How To Become A Great Copywriter

How To Become
A Great Copywriter, Even If You’ve
Never Done It Before

OK. But what if you haven’t had too much practice at writing letters.
What’s the best way to put one together?

Before I answer, let me ask you? If you wanted to learn to play great golf,
what would be the best way to go about it?

You would probably get hold of the best player you know and ask them to
teach you. And then you’d take the same stance, hold the club the same way and
take the same swing, use the same clubs and shoes as he does and then you’d
attempt to blow that little round sucker as far away as you could.

You notice I said attempt. That’s because it’s highly likely that on the first
few swings you’d miss the ball completely. And guess what? That’s perfectly
normal. Anytime you do something you haven’t done before, you are bound to
stuff it up somewhere along the line. But that’s OK. It’s part of the learning
process. When I started to write, the words just wouldn’t come. It was pure
agony. I’d spend days and days and still come up with gibberish—weak letters,
pathetic newsletters and ads that hardly sold anything.

Then one day I heard a fellow called Harry Pickering describe how he went
about writing great letters. Harry was an ex-teacher who attended a 3 day,
$20,000 marketing course in the USA held by a guy called Jay Abraham. This
was a lot of money for Harry at the time (almost his life’s savings) and he just
had to make it work. And make it work he did . . .

In the next 12 months Harry earned over $300,000 which is ten times what
he used to earn as a teacher. Here, in Harry’s own words, is how he wrote a
number of great sales letters in those first 12 months.

Any time he needed to write, he’d sit at his desk surrounded by other
people’s sales letters. Then he’d take a paragraph from one letter, adopt a
headline from another, take a sentence or two from the third and would keep
doing that until he had his letter.

“I couldn’t write” he said. “I didn’t have to, other people did it for me. All
I had to do was insert my product instead of the one in the other letters.” At
least Harry was honest. There is no one worth their pinch of salt who didn’t
initially copy from others. We learn everything from others, how to talk, walk,
dress, play guitar, tennis . . . everything.

Once you have your headline and opening (which should be the strongest
benefit your reader will get), you write the rest of the letter. It’s only once we
understand the basics of what we are learning that we start to stamp our
personality on what we do, like Harry did.

Borrowing a bit here and a bit there is OK, especially while you’re learning.
Once you have a few letters of your own that work, you have your own formula.
But until then, you are much more likely to make money using someone else’s
tested and tried formula.

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