Whats Your Best Technique For Improving Your Copywriting Skill?

Studying affiliate and other peoples sales pages. Analyzing the writing style and type of wording used, going over the placement of testimonials & buy buttons, and studying what "angle" the writer is writing from.

Then repeating this process for emails (the spam folder is a goldmine-seriously), WSO's, forum signatures, banner ads, and pretty much anything that tries to entice me to DO something. :p

For me it's all about split testing different content and tracking what converts and what doesn't. If group A takes more action than group B it's a safe assumption to go with what the market is telling you. All depending on your project, for me copy-writing is more about maintenance and monitoring after the setup. Hope this helps, I'm interested to see what tricks of the trade other's are using as well.

Writing.

If I don't have work then I'll write winners by hand.

And then I'll open a word file - and type out every sentence of that winner. And write up a psychological breakdown of all the persuasion techniques on that sentence.

(Sometimes I'll give one explanation for a few sentences. Assuming it's all one idea.)

Maximus and Andy - in my experience the writing-out-by-hand of great ads works, too. Something really strange about how the brain learns - just copying something out seems to trick my mind into thinking that "I'm writing this, I know how to write this way." Pretty far out.

This -

LOL Mal...I don't even know you that well and for some reason, I'm not surprised at all.

I'm not a grizzled old copywriter with a portfolio of controls yet, but I've found a few things to be helpful on the way to getting there.

A good starting point (for old and new alike) is along the lines of what Gary Halbert recommended once:

The Gary Halbert Letter

This background has been rather helpful. With the basics firmly in place, it can be useful to:

1) Study the very best proven ads (Hatch's Million Dollar Mailings is a good place to start). Write them out by hand. Reverse-engineer the ads by picking out the key elements, then rewrite the ads in your own words. Compare to the original. Toss into the trash can. Do it again. And again. And again. Use different ads by different authors.

2) Occasionally look at poor ads. If you have done your work above, you probably won't be able to read them for long. But if you have the stomach for it, rewrite some of those. But do it sparingly - you don't want someone else's bad habits to become ingrained, even subconsciously.

3) Learn everything you can about split testing. Hang out at split-testing websites like whichtestwon.com, and study the losers and winners. The results are sometimes surprising (even to well-seasoned veterans - the market is fickle). The advantage of such sites is that many winning writing styles are available to study. Split-testing your own ads will become easier, faster, and produce better results.

4) Learn how to do extensive research (and there's a hell of a lot more to it than just Google). Instead of studying the target prospect like a bug under a microscope, BECOME the bug. Know their joys, their sorrows, and what makes them tick.

5) Write, write, write, every day. Your thesaurus should be dog-eared, tired, worn, and well-thumbed. Know words that sell, emotional trigger words, and phrases that fit like a glove.

6) Learn to outline. A well-prepared outline is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Structural mistakes are easily noticed and fixed, before the page becomes a wall of elements and your eyes glaze over.

7) Know the rules well enough to know when to break the rules.

8) Learn touch typing. Seriously. It saves a lot of time. One place to learn is at www.goodtyping.com.

9) Always be learning. Study marketplaces, results, ads, mailings, radio spots, techniques, websites, marketing trends, business trends, technology trends, psychology, and above all, people. Read all kinds of books, newspapers, magazines, white papers, and even spam, because the best ideas are often formed by seeing the connections between seemingly-unrelated bits of information.

10) Practice, practice, practice. Focus on your strengths. There will be some things best left to others. That's ok - it just allows more time to be the very best at the things you do well. But at the very least, develop a strong working ability in the core styles - sales letters, long copy, short copy, marketplace copy, e-mail responders, headlines, and so on.

This isn't an exhaustive list by any means, but simply some of the techniques I have found useful to improve my copywriting. Your mileage may vary.

I'm putting off about $30,000 of paid work for 3 minutes to reply to this thread because nobody has had the courage to reveal the secret that will increased conversions in a heart beat -- 100% guareenteed:

RESEARCH!

And not google research. F-that.

I'm talking about -- hold on, wait for it-- talking to real people! (bonus points for previous buyers)

Imagine that!

Write to one person.

What would it take to get this one person it buy?

What fears must you overcome? What dreams to they have? What is their typical buying cycle? How they they make buying decisions? At what dollar amount do they have to talk with their spouse? Who are authority figures for them? What brand of jeans to they were? What wakes them up at 2 am? What regrets to they have in life? Who inspires them? What are the top 10 played songs on their itunes all-time list. What would they die for? What beliefs do they hold to be true? What political background are they? Do they vote? Do they have a house? Do they have kids? What pictures do they have on there work desk in their office?

