I recently was reminded of a quote from Michel Fortin that I blogged about once before. In one line, he sums up the problem with many of the new copywriters sprouting up on the web:

“The biggest error that most people commit when they write copy is that they try to be clever, trying to ‘WOW’ people with every sentence.” ~ Michel Fortin

EXACTLY. Here’s an example to show his point.

The prospect asks himself…

“How can I retire at 50 on my current income?”

The faux copywriter writes this headline for the prospect…

Attention! You Are About To Discover How You Can Unleash A Flood Of Interest-Generating Cash In To Your Bank Account So You Can Retire Young And Never Worry About Money Again!

The pro copywriter writes this headline for the prospect…

“How To Retire At 50 On Your Current Income.”

Copywriting isn’t about trying to impress the reader, it’s about connecting with the reader. While it’s important to get the prospect excited, it’s just as important to make your ideas as exciting as your words… or maybe more so.

If you want to start a successful online business, here’s what you need to do…

Create A Product
3 Quick Ways To Judge Your New Product Idea

Create A Squeeze Page
Should You Use A Squeeze Page?
7 Steps To A Successful Squeeze Page
Ballooning Squeeze Page Conversions With Winning Audio Scripts

Send Traffic To The Squeeze Page
Clixsense – Penny Traffic That Converts
A VERY Telling Conversion Story On Twitter

Send Subscribers To An Awesome Sales Letter On Launch Day

Stephen Dean’s Copywriting Services

Check out these 4 products I’ve personally checked out and love…

• Productivity Engineering
• Internet Business Box
• The Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate!
• Make Money “One Bite At A Time”

All 4 of them are worth at least double the asking price, so I decided to see if I could highlight them here.

Each product owner gave me permission to do so, and even decided to give me a commission for any sales I send their way. Cool!

If you purchase one and are not happy with it, you probably shouldn’t trust my opinion again. It’s with that understanding that I highly recommend these products.

Many copywriters advise that you keep a swipe file. Meaning that you keep a collection of high quality advertisements to study and get ideas from when writing your own copy.

There are ways to collect an awesome set of offline advertisments… and one way is to BUY products from successful offline mailers. But frankly I’ve never gone this route.

I primarily write copy online and I look for online copy to put in my swipe file.

In the past when I found copy I liked I’d bookmark it or add it to my favorites. This worked OK… until the site disappeared, the offer was taken down or the copy changed.

Then I tried saving the webpage with the copy to my computer. This works OK still. But it can be messy with all the extra files attached to the webpage. Especially if all I want to keep is a headline.

So now I’ve discovered my favorite method for keeping a collection of swiped ads.

Windows Vista, Windows 7 and some versions of Windows XP have a “Snipping Tool” that allows you to highlight a portion of your screen and save it as an image.

Now it’s easy and painless to save a simple headline. Take for example this quick swipe of the headline from my Copywriting Services page. (Which of course was based on a swiped headline

I’ve set up a folder on my PC’s “Desktop” called appropriately, “Swipe File.” And another folder inside there is named “Headlines.” I save all swiped headlines in here.

Then when it’s time to look at successful headlines, I can open up any image inside this folder. Windows opens the image inside of it’s photo viewer and allows me to hit “Next” over and over again browsing my swiped headlines.

Fantastic! So much cleaner than paper or saved web pages.

Of course, most of the images you are creating involve copyrighted material. So you shouldn’t be sharing or selling your swipe file with anyone.

But creating a swipe file this way for your personal use is no problem. (At least that’s what I believe. I’m no lawyer, so do your own research.)

In any case, you have permission to swipe any of my sales copy for your personal use in this way.

And if you’re looking for more copy to swipe, you might start here:

Productivity Engineering

Good luck hunting and swiping!

Ever visited a long copy sales page and noticed how LONG it was?

If so, there’s a good chance it was the poor quality of copy that tipped you off and not the length. Long copy can be a BREEZE to read when skillfully written.

And poorly written copy can feel like a waterless hike through the Sahara desert when read top to bottom.

Two methods for making long copy unbearable are…

1) Irrelevant, boring and/or misplaced content .

2) Clunky words, sentences and tempo.

Many posts at CopywritingDean.com cover mistake #1. So this post will cover mistake #2.

Keep Your Paragraphs SHORT

Big blocks of text are not reader-friendly. So remember to use the “enter” key often. I rarely use more than 3 sentences in a paragraph, despite my English teacher’s best efforts.

Keep Your Sentences SHORT

Avoid run-on sentences like the Black Death. There’s no easier way to confuse a reader than to lose him in a long, grammatically incorrect sentence.

That said, a long grammatically CORRECT sentence isn’t much better. A sentence that’s too long can force the reader to juggle too many ideas at once. Use frequent punctuation to give them a break.

You should also delete unnecessary words or phrases. Examples would be…

“Who Is,”
“Perhaps,”
“That,”
“Just,”
“Absolutely,”
“The Fact That,”
“Quite,”
“Actually,”
“Completely,”
“Totally,”
“Really,”
“Who Is,”
“Which Was,”
“Very,”

Keep Your Words Short

Using big words is an easy way to lose readership. Try sticking to words with 2-3 syllables at most. And if you do use a big word that’s uncommon, make sure it’s phonetic.

And yes, it is funny that phonetic isn’t spelled phonetically.

Vary Your Sentence Structure

If each sentence has the same structure your reader is going to get bored quick. An easy way to fix this is to switch between short, medium and long sentences often.

