You've just discovered copywriting and want to get better.  GOOD.  Well here's my top advice and books for getting better at copywriting. These copywriting books are ranked in the order you should get them:

Let's go through each of them and discuss:
• What I love about the book
• What skills you'll learn from the book
• Who it's for (beginner or experienced writers)

2.) Advertising Secrets of the Written Word - by Joseph Sugarman:(re-named "Adweek Copywriting Handbook")

Price: $16 on Amazon

What I love about it: He goes through 30 different "triggers" that cause someone's brain to switch into "buying" mode. These are super helpful, and a great resource to re-read when you're feeling unmotivated!

What skills you'll learn: Writing. Style choices. The 30 Triggers and how to use them.

Tone of voice: Casual and easy. I like Joe Sugarman's style because he isn't "hypey" at all. He's very genuine and not scammy like some other classic copywriters.

Reading Level: Total Beginner.

Other Joseph Sugarman Resources:

• 30 Triggers Book
• List of Joe Sugarman's 30 Triggers

3.) Ogilvy on Advertising - by David Ogilvy:

Price: $19 on Amazon

What I love about it: Written directly by the guy who started the famed Ogilvy and Mather advertising firm in New York (which "Mad Men" is based off of).

What skills you'll learn: Large-scale advertising.  Brand advertising.  How to layout ads like a billion dollar brand. Tone of voice: Informative and pretty funny.  Less talk and lots of examples.

Reading Level: Beginner.

Other Free David Ogilvy Resources:

• How To Create Advertising That Sells
• David Ogilvy Advertisements
• Video of David Ogilvy talking about direct mail vs creative advertising

5.) This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better - by Neville Medhora:

Price: $5 on Amazon

What I love about it: This could be a 300 page book, but it was distilled down to 54 pages for super-quick reading.  This was meant to be a reference guide you can keep on your desk for when writing a piece of copy. What skills you'll learn: Mentality of a copywriter.  The styling to use while writing.  Formulas for copywriting. Tone of voice: Funny and informative. Reading Level: Beginner Other Free Neville Medhora Resources:

• Entrepreneur.com: How To Write Awesome Copy with Neville Medhora
• Copywriting Videos by Neville Medhora
• What Is Copywriting? (A Visual Guide)

 Here's a helpful list of all the books and courses mentioned:

Copywriting Book Recommendations Video:

This is how you can edit any website directly from your browser:

Step 1.) Highlight the text in the blue box:

Step 2.) Drag the highlighted text into your bookmarks bar.

Step 3.) Click the icon whenever you want to edit any page!

Try it for yourself:

Click this link, and instantly you'll be able to edit the text on this page from your browser. Reload the page if you want to quit editing.

There's a bunch of useful AND silly uses for this little editing hack!

A Helpful Use Case:

If you're a copywriter doing consulting session with a client, you can edit their page live to show them how it will look:

A Fun Use Case:

Make your bank balance look super huge! Move over Bill Gates, my BankOfAmerica account now has billions of dollars:

This helpful little bookmark has been extremely useful for me through the years, hope you enjoy it too!

Watch video of this trick in action:

Sincerely,
Neville N. Medhora

P.S. Let me know if this tool is helpful, and how you use it!

(Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing)
This is a fun email for Friday April 1st, 2022. Hope you like it 🙂

🎤 Listen to this email here:

 

Swipe:

This is a 1991 ad for a shoe called The "Nike Air Huarache"

The headline does a good job of conveying this shoe was designed to conform to your foot with the help of a strapping mechanism.

It's been about 40 years since it's release, and Nike recently re-released this classic shoe in 2022!

 

 

 

Thought:

This slide from ARK Investments shows a chart of how they think about the price of Bitcoin in around 10 years:

The thing I like about the slide is how they breakdown their price expectations with this color coded chart:

While I'm not commenting on the validity of this claim, it's cool to see how they broke it down in this chart using numbers from the real world.

 

 

 

Uplifting:

In the mail the other day I got this cool light-up sign. It didn't include any info on who it was from, so I turned to Twitter to figure out who sent it:

Turns out it was my friend Adam Gilbert from MyBodyTutor (who I use for tracking my food) who sent it!

