Copywriting is hard.

Sometimes I find it easy to explain things clearly and succinctly.  But other times I really struggle to capture the main idea of a complex subject in just a few lines.

What’s so deceptive about good writing is that it looks simple when you read it.  It looks casual, like someone jotted it down in just a few seconds and it’s so easy to understand.  But if you’ve spent any time writing you know how wrong that assumption is: it actually takes much longer to write something in fewer words.

Case in point, here is a piece of copy I revised on UniversityTutor.com today.

Before:

After:

Aside from the blatant grammar mistake in the first one (“we’ll won’t”) which somehow went unnoticed, here are some other improvements I thought about:

• I gave up trying to combine both ideas (contacts are free AND we don’t take a percent) in one section.  The free contacts was an important point but it was already elsewhere on the page so I decided to just focus on one thing.
• Throwing out unnecessary parts can be just as valuable as adding the right parts.  Anything which isn’t relevant pulls attention away from what is.
• People in marketing talk a lot about features vs. benefits.  Getting free contacts is more of a feature.  People don’t lay awake at night worrying about how to get free contacts on my website.  They worry about saving money.  You have to get to the root of the benefit you are providing and not get caught up in listing features.
• Shorter is better.  Three lines of text is worth reading whereas four (spilling over to the fifth) is approaching a paragraph and people don’t read paragraphs (at least in marketing copy).
• It’s more dramatic and drives the point home to say “they take 50%” than it is to say “we don’t take a percentage”.  Subtle wording changes can make a big difference.

Anyway, I’m certainly no copywriting expert but I find it interesting to practice.  It’s an art form that all entrepreneurs should at least basically understand.

I’ve read a number of books over the years on it but the one that stands out is The Ultimate Sales Letter, by Dan Kennedy.  It was pretty good if you want to just get the basics down in one book.

However, I think like anything you can go too far down this road.  Most internet marketers take it too far where they create these ridiculous landing pages and testimonial things all over the internet that cause them to lose a lot of credibility.  If you focus too much on marketing you end up getting to a point where you are just trying to trick ignorant people, instead of doing the most important thing: building a product that is actually useful.

Having a useful product can make up for all the bad marketing in the world, or no marketing at all, because people will do it all for you by word of mouth and you’ll be richer in the long run.  But there’s no reason to make it harder on yourself and rely on that.  You’d do better to make a great product and also understand the basics of good marketing and copywriting.  After all, you’ve often only got a second or two (literally) before people click the back button on their browser.  You’ve got to make that first impression fast or you might not get another chance.