Practice

For me the best ways to practice is to write.

And then I edit about 28 times.

If I'm not writing, a good way to keep your skills sharpened is to read Ads, Sales Letters etc - and "critique" them.

What is good?

What is bad?

What techniques are they missing?

How would you improve them?


Hope this helps,


Steve

All the superb copywriters I know are all booked up solid for months in advance.

When we're not actually copywriting we are carrying out research on behalf of our clients.

'Not working' doesn't fit into the equation. Most of the top copywriters here - we're all working non-stop. What keeps our copywriting 'muscles' strong is the fact that we're all excellent at what we do. Which is why we're never short of work.

Best,


Mark Andrews...

Build up your swipe file of powerful sales letters.

Study them relentlessly to see what works etc.

Study the headlines, the first paragraph, the bullets, the copy flow, the offer etc.

This will give you a great headstart.

Get Halbert's Motherlode Collection of Sales Letters...a very powerful swipe file.

Best,

Thomas O'Malley

Are you a product creator?

If so, write a sales letter for a product you plan on creating. The thought processes you go through, and the writing you do, will be very helpful.

Alex

P.S. I've seen one good course (170-page ebook) that gives practice exercises at the end of each chapter, "How To Be a Copywriting Stud!" by Randy Gage.

According to the author, "As long as you do the practice exercises in their entirety, your skills will improve. And by the end of the course, you will be writing powerful copy."

Thanks for all the advice everyone.

I have a product in the pipeline so I will have to hone my copywriting skills at some point soon.

I've gone through a lot of different books and programs, trying to learn the art of copywriting and what I found is to just go out and start doing. I was fortunate enough to have a job where I had access to an email list where I could practice my email copy. We had analytics set up to where I could test subject lines and then I had tracking set up on links that I had in my emails. With certain objectives set in place, I worked on developing my voice in text and measured what was successful through the results I produced. Sometimes I screwed up, sometimes I offended but I started to see a spike in sales.

If you've ever had a sales job, you learn to listen for hot buttons and then start hammering away. Whenever I write copy, I imagine the prospect sitting right in front of me and I start to go through their fears and potential objections. Know your prospects, know your authentic voice and pay attention to the results. Tweak from there.

One of my favorite marketers out there is Frank Kern. He has a unique, real voice that I relate to. Find someone who is successful and that you relate to and go from there. Hope that helped.

To improve your skills, Gary Bencivenga ,one of the greatest copywriters now retired, says that you spend a minimum of 3 hours daily practicing your skill.


I guess you can start by reading at least one great sales letter per day. Then have a goal of writing at least 500, 1000, 2000 words of copy daily. I think that should be enough work for you.


Wondering where to get great letters?


They are plenty online.

1. Start by an intelligent guess. Do a list of 50 great living copywriters. Look up their websites and see if they are selling any products. Chances are the product has a sales letter. It is unlikely this letter will be a sloppy one.

2.Go to Clickbank.com and click on marketplace. Click on advanced search and choose gravity of more than 150. Choose the category and click on the products that show up. Those that have sales letters will most likely be excellent letters.

Does that help?

Write every day. Honestly, that's the only realistic way to significantly improve on your craft. When I decided that I wanted to take up a career in writing -- back when I was 15 -- I wrote, but I didn't write a lot. Writing back then took an hour out of my day, if that. Now I write 10 to 12 hours a day, which is split between various projects. The difference between my writing now and my writing then is night and day.

FreeMeal,

Yes, we post in the Copywriting Forum. We respond to threads with (hopefully) good advice, and maybe get paying clients out of it.

We also "practice" our positioning techniques by bad mouthing other copywriters, or simply creating threads with little to no value to practice our "authority" building techniques.