It's a neat light up sign for my garage gym. I hung it up, check it out:

 

 

Picture:

I often dogsit friends dogs, but I am now officially "The Dogfather" of the two dogs on the left (Hugsy & CJ) 😂

When I say "officially," I mean there's an actual legal document that states that I am their "Dog Father" 😂

So I'm taking care of these pups all week while the owners have a baby.

I'm making sure they get plenty of exercise:

Hugsy makes lots of goofy faces:

Also the dogs have won a Paw-litzer Prize 😂

 

Interesting:

This is a neat "anti-ad" I saw on Instagram trying to recruit salespeople to come work for this company:

It says:
"We don't do catchy ads. We just produce numbers. Come make $100k your first year selling solar."

They are trying to recruit salespeople who just wanna hit their numbers, so this ad plays in perfectly to that!

 

 

 

Drawing:

This is a concept I've liked for a long time: Concentrating more on your "Circle Of Influence."

Circle of Control: Things you can fully control. Focus on these most.

Circle of Influence: Things you can have an impact on but can't fully control.

External Circle: Things you can't control, and therefore shouldn't think about too much.

I've seen many versions of this around the web, and I always have liked the sentiment it portrays:

 

 

 

Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMe

(Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing)

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

Heh....do you think the write of this ad knew what he was doing?? 😏

I also love that the yellow truck is actually called the "Macho Power Wagon" 😂

Thought:

Sam Altman (who runs OpenAI) recently showcased an AI tool that takes written descriptions and generates pictures of them called Dall-E 2.

Checkout some of the user suggestions he typed into Dall-E 2, and the resulting pictures:

These types of AI tools are amazing for writers such as myself who like using a lot of images.

The reason is images often take waayyyy more time than writing. Having a cool "AI imaging assistant" could make our writing and videos far more engaging by cutting down the time it takes to make imagery!

Uplifting:

Now I just blabbed on about how awesome images are, but I follow this huge Instagram account called "When Where What Austin" that does the opposite.

They primarily posts text on a blue square for all their posts and stories.

A typical post looks like:

This easy format has really caught on, so all their posts are like this:

It's so funny how this format became iconic, and now people know it as "that blue square account."

Picture:

I'm a huge proponent of "co-working" because I work much harder when I THINK someone is looking at my screen.

If you weren't looking over my shoulder in this picture I'd be goofing off)!

However I did a Twitter Poll and 80% of people said they prefer writing alone:

I'm fine with writing alone OR writing around people....but I'm personally 10x likely to output more work if I think someone is around.

Interesting:

I was just on the My First Million Podcast talking about writing/creativity/happiness with Sam Parr.

We covered topics like:

• When copywriting started to click for me.
• Biggest mistakes in copywriting that people make.
• Are people born creative or is it learned? (Hint: A bit of both)
• My decision to die at 85 on Nov 17th, 2067
• Living next door to your best friend

Listen on the blog.
Listen on Apple Podcast.
Listen on YouTube.

Drawing:

Throughout most of modern human history the written word was the only way to scale your communication.

But as time has gone on, especially after the internet, the amount of ways to spread a message at scale has gone up exponentially:

In the year 2022 we have TONS of free ways to potentially scale a message to nearly the entire human race:
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Tik Tok
• FB
• Instagram
• Blogs
• Media Companies
• Podcasts
• Email
• Short videos
• Images
• So many more ways...

Kinda neat!

Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMed

(Swipe, Thought, Uplifting, Picture, Interesting, Drawing)

This is a fun email for Friday April 15th, 2022. Hope you like it 🙂

🎤 Listen to this email here:

Swipe:

Can you spot the "Social Proof" in this Canada Dry Water ad?

They use "number proof" to show off how popular their product is by saying "Over 900,000,000 highballs were made with Canada Dry Water last year."

Social Proof takes many forms, and using big numbers like this one is always a classic!

Thought:

If I write one blog post, it often "cascades" down into many pieces of content. Almost every time it goes like this:

For example:

I wrote a blog post on building a weekly newsletter:

Which turned into a YouTube video script:

Which turned into social media posts:

I call this "Cascading Content."

For me my "Cascading Content" is a strong blog post, and from there I can make multiple pieces from it.

Uplifting:

In the TV show Seinfeld, there's an episode called "The Opposite" where George Costanza is at a low point in his life, and decides to do everything "The Opposite."

