In this episode, you’ll discover:
- 00:26 – why you should NEVER worry about writing good copy
- 00:29 – my unusual background that might surprise you
- 00:46 – why formal credentials DON’T matter
- 00:59 – the reason your copy don’t need perfect grammar!
- 01:07 – why having no “formal writing training” might be an advantage to writing sales copy
- 01:28 – 2 things you need to know to write good copy
- 02:11 – the un-sexy answer to “how do I get good at email copy?”
Tweetables:
Transcript:
It’s John McIntyre here again. I’m the Autoresponder Guy. I’m coming to you from themcmethod.com, where we talk all about email marketing. Today in this video I’m going to talk about the question that I get asked by a lot by people, and that is, “What if I’m not a writer, John? If I’m not a writer how am I supposed to write these great emails? How am I supposed to tell stories? How am I supposed to come up with these ideas that sell stuff?”
The short answer to this is that you don’t need to be a writer.
I dropped out of school. I went to college and I ended up dropping out of that, and I had a series of random jobs after that for a few years, until I eventually sat down and taught myself copywriting. I’m not a writer. I have no formal training in writing, yet I can write an email to get people to buy stuff.
That’s why I believe that anyone, whether they think that they’re a good writer or they’re not, can learn to write sales copy, can learn to write emails, can learn to write landing pages. All this sort of stuff. Sales copywriting, none of this stuff needs to be properly grammatically correct, and that’s the best bit.
In fact, if you are a trained writer you probably won’t be very good at sales copy emails and all that because you’ll be trying too hard to make the writing proper as opposed to selling the way it needs to sell. If you’re feeling insecure that you can’t write these emails, that you can’t write sales copy because you’re not a writer, you’ve got to forget about that. You should not worry about it because it doesn’t matter.
The main thing that you need to do in your emails and your sales copy and these kind of things is communicate on a level that your prospect understands. That requires empathy. That requires understanding. That requires knowing how your product meets their needs and solves their problems. It’s really that simple.
You don’t need to be a writer and you need to accept that and you need to believe that in the deepest part of you, and then you’re going to be able to go out there and get good. Just quickly, you might be wondering, how do you get good at email? If you can’t go to school for it, if you can’t be a good writer of it, how do you actually get good at writing emails or writing sales copy?
The unsexy answer to that is that you just write more emails. You write more sales copy. Of course you can sign up to say,McMasters and you can learn the step by step things you need to do to get it, but at the end of the day you have to be willing to suck for long enough to get good.
That’s the secret to getting good at anything. Be prepared to be bad at it for as long as it takes to get good at it. It’s that simple. I’m John McIntyre, the Autoresponder Guy, coming to you from themcmethod.com.