Where face-to-face selling isn’t an option—because your total pool of prospects is too big or geographically dispersed, or you don’t have the budget for a salesforce, or it just doesn’t fi t with your business model—the answer is copywriting.
I wrote my fi rst sales copy in May 1986. It was for a market research report. I had to write a direct mail pack consisting of a two-sided A4 sales letter and a four-page A4 brochure. There was also a press release, I seem to remember. Oh, and a catalog entry. No web copy—that wasn’t invented then. Nor, in any real sense, were PCs. So I wrote my copy longhand on lined paper with a rather beautiful Waterman fountain pen. For younger readers, a fountain pen is a sort of metal tube fi lled with liquid ink (not toner) and tipped with a little piece of gold-plated steel that squirts the ink onto a piece of paper. Once I had fi nished my fi rst draft, I handed it to the Marketing Department secretary—Pauline—and she went off to type it up on . . . the computer. You could tell when Pauline switched the computer on because all the lights dimmed and an unearthly humming permeated the building.
Some time later Pauline would turn up again with the copy, now printed in Courier 12 point on crisp sheets of white paper. I’d read it over, make a few edits, and hand it back to P—who’d repeat the whole process until I was happy.
Nowadays I write my copy on a PC or, occasionally, a laptop, as I suppose you do. But although the technology I use to write copy has changed, the techniques I use are the same as they were in May 1986. I still write plans before writing copy. I still try to fi gure out what my reader wants to hear, rather than what I want to write. I still make a list of all the ways the product I’m selling benefi ts the
INTRODUCTION
2 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS
reader. And I still use the old standby AIDCA (see Idea 39). What has changed, for the better, is my skill in using the techniques.
I reckon I’ve written somewhere north of 3,000 individual pieces of copy in the last 23 years. They include lots of sales letters and brochures, plus press releases, press ads and presentations, websites, emails, and banner ads. And the odd menu, speech, and poster. My fi rst efforts weren’t bad (well, OK, some of them were): the stuff I’m writing now earns my clients enough profi ts for them to keep coming back for more. I want to share with you some of the tricks of the trade that I’ve used over that period to keep my clients happy; I hope they’ll work their magic for you, whether you’re a freelance, agency, or in-house copywriter. Most are my own, some are borrowed, or adapted, from other copywriters.
A couple of paragraphs ago I used the word “selling.” In many people’s houses, though not ours, selling is a dirty word. It conjures up associations of foot-in-the-door brush salesmen, high-pressure selling, boiler rooms, and other equally unsavory activities and individuals. But the truth is, without selling, there’d be no markets. Without markets, there’d be no capitalism. Without capitalism, there’d be no democracy. And without democracy, there’d be no freedom. So as you can see, without selling, we’d all be in chains!
And let’s scotch another myth about copywriting. We are not paid liars. I was once cornered at a party by a guy who actually was a salesman, for a confectionery manufacturer. When I told him what I did for a living, he said, “Oh right. A paid bullshitter.” That, regrettably, is how many people think about advertising. I prefer David Ogilvy’s take on truth in advertising: “Never write an advertisement which you wouldn’t want your family to read. You wouldn’t tell lies to your own wife. Don’t tell them to mine.”
Leaving aside this little bit of special pleading, even when I’m training marketeers and copywriters, many still don’t see the
100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS • 3
connection between what they’re doing and selling. Or don’t want to see it. But it’s worth reminding ourselves that we are salespeople. It sounds good to tell your friends you’re a copywriter. You imagine they see you as some kind of über-wordsmith, composing witty and creative advertising copy on a laptop while swinging to and fro in your Scandinavian-designed offi ce chair listening to cool music on your iPod. Yeah, right. When I tell other parents I meet in my boys’ school playground that I’m a copywriter the usual reaction is either, “OK, what’s that?” or “That’s interesting because I’ve got an idea I want to copyright.” Hmm. Now I say, “I help companies sell more by writing about their products. You know, for mailshots and websites.” Then everybody gets it. So, you’re in sales. I am too. The question is, are you any good?
Well, you buy books on copywriting. That means you are very good already or you intend to become very good. It’s only the ignorant, the uninterested, and the unambitious who don’t read books that could help them get on professionally. So what about this one? I’m guessing it’s not the fi rst book on copywriting you’ve read or even bought. And it’s a very different kind of book to the majority out there on Amazon and the shelves of your local bookstore.
For a start, you don’t need to read it all the way through. The 100 ideas presented here all stand alone. You could read one printed on a trackside poster at a rail station and it would do its job. Nor do you have to read the ideas in sequence. This book, and the series of which it forms a part, is expressly designed for you to dip in and out. Some of the ideas have explicit titles you could fl ick to to solve a particular problem; Idea 5, for example, shows you how to handle objections in your headline. Others are more elliptically titled, such as Idea 76, Act like a magpie.
What it won’t do is teach you about the theory of copywriting. Or how to write specifi c kinds of copy, emails for example, or press
4 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS
ads. Nor will it teach you how to become a freelance copywriter. What it will do, I hope, is prime your imagination with a set of ideas you could try out in your own copy to improve it and help you sell more stuff.
A fi nal note: throughout the book I use the words “reader” and “prospect” more or less interchangeably. “Reader” because this is about writing, and “prospect” because it’s also about selling