Strategy
Yesterday, I was reading through Gary Halbert’s newsletters, courtesy of a comment by Sam H on this article.
Gary Halbert’s newsletters are a gold mine, by the way. They cover a lot of what I talk about in these daily articles, but they do it better.
Anyway, in one of his letters, Halbert was talking about a copywriting nuts and bolts seminar he ran back in the day. I tried to find it.
I didn’t get a copy of that seminar, so that’s not what this topic is about.
This topic is about strategy.
When I was looking for the seminar tapes, I found an interesting comment:
“This seminar is about copywriting. Most Gary Halbert stuff isn’t about copywriting, it’s about strategy.”
This was news to me. I thought that all of Gary Halbert’s writing was about copywriting.
But then, the more I thought about it, the more I see that commenter’s point.
Gary Halbert talks a lot about business strategy, and carefully alludes to copywriting quite esoterically in his newsletters.
This brings me onto my topic of the day (finally.)
Mixing Strategy and Writing
It’s very easy to spend hours writing lists of things you are going to do. I have lists of book structures, keyword research and plans for various marketing campaigns that will probably never see the light of day.
I love strategy. When I was twelve I learned to play chess, and when I was a teenager I started playing real time strategy games on the PC.
In fact, in the past week, I’ve wasted hours playing a game called Europa Universalis. It’s a game where you attempt to take over the world.
I’ve had to uninstall the game because once you get over the steep learning curve, it’s addictive and it takes forever. I feel like I could literally take over the world in the time it takes to play that game.
My point here is that strategy and planning are addictive. Whether it’s games or business, you can spend hours feeling like you’ve got a lot accomplished, but really you are no closer to your goals.
An example would be someone wanting to become a best-selling author. You could spend weeks going through Amazon’s best-seller lists, analysing the genres which currently sell, analysing the covers and the blurbs.
After that month, you haven’t written a word, but you feel like you have accomplished a lot.
On the ledger line, you’re still registering a gain of £0 though, and you will be until you replace some of that research time with writing time.
Should You Not Plan Then?
No.
There’s a danger of going the other way. You could write a book that nobody wants to read, or, do like I’ve done in the past, which is create a niche site that will max out at four visitors a day.
Planning is important.
You need to find a ratio though of planning to writing.
How to Construct a Ratio
My latest writing template is for a novel in a new genre. I’ve read a few books in the genre (which I don’t count as strategy, it’s just reading.) I built the template.
The template includes about thirty five chapters.
Say I write seven days a week. That’s five chapters a day to get it done in a week.
It takes an hour to do each chapter.
That’s five hours a day.
Planning, admin, cover art, so on and so forth have to come in the admin time. As does researching niches, writing the blurb, updating my pen name’s site, etc.
What do you think, if you were doing this project, that the admin time should be?
Do what maximises productivity.
For instance, 20% of the time is one hour a day. I’d start to worry if I got above 20% of the time. I’d like it closer to 15 or ten percent if I could.
On the other hand, when I’ve done some big copywriting projects, planning time is paramount. When you’re searching for key words, planning bullets and generating headlines to grab Pay-Per-Click traffic, you need to devote a lot more time to planning. In those instances, you might spend thirty or forty percent (or even more,) of your time on planning.
The Golden Rule is to pick a schedule before you continue. You need to be moving forward according to that schedule, otherwise you’re kidding yourself.
Once you have a schedule, you can plan in your research time as you would words-on-a-page time.
As a general rule, don’t spend more than a couple of hours to start with on strategy for any project. Use those first initial hours to break down the project into all the chunks you need. Then denote specific schedules for research in all its forms.