Supercharging Your Copywriting Skills
I just finished a book called, “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.” I picked up a few lessons to apply to copywriting.
The main idea of the book is that it’s not innate talent or experience that forge greatness. Most people think it’s hard work that makes you good at something but that’s not really true either.
What is it that makes the difference? The author calls “deliberate practice.” It’s not just practice. A good example of it is how most adult city league soccer teams that I’ve observed practice.
Most adult soccer teams here don’t have a coach. If they practice as a team (many don’t) they simply divide up into 2 teams, set up two small goals and then play (scrimmage) until people get tired of it or the time runs out. Do we get better doing that? Not really. Is it fun? Most of the time. That’s why they do it.
A team I once played on was able to recognize we needed to do some skill specific drills. We practiced playing “keep away” where the goal is to maintain possession of the ball. We put goals in the middle that had to be dribbled through. We put a limit on the number of times we could touch the ball before passing. We played offense against defense so we’d recognize game scenarios.
Challenging ourselves with these drills made us better than other teams. We ended up moving up divisions each year that I played with them. I’ve seen other teams do that as well. It’s really not rocket science to be better than most everyone else. Deliberate practice will do the trick.
How about copywriters? You’ve probably heard you ought to copy other good letters so you absorb the language. There were 3 models for deliberate practicing researched: the music model, the chess model and the sports model.
Music Model
In music, you know exactly what the final outcome is supposed to be. You rehearse that over and over. If you get stuck on a part, you break it down and rehearse that until it’s perfect. In copywriting, that’s what we’re doing when we copy other good letters. We can do that with any element like headlines or offers too.
Chess Model
This is the scenario based solution model. In chess, you learn greatness by studying the choices masters made in a particular situation. That’s also how Harvard Business School teaches… through case studies. You look at specific scenarios and think about what you would do. Then you compare that to what actually happened and how you did by comparison.
For a copywriter, we can re-write letters. How would you have handled a particular selling approach differently? You can pick a product, write a letter for it and then see how it compares to the real one. You can critique letters if you don’t want to actually write an entirely new one.
You can work on smaller elements too. How would you rewrite a headline, bullets or an offer? There are plenty of smaller opportunities if you want to test yourself against pay per click or catalog copy. Take something you already own and write some catalog copy to compare to the actual.
Sports Model
Sports teams condition themselves for specific skills. For copywriting, you can build your swipe file and analyze each letter. You can take courses. You can read books. You can cross train in fields like sales, story telling, NLP and hypnosis, logic and debate. You can getting mentoring.
If you’ve been wondering how to improve, take heart. You now have plenty to keep you busy and take your copywriting skills to the to the next level.
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