Whether you are a born or a made writer, you should consider copywriting. Copywriting is a field that involves marketing. It requires an understanding of consumer sentiments and adhering to what your clients want. It requires getting out of your comfort zone and selling through your written words. Copywriting doesn’t make room for a writer’s ego. Understand that you are not writing for yourself alone. There are a handful of books on copywriting that can help you get started.  

Let us say that you are more conditioned to writing fiction, but you want to get into copywriting. In copywriting, you need to reach out to your audience and persuade them to buy the product or service you are writing about. In writing fiction, you ask yourself: How do I reach out to my audience? How do I persuade them that my plot is a reflection of reality and that it can happen in real life?

In a way, that degree of persuasion you do in fiction to convince your readers to identify with your plot and characters is the same with copywriting, except that you are selling a product or service. You need to have the empathy to connect with consumers. So many advertisements are floating and popping online, and this is annoying. Many people discard adverts, so you must realize that you have to grab their attention.

So how do you catch people’s attention? Begin with your headline. Studies show that people online only read headlines and if it doesn’t interest them, they move on. Those few seconds that they read your headline are crucial to hook them into your sales pitch. If your headline doesn’t win their attention, chances are, the body of your copy has been written in vain because your target audience didn’t read it. If you spent hours writing a good sales copy, you can afford to spend time coming up with a catchy headline.

In learning the basics, you can always learn from the classics. David Ogilvy, an esteemed advertising executive, has written a number of books on the subject of advertising and copywriting. Robert Bly’s “Copywriter’s Handbook” can help you with dozens of copywriting techniques. These are my personal recommendations. You can search for other great books on copywriting. Read and study the books of your choice by heart.

Copywriting is challenging but lucrative and rewarding. If you want to know how lucrative, simply search for copywriting pay scale surveys and see how much copywriters make on average per year. Of course, you should not get into copywriting for the money alone. Assess your purpose for wanting to get into this field. The confidence of knowing that you can do it is encouraging, but be sure that the theory and practice of copywriting go hand in hand. If you want to test your copywriting mettle first, you can offer your copywriting services for free to people you know who manage their own sites. Your goal is to educate and inform. Begin with a catchy headline, and see how well you can drive the audience to your client’s site.