My sister stayed with me last week to work on copywriting 1v1.
I watched her as she wrote copy and noticed that she was doing several things to make things harder for her. She was…
- using the backspace key WAY too much, constantly deleting her progress because in her words, “It wasn’t good.”
- staring at the screen wondering to herself if she was good enough to write what she was writing.
- writing aimlessly without a Template.
Just those three bad habits were enough to understand why she had to put in dozens of hours to complete a project that would take me just a handful.
So I gave her a challenge. I wanted her to write a sales letter in ONE day. From start to finish. Here’s how I told her to go about it…
1. Outline the major sections, making a Template for yourself. Headline here, opening here, bullets here, guarantee here and so forth.
2. Write the letter from top to bottom without stopping, and NO deleting. If you don’t like a paragraph, write an “improved” paragraph below it, but don’t delete the previous one.
3. Take a break.
4. Go back and fix the sections that truly don’t work.
5. Tweak the sections that almost work.
6. Take a break.
7. Polish.
Guess what, she finished that letter in 6 and a half hours. A record for her and dang good in anyone’s book. Plus, it was a pretty good letter. I don’t think it would have been any better if she had taken twice as long. And I won’t have to tweak it much before it goes into Muvar.
That’s the power of setting deadlines and breaking a big task into smaller tasks.