Copywriting isn’t just about putting pen to paper or fingers to keys and writing. It involves far more skill than that – in fact you could call it an art. There may not be any paint involved but words are intricately woven together into something powerful and compelling.
But of course, before you can even begin to create your message, you have to have ideas. Whatever you write has to break through all the other sales messages out there, grab your reader’s attention and cling on to them until they have got out their credit card and bought your product.
Creativity can be illusive though. Everyone has their own way of dealing with finding that elusive word or phrase. Here are a few of my favourite ways of stimulating the creative flow:
- Walking the dog
- Going to the gym
- Read a book, magazine or newspaper
- Write down anything and everything that comes into your head
- Read some websites
- Imagine yourself as the buyer
- Work somewhere else other than your usual place
- Brainstorm keywords
I am sure you can probably think of many other things that you can do. If so, why not share them with us.
Sally Ormond
Sally Ormond is a professional website copywriter, SEO copywriter and advertising copywriter with extensive experience in B2B and B2C copywriting markets. She can be contacted at +44(0)1449 779605 or online at http://www.briarcopywriting.com for any copywriting project you may have or for a complimentary webcopy analysis.
Those are some great ideas, Sally. I especially like the one about trying to put yourself in the mind of the buyer.
Sometimes when I get stuck, I’ll pull out my Super Thesaurus and just start thumbing through the pages. Or I’ll just pick a word and see what I find.
This often triggers ideas and I may find myself digging through the thesausrus following a creative trail that leads to a dynamite opening line. And things can just flow from there.
One other idea I use is to come up with the “killer” headline first. I’ll just write something totally non-creative just to get the basics of “what this page is about” on the paper or screen. Then it’s time for “word-play” and I just start scribbling or typing variations as fast as I can.