Supercharging Your Copywriting Skills

I was recently reading a book titled, “Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else.” In it, I learned a few lessons for copywriters.

The point of it was that it’s not innate talent or experience that determine greatness. Most people would say it’s hard work that makes people good at things but that’s not it either.

What makes the difference then? It’s something the author calls “deliberate practice.” The best way I know to explain that is how most of the adult city league soccer teams practice that I’ve seen.

Most adult soccer teams here don’t have a coach. If they practice as a team (many don’t) they simply divide up into 2 teams, set up two small goals and then play (scrimmage) until people get tired of it or the time runs out. Do we get better doing that? Not really. Is it fun? Most of the time. That’s why they do it.

I was on a team once where a friend and I were able to convince the other players we needed to do some skill specific drills. We practiced playing keep away where the goal is to maintain possession of the ball. We put goals in the middle that had to be dribbled through. We put a limit on the number of times we could touch the ball before passing. We played offense against defense with each playing in our game formations.

All these drills challenged us in game specific ways. And while I played with that team, we moved up 4 divisions. I’ve seen other teams do that as well. It’s really not hard to be better than everyone else. It simply takes deliberate practice.

How about copywriters? You’ve probably heard you ought to copy other good letters so you absorb the language. There were 3 models for deliberate practicing researched: the music model, the chess model and the sports model.

Music Model

When you perform music, you know exactly what it’s supposed to sound like and you rehearse it. If you get hung up at a part, you step back and rehearse that part until it’s perfect. In copywriting, that’s what we’re doing when we copy other good letters. But we have two other ways to improve as well.

Chess Model

This is the “what would you do in this situation” model. This is also how Harvard Business School teaches… through case studies. You look at specific scenarios and try to figure out what you would do. Then you compare that to what happened in real life.

For a copywriter, we can re-write letters. How would you have handled a particular selling approach differently? You can pick a product, write a letter for it and then see how it compares to the real one. You can critique letters if you don’t want to actually write an entirely new one.

You can also chunk it down to smaller elements. How would you rewrite just a headline or offer? There are plenty of smaller opportunities if you want to test yourself against PPC ads or catalog copy.

Sports Model

Sports teams practice specific skills. In copywriting, you can build a swipe file and analyze each letter. You can take courses to improve. You can read books on marketing or writing style. You can cross train in other fields like sales, story telling, NLP and hypnosis, logic and debate. Get a mentor or a coach to help.

If you’ve only been reading books and copying good letters get excited. If you apply what you’ve learned in this article, you’ll guarantee yourself a place among the best.