Gary Halbert's "The Boron Letters" and "Breakthrough Advertising" are foundational. But reading won't make you a copywriter. Write constantly, fail early, iterate until you sell something. A story about a chaotic American Airlines flight, told like Seinfeld, can sell a hiring course.
Why, hello there! Today we're gonna learn how you can write copy where you can basically sell anything. And this question was asked by Christina. Okay, so where do we start?
The—
one of my favorite places is Neville's copywriting blog, which is called Copywriting Course. And a book that he highly recommends reading is The Boron Letters. I love The Boron Letters because it's one of the greatest copywriters of our lifetime that put together notes for his son when he was in prison because his marketing was so good that he got put into prison. Another website I like is swiped.co. Swiped.co Video has a lot of different swipe files out there. Swiping means that you can look at people's copy out there and you can basically kind of take templates or, you know, high-performing copy that you would like to just take for inspiration. You can see what's high-converting and what isn't. So that's another option. One of my favorite books that is no longer in print right now is Breakthrough Advertising. Breakthrough Advertising was written around the 1920s or so, but all those advertising principles are still relevant today. If you try to get the book right now, I think I bought it on Amazon for $200 or $300. I highly recommend reading it probably once a year or so, and you'll be in a very good position to be really good at copywriting. Now, the most important thing you need to do to learn how to get better at copywriting, to do sales, to generate more sales, is to actually practice copywriting. Because it doesn't matter how many books that you read, how many websites you look at, if you don't actually end up practicing copywriting at the end of the day, you're going to be in trouble. And nobody wants to be in trouble. So, practice copywriting. Write as much as you can. You're gonna suck in the beginning. You're gonna get better. But over time, maybe a couple months, maybe a couple years or so, you're gonna get better and better and better until you generate your first sale. And when you generate your first sale, it's time to celebrate. Now, let me give you a story really quick in terms of successful copywriting. I remember one time I was flying American Airlines. I was so pissed off because American Airlines, like, just not my jam. So flying American Airlines is like the worst service ever. We were waiting on the tarmac for about 2 hours or so, and I mean, our, our, Our flight's like, guys, oh, we gotta pull back in. So we pull back in and we pull back out again. We pull back in again. It's just like a nightmare, right? And so, oh, here comes a tornado. We're in Dallas, right? So it's just like, dude, what is going on? So I got so angry. I didn't get reimbursed for that. So I ended up writing this email. Now in copywriting, these emails are known as Seinfeld emails. It's from this copywriter. His name is Ben Settle. If you watch Seinfeld, and I've actually never seen an episode of Seinfeld in my life, but the, but, but the, the gist around Seinfeld is that they talk about nothing.
Not saying anything.
You're saying something.
What could I be saying?
Well, you're not saying nothing. You must be saying something.
If I was saying something, I would have said it.
Why don't you say it?
I said it.
What'd you say?
Nothing.
So, literally what I did was I talked about my terrible experience with American Airlines. I wrote, you know, a couple hundred words or so. At the very end, I tied it in with an offer that we had, which is a course that we had, which is a course on hiring. I was like, my experience is so bad with American Airlines, and that's why you got to hire great people, right? Literally at the very end. And a ton of people bought from it. And that's the beauty of copywriting. That's when I started to see that, oh my God, this copywriting stuff actually works. Anybody can do it. I can write that way. I'm literally just telling a story and just tying it in like 5%. I'm tying it in with a sale. And are you kidding me? I'm getting sales that way. That's the power of copywriting. So tell me what you're going to read next. Are you going to read Born Letters or are you going to read Breakthrough Advertising? And just to tell you again, you can find these online. I'm not going to tell you how, but you can find them online. Let us know in the comments.
