How to use research and swipe effectively in your copywriting process
I hear you thinking to yourselves what’s that all about…
As all marketing you need to make sure you always complete thorough research of your market, without it you’ll make expensive mistakes and if these mistakes are at your clients expense chances are you’ll not get the opportunity to work with them again and I doubt very much you’ll get a referral from them!
So, in the context of research for copywriting what do you need to do?
I’d always recommend the very first thing you do with every new project is to identify your main competitors ( subscribe to their sites too). This ensures you’ll get all their promo material (e-mails, squeeze page copy, special offers, guarantee details etc etc) this will allow you to see what they;re doing to get paying customers, read it yourself and see how it sounds, you can then avoid making the same mistakes…
If the copy you’re writing is for a client ask them who their competitors are they may have come across some you haven’t or they may have done full and proper research themselves, this’ll save you time and energy…
What you’re looking for is information you think is useful, creative and effective in the promotion of your chosen product, information that looks good in the written word…
Research, simple yes?
Once you’ve spotted some valuable ideas, ideas you think look good and work well, next you’re going to ‘SWIPE’ it…
When we talk about swiping what we’re doing is copy and pasting the headline, body text, sub heads etc and then saving them in a file called a ‘Swipe File’ make sure you label this file and keep it handy…
This in time will become a very important and indeed valuable part of your business tools.
Now, although what we’ve done here is copy and paste someone else’s ideas what we’re not going to do is blatantly use the exact same format, that would just be plain wrong and will get you in to trouble…
We’ve only done this to provide a template to work from an idea to build on, it might be there was one word in particular you thought would be great to use or you liked a particular phrase, these things are used to provide inspiration and enable you to get your own creative juices flowing!
Don’t worry all copywriters do this…
I categorically promise you this, as your copywriting progresses your swipe file will become your biggest and most prized business asset, you’ll find you’ll use it every time you write a piece of copy, there’d absolutely no doubt it’ll save you time creatively providing you a ready made fountain of inspiration!
I hope this tip will be of benefit to you in your future writing, I promise it will, provided you remember to save those swiped ideas religiously!
And use them each and every time you begin a new project
