Hey

No matter what your goals are or how you plan on getting there, there’s one skill that you have to train:

Copywriting — the art, and science, of written sales.

And this doesn’t just apply to actually selling a product — whether on crowdfunding, ecommerce, or a digital SaaS subscription — but everything else as well:

• Trying to get a journalist to cover you? You have to ‘sell’ your story.
• Want to go viral on social media? Start ‘selling’ entertainment.
• Want people to read your emails? Start ‘selling’ your subject lines.
• …

But where do you start?

It can be very confusing... but luckily, there’s a simple technique that will quickly double your copywriting results!

When you first start taking piano classes, the teacher doesn’t tell you to go and compose something right away…

You first learn the basics. Play some scales, arpeggios, exercises…

Then you start practicing famous pieces by great composers. A little Mozart, some Bach, a dash of Beethoven.

Maybe a sneaky Philip Glass if your teacher is cool.

And only after you’ve actually become good at copying others, you can start composing your own original pieces.

Same with copywriting.

If you want to improve your copy skills, you can’t just start trying to write winning original copy out of the blue!

You have to start copying others. How?

By simply handwriting whatever they wrote. Word for word.

By noticing the patterns you’re copying, you build a toolbox of formulas, power words, pain points, and other tools that will form the base of your copywriting skill.

And once you have a solid toolbox, it’s much easier to develop your own voice, and knock out high-conversion copy without giving it a second thought.

Stephen King has a great chapter on building a personal writer’s toolbox. True, his is for writing fiction. But the same idea applies to copy:

“I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox [vocabulary, grammar, voice, structure] and then build up enough muscle [experience] so you can carry it with you. Then, instead of looking at a hard job and getting discouraged, you will perhaps seize the correct tool and get immediately to work."

Hey, if it's good enough for Steve, it's good enough for me!

I do this from time to time, just to make sure I’m at the top of my game and staying current of the latest tactics.

Sometimes I even write a first draft of something, put it away, then copy some of the best sales letters and write a second draft.

The second time around, I clearly feel how the letter I’m writing is becoming better and better…

The last test I did like this was a pitch to clients, in which the second version got 55% more replies!

It might sound like a simple school test, but it’s not.

Benjamin Franklin taught himself to write precisely this way.

As did the world’s greatest copywriters, from Ogilvy and Gary Halbert to Claude Hopkins.

It’s a powerful technique taught in many advanced training courses.

And now you can do it too.

Even if you don’t end up becoming as great as Franklin or Ogilvy, you can surely become 2x better than your current self!

There’s even a tool: CopyThat that sends you a new piece of copy every day… all you need to do is rewrite it… the learning comes without even realizing it!

Try it and let me know how it went!

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