Copy...

What does it take to start a podcast...?

Or record an audiobook?

Or make a great advertisement?

Copy. It takes great copy.

At the risk of sounding like President Trump, you need to have amazing copy, the very best, no one should be able to touch your copy. (You read that in his voice, didn't you?)

The problem is, that takes practice.

A sales coach once told me, you never practice on money; meaning that you never try new strategies with your clients that are potentially a paycheck for you.

That is definitely sound advice for sales. Don't botch a contract with new, untried techniques.

However, the opposite is true for copy writing, practicing on the fly and even split testing is the norm. Your first efforts are going to be weak at best, and that's ok.

We don't all start out doing pull-ups when we go to the gym for the first time.

Your copy should go through a number of revisions based around 3 different aspects: Word choice, sentence length, and overall length/positioning of your topic.

Word choice:

Orchestrating a fluid and harmonious excerpt for your advertisement is challenging.

Whoa... hold up there. We've got a couple $2, $5 and $10 words in there.

Your copy word choice should always be aimed at a 3rd to 4th grade reading level.

That's talking to a 9 or 10 year old at the most, depending on when their birthday falls.

Let's try again:

Writing a smooth and well fitting script for your ad is hard.

So much easier to understand, and you're not showing off to your listener, which can turn them off to your content.

I've seen folks who mastered good copy writing skills help businesses pull in 7 figure revenue. Yep, the marketing genius who wrote that was pretty much directly responsible for 80% of her company's revenue.

Sentence Length.

Vary it!

You'll notice throughout this whole article that I've had sentences with one to two worlds and some with up to 20.

You'll also notice that I break them out line by line.

Sometimes,

I'll even drop something to another line for

emphasis.

Your English and Grammar teachers will hate this, but the point is, it WORKS.

We process information in small chunks.

Don't overload a reader, listener, or customer with overly bloated copy that runs on and on and on and continues to try to tell as story in a run-on sentence (I've lost your attention now, haven't I?)...

Get above the Fold-

It's an old newspaper term, but it works perfectly for copy writing for any medium.

This describes having the hook, or the key bit of the story to get the consumer interested above the line where they have to take an action to read more.

That could be unfolding a newspaper, scrolling a mouse, or turning a virtual page. If the hook for your content isn't readily visible from the "front page", make it so it is!

This also goes for overall length of the piece of content.

Don't overstretch it! Be clear and concise with your copy.

Your copy for podcasts and ads should be high speed, low drag.

Audiobooks are a bit different because of world building and conveying mental pictures, but thankfully not every author is Tom Clancy when it comes to describing a scene.

Keep it compact

So that's it, we're not going to hammer these concepts in a 12 minute read article, we're going to keep it ~3 minutes. Time is the one thing that we and our customers/the consumers of our content can't get any more of.

Write well so it reads well.

~WPS