Best Education For Copywriters?

Bob,

Not one book will make you good at it. Best course is to start.

Best Regards,
vip-ip ...

Get a copy of the copywriters handbook by bob bly. I've got a bookshelf full of copywriting books and this has to be the best one i've found so far.

Allan forrest smiths videos are also good, he did some seminars with Brett McFall

But Just do it is the best advice i can give, don't learn without starting to practice at the same time.

Hi Bob,

If you haven't got this, Marketing Bullets | Gary's Arsenal, then you should.

Names already mentioned in this thread, such as John Carlton and Clayton Makepeace studied
this man's work...as if they were dogs on a trail findiing a bitch on heat!

Need I say more..?

I suspect not, if you are serious in your desire to rise above average.

It's all sitting there for the taking...no charge...no sign up.

All the best for your career,
Ewen

SWS anyday!

These are all great resources! And it's definitely best to just start putting it into practice...

I just gotta recommend the one program that has helped me out so much with my copy... Go to tednicholas.com/mp and you will get a super awesome deal on a whole bunch of stuff for trying his mentoring program out for 30 days... In case you don't know who Ted Nicholas is, he's the highest paid copy writer in the world.

Other than that, I would recommend reading all the different marketing and influence books you can find... Yes 50 scientific ways to influence people is one of my favorites.

Also, whenever you're checking out someone else's sales video, page, or emails, look at their copy and see how it works on you.

Hope this helped!

~ Omar

Yep...as my learned colleague has pointed out, the writing is the easy part. As Halbert said "Being on-target is much more important than being facile with words".

But having said that...I think an enquiring mind is a great asset for a copywriter. Be interested in everything - no matter how banal. 'cause good research will help you be "on target" and it will be obvious that you know what you're talking about.

Talking about being on target - http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...read-weep.html

Damn, I was all ready to tell you what to do until I read Mike's post. I guess he pretty much covered it all. Make sure you hit up those classic books! Salesmanship is timeless.

There are lots there. What you did is a good start.

Have you read the Gary Halbert newsletter? I think it is a timeless education:

The Gary Halbert Letter

Why take more courses?

Take what you know and drill. That's what creates skill.

If you want to do more learning before you start I'll give you a complete system that will make you a great copywriter but before I do you should know a few things...

One of the difficulties in becoming a good copy-writer is that like salespeople (in-person or by phone) the measurement of success is in unit of sales vs. number of contacts; but unlike salespeople a copy-writer does not get immediate feedback on their results. So in order to get good at copywriting you must become FLUENT. Let me give you an analogy - when you go to a foreign country you may be able to learn some basics of the language before you go and then when you get there you get fluent through being immersed in the language in your daily everyday affairs (this is like tele-sales or face to face sales). However when you want to write a LETTER in a foreign language you must become FLUENT before you write the letter (this is like copywriting). And to become FLUENT in copy-writing and the creation of written appeals you either need to write a lot of copy and get immediate feedback (from the market and hopefully from copywriters that can point out where you can improve) OR you can take a few shortcuts that I'll mention in a moment...

Here's another distinction... salespeople often sell ONE item (or type of item i.e. - cars) their entire career and being good at selling one product does not always translate into being skilled at salesmanship in general. I've seen stock brokers that made a 1/4 Million a year when they were selling stocks - then try to sell vacations and fail miserably. I've seen car salespeople who sold thousands of cars successfully and then moved to advertising sales and barely scraped by. This isn't always the case but it often is. People become good at specific things and it often DOES NOT generalize as much as you'd think.

These facts say a few things to me:

1. To be a true sales pro that can move from product to product and create pitches yourself you must understand sales in general (what you learned in the SWS course)

2. you need to become fluent in creating appeals (see above)

3. It's usually a good choice to be a copywriter that specializes if you can because you can often use the same appeals over and over in your area of expertise.


So what are the shortcuts to becoming FLUENT? Is there a system to become a good copywriter WITHOUT practicing on unwitting clients? Can it be done without buying more courses?

I think so.

If you'd like to find out more and would like me to post the method here - let me know.

visit globalline.biz to see the best resources on earth

One piece of media I recommend is the interview Ken McCarthy did with Gary Bencivenga.

Many copywriting view Gary as a God, but once they hear the interview and what he went through, you'll see just how accessible it is.

Start writing, submitting to article directories and monitor traffic and conversion rates. know SEO, social marketing and come up with ideas how to monitor results on your own blog. Write free guest posts or press releases for others. Then, after you get their feedback and build a portfolio you can start charging money for your work.