A couple days ago, I completed three copywriting courses that I began two months ago, including writing down ideas [from my notes] about how I can practice these techniques.
In the course I discovered on 'Skillshare,' “60 Copywriting Lessons: Actionable Tips to Build a Career as a Copywriter,” I learned the concept of clarity and that it is better to be clear than creative. If my reader, your client, does not understand the 'call to action' at the end, then I've defeated the purpose of copywriting. Copywriting is not about self-expression, rather it is about communication and I want my readers to take action based on my persuasive “power words” and choice of wording. There's the conversational tone, focusing on genuine connection with the reader. The reader is more important than the creator of the copy. There are copy hacks and formulas that I learned about, such as the 'AIDA' writing structure, the mid-story start, the big idea and a few more. Another concept I learned about is to constrain the scope. Readers have short attention spans. Short meta-descriptions, short headlines, short paragraphs of 200-500 words. I also learned the '30 Psychological Triggers' that Joe Sugarman talks about in addition to Robert Cialdini's “6 Principles of Persuasion.” Will be using both while practicing this psychological and persuasive prose.
After the second read of my notes, I inserted a fun emoji [in my course notes] next to all the ideas that I could use to practice copy concepts and techniques [in order to use as a marker for my 'practice loops'].
Practice Loops for this course: using the 6 Principles of Persuasion in an imaginary or real story that I could write down, writing the five story-telling structures I learned about, getting ideas from my own experiences or an imaginary dramatic event, and using “power words” and sensory words in those stories.
For the Udemy Course: “How to Become a Certified Direct-Response Copywriter, there were also a lot of actionable takeaways but it was more introductory, with PDF resources after some of the videos. I learned about how it is better to write about benefits, not features [a lot of beginner copywriters and mainstream copywriters emphasize features but don't tap into the benefit that the audience will get], knowing the client comes first before becoming knowledgable about the product or service, potential headline ideas, the importance of a good headline, and the difference between sales pages and sales letters.
Practice Loops for this course: doing an exercise in benefits and features writing, writing an imaginary sales letter for a task that my customer who purchased something from me wants, and then offering another product for them, implementing the email template ideas in order to write an imaginary email.
In “Genuine Copywriting: Effective Copywriting that Gets Results,” on Udemy, the course emphasized market research before starting to write copy. I learned that you get the copy from the actual market research, that there's a difference between market study and audience study, and that surprisingly, clients don't need to be persuaded if it is good copy.
Practice Loops for this course: Using the copywriting template learned in this course to write sample copy, writing an imaginary sales page, and implementing the 17 steps to write an authentic landing page.
Now, this month, primarily offline, penning on paper, I plan on performing these practice loops. I've downloaded a lot of articles about copywriting onto my MacBook [which I will be referring to] so I don't have the buzz of the net to distract me as I write.