What’s the funnest way to become a better copywriter?
Answer: Study stand-up comedy.
Seriously!
The endless parallels between stand-up and copywriting never cease to amaze me, and to demonstrate this irrefutable fact, I give you 5 nuggets of comedy wisdom from one of my favorite Scottish comedians, Daniel Sloss.
“Writing comedy is like trying to solve a puzzle. You have to find the exact right words in the exact right order to make people laugh.”
Copywriting is like a puzzle, too.
If you can just put the right words in the right order, you can get people to whip out their cards and happily hand you their money.
“The audience is your scene partner. They’re just as important as you are in making the show work.”
Comedians live and die by their crowd…
It doesn’t matter if a joke is funny in their head if they can’t make an audience laugh with it.
Same goes for sales copy.
If your copy doesn’t get people to buy or respond, it’s no good.
On a similar note:
“You have to be okay with failing in front of strangers every night. It’s brutal, but it’s also the best way to learn.”
Every great comedian has countless stories of the times they’ve walked on stage and bombed.
And every great copywriter has stories of ads they’ve written that have completely flopped.
It happens to the best of us.
But what separates the pros for the amateurs is how you respond to those flops.
Do they motivate you to work out what went wrong and get better… or do they put you on the defensive and have you blaming everything else for your failure except yourself?
More:
“You’re never really done growing as a comedian. Every show teaches you something new, and every audience challenges you in a different way.”
Likewise, every ad you write and every new client or niche you write for will teach you something new… and you will never stop learning.
Because when you’re a student of copywriting, you’re really a student of human nature, and human nature is endlessly complex.
Finally:
“Laughter is the best way to disarm people. Once they’re laughing, they’re more open to hearing what you have to say.”
There’s a ton of wisdom in this quote.
Using humor in your advertising isn’t always the easiest thing to pull off…
But when used right, it can be incredibly effective at lowering people’s guards, and opening their minds and wallets.
That’s why I’m a huge proponent of sprinkling little doses of humor into sales emails.
In fact, I show you how to do exactly that — along with a plethora of more shockingly-effective email copywriting methods — inside my Emails with Attitude Digital Cookbook.
Get it now, before you write your next email, ‘lest you risk writing it half cocked… Because nobody likes half a cock.
Grab it here:
https://kennethturnbull.com/Emails-with-Attitude-Doc
Stay sharp,
Kenneth Turnbull