You may have heard about copywriting, or may be not. But believe me, copywriting is one of the most important skills in digital marketing.
You can make everything work, but if you can’t make your copy work, everything will fail.
Before I teach you what copywriting really is, let’s understand how these words “copy” and “copywriting” came into existence.
Long back, there was no such thing as mass advertising or marketing. I am talking like 200-300 years back. Language was born much before that. The first form of mass marketing came in the form of print.
Printing presses were invented (by Gutenberg) and people started publishing content on newspapers and magazines. For the first time content could reach a lot of people – through replication.
For approximately 4,500 years before Gutenberg invented the printing press, books were made by hand. They were written on surfaces of clay, papyrus, wax, and parchment. There was no “copy”.
That’s why no one bothered about copy-writing!
Then came the printing press (before TV and Radio came along). Which helped people make copies of the content. That’s why it came to be called as “Copy-writing”.
So before the invention of the printing press, the only kind of sales were done through 1:1 sales by Sales men. People used to sell door to door. Or people used to have their merchandise in a market square and they sold their stuff. There was no concept of an “ad” to begin with.
Only sales, directly done by sales-men. So when the printing press was invented and newspapers started getting distributed, the concept of an ad copy was born.
And it is called an ad copy because the ad can be copied into each replica of the same newspaper that reaches 1000s of people. People who wrote content for these ads became COPY-writers.
They were Ad Copywriters, but they became known as copywriters. And the art of writing ad copies became to be known as “copywriting”.
Many people think that people who are good with the English language can write good copies.
No!
Language skills have nothing to do with copywriting. Someone might not be good with writing English and they can still be a good copywriter. Copywriting is the art of seamless communication with the target reader.
Here, I am writing a blog post “copy” and you are the target reader. Do you feel I am talking directly to you?
Like I am sitting next to you and talking about copywriting? That’s the skill I have developed over the years.
When I started writing, I wrote things online that looked like English Essays. Boring and professional. Such content is good for legal documents and school essays. But it doesn’t work online.
Because online, you need to talk to people directly. Appeal to their desires. And satisfy them.
If you have read up to this point in this blog post, that’s because you want to learn copywriting. When you opened this page, you knew that you were about to learn copywriting skills from me. And I am teaching that to you with my communication via written words.
Copywriting skill is not a skill that has to be learned (or needs to be learned). Effective copywriting is just communicating properly. We all communicate very well with our friends and family in-person. But we become boring when it comes to writing online.
That’s because writing online is a strange experience for humans. Evolution didn’t prepare us for that. The art of copywriting is to bring your online writing style to as close as possible to in-person communication.
So its more like unlearning your heavy professional English and become better at communication through writing. So everyone is a born copywriter. You just forgot it because you wrote Essays at school and project notes in college.
Albert Einstein said “Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.”
Not sure if it was really Einstein, but its a famous quote and it became famous because it is so true. And in the case of copywriting, it is truer than ever.
The way I am writing to you now, would have been the natural way I would have written if I didn’t go to school! After 20 years of schooling, I unlearned what I learned about writing words in the next 10 years. And now when I am 30 years of age, I am writing as I would talk to you directly, as a friend sitting next to me.
Comments
Post a Comment