[Rja]

What's the best way to get into copywriting? Any websites / blog sites that will accept free blogs?

[charliesaidthat]

Well if you have your own blog gives you time to practise writing great content. Writing is like most things, gets easier with practise.

When you have your own blog you can start connecting with other blog authors that share similiar audiences and interests.

Guest posts will give you exposure on bigger blogs, and facilitate guest posts on your blog to create community.

[wizely]

The best way of getting into copywriting (as a business) is get some years of experience in strategic sales/ marketing/ business and develop a masterful command of the English language!

Sounds like I'm just being a smart-arse... but just pointing out that most folks can write and use a word processor but it doesn't make them a copywriter. Effective copywriting is probably only 50% in the writing - the other 50% is figuring-out what to write... that's why I'd always recommend business acumen as the most important skill over literary artistry.

The easiest way is probably through writing articles but, for that to go well, you need, not just copywriting skills, but also deep subject knowledge. But article writing is very different to writing sales or marketing copy and there's no margin in it (article writing is the spec work of the copywriting world) - sure you can get paid, but not much - especially if you're not a recognised expert in a specialist area.

Don't get confused between blog writing and copywriting - there's a world of difference.

You're going to be very busy - what with learning all about web design and copywriting.

[charliesaidthat]

wizely, on 31 January 2010 - 01:18 AM, said:

Don't get confused between blog writing and copywriting - there's a world of difference.

Agreed!! Still can be good practise if you have nothing else to work on though.

[wizely]

charliesaidthat, on 31 January 2010 - 05:37 AM, said:

Agreed!! Still can be good practise if you have nothing else to work on though.

Totally agree, and good for the other reasons you mentioned.
But then I suppose starting out in copywriting is like web design... for 'portfolio' work you could approach anyone and offer to rewrite their website or marketing or whatever.
I'm just a lucky bugger in that I've always got paid (the idea of working is bad enough - the idea of working for free is unimaginably horrid to me!).

[notbanksy]

wizely, on 31 January 2010 - 01:18 AM, said:

The best way of getting into copywriting (as a business) is get some years of experience in strategic sales/ marketing/ business

Care to expand on your thoughts about this? My own thought is that sales/ marketing/ business are all things that can be learned, but to some extent rely on a level of instinct to be really good at them. I'm fairly conscious of the fact that my creativity retreats when the task at hand is to sell.

Anyone else experience this?

I think being able to write in an interesting and engaging way is probably only about 50% of the art. The rest is knowing exactly what people respond to, and my guess is: that's what takes the years of experience to develop a nose for.

[wizely]

Can I expand my thoughts by saying "what he said"?!
You're spot on... nearly everyone can write, some can write well, fewer still can write effectively in a business sense.

Who would you rather have working on your business' main sales tool... someone with business nous and marketing experience or who can quote Byron at you?!

Also, with testing what works and online copy being the main diet of search engines - it pays to be able to be good at research and analysis. That's the foundation of good copy and it's what takes half the time - get that stuff right and, if you can write well, the copy will flow to fill the structure you've developed.

Kind of like web design for business... the HTML and CSS are the easy bits - knowing WHAT to design to be effective is what makes a designer/ developer good. The interface, layout, functionality and visual branding will follow.

Heck... anyone can use the basic functions of a word processor just like they can Dreamweaver - however, what you get out the end depends very much on who's using them!

[notbanksy]

wizely, on 31 January 2010 - 10:40 PM, said:

Who would you rather have working on your business' main sales tool... someone with business nous and marketing experience or who can quote Byron at you?!

I'll have the Byron, please.

Interesting to hear you talk about research Wizely. It's one thing to write about what you know, but when writing for others, then their business becomes your business, and knowing that will certainly be a challenge. I'm sure many of us could summon up some reasonable copy for our own sites, but how would we fare writing for an agricultural or engineering company? Not so well I suspect.

Anyway, I'm going way off topic now! Anyone come across this poem? A friend showed it to me at the weekend, and it's still tickling me, so I thought I'd share.

The Quality Of Sprawl by Les Murray

Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.

Sprawl is doing your farm work by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
It is never lighting cigars with ten dollar notes:
that's idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
Nor can it be bought with the ash of million dollar deeds.

Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl almost never says, Why not?, with palms comically raised
nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That's Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth.

Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official's desk with a chain saw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal,
though it's often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know His own.
Knowing the man's name this was said to might be sprawl.

Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings.
I have sprawl enough to have forgotten which paintings.
Turner's glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl -
except he didn't fire them.

Sprawl gets up the noses of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don't include it.
Some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.

Sprawl is really classless, though. It is John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours' best bed in spurs and oilskins,
but not having thrown up:
sprawl is never Calum, who, in the loud hallway of our house
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it's Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, no Hitting Animals, no Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would thatit were more so.

No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.

[wizely]

Bloody hell, that's more culture than WDF can handle!
Not sure it's a good poem though... it doesn't even rhyme!

I do like these little gems:
"(every kind that comes in kinds)"
"Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
And thinks it unlikely."
And a fair few of the other rhythms. Can't say I like the sound of some aspects of sprawl myself - it borders on the Chav in places. For me:

"Sprawl tastes like oysters or bangers and mash
served on crisp white linen or grass-stained laps."

Not that you're to tell the lads I go shooting with that I wrote poetry.

