Why this is great: Easy to read layout. Talks about the style, and the details of the fabric. Has good CTA at the end.

Why this is great: Easy to read, familiar layout, familiar character (the Hathaway shirt man). It also pulls the reader in with “987,693 tiny windows”.

Why this is great: Clever headline matched with an authority-building subheadline. The body copy lays out 13 clear reasons why it’s a great car.

Why this is great: Great layout and image. The headline plays on a negative word, which grabs your attention. The body copy extends the “lemon” idea by showing you how VW actually does not let lemons leave their factories.

Why this is great: “Proof” photo paired with eye contact and finger pointing. The subheadlines do a great job building desire.

Why this is great: Clever headline plays on the thought in most of our heads. Body copy connects the dream with reality because now it’s “very affordable for you to drive one”.

Why this is great: Eye-catching before-and-after image. The body copy outlines a great offer: instead of buying new shoes, send yours in and get them fixed for just $13.95.

Why this is great: Great image and eye-catching color. The formatting is really easy to read from top to bottom.
 

Why this is great: It makes the watch part of the adventure story while highlighting quality and playing to manliness.

Why this is great: It sets up a potentially romantic story…gone wrong. Great storytelling that positions the shampoo as the magic bullet.

Why this is great: The images show the “bouncing and behaving” in action - it’s great proof! 

Why this is great: It shows a familiar before-and-after. Many of us have dealt with glaring sun while we’re driving. The body copy twists the knife on the left and plays up the benefits and features on the right.

Why this is great: The images show off the “flex” in several ways, on several people. 

Why this is great: It sets up the coat as military-grade quality that solves a specific “fatal” problem - water seeping in. 

Why this is great: The headline makes you wonder…why only 6 out of 7 days? The body copy explains the technical reason behind the headline, softly sells another shoe, and includes a great diagram “proving” why you should care about arch support.

Why this is great: Great layout and colors that make the toothpaste and headline stand out. The headline pairs two benefits (fight bad breath and tooth decay) and positions Colgate as the best in the industry.

Why this is great: This is a great trust builder. It shows the mechanic at work and lists all his qualifications.

Why this is great: The headline starts with one broad claim (it’s built for comfort) and then the body copy backs it up with several specific examples of comfort and luxury.

Why this is great: The ad sets up the status quo (using floppy disks) vs a new alternative (a bigger/better hard drive), and lists all the reasons why the NCR PC6 is a better choice.

Why this is great: The headline pulls your eye back to the image because it’s not immediately obvious that there is a difference. Then, the copy explains that the guy on the left is carrying a normal briefcase with a bunch of papers…and the guy on the right has an entire computer built into his briefcase. 

Why this is great: The ad is built around a couple of attractive features/benefits - ink can’t escape and bleed onto your clothes, and the pens can be refilled with the press of a button. Plus, it’s the official pen of the Army and Navy. 

Why this is great: It shows off the table in both “modes”. The layout and images are great, and the body copy lists a lot of additional attractive features.

Why this is great: The images range from technical drawings to product shots to action shots - it’s a great way to present the helmet. The text is simple and direct.

Why this is great: Great artwork, interesting layout, and specific benefits about the driver, service, scenery, and savings. 

Why this is great: The imagery is impossible to ignore and the text highlights 5 great bullets that are easy to understand and make signing up an easy decision. 

Why this is great: Great layout that makes the bike look like it’s physically sitting on the text. 

Why this is great: It sets up the (at the time) new idea of shaving at home as a better idea that’s clean, affordable, and a growing trend. 

Why this is great: It lays out a philosophy that you deserve quality for your money. This copy was popular and used with several different sets of images. 

Why this is great: Great layout that draws the eye to the new product feature - the built-in arch support. The subheadline builds authority and the body copy adds extra benefits. 

Why this is great: This 120+ year old ad should be tough to read, but the layout, text sizing, and images do a great job drawing your eye down the page. All the formatting tricks used here still work today.

