There are plenty of tools and ebooks on copywriting these days. Back in the preinternet days, there were fewer resources. Now books on “formulas” for writing killer sales letters or software to create headlines and sales letters are very prevalent. It’s created a hype machine and reader boredom to say the least.
Once you’ve read through sales page after sales page on the internet you begin to see the same hyperbole and increase your sales resistance a great deal.
But words and articles still “sell” in the sense of generating traffic, generating pay per click income and text ads, and words can still sell if they are interesting and unique.
You can’t get interesting and unique from the ebooks.
That’s something you cultivate.
Some may call it playing with words. It’s somewhere between a gift and a compulsion depending on the person.
Weird Al Yankovic has this gift/disease. He parodies great tunes by including new words that are totally unrelated to the original tune but sometimes do more service to the music than the original lyrics!
Mike Shea has compiled numerous Writing Tips in html or pdf format to guide your writing attempts so you don’t end up recycling cliche’s.
Here’s how to use them to cultivate your writing skill.
Let’s assume you’ve already written an article for publication somewhere or a sales letter.
1. Open your article or sales letter in your word processor.
2. Read through the writing tips once.
3. Start reading your article or sales letter.
4. Using a the highlighting function of your processor (or a red pen if you’ve printed it out), highlight any of the “no no’s” that appear.
5. When you’re done, go back and ask. “How can I fix this?”
6. If you’re really brave, have someone who’ll be honest with you read it too and offer their critiques.
7. If you’re beating around the bush, taking too long to get to the point, etc. start cleaning it up.
It’s an arduous process for now and perhaps always will be. But if words are money, you need the right words to avoid looking like a hick or worse - a crook who doesn’t really know anything about what they’re selling and who is just out to get someone’s money.
It may not be true, but they might not be able to tell from your writing.
No comments yet.