I was re-listening to a recording of a John Reese seminar (that he gave some time back) a few days ago where he shared that writing copy is the ONE thing he does NOT outsource. He gave a few obvious reasons as to why, such as tracking conversions on sales pages and email broadcast messages etc.

I’ve never sold my own products (until a couple of months ago) so I never really thought about copywriting since I associated it with selling a product online…

You see, until relatively recently I used to outsource nearly ALL of my writing because:

1. I only needed generic Niche Articles for my Adsense sites (10 - 20 page niche sites)
2. Articles for syndication, i.e. for submission to Article Directories, were search engine fodder and didn’t need to be terribly high quality
3. Article writing is a $10 an hour type of work and I could spend my time on more profitable things
4. I felt self-conscious about my writing skills because English not my first language (it’s actually my 3rd)

As I’ve shared in a previous post regarding a case study for one of my Authority Sites, I have been studying Web 2.0 and the "how-tos" of building Authority Sites for the last several months. And it was when I initally got started that I listened to John’s recording.

This is when I had an epiphany of sorts… nothing ground breaking, but a paradigm shift nontheless.

Up until then, I had been trying to outsource all the content to my Niche Authority Sites, either through the use of ghostwriters or edited PLR articles. I was still thinking from an Adsense publisher’s perspective, i.e. throw up keyword optimized content that the search engines could find with no regard to the visitor experience.

But after listening to John’s recording it hit me… even though I had no "product" to promote per se I realized my website IS the product. In other words, I needed to brand my site as the leader in content for that specific niche, which meant I had to write compelling copy… and the only way I could really control this was by writing it myself!

So I set out to learn more about writing, specifically the art of writing compelling copy.

In any event, I finally understood that one of the most important things one ought to study (to achieve success in internet marketing) is the art of copywriting.

Not only for sales letters (a very myopic view on my part), but as conetnt for your authority / money sites. Content that will have your visitors coming back time and time again (or keep buying from you again and again).

So, how the heck do you get started in this educational process?

Thankfully I had invested in a course on copy writing a couple of years back, so I’ve started to study this in-depth. But if I had not had the course in my hands where would I have started?

Well, here are a few of my favorite FREE resources:

1. Gary Bencivenga’s Bencivenga Bullets. Mr. Bencivenga is one of the most respected copywriters and this is one of the BEST resources online for copywriting (in my book it’s tied with the next resource)
2. The late Gary Halbert’s The Gary Halbert Letter. A wonderful collection of Gary’s thoughts and teachings. Gary has been widely known as the "best" copywriter ever. The "Boron Letters", a series of letters that Gary wrote to his son, come highly recommended by many top copywriters.
3. Michel Fortin’s interviews of Gary Halbert and John Carlton (one of the best copywriters around), which can be found at BoostMyResponse.com.
4. Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins - A copywriting classic!

Study each of these and you are well on your way.

TIP: I highly recommend that you practice writing by copying successful sales letters or writing by famous copywriters, e.g. I was told to sit down and copy each on of the Gary Halbert letters in long-hand (using pen and paper). I’ve copied about 20 of them by hand now and still have ways to go… Allot about 15 - 30 minutes or more EVERY SINGLE DAY to copy these letters (or sales copy) by hand. It is a sure fire way to get good writing hard wired into your brain.

P.S. As soon as I made the switch to writing my own content I started seeing immediate results. People started to bookmark my pages and referring others to them (which was apparent by the type in traffic that was showing up in my stats).

Tags: blog marketing, copywriting tips, website copywriting, authority site building, authority site, blogging, copywriting

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