Copywriting Progress Is Often Invisible
If you commit to daily learning and general self-improvement, then you should be prepared for the fact that most of the gains you make will be completely invisible to you.
Essentially, what you achieve today will seem insignificant in a year’s time, but this time next year you probably won’t feel like you’re any better than you were today.
Obviously, this is just a false perception. If you lift weights, for example, you might start at lifting half your body weight. Next year, you can lift nearly double your bodyweight. You won’t feel like a superhuman even though you’ll be warming up by lifting a greater weight than you can even think of lifting today.
The same is true whether you’re talking about physical, mental or any other goals.
Your Copywriting Skills Increase Incrementally
Yesterday, I stumbled upon an old sales letter I wrote in 2014.
It was the first sales letter I wrote for a product I’d created. A simple five-page website and a link to a miniature email course I’d written.
At the time, I spent hours on this sales letter. I planned it meticulously, did an audience profile and checked out competitor pages to steal some of their ideas and make them my own.
I was pretty proud of my sales letter, and I’ve always remembered it as being great.
Until yesterday.
Yesterday I read my old sales letter, and whilst it’s not terrible it wouldn’t be a first draft of something I’d write today. In fact, the words wouldn’t even leave my brain and make it to the end of my fingertips; virtually none of it would get as far as the word processor.
This experience actually highlighted how much my copywriting – and my writing in general – has changed over the past eighteen months or so. (I think I must have written this letter after about four months of being a copywriter professionally.)
For the rest of this article, I’ll give you a few areas where my process, knowledge and skills have changed. Note that I didn’t realise any of these things until I read the letter. They’re examples of “invisible improvements.”
Don’t Use Anyone Else’s Material
When I wrote the aforementioned sales letter, I’d been freelancing writing for a few months, and I was only just getting to grips with copywriting.
So in writing the old sales letter, I took the structure and topics discussed from another letter.
I didn’t copy from the original, because it was on a completely different subject. But essentially, when the sales letter I was using as a template said, “And the bad thing about our competitors is…” I did the same thing.
Now I don’t do that at all. I don’t reference other copy at all in my writing. Sure, I’ll take good ideas and read through letters to see how they do things, but I don’t ape the style of anyone else, nor consult anything else when I’m writing.
This makes my writing more effective, less derivative and it’s also easier and quicker to produce now I’ve internalised what to say and when to say it.
Your Writing Style Develops Over Time
Almost every piece of writing advice – be it books, websites or helpful University lecturers that charge obscene amounts – tell you that it’s imperative that you “develop your own writing voice.”
It doesn’t work like that.
Your writing voice is a by-product of your personality and your written communication skills. It develops naturally, and there’s really nothing you can do to develop it other than work on the two above things.
My sales letters are almost completely different to what they were a year ago. That’s not because I’ve “worked on my writing style” in any deliberate sense. I’m a better writer and I’m more used to expressing my personality through my words.
That’s all there is to it.
Don’t Be Afraid To Not Talk About Your Product
In that old sales letter, this was the first problem I noticed. It was the most obvious problem.
When I started, I – for some reason – thought that I had to relate every single paragraph to the product. I wouldn’t go a three-sentence paragraph without mentioning the name of the product.
You don’t need to do that. In fact, it’s a bit weird when you do.
It’s perfectly fine to talk about the problems your customer faces for a few paragraphs. Writing about your life outside of the product is natural too.
You can always come back to the product later. You don’t need to choke your reader out on it.
…It’s Not Even About The Product
Related to the last point – remember a sales letter is not about your product.
It’s about Problem Versus Solution.
In my old sales letter, I’d mention the product repeatedly, but not talk about the various aspects of the problem, nor talk about the solutions outside of my product. As I’ve written about before, this is a mistake.
Remember, you’re not selling a product. You’re selling a solution.
Every Sales Letter, No Matter How Simple, Has A Design/Layout
The second-most obvious problem: My sales letters looked horrible. I’m not a design-minded person. (Luckily, I realised this a long time ago.)
The sales letter I’m talking about was words on a page. I didn’t bother with subheadings (I’ll talk about that in the next point.) Nor did I use graphs, charts or pictures.