When you know all this information, writing copy is easy.

Yes, there are certain visual things that will increase conversion. Yes, there are certain "power" words that will increase conversion. Yes, NLP can be useful.

But remember this...

... when a person clinks your link, on the other side of the monitor is real human being.

Remember this.

Reading through some ads in vintage magazines written by well-known masters of copywriting. I write out the best sentences into a separate document and read them over and over while trying to use some these phrases in my current writing work.

@Mal: Beer holder truth

This suddenly comes to mind...

Trust the French...


@OP: For me, it's about CHUNKING. Like eating an elephant (not that I've done this)... it gets a whole lot easier breaking the process down into smaller chunks. Also establishing SYSTEMS that make things easier, faster.

Read the copy of some of the copywriting superstars.
Test your different aspects of your copy to correct your mistakes.
You will definitely improve your skills.

Studying human psychology then figuring out (understanding what we look for as human beings and what motivates us), as a customer of my product(we all started out in our clients' situations) what would have been an incredibly appealing offer to me.

Writing copy is not hard - but I would not say it is easy. The thing is, you have to be comfortable using written language. You can't just go into writing without actually liking writing. It is hard work that takes a long time.

There is nothing more soul-crashing than having used your computer all day and re-reading the copy you have written while you just know it doesn't make any sense. My advice for new copywriters can seem a bit counter-intuitive because it takes a bit of time but: READ! Read a lot, magazines, web copy, great works of literature - it takes pretty easily and you start using language in a better way.

For me it's learning human psychology, and actually knowing why I'm doing what I'm doing, and writing what I'm writing.

For example, when a person writes, "Discover How You Can 'Crank-Out' Your Own Cash Generating Website With NO Money, NO Computer Skills and NO Experience Required" how many people actually know what happens in someone's brain cognitively, their body emotionally, and the process they go through that you're trying to leverage and create inside of them in order to make your writing in the first place... a person doesn't even know what they're trying to get a person's brain and body to do by writing that... they're just writing it because some cookie-cutter template told them to.

Learning WHY I do what I do has been the most powerful thing for me; being organized and not just doing random things because there's a template handed to me without understanding the psychology behind it so I can make it work for me, or even make it better.

For example, do we have ANY reason to say "dear friend"... or are we just doing it because it's what we were taught to do, and we're just following a template because someone told us it works?

Read good articles and learn new words in the English language. Then implement the new words in your articles. These should help you a lot in improving your articles and gaining a lot in the long run.

What's helping me the most lately is just reading good ads every day...

Got my hands on John Carlton's 3 volumes of collected letters, a collection of Halbert ads, and been simply reading them.

Then when I go write ads, I notice I borrow a lot of psychology and structure from them... also power words here and there.

I make it a point not to write in their style, but I've found the more I read good ads, the more I use the subtle psychology in the ads for my own.

By reading ads daily, I keep it all fresh in my mind.

write more

My best techniques are:

1. Know the problem
2. Know your audience
3. Know the product
4. Write your copy as if you were writing a letter to a friend

George

I'm mentioning 5 techniques of improving copywriting skills:
1. Learn from experienced copywriters
2. Check your skills by performing variety of copywriting works
3. Work for business that are used for commissioning copywriters
4. Copy good copywriting
5. Write everyday

Same here.

I study other people's work and I keep on making drafts. No matter how imperfect my ad copy is..I practice. Practice makes perfect. Whatever flaws or mistakes we make with an ad copy, we have to try and make it better next time.

Grammer in copy is not the most important. Study the great and tweak to your market. I believe that if YOU know a niche market well, then you write the copy. If you're new to a market and can hire an expert, then do it. Especially in the IM niche. There are some kick ass writers around here.

I like to study NLP and to find out the root of what makes people tick. Once you understand human triggers, you'll be able to be much more effective in persuasion and understanding copy.

Good luck!

Nobody knows for sure which is "the" most powerful learning strategy, but I would say that taking a world-class ad - sales letter, space ad - and deconstructing it (analyzing each and every sentence, scribbling down notes). J. Carlton deserves some credit from me about thinking about this method.

Other proven techniques are: 1.) writing sales letters for own or clients' products (very powerful); 2.) rewriting by hand world-class sales letters; 3.) training to write separate sales letter elements - headline, opening paragraph, sub-heads, call-to-action, etc.; 4.) creating a SWIPE file and reference file; 5.) reading sales letters on a daily basis (to internalize the persuasion elements in your memory and subconscious.

Cheers,
Ray