A word about copywriting

If you take a copywriting course, you learn a lot of important things.

You learn the importance of research and how to conduct it. You learn to understand your customer and to appeal to their desires and emotions. You learn how to grab someone’s attention with a powerful headline. You learn about power words and persuasion techniques. And so on.

These are all incredibly important, but they’re like reading instructions for learning a sport or an instrument. The one thing you don’t learn is how to actually write.

That’s because, just like with learning how to play a sport or an instrument, the only way to learn how to write is to practice, practice, practice. And trust me, it takes years of practice. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something.

But unlike learning an instrument, where you can sit in your room all day practicing chords or scales or mastering a guitar solo, you’ll never actually get better at writing if you only ever write for yourself. That’s because writing is the act of taking your thoughts and turning them into someone else’s thoughts. To do that, you need an audience.

So, the only way to improve as a writer is to practice, practice, practice with a real audience. This means your failures will be, well… right out in the open where everyone can see them. And yes, you will fail, again and again and again. Because that’s the only way to get better.

Copywriting is hard and, as I said, takes many, many years to become expert at. Just because every literate person knows how to write, doesn’t mean they immediately know how to write copy.