I didn’t even format it like an advertorial or anything like that.
Every sales letter needs to be designed in some way. Otherwise it’s just words on a page. Even if you add some graphics and create the page to look like a news article, it’ll be better than words on a page.
(The quickest solution I’ve found to this since is to get Thrive Content Builder. It’s amazing and my review doesn’t really do it justice.)
Little Tricks – Name Everything, Subheadings, Etc.
A couple of weeks back, I said that you should name everything.
Unsurprisingly, I didn’t do this in my first sales letter. I didn’t even have subheadings.
(Subheadings are not something I’m naturally blessed with. I like reading dusty-old tomes where you won’t see a heading for thousands of words and tens of pages. You can see this on earlier articles on this blog, actually.)
In the old sales letter, I just said, “I offer a full money-back guarantee.”
Now, it’d be the “[Product Name Confidence Promise] – 100% Satisfaction Or Your Money Back!” guarantee.
I’d put it in a big heading and then talk about why it wasn’t just any guarantee – but the guarantee itself is more valuable than most products.
Speaking of which…
Chances Are You’re Being Too Subtle
…New copywriters tend to be very wary of being too much of a salesman.
When I wrote the old sales letter, I thought I was being too pushy. I thought I was giving readers the hard sell.
“What, you’re actually asking them for money, Jamie? Jesus Christ you filthy Oligarch!”
Needless to say, I was being a lot more subtle than that. Too subtle, in fact. Looking back, I had a single tiny Paypal “Buy” button and if the sales letter had have been any more laid back about pushing for the sale, it would have been comatose.
Now, I realise that as long as you back up your solicitations to buy with reasons to buy, you can be a lot more salesy than you’d think. In fact, it’s better for you and your customers if you are pushy.
Don’t Assume Your Target Market Knows Anything About Anything
“Hey… guys. You know that thing that we all know about? Well, I’ve added a little extra to the product that’ll help you be better than that, if you know what I mean!”
… I didn’t quite write anything that coded, but it wasn’t far off.
As I wrote just the other day, it’s a big mistake to assume your target audience knows anything.
In a sales letter, you certainly don’t want any ambiguity. Ambiguity means they might leave your page and never come back.
Don’t Start With “Why Everyone Is Wrong!”
A big part of sales letters is involved with presenting yourself as a better alternative to your competitors.
I did that pretty well in the old sales letter.
However, I should never have done what I did – which is put that section at the beginning. It’s a grievous error that I’d never do today.
You need to do several things before you go on a tangent about why all your competitors are stupid; even if they are, if you haven’t established authority, gotten your audience interested and built some rapport then this is going to put you across as negative.
Also, if you haven’t introduced your product, there’s no point.
Don’t Ham Up Your Vocabulary and Jargon
This is related to the ambiguity point above, but it’s a separate issue. In my old sales letter, I hammed up my use of jargon.
Red flag. Big mistake. Don’t do this.
If you are a part of your target market – an insider – then you come across as try-hard by doing this. Like a college fresher who lets everyone know they smoke weed by having a Cannabis-leaf iPhone cover and talking about how stoned they get every night… it’s just bad.
If you’re not part of the niche you’re selling to, then you just come across as an idiot by using jargon. In short, you look like Hillary’s Pokémon quip:
There is absolutely no need to do this, and your sales letters will be less effective if you do this.
Nobody buys a home-gym because a sales letter spams as many “bro-culture” keywords as it can. People buy a product because they want it and because your sales letter works towards convincing them they want it.
Final Thoughts
Believe it or not, the old sales letter I wrote wasn’t terrible.
It converted at a reasonable rate.
The point of this article – as well as giving you some helpful copywriting tips – is to show that within a year, eighteen months or two years, your copywriting (and other) skills will be unrecognisable. Obviously, you can use the above tips and tricks to make your sales letters better.
But in a wider context, you can go and grab a copy of your first sales letter and do exactly what I’ve done – think about what you’d do differently, how you’ve improved and what you can do better.
It’ll make you feel good, but it’ll also show you how far you’ve come and it’ll give you great insight into how you can improve further as well.