If there were a church near me, I’d go and nail an announcement to the door that says:
I’m nearing the end of Copy Zone, my guide to the business side of copywriting. Managing clients… getting them if you don’t got ’em… upleveling to as high as you want to go, that kind of thing.
Copy Zone consists of 114 points, rules, or maybe theses, to keep going with the religious theme I have set up my offers.
I’ve finished all but a handful of these 114 theses. And for those that remain, I have notes and clear plans for what I want to say.
But here’s the puzzling and conflicting thing to my troubled mind:
I started working on Copy Zone over 3 months ago. This final result, soon to be finished, will be 85% what I initially wrote up for myself in a batch of notetaking in the first couple weeks, when I started working on this.
And yet it’s taken me over three months, and will take a bit more time, to actually get to the end.
That’s not because the actual writing has been so hard or has taken so long.
Instead, it’s because I had doubts about the overall structure… the presentation I was making… the emphasis I wanted readers to rememeber and walk away with.
So I ended up rearranging, making tweaks, changing the structure multiple times… while keeping much of the content the same.
Will it be worth it?
And even if the current version really turns out to be a 100, wouldn’t it have been better to put out something that was an 85, but to do so three months ago?
Who knows. It’s a fair question. and maybe It’s a lesson I will draw for myself in the future.
For now, I just want to share a different point with you:
Don’t get desperate if your copy, or anything else that you’re writing, sucks.
Don’t go all Nikolai Gogol on your half-finished sales letter and set it on fire, or delete it on your hard drive.
It might be tempting. I know I’ve felt the urge. But the fact is, even if what you’ve written looks awful right now, 85% of it can be salvaged.
So take a bit of time — or worst case, take three months — and rewrite what you’ve got. There are sure to be good ideas in there. Your entire package just needs to be sharpened, polished, molded or otherwise physically transformed. But the substance is there.
A-list copywriter Parris Lampropoulos once talked about how he writes a sales letter. After the first draft’s done, Parris said, he always thinks he’s lost it. People will find out he’s a fraud.
Then he rewrites the bullets he’s written. They’re still bad. But Parris squints a bit, tilts his head, and thinks to himself, maybe, maybe I can get away with this?
Third and fourth rewrite, the bullets are starting to look pretty damn good.
And the next thing you know, Parris has got himself a new control sales letter, which ends up paying him hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in royalties.
Ok, on to business:
Do you want to get notified when Copy Zone is out? You can keep waiting for that announcement on the church door. Or just sign up to my email newsletter.