What is Copywriting?
The ability to write like a professional. It is even more valuable now as blogging and Internet Marketing popularity on the rise.
If you have copywriting skills, you can save a lot of money and easily improve on your marketing. Also, you can make lots of money offering copywriting services to others.
You can apply this skill in almost anywhere… from books, brochures, emails to TV ads and websites.
Goals of Copywriting
There’s no right or wrong to writing as in to painting an art. The only way to find out is to do popularity testing. If you have a few writings on the same topic, you can rotate and test out which having the highest readers and highest participation rate.
How Do I write?
There are 2 parts in writing. One is the title and one is the body of the article.
For title, you will need to be creative. There are some tested and proven words that attracts more click-rate. Examples like “How To”, “You”, “Secret”, “Biggest”, “10 Reasons”, “13 Top”, “Free”. The numbers are just for illustration purposes. You can also looked at titles to trigger emotions such as:
- Fear
- Pain
- Anger
- Greed
- Curiosity
For the body or content, it will be more easier. If you can write an email, then you can write the content. Write as though as you are talking to someone – it makes it more readable and enjoyable too.
Depending on the targeted audience, always keep it simple without the need for people to refer to the dictionary.
Tip #1: Be Active, Not Passive
Write as though as it is actively doing or happening. Instead of past tense, use present tense.
Example: The letter has been sent out by Mr. James. Should write as: Mr. James has sent out the letter.
Tip #2: Be Positive
Instead of writing something like: Do not run downloaded programs before scanning it with antivirus. Otherwise, you will waste money and time.
Make it something like: Scan downloaded programs with antivirus before you run it. This will save you money and time.
Tip #3: Use Tools
Check your spelling and grammar. You can use software that does that. One that I’m using within WordPress is the plugin from After The Deadline.
I Need More Data
No one in the world knows everything, so partial is fine – but striving to be impartial or as complete as possible.
One example, if writing on watches – you may want to research on types of watches, its history, the technologies involved and evolving, the companies making watches, celebrities wearing it, how to fix it, etc.
Where do you do research? None other than the biggest library in the world – Internet. Do some searches in Google, Yahoo, Bing or others to find out more about your topic. In some cases, you may find more down-to-earth information in past discussion forums.
Copy and paste important sentences out to a note-taking program like notepad or wordpad. Once you have all the information, you can start consolidating it and have more knowledge about the topic.
Practice Makes Perfect
For any skills, practice is always the key to success.
Well, I hope that this article will get you started on doing more writing for any topics that you’re planning to do. Do drop me a comment below to share your thoughts or tips that you have for copywriting.
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