Written by Kenneth Turnbull – February 6th, 2016
Want to know the easiest way to rapidly improve your copywriting?
Daft question, eh? Of course you do!
Well here’s the simple trick.
All you’ve got to do is copy out great sales letters by hand. That’s all there is to it. By doing this, and doing it a lot (I’m talking at least 100 different sales letters) will ingrain in you, the writing styles and structures used by some of the worlds best copywriters. So the next time you sit down to write a sales letter of your own, you’ll be writing like a great copywriter without even really thinking about it.
Don’t believe me?
Just try it for yourself and see.
Most of today’s best copywriters have done it and it’s paid off for them.
And it doesn’t just work for copywriting.
It helps with any kind of writing.
For example, take Jordan Belfort. Or as he is better known, The Wolf of Wall Street.
He started writing his life story that eventually turned into the best selling book and movie, “The Wolf of Wall Street” when he was locked up in prison. But when he started writing he had never written a book before in his life, so naturally he sucked. His cell mate even told him that he sucked when Jordan let him read what he had written.
And what he wrote didn’t suck because his life story was boring. As I’m sure you probably already no, that’s certainly not the case.
No, his writing sucked because his writing style was awful.
So in an effort to improve his writing, Jordan made a smart decision to look at the writing style used in a few books he had enjoyed reading and he ended up copying out the whole of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S Thompson by hand.
The result? His writing style improved dramatically and the Wolf of Wall Street is actually a very entertaining read.
His writing is noticeably very Thomson-Esque at parts, but he adds his own unique voice to the style and that’s exactly what you will do naturally if you start copying out sales letters from great copywriters by hand.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, this is all well and good Kenny, but what sales letters should I be copying out and where can I find them?
Well I’ve got the answers for you.
You want to be copying out what are called “controls”. A sales letter that is a control simply means that it’s been sent out time and time again, and because of this we can safely assume it is profitable.
And where can you find these controls?
At this handy little website called Swiped.
Just visit the website, click the little checkbox that says control and start copying out those sales letters by hand.
I’d also recommend that you only copy out sales letters that are sent out via direct mail as a pose to sales letters from web pages.
The reason?
Sending out mail on mass is expensive whereas throwing up a sales letter on a web page is cheap.
Just because a sales letter is on the web doesn’t mean it’s any good, however if a company is willing to spend the money to continually send out a sales letter through the mail, it must be making them more money than it’s costing them to send out the letter in the first place. Otherwise they wouldn’t do it.
So here’s a quick recap.
Go to Swiped.co
Copy out sales letters that are controls and have been sent out via direct mail.
and repeat at least 100 times.
Do all that and you will see your copywriting improve dramatically.
Have a great day,
Kenneth Turnbull