Learning Copywriting

If you are a good writer, you should be able to pick up copywriting.  The key behind copywriting is that you must understand that you're writing in a different style and to a different audience. A good quote that will be used to start this article comes from the book The Copywriter's Handbook, A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Copy that Sells.  "A copywriter is a sales person behind a typewriter." (p.1 of book mentioned above)

This is the key when you are learning copywriting.  You must learn to communicate with the audience in a way that persuades them to buy the product or service that you are writing about.  There must be an initial connection that is made or else you'll find that you've lost the audience's attention.  In this day and age, people are inundated with the number of advertisements that they see every day and quickly discard any advertisement that does not fit within their perspective immediately. You must realize that your writing cannot be for the entertainment of an audience now but rather to sell a product or service.

As a quick introduction to some of the important points on learning copywriting, the first key is to pay attention to the headline.  The headline is read more often than copy at an exponential rate.  If you cannot catch someone's attention with the headline, you have wasted the rest of your sales copy.  A sales letter essentially only has about five seconds in which you can grab a person's attention and the headline is one the most important factors in being able to pull that attention.  This is just an example of copywriting and what you must look for. 

In learning copywriting, look into the works of Dan Kennedy.  He is one of the foremost experts on the subject and he has said before that he became better by continual development of his skills.  If you would like to learn more about any one of his books, look into the following title: The Ultimate Sales Letter. You will want to make yourself a lifelong student of the subject in learning copywriting because there is always something more to know.

Hopefully this article on learning copywriting has helped you. This field will seem very challenging but at the same point it is one of the more interesting fields that you can find out there.  The key to being successful and copywriting is to learn from what you do.  If you constantly read and continue to develop your skills, you'll find that you will become a great copywriter.  It is hard within a single page to truly give you an idea of what it takes to be a copywriter but go back to the quote at the beginning of the article that a copywriter is a person who sells.  Your goal is to educate an audience in a way that persuades them.  This is the only difference between how you currently write and how you will write as a copywriter.