Writing Templates
When you work for a penny a word, you learn to do things quickly. In fact, you’ll scramble around trying to find as many ways to make things happen as quickly as possible.
Writing templates are like gold for this reason.
I’ve talked about building your own swipe file before.
I’ve talked about keeping the rights to your work so you can re-use them.
I’ve talked about automating things.
I want to talk about something else that I’m sure a lot of writers do but most don’t talk about: building writing templates.
For instance, when you’re doing some freelance writing for a site like oDesk, you’ll get a lot of repeat requests. They generally fall into one of three things:
1. Reviews.
2. How To Articles.
3. Sales letters.
When you keep doing these, you’ll build an intuitive feel for what they all need to contain. I’d suggest to go one step further, and deliberately systematise your approach.
For instance, with reviews (providing you use the object in question) you might have:
- Introduction (What’s the problem)
- Introduce the item for review.
- Three good points.
- Three bad points. (Don’t not have bad points, even if you’re trying to get people to use your affiliate link. It looks really untrustworthy if you say, “There is nothing wrong with this product.”)
- Three things you can actually do with it in the real world.
- Conclusion/call to action.
For How -To articles, it tends to be that they follow the list function.
“Ten great things to do in London.”
“Ten ways to make your car cleaner than your neighbours.”
“Fourteen reasons why falling asleep behind the wheel is probably not a good idea.”
Even these you can ‘template’ further. For instance, if you write often about health topics, there’re probably a few subjects that always come up. Juicing for health. Doing cardiovascular exercise. Weightlifting.
As an example, exercise helps with most conditions. So if you’re struggling for number seven on your list of eight things that help you deal with X condition, you can probably throw in some form of exercise that you’ve written about. So long as it’s true, why not?
Sales letters seem a bit trickier on the surface, but if in doubt, you can use a template for those too.
1, Your reader has a problem.
2. How you identified the root cause.
3. How you battled with demons and tried all the stuff that didn’t work.
4. How you can across the one thing that does work, and how that’s turned you into a happy smiling person since.
5. Call to action and the reason why the person shouldn’t delay.
Closing Thoughts
Now obviously, all three of these sample writing templates work for me and might not for you. You’ll find your own.
Also, these are just templates. Five sentences of copywriting bullet points isn’t going to turn you into Gary Halbert overnight, but it’s a place to start.
Think back (or maybe not, depending on how old you are) to when you were in school. The worst part of getting an essay question was probably one of two things: Where to start and how to slog through the actual writing of it.
A template helps with both things, because you never worry where to start, and the slog is broken down into separate parts so it’s pretty intuitive and you can pick up and start off.
That’s why you should think about slotting writing templates into your writing wherever you can.
P.S. You should always include a P.S. section. I’ve been split testing this recently, and any time you leave a call to action in the P.S. section, it gets higher click through rates than it would do normally. Weird, but a topic for another day I suppose.