Why this is great: The headline is a fantastic storytelling hook, and the rest of the ad goes on to tell the story. It makes you want to relive the situation yourself - winning over a crowd and impressing everyone.

.Even in 1964 some companies were touting "low calorie" options, like this Tab Cola ad from 1964 showing how it has only 1 calorie:

My favorite part of this ad is how the cola is poured in a wine glass to look fancy 😂

The dumbest people I know use big words to mask their dumbness. 

The smartest people I know use simple words, and are good at making simple analogies anyone can understand.

For example, the famous physicist Richard Feynman was famous for being able to explain complex topics in a very easy way. 

He explains thermodynamics here as jiggling balls: 

Written out it looks simple too!

Much of copywriting is noticing what makes you :
• Click
• Sign up
• Buy
• Laugh
• Or say, "Woah!"

So whenever you see something like this, save it! Take a picture or screenshot and store it in a file.

I do this regularly and post it on SwipeFile.com.

For example I like these ads, so I'll add them to Swipe File for future reference:

Then when I need to reference these, I can go to the Print Ads section and look em up. 

It's my own Swipe File and it's public for anyone to use. Enjoy!

Roughly 10% of the time in my home gym is now spent in VR:

Some of the games I play to get the body moving are:

• Beat Saber
• Thrill of the Fight
• Gun Club VR

Using VR in a big empty space makes it so much more immersive as you can freely walk around and explore. It's pretty fun!

The transition to the Metaverse is slowly happening 😬

You can add "Generators" or "Calculators" to your content to leap ahead of other posts in the search engines. 

Pro's:
✔️ A calculator can make your content stand out.
✔️ A generator can "do the work for them" making it more useful.

Con's:
𝙓 May not be the best traffic.

Here's three examples →

The "Death Calculator"

Visits: 19,586/mo
Ranking Keywords: "When will I die?"

I've planned my death at 85 years old, so I made this for myself, however this calculator and data took on a life of it's own bringing in ~20,000 visits per month.

The "Podcast Name Generator"

Visits: 3,018/mo
Ranking Keywords: "Podcast name generator"

People use this to generator podcast names. It's a helpful tool, but converts very little of the traffic to email signups or customers.

The "Monthly Recurring Revenue Calculator"

Visits: 300/mo
Keywords: "Recurring Revenue Calculator"

I was playing around with membership models and made this for myself to see how much income is possible at different prices and member sizes.

If you're interested in my thoughts (good & bad) on making calculators, and more technical details how to make them, listen to the podcast here.

These calculators can turn your content from just a blog post into a genuinely helpful software tool!
 

For people who build courses or digital products, this is often the path that takes:

→ Build a course
↪ Build several courses
↪ Have too many courses, gets confusing
↪ Bundle all courses
↪ Move to monthly/yearly membership or community

It looks like this:

Seen in the wild: A high school freshman puts up door hangars and sends a hand-written note to his neighborhood to promote his lawn care business:

That's some good old school hustle 😎

LOL at the horse pushing a lawnmower 😂

This is the hand written note he sends to create a personal connection to the neighbor. This probably 10X's his chance of getting their business:

When something works well, you keep repeating it until it doesn't work well. 

Look at Noah Kagan's top 5 YouTube video titles:
- Asking Millionaires How To Make $1,000,000
- Asking 80 Year Old Millionaires If It Was Worth It
- Asking Superyacht Owners How To Make $1,000,000
- Asking Millionaires How To Make $1,000,000
- I Asked Crypto Millionaires How To Invest $5000

I've talked with Noah about this...and those videos are NOT the most fun for him to make (2+ days of filming, uncomfortable to ask people this stuff, spend money on lots of crew and editing), but his goal is to grow the channel, and those videos tend to hit hard!

Look at my top 5 YouTube video titles:
• 9 Copywriting Exercises you can start doing “write” now
• How To Become A Copywriter (with No Experience)
• What Is Copywriting?
• How to write a great memo
• Getting Your First Freelance Writing Jobs

It's pretty clear people want copywriting advice on my channel! 

