Nobody called me out on it.
For the past four days, I’ve been sending out plagiarized emails. I would have kept going too, but I ran out of source material to abuse.
So on Saturday, I sent out the email “What I learned from copywriting.” That was plagiarized from James Altucher’s “What I learned from chess.”
On Sunday, I sent out “Stop caring what people think.” That was plagiarized from Jason Leister’s “Just tell me what to do.”
Monday was “Why I didn’t collect my $10.5 million.” That was plagiarized from Mark Ford’s “Why I wasn’t loyal to my broker.”
And yesterday I sent “How to create a selling style people love to read.” That was actually Ben Settle’s “How to create a writing style people love to buy from.”
If you are compulsively curious, track down the originals and then take a look at my plagiarized copies.
Because it’s not just subject line I plagiarized.
I plagiarized the content too. Especially the structure. Even entire sentences.
(By the way, I picked these four writers to plagiarize because 1) they send out more or less daily emails… and 2) they are the only people whose emails I more or less read each day.)
But here’s my point, and perhaps something that will benefit you:
I’ve spent a hundred hours or more hand-copying successful sales letters. I think this practice had some value. It forced me to slow down and actually read the damn things. But I don’t buy into the whole magic of “neural imprinting,” which is supposed to happen when you copy stuff by hand.
Instead, I’ve found plagiarizing to be much more useful.
Plagiarizing does double duty. It first forces me to look at copy critically, and ask, “What is this guy really doing here?”
For example, for the Jason Leister email, I came up with the following skeleton underlying the flesh of his writing:
* where I was before
* how that benefited others, why that was, all the wrong places I was looking
* realization of what will happen if I continue this same way
* what I do now
* what that does NOT mean
* bring it around to you
* analogy to reinforce
* diagnostic question you can ask yourself
* exposing all the reasons and assumptions that kept me where I was
* bigger consequences, or bigger context of this single issue
* inspirational takeaway if you do, and uninspirational takeaway if you don’t
I find this is much more effective than hand copying ads for learning. It seems to sink into my memory better, and it impacts how I write copy weeks and months later.
But that’s only half the exercise.
Because once you “chunk up,” you then have to “chunk down.” You actually write a new piece of copy with the same skeleton.
And that’s what I mean by double duty. Not only does this exercise help me learn… but it also produces a serviceable piece of copy. Often, it produces something better than what I would have written on my own.
With plagiarizing, I’m earning while I’m learning. Which is why, if you’re looking to get better at copywriting, I recommend shameless plagiarism to you too.
You can plagiarize my stuff if you want. Here’s the optin for my daily email newsletter.