Hi all,
I've been a full-time professional freelance copywriter and marketer for 24 years and I'm often asked the question... "what does it take to become a successful copywriter?"
It's a fact that many of the world's leading copywriters have had no formal training, tuition, coaching or mentoring. Many do not possess a degree in any subject and many did not even attend college. So, what does it take to become a successful copywriter?
I think it's simply a passion for business, an understanding of people and a flair for communication through writing.
I also think that anyone who has a degree in English, Marketing or Journalism is going to be pretty handicapped in this business. And the reason I think this, is because copywriting is not about use of the "English Language", although the use of good grammar and punctuation are quite important, as far as credibility is concerned.
And it's not about "Marketing" in the sense of creating flashy, meaningless advertising like you see in the TV commercials. And it's definitely not about "Reporting" as you might read in a newspaper or magazine.
But it has everything to do with communicating with the reader. And the only study I would recommend for anyone considering copywriting as a career is to study the masters. A master copywriter does not merely make a very good living at his craft, but is recognised as a master of his craft by everyone else in the copywriting and marketing business.
So, if there is one piece of advice I could give anyone contemplating becoming a professional copywriter it is to "write as you talk". I've said this many times but it doesn't always sink in with some people, and that's because some people find it really difficult to write this way.
Not surprisingly, the people who find this concept the most difficult to grasp are those who have been educated in… you guessed it… English, Marketing and Journalism.
I'm not going to dwell on this issue but instead I'm going to tell you a story…
Before I became a professional, freelance copywriter I was a Garden Designer. Briefly, here's how it all began…
I set up in business as a freelance Garden Designer and I advertised my services locally. I would get a phone call from an enquirer and we would arrange a mutually convenient time for me to visit them and survey their garden. After taking the overall measurements of their plot, I would then listen very carefully to what they wanted in their garden and how they wanted it to look.
My initial question to my potential client would always be, "so how do you imagine the finished job will look?" I needed to either paint a picture in their mind or somehow get a copy of the picture they already had their mind. My job then was to put that picture on paper and get my construction team to bring it to life.
The finished garden design would be the result of understanding my client's exact requirements, and by using my skill as a designer, I would transfer those communicated desires onto paper. I would then have to communicate the contents of this blueprint to my construction manager and create a finished picture of the garden in his mind.
That's how I worked. I relied heavily on a communication process that would ultimately create pictures in the minds of everyone involved in the project in order to achieve the desired result. And it worked like clockwork.
However, after 12 years of garden designing I began to get bored. It was all becoming too routine and I needed a challenge. And I mean a real challenge. Something to get really excited about and something that could make me feel like I really wanted to get out of bed for. So, I wrote a book about garden and landscape design. I self-published it and I had 100 copies printed.
Next, I wrote a sales letter.
I'd never written a sales letter before but I found it quite easy to do. The words just flowed onto the page. Of course it is easy to write about something you already know a lot about. Then I did two things. I placed a small classified ad in a national horticultural magazine and I rented a mailing list of 1000 names and addresses.
Next, I sent out my sales letter.
The Internet wasn't around then so direct mail was the only way to get right in front of my target audience. And the result? I sold all 100 copies of my book in the first week, so I repeated the process over and over. Now what I was learning here was that I had discovered a way to communicate with complete strangers through a letter.
I wasn't duly concerned about the volume of book sales, although it was nice to be making some easy money. However, I was much more interested in experimenting with my writing and promoting other completely unrelated products.
I bought the resell license to a home study course about "Making Money from Direct Mail". Well, I was suddenly very interested in direct mail, so I thought I'll read the course and promote it at the same time. So, I wrote the sales letter, had 100 copies of the course printed, rented a mailing list and placed an ad in the business opportunity section of the Exchange & Mart.
Within a week I had sold only 17 copies.
Well, not only was I feeling a bit bemused but my ego was totally deflated. After a while I thought, how arrogant I was to think that I could communicate with people I didn't know, about something I didn't really know much about, and expect them to buy from me. What a wake up call!
Lesson learnt!
And that lesson became the driving force that led me onto the path of copywriting. I read everything I could find about copywriting, advertising and marketing and from that day on I tested everything.
I tested headlines, sub headers, guarantees, PS's, length of copy, testimonials, font colours, font type faces, length of sentences, length of paragraphs, I wrote sales letters with images and without images. I created order forms and tested them against "priority reservation certificates". I used lightweight paper and heavyweight paper. I used white paper and I used vellum coloured paper. I wrote teaser copy on the envelopes and I used different size envelopes. I personally signed my letters and I used handwriting fonts on others.
I tested and tested and tested.
And today, 24 years later I am still testing…
Only now I'm testing my copy on websites, in emails, in press releases and in articles. And, in all my years as a professional marketer, I've learned never to assume anything, never take anything for granted and never, ever think you will ever know everything there is to know about copywriting.
The best you can hope for is a result.
And with testing and tweaking you can make that result a profitable and viable proposition.
So, let's summarize. The question was… what does it take to become a successful copywriter?
And the answer is, know your product, know your customer, communicate naturally and test, test and test again.
Till next time,
Bill
Knight-Writer.co.uk