Got Any More? Leave A Reply

If you have any more simple tips for writing like a copywriter, please share by leaving a reply.

Thanks in advance!

Stephen Dean

When I do multivariate testing for clients I typically break up the copy in to several distinctive sections, and test each part of the copy against absolutely nothing.

That’s how I discovered that so many beginning or amateur copywriters write terrible PS’s. I tested their PS section against saying nothing at all. And saying nothing at all often beat poorly written postscripts.

Over time I get a good sense of which sections almost ALWAYS improve conversion. And I recently found one you may not have thought of.

I call it SCREAMING for attention. Typically I see that as a bad thing, but if you do it at the write time in copy it works, and it works well.

Picture this. You’re building the logical argument for why your product solves a problem they’ve been consciously or subconsciously meaning to solve… you’re providing proof… you’re demonstrating how easy your product is to use…

…and then, to make sure they’re excited and paying attention, you say something drastic.

I’ll Let Mike Tyson Slug Me In The Jaw If This Doesn’t Work 100% Of The Time!

Or…

It’s So Easy Even A Total Jackass Can Do It!

Or…

And If Not I’ll Drive This 3-Ton Bulldozer Over My New Ferrari

Saying something outrageous and unexpected like the examples above in a subhead almost always increase conversion for me.

I typically follow the lively subhead with a ridiculous picture to really bring home the point. Maybe boxing gloves would work, maybe a live-action punch to the jaw, maybe a picture of a donkey (a jackass), or a picture of a bulldozer creeping up on a Ferrari.

This subhead is a blatant SCREAM for attention late in your copy that can refocus the attention of anyone you may be losing. And putting a strong sales argument right after this subhead is a great way to bring them back.

Thinking back, I can’t think of a time when “nothing” beat this “SCREAMING for attention” approach.

If you give it a try, let me know how it works out for you!

The thing about having fun while doing an interview over the phone is you sometimes give up TOO much information.

The other day I got to talk to Robert Plank on Skype about how I optimize my blog for profit. We talked for 30 minutes and had such a great conversation about blogging… that many times I forgot that Robert was recording the call!

We shared our favorite strategies, favorite plugins, our favorite marketers, and more. I came at it from a copywriter’s perspective, which is something you probably haven’t seen before. (So let me know what you think)

In the future, only people who join my email list will get access to this interview. And while I hope you have signed up to receive announcements, I am going to let you access the recording today with no restrictions.

Here it is: http://www.copywritingdean.com/robertplank

Hope you enjoy it, and don’t forget to check out Robert Plank’s blog. He set a goal to make $30,000.00 for the month of February and he’s almost there. I’m sure he’ll let you know if he makes it at the blog.

Remember when I had Click2Mail send me a test postcard for ad campaign? I wrote about it here: Sending Postcards To Advertise Your Product Or Services.

Well it finally showed up yesterday. It took a LONG time…

…because of user error. My fault. I accidentally picked “standard mail” instead of “first class.” Instead of 4-5 days it took 9-15. (And I saved a whopping 11 cents!)

So that’s one mistake I noticed. The other is the graphics program I used to create the postcard.

Microsoft Paint just isn’t going to work! I saved the image I made in paint as a .jpg file, which looked fine until it showed up on a printed postcard. There’s too much noise surrounding the words… as a result of Paint not saving the .jpg at a high enough quality.

It’s possible that Paint might be able to work if I save it with another image format. But whatever…

Instead I’m going with Gimp. This is a free software program that acts a lot like Adobe Photoshop (a great program, but very expensive).

Gimp will be able to make a high quality screenshot and fix my postcard.

One more note. I took the advice to keep all of my content an inch up from the bottom in case the post office put a sticker on the bottom. The postcard did not get a sticker. In fact, I think the “sticker” was printed on the card.

However, I don’t want to risk it unless I need the extra space. So I’ll continue to heed that advice for a while.

I’m wondering how many of my readers have a blog. If you’re reading this and you do have a blog, will you leave a comment?

If you don’t have a blog, consider starting one. Blogs are a great way to start a business or generate traffic.

A great way to establish yourself as an authority is to have dozens and dozens of blog posts published to the web for visitors to read.

Plus Google loves content, so they love blogs. The more content you have the more search engine traffic you’ll get.

Whenever I start a new hobby, I start a blog with it. That way I can track my progress with the hobby, and I have a ton of content if I ever get to the point where I want to monetize that hobby.

Right now, in addition to this blog, I have a music blog and a wine blog. I keep both of them secret and don’t talk about them too much.

And I haven’t posted to either one in quite a while. But that’s OK, the content is there waiting for me when I come back. One day all that content I’ve compiled will be very useful. And if not, I’ll still have a personal record of the hobby if I ever want to go back and look.

I think I have some DVD’s that show how to set up a blog. Maybe I’ll give one away next week. In the meantime, it’s not hard. Buy a domain name, get a web host that uses cPanel, point the domain at the webhost and use cPanel’s auto-install to install Wordpress. Done!

Before I write copy, I send all of my clients a questionnaire. The questions I ask are based on 5 years of experience writing copy for clients.

The posts below reveal the questions I ask and why:

My Copywriting Questionnaire, Question #1

My Copywriting Questionnaire, Questions #2 And #3

My Copywriting Questionnaire, Questions #4, #5 and #6

My Copywriting Questionnaire, Question #7

My Copywriting Questionnaire, Question #8

My Copywriting Questionnaire, Question #9

My Copywriting Questionnaire, Question #10