- Seven copywriting exercises
you can do right now to become a copywriter. Now, first of all, I
want to you to understand that copywriting is a learnable skill. How do I know it's a learnable skill? Because I learned it. When I first immigrated
to Vancouver, Canada, I couldn't speak a word of English, right? So, English is not my first language. So I know for a fact that
if I could learn this skill, if English is not your first language or it is your first language,
you can learn this skill. It's very much like a muscle, right? You can go to the gym,
you can bench press, you can do push-ups, you can do curls. You can work that muscle. So today I want to give
you seven exercises that you could do that you could exercise your copywriting muscles so you can become a better copywriter. Sound good? Here we go. Exercise number one,
and that is I want you to sign up for what I call
a learning email address. It's not your primary email address. A learning email address and you would use the email address to subscribe to everyone's list. Everyone has got a learning page, some kind of offer.
Subscribe to their stuff. So what happens is, you could use gmail, I like to use gmail, when you get the email addresses, you can then filter them
and sort of put them in different folders so you're
collecting different emails from different people,
different learning pages. So you would see other people's work. When you do this, you are
building your email archive of other people's work like naturally. So that's exercise number one. Sign up for other people's stuff. Do not use your primary email address. You'll be bombarded with
thousands and thousands of emails everyday and you'll
come back to my channel and comment and you bitch
about it. Don't do that, okay? Copywriting exercise number two and that is go to
www.swiped, S-W-I-P-E-D, .co I'll put a link somewhere on this page You go there and you see a
lot of different white files and sales letters and
what you want to look for is look for what I call control, write it down, control pieces. Meaning that it's a marketing piece that has been proven to convert sales. Proven to generate revenue.
Look at those control pieces and then you want to save
them, you can print them out I like to print them out
because I am old school, right? So I like to print them out
and I like to look at them and I like to dissect
"okay here's the headline." "Oh here's the storytelling part" "Oh here's the guarantee" and you're looking at other people, other master's work, right? And this will give you a
better understanding of, "Oh I can see that this
is what makes it good." or "I really like this
headline here." Right? If you like it, copy and paste maybe put it in your work
document, organize it nicely. Then you're building your
own little virtual library if that makes sense. Copywriting exercise number three, now this is so simple but
this is one of my secrets. When I had clients who were contacting me and they hired me to write copy, one of the first things that I do is always ask them and say "hey can I talk to some of
your existing customers?" You will be shocked how many entrepreneurs and business owners, they don't ask. They don't talk to their customers. So here's what I do this is what makes me
look like a genius, right? In my early twenties, I would say, "okay give me a few of your best
customer's contact information I will go and talk to them." So then I would settle a time,
I work on the phone with them and I simply ask them "Hey, you know, why did you do business
with this company?" "what motivated you to buy from them?" "Why didn't you just buy
from everybody else?" And most of the time you'll find out they'll tell you everything. "Oh I love about the customer service." "I love the brand." "I love this, like how
this product works." And all of that, I wrote
all of those things down. And I went back and I
talked to my client and said "Hey you know, do you know
why people buy from you?" and usually they would
say "Oh they buy from us because of A, B, C, and D" and I said "That's not true. Let me share with you exactly why they buy from you." and I show them X, Y, Z and they're like "Oh my God, you're a genius.
How come we didn't know this? How come we never find out about all these things about customers?" And I mumble "because you
never asked." Like duh! So then all I need to do as a copywriter is taking what is obvious
like "Duh! Hello?" You take in what's obvious
and then you craft a message 'cause if I'm talking to
three, four, five people that's why they bought from
this person? This company? I took all that and guess what? Most of the time, other people they're buying for the same reason! Like, craft marketing message then you send out to a market place and it works. And then
you look like a hero. So it's not so much about writing, it's about doing the research It's about understanding the customers. Most people don't do this. So that's exercise number three. Exercise number four and this I actually learned
it from my mentor Alan and Alan's the one who
had taught me copywriting. And he actually learned this
from the great Gary Halbert Which Gary Halbert, when he was alive, arguably one of the, if not thee greatest, copywriter of our time. Kind of the Michael Jordan of copywriting. Gary Halbert used to have this exercise and he said "Okay after you've
finished a marketing piece" and Gary usually sells to the
masses, right? Like everybody. "Once you've finished
your marketing piece, and backed in a direct real piece," and he said "here's what you wanna do" "You wanna go to a bar, go to a pub." "Go somewhere public and you
show people what you wrote" "About the author, about the
letter, about the campaign." You show people, and he asked people "What do you think about this?" And they would read it
and if they say to you "Oh this is really good!" This is like "yeah, yeah this is cool!" It means it's shit. It means this is shit It means your stuff is not good. That's not the reaction you
want. If they say to you, they're reading your letter,
they're reading your offer "Where can I buy this?" "I
want to buy some of this." Then you know you got something 'cause people vote with their wallets. So show your work to people who may not even be your ideal customers. Have them look at it, get some feedback 'cause they would give you feedback that you may not even be aware,
you may not even think of! Just ask them and say "I
don't understand this." "This is totally confusing to me." What do you mean it's
confusing? It's so obvious. Like one of the things
I'll share quickly with you when I talk about closing, in my mind because I've been in
the industry for so long I thought everybody knows what closing is. Now when I talk to people
outside of business outside of sales, you know
what they think closing is? They think closing is this. They think it's closing the door. I say "What the hell? Closing, sales!" "Oh! Sales! You mean like selling, yeah!" They don't make that connection. So then I know from then on every time I talk about closing, I would explain what closing
means. I would tell them "Hey, you know how you
have traditional sales?" "The kind of people who are
slimy, pushy, aggressive like snake oil sales? Closing
is a different form of sales." "It's a higher level of sales." "Oh!" Now they're curious,
they're intrigued. They want to know more. So even simple things like that 'cause keep in mind in
this day in and day out we do this day in and day out, sometimes we take ourself
out of the picture. Give yourself a little bit of distance between what you do and what you sell. You would be able to
communicate your message so much better to your ideal audience. Copywriting exercise number five. This you can do immediately and that is after you've finish your copy, get yourself a quiet room, okay? Maybe in your bedroom, in your living room and you want to read out your
copy out loud. That's right. So after you finish your
letter, your message, your email, your learning
page, just read out loud. When you read your copy out loud, the spots that you feel
like it doesn't flow? If it doesn't flow when
you are reading out loud, it doesn't flow for your reader
who is reading it mentally as they're going it through,
going through the copy. So then you might want to
change some of those segments Or when you read it out loud there's certain words you think maybe that word is too
complicated. It's confusing. You can replace that word with
easier to understand words. Right? Simpler words.