Theoretically if I wanted to grow it faster, I'd create content directly harping on that.

Here's my personal goals for the rest of 2022:
• 100,000 Twitter subs. 
• 100,000 YouTube subs.
• 200,000 organic visits/mo with 2% conversion.
• Post 1 audio podcast per week. Every Tuesday. 
• Be guest on 1 podcast per week (reply if interested in having me)!

If I'm a copywriter worth my salt.....I should be able to do this.

I think the hardest goal to hit will be 100,000 subs on Twitter. This would require a 4x'ing of my audience in less than 5 months. 

I started connecting with a bunch of other Twitter people, and am even hosting a Twitter in-person event in Austin in two weeks:

You can follow along and see if I'm hitting these goals:
• Copywriting Course Stats Page
• TWITTER / 24,100 subs
• YOUTUBE / 78,700 subs
• ORGANIC / 52,000 per month
• PODCAST / Posted first 2 audio only / been guest 1x/week

Wanna join in growing your own social followings? Join our community and we can work on this together!

Can you spot why this guy is still totally poor?

This guy is supposed to be a representation of unemployment....but the reason this guy is still unemployed might be because he’s a terrible copywriter!!

Look at his sign again.  It’s filled with ME  ME  ME  ME.

It’s all about HIM.

It’s trying to use some sob-story to get someone to hire him.  As if someone owes him employment just because he has kids.

If someone's an employer, they don’t care about this...they care about:

"What can YOU do for ME?"

Let's fix up his sign with some more enticing copy:

Which guy are you more likely to hire? 
A: "Sob Story Guy" 
B: "Skilled and Ready To Work Guy"

This is the daily to-do list format that can change your life:

• It keeps you more focused.
• It keeps track of appointments.
• You can see when work is done for the day.

Here's how you make it...

Start with a blank sheet of paper.
I prefer using yellow legal notepads, but any type of paper is fine.

Draw a line at the top, and write today's date. 
For example: Monday, August 8th, 2022.

Then write out all your daily tasks. 
I like drawing a small bullet point next to each item, such as:
• Write email to client
• Review blog post from Cristina
• Add to Copywriting Course Community

OPTIONAL HOURLY TRACKING: Draw boxes down the page and track what you did every hour.
This way you know if you've been productive or slacking off.  If I wake up early I'll see tons of boxes filled out by 2pm.

If I wake up late, maybe 2 boxes filled out.

OPTIONAL SUMMARY OF DAY: Draw a line at the bottom and use this as a place to write a summary of the day or write notes. 

Sometimes I write reminders for the next day here.

Here's how everything looks when filled out:

Here's a Pro-Tip for staying ultra-focused (I do this and it's amazing):
Take a scrap piece of paper and put a piece of tape at the top.

Tape the paper over your to-do list, only letting it reveal the top item on your to-do list.
You can ONLY work on this item until it's done. No other tasks will distract you since the paper is covering everything else. Start working on that task till finished...

When done, scratch the task off the list, then move the paper down one row. 
Start working on that next task.

Once you scratch off the last task, you're done for the day! 
I make it a rule that once I scratch off my entire to-do list, I'm not allowed to do anymore work.

This to-do list trick has helped myself and thousands of others focus on work, get it finished, then go play:

With a simple pen and paper, you can create this to-do list every single day with just a minute or less of time. 

You get bonus points for making it the night before!

The biggest sales week of the year in the US is generally Black Friday:

If you’re a copywriter looking to end 2022 with record sales numbers, there’s one event you need on your calendar:

The 2nd Annual Black Friday Summit on October 3rd - 5th (presented by GetEmails):

Whether you’re looking for cutting edge email marketing secrets … new strategies for SMS … or want some conversion rate hacks from some of the best marketers in the business, this Black Friday Summit has got you covered!

Live sessions from dozens of experts like:
Ezra Firestone, Amanda Natividad, Jimmy Kim, Joshua Johnston, Nikki Elbaz, Tina Donati, Neville Medhora, (yes I’m speaking!), and more...

