The Copywrite Vista Method

byTheCatherine

14K followers

3 years ago

If you’ve struggled with copywriting (or even the thought of it), this may be helpful

I’ve been creating quite a bit of sales copy recently and also helping some clients and friends work on theirs.

It’s true that copywriting can seem like a very arduous task. When I start to think about it can be overwhelming.

So try the following two principles which can really help you:

1) Fill In The Framework

The great copywriter Eugene Schwartz said,

“Copy is not written; copy is assembled.”

What he means is you should never open a blank document with the intention of writing your sales page start to finish, top to bottom.

Most people make this very simple basic mistake.

This is extremely unrealistic and VERY difficult (I certainly can’t do it).

Instead, which is what Eugene is really getting at, is that you work on the individual components like:

Headline

Sub-Headline

Introduction

Problem

Pain

Solution

Benefits

Guarantee

Calls-to-action

Testimonials

...etc., and so on...

So, on Monday, you might work on just the calls to action.

On Tuesday, you might create five candidate headlines.

On Wednesday, you could create a bullet list of benefits.

Once this is done, then you assemble these components into the overall framework of your sales letter.

2) The ‘Copywrite Vista Method.’

That’s my name for it, but the general principle has been talked about by many great copywriters.

Basically, we can’t work on the copy all day.

Personally, I can last about 1 hour before my creativity wanders or wanes.

From bitter experience, I can tell you that if you try it for longer, you lose the ability to look it at from the point of view of the buyer. So this is where the Copy-vista Method comes in.

Once you’ve assembled your components, you observe the ‘vista’ over your copy once per day, making small incremental improvements.

25-40 minutes is more than enough for this.

By sleeping in between these sessions, you come back fresh: a sub-headline that looked great yesterday can seem rather lacklustre today!

So you tweak it.

You can also spend some of your allocated time collecting other people’s copy from around the internet.

Every time I see a sales page in any niche, I copy it into a swipe file.

Then you borrow the style, phrases, and layout and adapt your words accordingly.

Try this, and I think you’ll be amazed at how these small, incremental improvements add up.

For me, this process usually takes three to four weeks, with one 40 minute session per day.

(the rest of the time, I’m usually creating the product content itself as I generally like to create my sales material first)

The reason I like to have my sales copy first5 is the fact it stops you from spewing out everything you know about a subject.

A sales page defines your offer, and I tend to stick with it more, and it ultimately gives me a cleaner product

So that’s 15 ‘sweeps’ I’ll do, improving, improving, improving.

The other great thing is that this takes the fear out of the process because even if you hate the thought of copywriting, you can still manage 25-40 minutes per day.