You can also do that. So just by reading it out loud,
I don't care what you wrote Reading it out loud, you will find that so many places and spots
within the marketing message that you could improve.
So, very simple exercise but very, very effective. Copywriting exercise number
six. Now this exercise is probably one of the
most important exercise that I could teach you. And I learned this from,
again my copywriting mentor. When he taught me this exercise he said "I have taught this
exercise to so many people" "I've shared this with so
many people over the years." "No one does it. Dan, you're
one of the very few people, maybe the only one who actually does it." I said, "Okay what is that?" Right? Like why is that? He said "I don't know,
people are just too lazy." Maybe? So here's the exercise. You take winning, proven pieces letters, marketing messages, copy, and you copy them word for
word in your own handwriting. That's the very first thing
that my mentor taught me. So we'll take these marketing letters, have a notepad here, the pieces, and I would copy word for
word in my own handwriting. Notice I said handwriting.
Not laptop, not computer, not typing, none of that. Good old paper and pen. Why? Because when you do that, you are rewiring your nervous
system. You're learning. There's something when you
use the pen. When you write, it connects to a different
part in your brain. So when I first did this, I
thought it was kinda dumb. I didn't understand how profound this is. I was arguing a little bit
with my mentor, I was like "Why do I need to do this?
Couldn't I just read it?" "Couldn't I just type it so much faster? Like, this is slow!" I
could type pretty fast. He said, "It's not how it works." And I didn't quite
understand. He just said "Just keep doing it. Just keep doing it" "Just keep doing it. Just keep doing it. and I did. And it's not
like different letters. It's like the same freaking letter! Do it two, three, four,
ten times. The same letter. And one day it clicked for
me and here's what happened. As I was copying the letter word for word, Suddenly it's this
bizarre experience, okay? Because I've done it so many times I could finish the sentences. I would know what was
coming up next, right? Just by memory, but more than
that you have this experience. You gotta experience it. You gotta do it I can't just describe it for you, you gotta experience it for yourself. Something will click and
suddenly you will get into the psyche and the psychology and the mental state of
the copywriter, back then. It's just crazy experience. That you would write and
suddenly you kinda get a glimpse of what that writer was thinking about. And then once you do a little bit more because you're kinda trying to imitate you would kinda slowly
picking up their voices. They're like "Oh yeah, hmm I
can see why he wrote this way." "Why he thinks this way." and it's like you're downloading their
writing style to your brain. It's the craziest thing, you
gotta do it to experience it. I cannot describe how it is. Now, it's gonna take a while, right? It took me quite a few months before I had the "Ah ha" experience. And that, from then on,
this is my go to exercise This is how I got good. Look at great masters
and what they have done and you talk about modeling,
just do this right? Just do this, you do this
ten, twenty, thirty times you do it long enough,
something will click. Which leads to exercise number seven which is devote some
time every day to write. If you're gonna be a
professional copywriter, well what's the difference
between a professional and an amateur, right? An amateur kinda does
it like hobby! Right? You think about
professional golfer, right? If you golf infrequently,
whenever you feel like it, you're an amateur golfer. If you're a professional golfer, you do it all the time.
Also you get paid doing it but more so it's a part of your lifestyle. So you would not be a very good writer if you're not writing
everyday. I don't care if it's as little as ten,
twenty, thirty minutes a day let's say thirty minutes
a day, let's have a deal. Thirty minutes a day, you're
gonna devote some time maybe in the morning, in the
evening, it doesn't matter just to writing. The more
you write, the better you get the easier it is for you to
write, the faster you'll write. In the beginning maybe it takes you I don't know, three hours to craft like, a good ad, a good email. You'll be able to do it faster and faster when you write every
day. Every single day. Every single day. Every single day. Then you'll do it in maybe two hours and then one hour and before you know it, I could right now write
something in an email send out to my list, it
could be five, ten minutes with a very very good
email. It could be an ad. Because of practice, right? You could do it. It's a learnable skill. So those are the seven
copywriting exercises you could do right now. Now, besides exercise, if
you want to learn techniques if you want to learn strategies, you want to learn how to
do some of these things, or how do you actually craft a headline? How do you craft a compelling offer? How to craft a compelling call to action? If you want to learn how to
do that, click the link below and check on my free on demand
training on copywriting. I think you'll love it.
