Copywriting can be a daunting task. If you’re not careful, it can bring on a severe case of writer’s block and you either procrastinate on it forever or do a rush job and then beat yourself up for that.

Of course, you could hire in a professional copywriter. But the best ones have high fees, maybe usage royalties on top of those fees and, even then, there’s no guarantee of success.

The good news is that you can create copy yourself which, whilst not necessarily world class, is very effective and works for most purposes.

You also need to remember that copywriting isn’t just sales letters – it’s blog posts like this one, emails, Tweets, Facebook posts, LinkedIn messages, forum posts and anywhere else you appear “in writing”.

Headlines are critical

Headlines – or subject lines for emails – are the most important part of copywriting.

Most professional copywriters have what they call a “swipe file” which they use for inspiration when they write headlines.

Most of the rest of us don’t have that luxury – at least, not initially.

If you start to get serious about your copywriting, it’s worth creating your own swipe file – a simple Word document or spreadsheet that you open up every time something attracts you about an email you receive, a web page you find, a news or magazine headline or anything else that screams out to you “that would make a good headline to use”.

If that’s still too much hard work – and I’ll be the first to admit that it’s not something I do personally – then the good news is that there are a variety of headline generators available on the web.

One of the best I’ve found is free and can be found here.

You fill in the blanks and it merges them in to the appropriate places in some pre-written headlines.

Most of the times I’ve used it, it’s come up with several headlines that can be either used “as is” or with very little modification.

It’s a good shortcut and saves you labouring over your headline for hours on end.

For a blog post like this – and for my emails – I don’t use a headline generator. Instead, I’ll just go to Google and use their suggestions to get my initial phrase. In the case of this post, the phrase was “easy copywriting formula”.

I scanned the titles of the pages that came up, wasn’t really inspired by any of them and simply decided to use the title you can see above. I think it’s OK and the fact that you’ve read this far means you’re probably in agreement.

It’s not a rocket science method but it doesn’t have to be.

Shortlist several headlines

If your message is critical – maybe a sales letter or an email that will stay in your autoresponder sequence for the forseeable future – then follow this step. If not, you can happily ignore it.

Shortlist several headlines and put them to one side.

Overnight works well, just like marinating food.

Come back to them the following morning or later.

Chances are at least one of them will almost leap out from the screen or paper and that’s the one you should use.

If that’s not the case, read each one out loud – you can pretend you’re on the phone or Skype if that sounds embarrassing – and figure out which one grabs you most.

If none of them stand out, you’ll need to take a view depending on the importance of the message they’re going with.

Outline your message then expand on the points

If you’re just writing an email or blog post, you can probably safely skip this step as well.

If it’s early in your copywriting career, follow this step.

Outline the major sections of your message.

For this page, they’re the bolded subtitles.

If I was using this part of the formula, I’d have put the headlines onto my blank page and then expanded on them.

Because I’ve done it before, I’m just adding them as I type. It works either way and if I hadn’t told you I’d cheated, you would likely have thought I’d followed what I’m telling you.

The outline sections should be readable or skimmable and people should be able to get the main idea of the post purely by reading them.

Because life’s too short to read every single page and message in full.

And because people are impatient and easily distracted.

Ideally, the outline headings should draw people in to reading the longer areas below them.

That’s great if that happens but don’t go off and sulk if not everyone worships your every word.

Rest assured that Google and the other search engines will “read” your words and will be more likely to bring up your pages when they are relevant to the search.

Even on a sales page, not everyone will read everything.

But the “thud” factor of a long page, even if it’s not read totally or even at all, helps prove that the product is worthwhile.

That’s one of the reasons why long sales copy works better than short sales copy, even though your graphic designer will try to persuade you that a picture is worth a thousand words. In copywriting, that’s most definitely not the case.

Don’t be afraid to change things

My previous sub-heading started out as “Outline your message”.

Because I strayed from that when I was writing – something I do quite regularly – I added the words “then expand on those points”.

Rather than go back and split things out so they fell slightly more neatly into two sections rather than one.

If this page was a product I was creating, I may have gone back and edited the paragraphs so they split out better into the two separate sections.

But it isn’t.

It’s a blog post and, as far as I’m concerned, the content matters more than splitting hairs over style.

So don’t be afraid to change things if that works better.

Use a call to action

On a sales page, a call to action is telling people to click the buy button.

On a web page or email, it might be telling to click a link or carry out some other action.

At the time of writing, that will be the “add your comments” line that will be slightly further down the page.

Plus a sign-up to an early bird notification link for the copywriting product I’ll be creating soon – this will turn into a “buy” link once the product is created.

If you can’t think of a call to action, it’s worth asking yourself why you’re doing this copywriting.

There might be a perfectly valid explanation. Or it could be that you’re almost afraid to ask people to do something – that’s normal but not a good reason for missing out a call to action.

Read everything – out loud

Again, this step is missable if the copywriting is relatively transient.

Although, that said, there are a considerable number of people who wish they’d done this step before sending Tweets and other messages that came back to haunt them.

The best sales letters are read out loud.

A lot of times.

More than some actors rehearse!

This is best done with a helpful colleague but you can do it yourself.

Anywhere you stumble or trip over the words or miss out words isn’t quite right yet.

So you need to go back and amend those words.

And then read the whole sales letter out again, ideally starting from the beginning.

For an important sales letter, this is an essential part of the copywriting process.

It highlights the parts of the message that aren’t “on message”.

It definitely sounds different reading something out loud versus reading it in your head.

So, along with the initial headline, I’d say that this is an essential part of the copywriting process for almost anything you write.

For emails, Tweets, Facebook posts, forum posts and other relatively transient things, you’ll probably get away with reading your words in your head.

For real, full on, sales letters you won’t be able to skip this part without negatively affecting your results.

It’s that simple.

OK, go do it!

Yes.

You have to start.

Theory is good but even your worst attempt that makes it onto the web or into print is better than a theoretical attempt that never gets beyond you.

Refer back to this page as you need.

Or get my complete easy copywriting course now!

And, of course, feel free to add your comments below!