[charliesaidthat]

Most times I have written copy for companies before, I have had long meetings with them (or several short ones) to go through the main elements and to get an understanding of what they are all about. My aim is to turn their words (and usually enthusiasm) into words that people will search, read and not be scared by.

I break it down into each service that they provide and get them to think about the customers that would usually buy that service. (Yes, I come from a marketing background)

I have found that clients usually speak in code - decoding their jargon is the key to making it more accessible and friendly for their customers. The only problem I reguarly fear is if I write the site so it is super friendly and they turn up and jargonise at them, makes for a very confused customer!!

I usually reference what they have told me with competing websites in a similar field so I know roughly where I should be pitching with the companies brand values in mind. Their business is my business, but I take their words, and write the same thing in different words.

I like to think of this video: The Story of a Sign

[notbanksy]

Tee hee Wizely's a namby poet! I'm telling!

For me this is what clinches it:

Quote

Turner's glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl -
except he didn't fire them

But it's a great piece of work.

I disagree about the chav associations. Sprawl is too agile, too graceful to be chav:

Quote

Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility.

"Sprawl is to etiquette as parkour is to urban"
My contribution ^^

[wizely]

Quote

No, sprawl is full gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed,
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.

^ Chav! I can picture this little vignette on the BBC between programmes... some politically correct hoodie type on some graffiti-hacked and desolate grey council estate while a red carrier bag blows along!

Like your contribution... not sure what fancy flooring has to do with it. Oh, hang-on, it's that French "too lazy to use the stairs" thing isn't it?!

And of course you'd love the burning of parliament - bloody communist!

This post has been edited by wizely: 02 February 2010 - 01:27 PM

[notbanksy]

wizely, on 02 February 2010 - 01:25 PM, said:

And of course you'd love the burning of parliament - bloody communist!

How dare you sir?! I am not a communist, I am an anarcho-syndicalist.

Pft, one mention of council housing, and suddenly it's a chav poem. I like the touch with the red carrier bag though. Very BBC.

Do you really think it's chav? I think it's bordering on zen...

[wizely]

But I couldn't spell "anarcho-syndicalist".
I really do think it's erring on the side of chav... there's a definite 'bovvered' undertone to this sprawl. It seems to think it's raging against the machine and laughing inwardly at the other classes (every kind that comes in kinds) but just seems a little too contrived, spouty, needy and infantile - just dressed-up in poncy words.
But then I've never been a fan of modern poetry... I'm sure it's awesome and I'm just thick/ uncultured!

This post has been edited by wizely: 02 February 2010 - 01:44 PM

[notbanksy]

wizely, on 02 February 2010 - 01:44 PM, said:

I'm sure it's awesome and I'm just thick/ uncultured!

Ha ha yes it's awesome, but you're definitely not thick or uncultured. You put forward a convincing argument for the chav analysis, but I agree to disagree if you do

Seems not many folks out there like poetry any more... Is it just the modern stuff or all verse you're averse to (geddit?)

[charliesaidthat]

I like poetry, but only small amounts. And usually only evocative and emotional wordlings.

Charles Bukowski - The Shoelace said:

a woman, a
tire that's flat, a
disease, a
desire: fears in front of you,
fears that hold so still
you can study them
like pieces on a
chessboard...

it's not the large things that
send a man to the
madhouse. death he's ready for, or
murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood...
no, it's the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse...

not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left ...

The dread of life
is that swarm of trivialities
that can kill quicker than cancer
and which are always there -
licence plates or taxes
or expired driver's license,
or hiring or firing,
doing it or having it done to you, or
roaches or flies or a
broken hook on a
screen, or out of gas
or too much gas,
the sink's stopped-up, the landlord's drunk,
the president doesn't care and the governor's
crazy.

lightswitch broken, mattress like a
porcupine;
$105 for a tune-up, carburetor and fuel pump at
sears roebuck;
and the phone bill's up and the, market's
down
and the toilet chain is
broken,
and the light has burned out -
the hall light, the front light, the back light,
the inner light; it's
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.

then there's always crabs and ingrown toenails
and people who insist they're
your friends;
there's always that and worse;
leaky faucet, christ and christmas;
blue salami, 9 day rains,
50 cent avocados
and purple
liverwurst.


or making it
as a waitress at norm's on the split shift,
or as an emptier of
bedpans,
or as a carwash or a busboy
or a stealer of old lady's purses
leaving them screaming on the sidewalks
with broken arms at the age of 80.

suddenly
2 red lights in your rear view mirror
and blood in your
underwear;
toothache, and $979 for a bridge
$300 for a gold
tooth,
and china and russia and america, and
long hair and short hair and no
hair, and beards and no
faces, and plenty of zigzag but no
pot, except maybe one to piss in
and the other one around your
gut.

with each broken shoelace
out of one hundred broken shoelaces,
one man, one woman, one
thing
enters a
madhouse.

so be careful
when you
bend over.

[notbanksy]

I really like that a lot - funny because I don't remember having liked much that sits in the 'beat' genre, but that reminds me of some of Tom Waits' darker moments. Might have to take another look at Mr Bukowski.

Quote

it's
darker than hell
and twice as
expensive.

Brilliant!

[great]

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[arindra]

I started my copywriting career with a good SEO company. So, I feel that there are many big and small SEO companies whom you can approach if you are confident enough to write well in the language you are applying for. You can also do freelancing. Once experienced, there are many ways to go.