Writing for Everyone = Writing for No One

Rule 11, when you write something for everyone, you end up writing something for no one. So this is an old copywriting adage, which is every time that you write, you want to think of not a crowd of people, but one very specific person. And again, going back to this sales copywriting mentor that I had, Craig, one of the things that he really passed along to me is before you write something, before you write an ad, before you write a landing page, before you write an email campaign, the best thing that you can do is to actually create an archetype to, in your mind of the type of person that you're trying to reach with your writing, who is your ideal customer. Now, everyone's heard this, but they don't really know what that looks like. So a process that I ended up stealing from Craig is what he would do, is he would tell me he would write like a 5 to 10 page autobiography about that person, you know, and so he would try and get in their head and go, okay, so who is this? How old are they? Where are they from? What do they care about? What are their hopes and dreams? What are their biggest problems? What things have they tried in the past that didn't work? What are the faulty beliefs that they carry around with them? And you really have to get inside this person's head. And what Craig would do, and I've since stolen it for myself, is I go and write an entire first person draft from the perspective of this person. Here's who I am, this is what I care about, this is what I really want. This is what I'm struggling with. And what that allows for is that when you write copy, when you write emails, ads, landing pages, you don't want to try and speak to everyone. You want to speak to that one specific individual. And when you do that, the Internet's job is to go find you all the people in the world that are just like that architect type.