…It’s the only virtual event dedicated exclusively to Black Friday / Cyber Monday sales strategies. 

And it’s ALL completely free. 

All you need to do is get your ticket using this special link!

Plus, all S.T.U.P.I.D Email readers get a bonus: A free video case study on how one eCommerce brand turned a tiny list of only 2,700 people into $32K+ in sales selling just a $29 product on Black Friday. 

You’ll see exact emails, ads, and upsell templates — all free, when you sign up today. 

Some people need a drill sergeant to drag them through the process as directly as possible. This type of environment is transparent, honest, and intense, and it’s highly motivating for the right kind of person.

Here’s an example of some tough love:

Other people need a much gentler approach with feedback. You need to keep things positive and soft in order to keep them engaged and committed. Here’s the same idea as #1, but delivered with a “gentle hand”.

One of the best ways to get work done is to work around other people (even if they’re not working). That’s why some people love working from cafes - a little bit of ambient noise and the presence of other people is highly motivating. 

You can recreate a version of this by livestreaming yourself working, like this:
Youtube.com/watch?v=2O8_WE4Eeg0

Here’s how to announce it and put some healthy pressure on yourself.

This is a great way to link up with a buddy and get a ton of work done. It’s the same idea as #3, just tweaked so that it’s you and a friend instead of you and a bunch of anonymous viewers. 

Back in 2012, Maneesh Sethi hired someone from Craigslist to slap him every time he got distracted from work and started messing around on social media instead. 

Here’s how you can recreate the same idea by hiring someone from Craigslist. 

Working in a focused sprint is the best way to get things done. Shut off all distractions, set a timer, and do the work! You can do this solo or with a friend. 

Pomodoro timers are great tools to keep you fresh. They get you to work in a combination of short shifts and ultra-short breaks. 

Here’s the setup I like to use:

Ask the general public for accountability by announcing your work on social media! 

Here’s a template you can copy/paste: 

Sometimes you don’t need to actually do the work live with a partner. Instead, you can just do a daily check-in, like this:

Social pressure can be great! If you connect a project’s success to group rewards and punishments, it creates a special type of motivation!

Where you work matters! At home, try shifting locations - work from your kitchen, work from your couch, try anywhere other than your desk. It’s even more powerful to work from different physical locations outside your house, like a coffee shop, library, bar, or coworking space. 

Having trouble finding a good work/accountability buddy? You should probably find a community of like-minded people with similar goals. If you’re a business owner, a writer, or a marketer, you’ll find plenty of “your” people here at Copywriting Course. 

• We can make inherently social content.
• Only one system to maintain rather than two.
• Community interaction is far better than static blog.

Here's what the community looks like (jump in here)...in fact if you're reading this, you're technically on the forum already, just in the blog section:

Wordpress kicks ass for posting static blogs, but to promote a blog post and get interaction you must push it through your email list or social platforms.

Social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube etc) have natively built in social features.

Wordpress doesn't 😞

I thought something like Disqus would become ubiquitous and form a social layer through all Wordpress blogs, but alas it didn't happen.

It's frustrating how everything has moved to social, but Wordpress publishing remained the same.

And the Gutenberg editor, whatta mess 😬

I run a Copywriting Community, so people need to post long pieces of copy for review, and get feedback from writers.

This was impossible on FB Groups or Circle.so (which I love, but can't do long and formatted commenting).

For this reason we chose a forum and modified it. This allows users to post an unlimited-length piece of copy, completely with pictures and formatting...

...and get responses and re-writes from professional writers and other community members. 

It also allows us to have "assignments" and get answers, then review those answers.

We started racking up thousands of posts, thousands of wins, and a vibrant community from this. 

You can see open stats here:
Copywritingcourse.com/stats

Listen to the podcast above to further hear my thoughts on this (so far the transition has been fantastic)!

Today's swipe is super exciting...... colorful bar charts! 😂

These are two examples of easy bar charts that also have color-matching company logos on them. 