It ends up working out amazing for him....

When George decides to do the opposite, Jerry says a sentence that's designed to mock George, but is rather profound:

"If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right." - @JerrySeinfeld

George's first "opposite" moment is when a beautiful woman is looking his way, and as usual...he does nothing.

He decides to do the opposite so he doesn't regret this moment.

He goes right up to her and says, "My name is George. I'm unemployed and I live with my parents." 😂

In this sentence he immediately revealed his deepest insecurities right up front, with zero lying or embellishing of the truth.

Much to George's surprise the woman responds very positively.

George's next "opposite moment" comes when two men sitting behind him are disturbing a whole movie theater.

Normally George would cower away and just accept this fate, but he does the opposite and scolds the men for being loud, to which he receives a round of applause!

George's final "opposite moment" is when he lands an interview with the New York Yankee's baseball team.

Instead of being polite to his future boss, he passionately lashes out against him and saying he's reduced the Yankee's to a laughing stock.

George instantly gets hired!

While Season 5 Episode 21 of Seinfeld is fictional, the lesson of "doing the opposite" is real.

If something isn't working, can you try the opposite?

Doing the opposite often feels foolish, takes courage, and maybe even involves some stupidity.

But the reward can be great.

Try the opposite.

You can watch "The Opposite" episode on NetFlix.

Picture:

Before Facebook allowed you to post pictures on the wall, people would post "ASCII Art" which was pictures made out of text, like this:

I still use a form of Ascii Art in my writing in the form of bullet points sorted by length, like this:

See how organizing that bullet point list makes it slightly more interesting?

Interesting:

Did you know you can edit any website with this little Javascript trick:

Create a bookmark in your browser with this code as the URL:

javascript:document.body.contentEditable = 'true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Just click that bookmark and you can edit text on any page!

Here's an example of me going to the Tesla website and editing the headline to my liking:

Let's make some fake news on The New York Times using this little Javascript trick!

I can "mockup" Twitter profiles using this trick also. Here I improve upon my friend Noah Kagan's profile!

You can see this trick in action in this quick little video I made:

I personally use this Javascript for:
• Showing clients what copy would look like.
• Seeing what minor webpage edits would look like.
• Removing images or elements from a page quickly.
• While reviewing someone’s website, just start changing the page up live so they can see it.

Copy and Paste the Javascript code into your own browser right from this post: https://copywritingcourse.com/blogs/34-edit-any-website-free-tool/

Drawing:

There's so many ways to spread your message at scale these days, it's almost confusing which social network to focus on:

Here's 3 questions to ask that'll help you decide which to focus on:

#1.) What channels do I have a natural advantage?
#2.) Will I enjoy spending 1-3 years of time on this platform?
#3.) What main channel helps me create "cascading content"?

I'm currently writing a blog post about this, and will share it here shortly 🙂

Hope you enjoyed these little tidbits, have a happy Friday!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora - CopywritingCourse.com | @NevMed

Here's what the AIDA Formula is in a nutshell:

Attention: Get their attention with something catchy and relevant.
Interest: Tell them interesting facts or uses.
Desire: Make them desire the product/service.
Action: Get them to take an action.

Let's break that down into sections to understand it better:

Why Is The AIDA Formula Important?

The AIDA Formula is designed to lead people through a logical process that hooks them, gets them interested logically, gets them interested emotionally, then close the deal:

Going through these steps in order is one of the best ways to convince someone to:

• Buy a product.
• Buy a service.
• Convince someone of an idea.
• Take any action.

The AIDA Formula In Action (w/ Example):

Neville from Copywriting Course and Ross from Siege Media discuss how to use the AIDA Formula:

Here's a little demo and reminder of how to use the AIDA formula on your own:

Example of AIDA Formula (Let's Sell A Helicopter)!

Using the AIDA Formula as a base, let's see if we can convince someone to buy this helicopter:

It's hard to start off with a blank page, but with the AIDA Formula we just have to fill in the Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action sections!

Let's give it a try:

See how much easier that was to pitch since we just had to follow the simple AIDA Formula!?

I sincerely hope this useful formula helps you write content, emails, and everything else much easier!

Sincerely,
Neville N. Medhora