As I mentioned in my email on Friday, I’m doing a feature this week and next called “Santa’s Mailbag”.
And I’m taking some time out from the new mentoring program I’m planning (details coming soon) — along with my never-ending holiday “to do” list — to answer your most burning questions or share your feedback and insights.
So let’s get rolling, shall we? Let me dig into my mailbag and see what I come up with…
Here’s a good one from Copy Insider Victor Odey. Victor asks, “If you were starting out afresh, how and what would you do to stay CURIOUS?”
Great question, since one of the keys to being a good copywriter is being curious.
If anything, staying curious may be more of a challenge after you’ve been a copywriter for many years — especially if you’ve been writing about the same type of product again and again.
But you need huge amounts of curiosity when starting out, so that you soak up all of the new knowledge you need to develop and strengthen your skill set.
Plus you want to be able to go deep into whichever niche you’re writing for, and come up with fresh ideas and new approaches that could lead to big winners.
So I think the key is to write for things you find interesting. And if they’re not that interesting, figure out how to make them interesting.
Get to know your market. Interview your spokesperson, founder, and/or whoever created the product. There’s definitely a story there.
Ask lots of questions. Listen to the answers. Keep a journal or use another way to organize your thoughts and ideas.
And when doing research, don’t be afraid to go down a few rabbit holes (yes, I know… my Research Beast course gives you a structure so you don’t get lost in them, but they can sometimes lead you to some great “big ideas”!)
A lot of my lounging around/”do nothing” time is spent on my phone where a question or idea pops into my mind — perhaps generated by something I saw on social media or TV.
Thanks to the power of Google et al I am often pleasantly surprised by where my various random inquiries can lead me… and then email these ideas to myself to be used at a future date.
Another big part of staying curious is to regularly get outside your usual routine: different places, experiences, groups of people. Give your brain a steady diet of “new” stuff — whether it’s reading unrelated nonfiction books or escaping into fiction.
Also, don’t work all the time… take regular breaks. Remember Gene Schwartz’s 33:33 timer practice.
He’d get up from his desk after working straight (or staring at a blank screen or page) for 33 minutes and 33 seconds. Then he’d get up for 5 minutes of “mandatory leisure”.
This is when whatever he’d been working on or thinking about would start to make connections in his brain — while he was resting it. Creativity is really connectivity… so make sure you take breaks and expose your mind to other things on a regular basis.
I also recommend reading other sales promos — within and outside of your niche — to analyze the copy tactics being used and to generate new ideas you can apply to your own. Which leads me to the next question…
This came in from Copy Insider Vinish Chandran. He asks, “What is the best way to learn copywriting? Is it hand writing?”
There’s no one “best” way to learn copywriting. And there are so many different layers to learning and mastering copywriting.
One of the best books that can give you a great overview of the philosophy of sales copy is the classic book by Claude Hopkins called Scientific Advertising — which you may be able to find online for free.
My Get Dangerously Good Copywriting System gives you a great practicum of tactics, examples, playbooks, and other tools and training.
But Vinish asked specifically about hand writing copy. I will admit, it’s something I never did when I was starting out.
But I started out in an on-the-job way where I was writing copy as one of many marketing “hats”… plus also seeing how it was used and applied in a business setting.
When I did go freelance, I collected, read, and studied successful promos and feel that that ongoing practice contributed greatly to building my skillset faster. But it worked because I already understood or could identify the strategies and tactics that were being used in the copy.
If I would have just blindly hand-written that copy without understanding these things, I don’t think I would have gotten nearly as much out of it.
For example, I’m a newbie at writing screenplays. So while I could hand-write scripts and perhaps start to get a feel for the cadence and tightness of dialogue, there are a lot of tactics being applied that I’d completely miss unless I already was studying and learning those tactics from a book or course.
By hand-writing, you can start to train yourself in certain things that are fairly similar in any promo — for example, how the close copy is structured — and it could help you write a similar close in a new promo.
But in order to come up with the best way to sell a particular product in the headline or lead, for example, you can’t just regurgitate stuff you’ve seen elsewhere — you need to come up with what’s best for the product you’re writing about.
So in addition to reading and learning everything you can about copywriting, and studying successful promotions, I suggest you actually WRITE every day.
You can do so even if you’re making up practice projects for yourself. And do what you can to land some initial clients so you can get real-life practice.
Alright, that’s it for today’s Santa’s Mailbag. I’ll be back at you later this week with answers to questions I’ve gotten about optimizing funnels, finding retainer clients, and more. But you can still add your question to the list.
So send them to me at Kim@kimschwalm.com. Better yet, use this simple form here, and you’ve got a good shot of having me address them in a future issue.
Yours for smarter marketing,
Kim
P.S. I mentioned earlier that I’m working on a new mentoring program. It’s going to go beyond getting (or watching) copy critiques to helping you improve your copy dramatically by understanding the tactics, strategies, and structure of winning promotions — like emails and sales pages.
I’ll be sharing details soon and there will be limited spots available. So if you’re not already on my mentoring wait list, you’ll want to get on it here. That way you’ll be among the first to hear about it!