I like these because they show a lot of information in a single image.

This chart shows how many franchises different restaurants have:

This chart show the greatest company acquisitions, and has nice color-matching logos of the companies at the bottom:

In one simple image so much data is visualized!

What’s a weird way a customer uses your product? 

Here's a quick example:

In college I ran an eCommerce site "House Of Rave" that sold light up and glow stuff. One of my best sellers was these "Finger Lights" that I assumed 16 year old ravers used like this:

One day a plumbing company bought 50+ packages of these finger lights. I was a little confused by the order, thinking it was fraudulent, so I called them up to ask why they purchased these... 

Their reply was very interesting. They said:

"Our plumbers have to climb under sinks and cabinets and they can't see because it's dark, and sometimes their headlamp light can't reach what they're working on, so they put these finger lights on their fingers to light things up." 

This was fascinating, and I added this use case to the product page. 
More importantly this lesson taught me to think about "target audiences."

I used to think 16 year old ravers were my target audience, but they could barely afford $20 per order.

However I would get $1,000+ orders from wedding & party planners, so I started focusing on that!

A wedding planner ordered several hundred of these little LED lights designed to light stuff up:

She bought 500+ of them for a wedding:

It was only 1 customer, with a single product order....so on my end this was a simple-yet-very-profitable order. 

I never thought a RAVE COMPANY would morph into a party planner company, but alas thats where the money came from when I focused on the right target audience. 

In the end if I got ONE order from an events company, it would far eclipse the profit from 100 orders from ravers.

There's "technically" a holiday that happens everyday of the week. 

We made a big list of holidays for my own reference. We compiled them all into one image:

These are all "novelty holidays" but more importantly are the major holidays. 

After creating 1,000's of campaigns for holiday sales, I'd say these are the best sellers:

Have a happy Single Working Women's Holiday today!! 

In my experience Twitter as a platform has the fastest "Virtual-to-In-Real-Life" times ever. 

Recently I co-worked with @theKevinShen  (who designs home office studios) from a simple Twitter message:

Then later that day @Danmcdme introduced me to @jayclouse and we scheduled a podcast within minutes. 

While it's easy to criticize social media, I'd argue social media creates more IRL interactions than anything else: 

• Facebook Event invites
• Instagram events pages
• Finding people you have similar interests and meeting up
• Introductions
• Watching people's videos/pods/posts and getting to know them
• Sharing photos with friends/fam

Think of the vast amount of ways social media ENHANCES real life. 

It's kind of cool to hate on social media these days, but it IS pretty cool in a lot of ways.

We created a public /stats page to track all this stuff:
→ Copywriting Course website stats
→ Swipe File website stats
→ YouTube channel stats
→ Twitter Stats

I want to publicly track all this stuff in order to improve it even further.

You're welcome to snoop through:
Copywritingcourse.com/stats

July 2022 Copywriting Course Community Stats:
• 1,464 posts
• 2,432 likes
• 197,826
• 1,244,048

July 2022 CopywritingCourse.com website stats:
• 119,589 visits
• 52,902 organic search visits
• 3,257 social visits

July 2022 SwipeFile.com Stats:
• 58,353 views
• 10,266 organic search views
• 2.6 pages per session

July 2022 YouTube.com/Kopywriting Stats:
• 78,200 total subs
• 2,551 new subs
• 71,790 views
• 5,438 hours watch time

July 2022 Twitter.com/nevmed Stats
• 23,800 followers
• 1,196 profile clicks
• 50,100 profile visits
• 196,000 Tweet impressions

Future goals for the remainder of 2022:
• 100,000 Twitter
• 100,000 YouTube
• 200,000/mo relevant search traffic with 2% conversion
• Be on one podcast per week 

If you have a podcast or webinar series you'd like me to appear on, reply and let me know, I'd love to connect!

This is a great drawn ad for Alka-Seltzer from 1959 that clearly shows:
• What the product is for.
• What the product looks like.
• What the packaging looks like.
• How to use it (by dropping it in water).