“You’re very good at writing in this conversational tone.”
I was getting some copy critiqued by a more experienced copywriter.
“Yeah, this opening story is great,” he said.
Fact is, i didn’t write any of it.
It was a story I found online. I cut it down, rearranged it a bit for emphasis, made it more readable. But most of the words were somebody else’s.
That’s because one of my mantras is that I should write as little copy as possible. The less I write, the better the final result tends to be.
That doesn’t mean to make my sales letters short.
It does mean that most of my copy, particularly the crucial bits like the lead and any stories inside, are not my own invention.
Instead, I dig them up online…
Or, if I have the luxury, I get them straight from the mouth of the guru behind the product, during an interview.
And that’s what I want to share with you today.
Because most people won’t give you the drama and the stories, even if you ask them nicely. They simply don’t understand what you’re after, or what makes for a good story or for exciting copy.
That’s why it’s your job to reach down their throat and pull that out.
It took me a while to get decent at doing so. I still mess up often. But I now have a bunch of little techniques I use now that help.
Such as the 3+ technique of negotiation coach Jim Camp. Camp advised covering each main point of a negotiation — or an interview — at least three separate times, using slightly different cues.
“So tell me about the time you first discovered this…”
“Let’s go back to time you first discovered this… where were you when it happened?”
“So wait. When you discovered this… what did you do right after?”
And like I said, I have a bunch of other little tricks. I even wrote them up once in a post on how to be a magnetic listener. If you want to see this post, so you can write write less copy… get better results… and have people like you better (because who doesn’t like a good listener)… then here’s the link:
https://bejakovic.com/10-steps-to-becoming-a-magnetic-listener/