How To Start Copywriting? A Complete Guide To Copywriting

This post is designed to teach you everything you need to learn about copywriting and how to develop this skill.

What is copywriting?

Copywriting is one of the most demanded skills in the marketplace right now and it will keep this position for a long time.

Copywriting is like selling over the phone but instead of using your voice and closing in person, you sell with a script.

You basically use a piece of written content to persuade the reader to take action or even provoke a certain feeling.

Types of written content

Copy can be presented in many shapes and forms but it has the same goal. Get the reader to do something.

This could be an email for a marketing agency, sales landing page for an online store that sells t-shirts, an about us page on a restaurant website, or anything else you can think of that is written.

Actually, you are already writing copy every single day of your life when you chat with your friends trying to convince them to go eat Mexican food instead of Italian, you’re copywriting.

When you write an email to your high school teacher explaining why you haven’t delivered the assignment on time you’re copywriting. Or when you’re writing a very flirtatious text to a girl you want to meet or ask out your writing copy.

The main difference between you and a professional copywriter is that a professional copywriter actually knows what he or she is doing and he’s getting paid a lot for this.

Types of action in copywriting

So as I said one of the key goals of copy is to get people to do something. This something might be really anything.

Here are a few examples to give you some perspective on this:

Copy for an online hat shop the shop

This shop sells high-quality handmade hats and even makes personalized hats for those that are willing to spend a little bit more than usual for something you need.

The goal of the copy on this website is to get people to first add to cart a bunch of hats and click on the purchase button.

Copy for a DIY blog

this blog talks about all the tools, projects, and best practices of a proper DIY artist. It already has a decent following but in order to decently monetize this audience and make a profit, they need to get people to subscribe to their mailing list so they can always stay updated on what they’re doing.

In this case the action to be taken is to click the subscribe to mailing list button.

Copy for a sales webinar. This project is all about a big sales funnel with the goal of getting people to interact with the Creator in order to later purchase an online digital product. In order for people to familiarize themselves with the Creator, they need them to watch his free training which is a webinar.

With their marketing campaign, they need to get people to subscribe to that webinar so that’s the action to be taken in this last case.

So as you see there’s a variety of actions that you may want people to take. As a copywriter, you need to not only know how to make people take action but you also need to understand why they would want to do that. We’ll talk about this in a minute.

Types of feelings

The other goal of copy is to generate a certain feeling or emotion toward something.

For people to buy they need to be emotionally involved and feel understood. The product that they’re supposed to buy needs to solve their problems and to be useful for real.

And that’s when a copy comes in. Emotions are fundamental for something to be sold and for people to buy.

In fact, people love to buy but they hate to be sold to.

The copywriter has to prove to the reader that the product in question is legit and will actually deliver on its promises.

Trust generating strategies

There are many techniques to generate these feelings of trust. Here are a few strategies to use in order to generate Trust:

What others say about you.

Tell them a story, or even better have someone else tell them a story. This could even be a testimonial video but a written testimonial works well too. Ask for someone that already worked with you and knows that you give honest feedback to your viewers.

This is called Social Proof. As humans, we naturally seek approval from society and the more people believe something is legit the more the individuals will believe that too.

When you get someone else to give feedback on you as a person, or of your product or your client’s product you instantly receive approval and attention.

This is because what other people say about is infinitely more powerful than what you can say about yourself.

Storytelling

Humans are naturally attracted to stories. Especially, when they can relate to them emotionally. If you can make someone relate to your story on an emotional level you’ve basically won them over.

The reason why storytelling is so important is that it makes your claims more comprehensive and incoherent. Also, it helps to keep the reader’s attention.

When reading something online, it is very easy to just move on to another article so it’s a constant battle of keeping them glued to the screen.

Actually deliver

The faster you deliver on a promise you make the fewer people will move on to the next article without taking any action.

This means that if you’re actually able to do what you say and offer value right away people will believe you and trust you more than if you just promise staff.

When we buy a product, we obviously want to know what we’re getting into. That’s why we test drive cars. To test the product!

The same case applies to online courses, digital products, or any other product. If you give value right away it creates a sort of test drive effect and people know what to expect after taking action.

Also, if you’re able to offer a massive value for free people will start wondering what kind of amazing value you will offer if they buy your product.

This is actually what I do in every single post.

Be different in copywriting

Copywriting where you need to be different

In order to find your first client for your copywriting activity and in order to actually deliver there are a few more principles that I want you to understand.

Imagine receiving 50 emails from 50 different car companies. All of them have interesting offers and all of them looked legit. So you start checking some out.

Every single email that you open has a big blue banner at the top. Every single one of them!

At a certain point, you’re sure that every other email that you’ll open will have a big blue Banner at the top. But at a certain point, you open an email and the banner is actually red!

This gets your attention, so you start reading the email with attention because you’re curious. Why is it different? Why is the banner red, unlike all the others?

So, in order to get more attention, you have to be different. It could be the format of your copy or the words of your copy. But something has to catch attention and stand out.

There are 4 levels of marketing

4 different voices that you can give to your copy.

1. I too offer this product.

2. I too offer this product but better.

3. I too offer this product, but my product is different, thus better.

4. only I offer this product.

Ideally, you want to always have the voice of level 4. Where only you can offer that product or service so people have no choice but to choose you.

However, you can only do this if you are actually the only one who offers this product. Don’t LIE in your copy and keep real. Otherwise, you lose all the trust you’ve built.

What’s in it for them?

Here’s the harsh truth, your readers don’t care about you. All they care about is your product and whether it can help them solve their problem or not.

As I explained to you if there isn’t a problem to solve you won’t sell any products. So if you really want people to buy or take action you need to explicitly tell them what’s on the table and what they can gain from purchasing your product or taking your desired action.

So instead of telling them how good you are and how cool the product is, tell them about the benefits of that product.

How can and how will that product improve their life? How will it solve their problem, if it will? And why should they choose you instead of your competitor?

Explicitly or implicitly answer these questions and you will convince anyone to do anything as long as you keep it interesting.

Keep it interesting

Copy isn’t an essay and it has nothing to do with what you used to write in high school or as academic research or anything like that. It’s quite unique actually.

First of all, there’s the language.

The language you’re going to use has to be simple and direct. In other words, it has to be Conversational. It’s like you’re talking to your friend in a bar.

Just stay appropriate and people will be far more likely to read all of your copy if it’s friendly relaxed and easy to read and scan.

Format and structure of Copywriting

Every 2 to 4 or 5 phrases the paragraph has to end. There are 2 reasons to why you should do this.

First of all, you don’t want people to be presented with a big wall of words that looks like a lecture from their history teacher.

Second of all, you need to structure your copy in such a way that it’s easily scannable. You want it to be so easy to understand that people will be able to identify what you’re talking about in any section of the copy with just a glance.

This is so important that it will make the difference between a winning copy and failing one.

Call to action

This is nothing more than telling people what you want them to do.

Some think that this is ridiculous but it has been proven multiple times that including a call to action in your copy will dramatically improve the odds of people actually taking action.

So you have to do something similar to what I’m about to do right now:

If you enjoyed this post don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter.

This blog is designed to help people just like you make more money online and become the best version of yourself. If this sounds interesting Subscribe to our newsletter and check these posts.

We’ve been working very hard on this content lately and we’re actually developing awesome content that will help you make more money and improve yourself faster.

Thanks for your time

This was my approach to copywriting. I hope you liked it and if you did then I recommend you to join my newsletter I post about money management and how to make money online.

Also, if you think this post might be helpful for others, feel free to share it.