Copywriters, Magic + Spark
By Jessica Albon
When I created Sales Page Play Dates, I got a lot of questions. People wanted to know why they should invest in learning to write better copy.
“After all,” one person said, “I’m just doing this in the meantime until I can afford to pay a professional.”
A lot of people weren’t clear on why they should learn to write their own copy other than that they couldn’t afford to pay a copywriter to do it for them.
I love to write. You know that about me already. And I didn’t always.
I had to learn to love to write. When I was little, one of the reasons I didn’t love to write was that I wasn’t very good at it. I’d read these wonderful stories and then I’d write one of my own and I’d see just how terrible mine was in comparison to the “real” story. And that made me dislike writing even more.
It’s hard to like something when you’re not so good at it.
Especially when you’re comparing your own first drafts to someone else’s final drafts. (Yikes!)
Sometimes we think we should be able to do this. After all, you know how to write, right? You learned all about nouns and verbs and adverbs and dangling participles in school. And you learned to string them together properly into sentences and paragraphs and pages.
But writing compelling, engaging copy is an entirely different animal from writing book reports or even from writing blog posts.
And so there are new skills to learn. And until you’ve learned those new skills, of course it’s a struggle! Of course you might not like it.
It’s worth it, though. Because what waits on the other side–what waits for you to learn how to write your own copy–is magic.
Nothing short of magic.
See, copy you write yourself has a spark to it. An aliveness. It’s infused with your voice, with your intimate understanding of what you offer, and of who your people are.
It pours out of your fingers into the keyboard and comes to life on the screen.
When you learn the tools. When you do the work.
And that’s something you’ll never get when you buy copy from a professional. Because no matter how much homework they do, no matter how much they learn about you and your audience and what you offer… They will never understand it the way you do. They will never know it in their bones the way you do.
There are advantages to that detached stance that a professional has. But none of those advantages will ever, truly breathe life into the copy written by a professional.
Oh, sure, they can write copy that’s compelling and effective. They’ll be well worth your investment in them.
But if you want to imbue your copy with magic, you have to do that yourself.
That’s why you learn to write your own copy. Because when you do, the copy you’ll write will have a depth, a power, an aliveness that no one else’s copy will have. That’s what makes learning to write your own copy priceless. Not the increase in money you’ll make or the increase in clients you’ll have (though that will happen). No, it’s the process itself. The glorious, unfolding, blossoming process. The process of watching your copy spark to life.
