If you look back over the work you have done as a freelance writer or copywriter over the last year, you can probably identify one or two jobs that stand out from the rest.
These were jobs that brought out the best in you.
They tapped into your core skills.
They allowed you to shine in ways that just didn’t happen with most other projects.
You probably loved the product or service you were promoting.
You respected the company you were working with.
I had lunch with a colleague last week.
Like me, he comes from an ad agency background from way back.
We have the same opinions about a few aspects of advertising and copywriting.
First, we both get hugely irritated by bad advertising. We hate blunt, clumsy ads and blunt, clumsy copywriting.
And we both agree that really good copywriting is also really good writing.
That shared opinion led me to tell him the story I share in my live talks about copywriting. It’s about a series of ads written for an insurance company in the UK back in the 1970s. The company was Commercial Union and the copywriter was Susie Henry.
Reading her ads is a joy. She followed advertising legend Bill Bernbach’s philosophy that “good taste, good art, and good writing can be good selling”.
Her copy style was also conversational…it was “across the kitchen table” copywriting. In that sense she anticipated the more conversational style of writing for the web.
Back in the early days of the web we followed the lead of traditional media.
Newspaper editors favored long, detailed articles with maybe one or two images.
We did much the same. Except back in the days before broadband, we took it easy on the images. They took too long to download onto the page.
Even with the arrival of broadband we still focused on using a ton of text. Why? Because that’s how we caught Google’s attention. We wrote long articles and posts, included a few keywords and waited for a flood of readers.
Well, things have changed since then.
You probably remember this from your own time at school.
When you enjoyed the subject, and liked the teacher, you learned faster and did well. And the most enjoyable classes where those in which you were actually doing something rather than just studying a text book, line by line.
Long story short, you always learn more when you’re having fun. And what you learn sticks when you learn by “doing” instead of just reading text books.
The same is true when learning online writing and copywriting.
You can study all you want, but you’ll learn most when you “do it”, and when you’re having a good time.
Which brings me to my own favorite learning tool.
You’re driving downtown, in three lanes of traffic, during rush hour on a Friday afternoon.
Your foot is jumping between the accelerator and the brake. Your eyes are looking out front, but also frequently checking the rear-view mirror.
And you’re in the middle lane, so you’re watching your wing mirrors and turning your head to check the blind spots.
In short, you’re moving forward, but constantly aware of everything that is happening around you, and adjusting how you drive accordingly.
And then…every now and again you’ll end up behind one of those annoying drivers who does none of these things, other than staring straight ahead. These bad drivers act as if they are completely alone on the road, without any regard to anything that is happening around them, with the exception of what’s right in front of their noses.
It used to be easy to win with keywords.
Go back ten years and everything was different. If you spent a little time learning the rules, and had access to a decent keyword research tool, you could get yourself placed high up on page one of the Google search results almost every time.
Why was it so easy? For a few reasons.
First, most internet marketers didn’t have a clue when it came to keywords. So with a little knowledge and the right tools you could beat them every time.
Second, there were a lot fewer websites back then. Today? Tens of millions more websites and who knows how many blogs.
Third, Google’s algorithms were a lot less complex and sophisticated. So if you knew the rules, you were good to go.