Writing Sales Copy – The Curse Of The Copywriting Education

Dear Business Builder,
I’m up to my eyeballs in copy cubs, and I love ’em to death.
Every blessed one of them is a brilliant, gifted, fresh-faced kid with a big dream in his or her heart and an obsession for copywriting. And frankly, I’m convinced that each one of them will go farther and have far greater successes than I have.
For one thing, they’re smarter than me … better educated than I am … and they already know far more about copywriting than I ever will.
They’ve devoured every copywriting course, book, seminar and e-zine they’ve been able to lay their hands on.
They’ve gobbled up copywriting rules, maxims, proverbs, templates and formulas like an army of starving Sumo wrestlers chowing down at a free buffet.
They’ve perused every new swipe and every new insight as passionately as a furloughed sailor chases skirts.
They can quote Hopkins, Caples, Reeves, Ogilvy and Schwartz chapter and verse. They can recite everything Bencivenga, Halbert, Carlton, Masterson and Makepeace have ever written.
They remind me of race horses in the starting gate … champing at the bit … pawing the ground … every creative muscle in their bodies tensed, flexed and ready to explode into action at the slightest twitch of the starter’s trigger finger.
… And the same damned thing happens every time I give one of them his or her first assignment:
KABLOOEY! Their heads explode.
I can see the train wreck that’s sure to follow even as we discuss their first assignment:
The frenzied note-taking …
The tortured expressions on their young faces as they mentally juggle dozens of complex, seemingly contradictory rules they’ve learned by heart …
The numbness in their eyes as they consider the massive emotional and financial rewards they imagine will follow if they get this right – and the consequences (too horrific to contemplate) if they screw this up.
And I know what to expect: I can bet the farm the first draft will be …
Days late …
Four, five, even six times longer than it should be …
Crawling with recognizable formulas lifted from copywriting gurus and swipe files …
Replete with presumptuous lectures on how my prospect feels now – and how he should feel after enjoying the benefits the product provides …
Teeming with non sequiturs, mixed metaphors and tortured similes …
Packed with overused “power words” and over-the-top claims and of course, exclamation points …
Devoid of a compelling lead (since it has been neatly buried somewhere around page eight or nine) …
Flabby – prattling on for paragraphs on minor points when a single sentence or a string of fascinations would get the message across much more quickly and effectively …
Unfocused – the product will feel vague, ethereal, poorly defined … the offer copy will seem like little more than an afterthought … and the call to action will be virtually non-existent.
That’s OK, though – it’s not their fault: It’s just that …