This morning, I found myself, frown on my face, jaw clenched, staring out the window. I was actually stroking my chin, that’s how deep in unpleasant thought I was.
I was trying to come up with a way to start this email.
Finally, disgust swept over me. “Let me just write something, anything,” I said to myself. “In the worst case, it will be terrible. And I will just have to rewrite it.”
In case you’re starting to get a little nervous about where this email is going, let me ease your mind:
This isn’t me cowboy hollering at you to to git ‘er done.
Instead, I just want to remind you — and really, myself — of something I heard in an interview with Parris Lampropoulos.
Parris is one of the most successful copywriters working over the past few decades. He has something like an 80% success rate at defeating control sales letters. And he makes millions of dollars while working on only three or four projects a year.
Even so, Parris doesn’t produce winning copy straight out the gate.
In that interview, Parris said something like:
“When I first sit down and write the bullets for a promotion, I always think I’ve lost it. They’re terrible. Everybody will find out I’m a fraud. Then I rewrite the bullets once, and I think, maybe I will be able to get away with it. Third and fourth rewrite, they’re starting to look pretty damn good.”
So if somebody as successful, proven, established, revered, and experienced as P-Lamp still gets feelings of horror and doubt when he looks at his first draft… then maybe it’s okay if you and I also feel the same.
Or in the words of another A-list copywriter, Clayton Makepeace:
“Don’t compare YOUR first draft with MY 16th draft.”
“Thanks John,” you might say, “but I really don’t need encouragement to keep fiddling with my copy. I do that aplenty already.”
I feel you. I can revise my copy endlessly, moving a single word from place A to place B, and back again, over and over, a dozen times. There’s obviously a point at which it stops paying for itself.
But it’s good to still remind yourself that other people work the same way, including some of the best of the best. It can help you stay sane.
And just as important:
Reminding yourself of the power of rewrites can help you get going in the first place. Like what happened with me with this email you’re reading now.
So that’s all the cowboy hollering I have for you today. And now on to business:
I bring up both Parris and Clayton since they feature many times inside Copy Riddles.
That’s because both Parris and Clayton were a couple of the slowest — but most deadly — gunmen in the Wild West of sales copy. Here’s one of Parris’s bullets that wound:
“How to use an ordinary hairbrush to quit smoking.”
I discovered the secret to this (and many similar) brain-teasers by looking at Parris’s bullet… as well as the actual book he was selling.
The trick Parris used to write this bullet is simple. You can discover it in round 17 of Copy Riddles. Once you know it, you too can write intriguing stuff like this “hair brush” promise, on demand.
And then you can rewrite it… and rewrite it… and rewrite it some more. And slowly, it will start to look pretty damn good.
Anyways, enrollment for Copy Riddles closes tomorrow. So if you’ve got a hankering for some A-list copywriting skills, then pardner, head over here: