Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Audio Recording

In Episode #4, I answer the question, “What are the best resources for learning copywriting?”

 

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Written Transcript: The Best Resources For Learning Copywriting

Hi guys. Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood. The question I want to answer today is, “What are the best resources for learning copywriting?” That’s a reasonably common question.

I think the version of this question that might be even more common is simply, “How do I get started?” That’s probably the one that I get the most, and it’s often accompanied by someone who has just read my guide to getting started as a copywriter, so I think the real question being asked there is, “Okay, I kind of understand the theory of this, but how do I actually go from “I know nothing about copywriting” to “I feel confident doing a copy writing assignment or gig”.

The place we need to start is in understanding that everyone’s different. What is going to be most effective in helping you learn is going to be different than what helps me learn, or what helps anyone else. The most effective strategy for one person might not work for someone else.

As an example of that, if you look at my blog post that’s about the top copywriting books, you’ll see some of these titles that get constantly recommended—The Boron Letters—or Ogilvy On Advertising—blanking on some of the other ones—there’s a whole slew of these old-school ones, and then there’s a lot of newer titles as well. But these get thrown around a lot because people like reading books when they’re approaching a new subject—a subject they don’t feel they know a whole lot about—a lot of people really like to read a book.

A book helps them. Some of these books are the things that gave them an initial window into what copywriting is all about, and that’s why, to them, they’ll always associate their knowledge of copywriting with these copywriting books that they read. For me, I’m pretty much the exact opposite.

I hate books. Not all books. I hate business books.

Can. Not. Stand them. Will. Not. Read them.

I spent a brief window of my life trying to read them…. Never again. So I didn’t learn anything from copywriting books, because that’s not how I learn.

So, if you’re someone like me, don’t go fucking read 20 copywriting books. Don’t even read one if you don’t want to. There are plenty of ways to get the exact same information from other mediums. The first thing I’d tell you is, “Go to the type of resource that most helps you learn and don’t feel like you need to follow the exact path that someone else followed on their learning journey.”

That’s the “Everyone’s different” spiel.

Now, I’m going to go in the exact opposite direction and say, “Everyone’s the same.” And here’s what I mean by that. 90% of what you’re going to learn about copywriting is going to come from actually writing copy. So, that initial learning period where you go from, I know nothing to I have a baseline, that’s really only the first 10%.

You can go do that in whatever way floats your boat, but at the end of the day, if you want to really learn copywriting, you’re going to have to actually write copy—do copywriting—and there’s no way around that.

I joke in that blog post that rumor has it, if you read The Boron Letters 10,000 times in a row, you can be a six-figure copywriter without ever writing copy. To hear some people talk about it, you would actually think that might be true, but obviously, if you really want to be able to write, you have to actually sit down and write copy.

So whatever method you choose initially, whether it’s books, whether it’s a blog post, whether it’s premium training, whether it’s videos, whether it’s a podcast, whatever the avenue is that you kind of become introduced to what copywriting is all about, it’s only going to get you a small percentage of the way there. As soon as possible, you need to be sitting down and writing copy.

And when you actually sit down to write it, you’re going to start understanding everything you actually need to learn. If it’s just a theory, then even all the little tips and tricks that’ll show up in some of these resources, they’re going to be virtually meaningless to you, and you’re not going to remember any of them because there’s no context built into you that can collect them and apply them.

But once you actually start doing it, you start running into these challenges, you start getting stuck at points, you can look at a piece of copy—you can look at an assignment—and kind of understand where everything fits. You can know where to apply the things that you’re learning because you have context for it.

No actual writing experience means no context.

The most important thing you can do is to get into the weeds of writing copy.

That said, after you start writing copy, just writing over and over doesn’t necessarily improve your writing. Approaching different challenges, writing for different types of companies, getting feedback when you’re actually doing real gigs, there’s going to be enough variance there for you to really learn a lot along the way.

But at the same time, then we start to run into the concept of Practice doesn’t make perfect if it’s shitty practice, or if it’s repetitive in a way that doesn’t push you forward or move you forward. There has to be some sort of mechanism to increase your mastery, increase how you improve.

We talked about in a previous episode, how rare it is to have clients that are actually testing, so I’m not even going to touch on that in terms of how that can help you grow. What I want to talk about more is: You want to have resources that you are aware of and can reference as you’re writing copy.

For example, if you’re writing a piece of copy and you’re wanting to use a particular persuasion principal, or you’re wanting to follow a certain format, then being able to reference something in gauging how well you’re doing can be helpful.

Similarly, having other people who you look to and know—people who do good copywriting—and cross-referencing what you’re doing periodically with what you see from them, that will help you identify shortcomings and continue improving. For example—and the fact that he’s a competitor will not keep me from saying this, but Ramit Sethi—that guy was making seven figures before I even got started. He’s been doing it long before me, and even though I’m kicking his ass on a handful of keywords, at the end of the day, he’s miles ahead of me and what I’m doing.

And he’s a fantastic copywriter. So, I very frequently will go look at pieces of copy he’s done, I’m on his email list, not because I really care about any of the things he’s selling, but because I like to see what he’s doing. It’s the same with other people in this space; I like to look at what they’re doing. When they launch a product, I want that sequence in my inbox so that next time I go to launch a product, I can do what I think I need to do.

If I have a game plan, I’ll start there, and then I’ll cross-reference with what some of these other people like Ramit have done, or I’ll reverse-engineer what they’re doing from the beginning. If you look at my sales page for my copywriting course, it’s modeled around one of Ramit’s landing pages. Now, every single word on that page was written from scratch by me for a mostly different audience. But what I did is I looked at how he arranges it, I looked at where he emphasizes certain things, the approach he’s taken. Visually, you can kind of see some similarities; I really liked his visual design as well, so I tried to mimic that to some extent, but if you were to read through the copy, you probably would never know that I was referencing what he’s done, or working off—reverse-engineering—but structurally, there are a lot of similarities there.

That’s not because I didn’t think I could have good results with something I wrote from scratch; it’s because there’s no reason for me to rely on even my own experience when there’s lots of people who have done it longer, spent more money testing it, and made a shitload more money than I ever have talking to similar audiences, selling similar products, or at least similar classes of products.

So, as you’re working by doing, don’t forget to take advantage of the many resources and the many experienced people out there in gauging your copy.

Alright. Well, that’s going to do it for today.

I will catch you guys later.

Share Your Thoughts

I hope this was helpful, and I’d love to hear your thoughts on this topic in the comments below.

Plus, if you have a question you want answered on a future Write Bites episode, ask in the comments, and I’ll add it to the schedule.