Essential marketing books summed up in 404 words, or less.

In this post, we look at The Art of the Click by Glenn Fisher. Copywriting expert Glenn Fisher boils down over a decade of experience to give you a toolkit of techniques, tactics and industry secrets to improve your copywriting. The aim is to get more clicks, and ultimately, get more sales.

‘The Art of the Click ‘ isn’t like most copywriting book on the market. Glenn Fisher offers actionable takeaways from the very beginning and helps you to think about what really matters in your copywriting, before you’ve even put pen to paper.

Summary

Direct-response copywriting is designed to lead the reader to a buying decision there and then, in that very moment.

You need to unlearn your fancy words and start writing how you speak. Do not follow the misapprehension that only difficult writing is good writing.

Content marketing isn’t a thing. All marketing involves content.

The key to truly improving your skills as a copywriter is practice.

Write out good copy by hand. By writing out a piece of copy over and over you’ll start to pick up on the style, grammar, sentence structure and pacing. Search for other peoples copy that is working and write that out by hand as well.

To find successful copy sales letters: a great resource is affiliate networks like Clickbank and JVZoo. They act as a marketplace for people to sell their products and services. Look at the sales figures to see which are working, and copy those out too.

Speak to a single person and communicate one idea above all else. Focus your studies on the reader, not the format.

Write with a specific reader in mind. The more detail you can build up around the reader, the better. Possibly choose a family member.

Read Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. You’ll learn far more from this than most copywriting books.

Without doubt, the easiest route to successful copy is to dig deep within the product or service itself.

Watch people and see how they act when faced with a choice.

Don’t try to be too clever. You can try to be original, but you’ll make less money.

Good ideas don’t need to be big ideas. And don’t try to change people’s minds.

Whether it’s a 50-page direct-response sales letter or a three-line PPC advert, it needs an idea behind it, or it’s going to suck.

If you want something new to come out of your brain, put something new in it. The only problem is, ideas are built in the subconscious. Therefore you need as many different raw materials as you can. Consume equal amounts of content related to copywriting and content that is unrelated to copywriting.

Focus on benefits of features, as in all selling.

People rarely buy features. But neither do they always buy benefits. What people really want to buy are narratives. Narratives support the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves.

People don’t read testimonials but are interested in the presence of them.

We recommend you read The Art of the Click in its entirety. Follow the link here to grab yourself a copy.