Welcome back!
I’ve been asked a couple of times how to get started in copywriting and NLP.
If you Google “getting started copywriting” you’ll see over 200,000 results. Most of the advice I’ve seen and followed boils down to a few steps:
- Study the masters
- Copy out successful letters
- Build a swipe file
- Practice on low risk jobs
- Build your portfolio
- Specialize in a market
- Get bigger clients
What I want to point out is that your path depends greatly on your end goal. Do you want to be a corporate copywriter? Freelance? Or how about run your own business?
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Filed in Business, Copywriting, NLP Essentials, NLP Resources, Personal, Products
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Tagged Ben Settle, Clayton Makepeace, Dan Kennedy, David Gordon, Eric Graham, Harlan Kilstein, hypnotic writing, James Brausch, Micheal Senoff, Michel Fortin, NLP copywriting, NLP Examples, nlp marketing, Steve Bauer
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A few days ago, Harlan Kilstein (NLP Copywriting guru) asked his mailing list what we thought he was doing in a particular email he sent.
What follows below is the original email, his selected best response, my comments on that response, and my response.
I’m still plugging away at the tiny house (see the previous update post) but I figured I could post this since it was almost already written.
First, Harlan’s email to the list:
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I haven’t posted for a while due to moving across town, a couple of different work projects and getting married.
A couple of customers of my “Be A Hypnotic Writer” Course have let me know about a few broken links and other errors that I’ve gone back and now fixed. I also created a new, one hour delta meditation audio for kicks.
I emailed everyone the updated info. If you didn’t receive an update, let me know and I’ll check the records.
If you’d like to see the new cover art for the course, go here:
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
In many marketing discussion we hear that you must connect with your audience. You must enter the conversation taking place in your customer’s mind.
I’d like to add that your ability to connect with an audience is directly related to connect with yourself and your own experience. Here are some examples of what I mean:
Lately I’ve been making plans to build a tiny house similar to what they make at Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. One issue is the plumbing on something that’s more or less off the grid. After reading a book on humanure, I realized our plan as a society is to separate ourselves from our own waste and transport it off to treatment facilities when your yard or garden is where it really ought to go. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the cycle of life.
In the past year or so, I’ve taken to eating more raw food. Rather than vegan, I’ve headed down the raw-paleo path. As a people, we’ve generally separated ourselves from our food supply and production. Most of what we consume comes out of plastic bags and cardboard boxes instead of from the ground or from an animal. I can tell you, I notice a huge difference when I switch over to processed or cooked (dead) food for a meal or two. We’ve removed ourselves from that part of the life cycle.
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In chapter 24, Joe goes into depth on rewriting. Sort of. He calls this the most important chapter in the book. He goes through the process a couple of times. Here was the first example:
- The door was opened by Joe.
- Joe opened the door.
- Joe kicked open the door.
- Joe kicked open the door.
He calls the last line irresistible. Perhaps. From an NLP perspective, the idea here is to use kinesthetic language in 1st position. That’s what they call active voice. The rest of the chapter is another example and narrative of him doing this process with a client.
Chapter 25 is about using language tools.
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Monday, September 28, 2009
In Chapter 22, Joe talks about how many of the past great writers got that way by imitating other great writing. Specifically he encourages us to copy other letters by hand. As far as I know, that’s a universal recommendation for copywriters. Michael Masterson said that you can type out letters and it works the same. I kinda wish I would have known that before I copied out a number of letters by hand.
Chapter 23 is how to get inspiration to write. Joe’s advice is to do it and the inspiration will follow. That’s also in line with what all other writers I’ve heard say. Stephen King talks about that in his book “On Writing” too. I think I remember him saying he writes for an hour a day even on holidays. Many copywriters write for an hour or two first thing when they wake up.
How long you write for is another matter. One famous copywriter, Eugene Schwartz is famous for his 33 minute, 33 second writing sessions that he enforced with a stopwatch. Steve Pavlina says it takes him about 15 minutes to get into a flow state and an article could end up taking him 4 uninterrupted hours to complete.
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Thursday, September 17, 2009
In Chapter 20, Joe makes the point that repetition is hypnotic.
He uses one example of Robin Williams in the movie, “Good Will Hunting.” At the end of the movie, Williams tells Matt Damon that it’s not his fault. Of course it almost gets him assaulted too but it’s just a movie, right?
Another example that comes to mind is a Derren Brown’s Subway Amnesia trick. You’ll notice it didn’t work every time and once he didn’t really use repetition. The phrase he’s using is an embedded command… “What STOP, thinking about it now…”
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Tuesday, September 15, 2009
In doing research for a client this week, I found something strange is going on.
I called a number of debt settlement companies and found that they’re basically all doing the exact same thing.
I called 5 of the largest companies and asked them all what their fees were and what made them better or different than the other companies in their industry. I selected these 5 because they have the largest numbers of International Association of Professional Debt Arbitrators.
Most of them charge 15% and a couple charge a monthly fee on top of that.
When asked what they do better, they all pointed to their size and how much debt they’d settled recently. One had stats on customer satisfaction and another said they exclusively used attorneys for negotiations. I’m not sure whether credit card companies care that they’re talking to an attorney or not. A settlement is a settlement and my understanding is they look at the past history of the account, the person’s ability to pay and what kinds of quotas they need settled.
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In chapter 18, Joe throws his two cents into the long copy versus short copy debate. His answer is that as a general rule of thumb, you need more words for a higher price and that you can write as much as you want as long as it’s interesting.
This may not exactly be a hypnotic writing topic per se but it’s one that every writer wonders about. Just because people read books doesn’t mean you can turn a sales letter into a book no matter how interesting it is. And then there are plenty of catalog sites that sell just fine with a single paragraph.
I’m a fan of stepping back and looking at the big picture. Each sales letter needs to fit into the larger conversation that may be happening through other media than just the single sales letter. If the person has already read a review about your product elsewhere, they may not need a long sales letter. If I spoke to someone over the phone, I may not need anything at all other than an email address to PayPal them some money.
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Thursday, August 13, 2009
by Glenn Hughes
The tone of any particular piece of writing comes across as clearly as the nose on your face. Many times that I read a CV that has been written by someone who is fearful, I can tell immediately. The tone of writing comes across very quickly and turns off the reader so quickly that the CV gets rejected almost immediately even though nothing else is actually wrong with the document
You cannot help the way you feel about an event that is going on in your life. Feelings of desperation, despair, loneliness, etc. find a way of getting in to your subconscious mind and this definitely transmits through to the things you say and write about. One of the first things to do to resolve this issue is to understand it in the first place. Once you understand that your feelings definitely transmit into writing, you can start to do something about it
Just the simple fact of understanding that your feelings affect the way you come across in writing can help you get the results that you desire from your writing. For example, if you are at your best first thing in the morning, clearly it makes sense to write then. We all have some degree of flexibility in our schedule and choosing to write at the time when we are at our best and perhaps just planning when we are not so good
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Filed in Copywriting
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Tagged Business, career, Copywriting, cv, job, men, motivation, publishing, resume, self development, self;improvement, women, work, writing
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