be writing about the whole future of the way we use computers, so if you don't want to know the score, look away now. This is the sort of thing we geeks daydream about when we've got an idle moment. You may be more interested in what's for dinner tonight; I wouldn't blame you.

While watching a football match on the TV the other day, something happened which made me sit up in a way I haven't done for about 15 years. That earlier occasion had been in the mid-nineties when, at the end of a TV programme, the closing credits were followed by a web address, where presumably you could get more information. It sounds totally unremarkable now, but at the time it was astonishing. The vast majority of people watching wouldn't have even known what that "www" thing was. But it was TV acknowledging, and actually using, the web. That was the moment, years before the dot-com boom, when I knew something big was coming.

Fast-forward to 2010 and the football match in question. On the annoying electronic advertisement hoardings by the side of the pitch, the Premier League club (we don't say the C-word here) was advertising its downloadable "app" for the iPhone. I nearly dropped my Doritos. Once again, it struck me that something major was brewing: the end of the web as we know it. And I'm going to explain why over the next few days.