Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Epic copywriting is an integral part of driving traffic and making conversions. Smashing Magazine even states that “it’s not how can you become a world-class copywriter in a short period of time if you have only minimal experience?

It took me 10 years to improve, figuring out these techniques. By practicing them, you’ll be able to improve a lot faster....

Writing isn’t a talent—it’s a skill. A skill you can develop, refine, and improve.

Becoming a great copywriter isn’t easy, but if you consistently work on your writing, your writing will get better and better.

Here are 33 (count them!) writing tweaks that will propel you to copywriting mastery....

Copywriting is hard. (That’s why everyone says they want to write yet very few actually do.) Creative fear and distraction most often get in the way, which is why it takes inspiration, energy, and discipline to get something good on the page.

Luckily, you’re not Thoreau, sequestered in the woods. There are blogs, books, plugins, apps, and a ton of other resources available to help you up your writing game—and  we have them all here for you. From style guides to grammar hacks, here are 101 tools to help you be a better writer....

Not sure where to start? That’s okay. This article will teach you the fundamentals. You'll learn how to drive audiences to read every word you write. You’ll learn how digital copywriters -- you know, marketers who use words to convert people online -- get and keep the most valuable commodity on the internet: attention.

However, in order to command an online reader’s attention, you have to first understand how they read.

The answer, of course, is that they’re not reading at all. On the internet, the majority of people are actually skimming. In fact, according to research performed by Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen Norman Group, only 16% of people online read word-by-word.

Just about everyone else is a scanner, picking text apart for the bits that are valuable to them.

Knowing that, there are several ways you can write to make the process easier for people, ensuring that your message is entirely received.

Ready to learn a valuable skill?...

Last year I did a post for the Writers Digest website, explaining why (my opinion) “just write” is among the most dangerous soundbytes of writing advice ever uttered.  It’s like telling someone about to on trial without a lawyer (an apropos analogy to trying to write a story without knowing how to write a novel) to skip law school and “just talk.”  One reader commented in response that, because after years of practice some writers can indeed “just write” and be successful… I thank her for helping make my point.

There is a huge, hard-won backlog of knowledge and principle that makes anything that can otherwise be “made up as you go along” functional, if not downright fatal.

“Just do it” can get you killed, and it can kill your story, as well.  

In that context, I’ve yet to encounter a writer who can disprove the existence or need for a largely given structure – the order and context for how a story should flow – for the rendering of long form storytelling....

Coming up with exciting content is a bit tricky though, not just because everything has already been done to death, so it’s hard to come up with anything original, but also because once you set out to create it, it seems as if everything is turning against you and wants to prevent you from creating it. You name it: procrastination (although that one is on you), writer’s block (a little bit on you), distractions, the agony of having to edit your work, the list is seemingly endless.

We've mentioned tools to help with content marketing several times at Smart Insights. We thought it worth mentioning these tools because whilst you may already be using the likes of Trello and Hootsuite, these less well-known tools may also help you be that extra bit more effective when it comes to writing content....

When you’re planning to write, but before you’re actually writing, you create an outline. Unfortunately, most outlines are worthless. You need a better outline: a fat outline.

Outlines are helpful for mapping out the structure of a long piece of writing — anything more than 1,000 words (a couple of pages). An outline ought to help the people you’re working with — your boss, your clients, your editor — to understand what you’re going to write. It should also force you, the writer, to think clearly about content.

The problem is, traditional outlines don’t do this very well.

Words are hard.

Whether you're a published author or just getting started with blogging, it's not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something.

But every marketer should be able to write -- and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It's just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing. 

Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section....

Whether you're a published author or just getting started with blogging, it's not always easy to string words together in a way that makes sense, sounds good, and makes the reader feel something.

But every marketer should be able to write -- and, more importantly, every marketer can write. It's just a matter of finding the writing environment that works best for you, expanding your vocabulary, asking for feedback (and listening to it), and practicing.

Luckily, there are a slew of great tools you can use to help improve your writing. Check out the list below, and feel free to add the most helpful ones you use in the comment section....

Editing copy boils down to two key things: recognizing weaknesses and knowing how to fix them. It’s a critical part of the writing process and yet, one that’s all too often overlooked. After all, if you don’t know that there’s an issue to begin with, how can you fix it?

That's why, if you struggle with editing, you’re going to love this article ...
Because by the end of it, you’ll be armed with 10 powerful, uber-specific editing actions that’ll make your copy more addictive, engaging, and compelling than it was before you got to work revising it. Whether you’re writing a landing page, a blog article, an email, or a web page, making the following changes will have a profound impact on your readers.

Namely, these edits will make them more likely to do what you want them to do -- and that’s what great copy is all about....