To be an effective internet marketer you have to be an effective copywriter or you have to have the money to be able to outsource your copywriting. And outsourcing your copywriting ain’t cheap let me tell ya…
There’s just no way around it… to be able to sell anything online you have to be able to convince people to buy and the only way to do that is through your sales copy.
One of the simplest strategies I employ to become a more effective copywriter is the use of swipe files.
Now by definition a swipe file is:
“A swipe file is a collection of tested and proven ads and sales letters. Keeping a swipe file (templates) is a common practice used by advertising copywriters and creative directors as a ready reference of ideas for project”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swipe_file
Every single time I see compelling copy on the web I bookmark it.
If I see an interesting PPC ad I usually cut and paste it into a file I keep in a word doc.
Point is I have a ton of these swipe files saved and bookmarked and whenever I hit a stumbling block while writing sales copy, I just start going through my swipe files…
I like to take the “genre” of a sales letter or maybe a particular headline or one liner and basically use it in a different niche.
That’s the beauty of these things… on the days when you’re just not feeling “creative” you can still come up with some pretty compelling copy because of the large amount of reference files you can look to for inspiration.
This is also works for landing pages, email headlines and hell sometimes you can”swipe” entire websites and unleash them in different niches!
One other area where swipe files have really benefited me is with my split testing.
When you’re split testing, it can become difficult to continually come up with different variations of your headline and your sales page and you guessed it… that’s where I use swipe files to get me over the hump.
