Copywriting Inspiration

July 30, 2009 by Russell Hall
Filed under Articles, Copy Writing

Copywriting Inspiration

rodin20thinker If you’re an experienced marketer online or offline you’ll be aware that copy writing is the most important ingredient when it comes to making sales and getting people involved with you product, service or cause.
At some stage you’ll probably need to attend to the task of creating copy and if you’re a relative beginner (especially to Internet marketing) then that prospect could be a daunting one for you even if you’ve previously had some experience with persuasive writing.

The thing to bear in mind is that sales copy is simply “salesmanship in print”. That fact and statement has been echoed by all of the talented and great copy writers in existence but the thing is to understand what salesmanship is and how the approach to selling and the whole sales process changes from one industry to another as well as changing between peer groups and generation demographics.

It seems that the days of “hard sell” (pushy style) are all but behind us even though I’ve seen a recent wave of subtle hard sell messages online where the “fear”, “scarcity”, and “inadequacy” factor have been played on, and in some cases I believe too much so.

These days, people seem to respond far more positively to being sold to “softly” or in fact not “sold” to at all but “helped” to make investment choices that benefit them richly. For sure consumers are smarter and more discerning than ever and when you combine that with the fact that the lingering thought of recession, foreclosure sales and corporate downsizing, it just makes the task of facilitating sales more challenging than it’s ever been.

I draw my inspiration and copy writing ability from my past sales experience which included a stretch selling life assurance and investment products, door to door (where the first 15 words and 7 seconds either made you or broke you) as well as some media advertising and direct sales,- so I have a slight head start on the task. Having said that, I still like to carefully analyze good sales copy and try to break it down into demonstrable chunks which I can emulate here and there.

However, rather than sitting blank minded and frustrated at an empty word-doc, I often like to take inspiration from reading some good articles on copywriting and sales. That most often leads me either to Seth Godin’s blog or to Michel Fortin’s blog. I’ve found both of them to be excellent sources of information, tips, resources and inspiration. I was actually looking over a few of Michel Fortin’s articles last night and I realized that one of the reasons why he enjoys such favorable notoriety as a copy writing authority (apart from being naturally gifted in that regard) is because his blog has been going for years and as a result there are literally hundreds of articles from which you can draw a lot of information. I usually rock on over to his site and type in a search for some particular topic and most often I get a choice of several really terrific articles that I can find some useful tips or pointers from. I haven’t written this to win any favor or secure any financial reward from Michel at all,.. I just genuinely feel that the guy really has his finger on the pulse of what’s currently happening with copywriting and as such is a resource to avail myself of. One of the things about my blog is that I like to focus on pointing people in directions that I feel could help, and in the area of copy writing Michel Fortin is certainly one of them!

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