How To Get Millions Of Dollars of Killer Copy for Free ( or – how to ethically steal stuff from dead people)
Aug 28, 2008 at 10:03 am in KARMA by ian
A couple days ago I started playing around with some old "classic" copywriting ads, inserts, letters, etc – not stuff that is mine, rather, just really masterful pieces I have collected over the years to study, survey and emulate.
I used to – years ago, when I first started doing offline direct response stuff, read all of the great ads in the supermarket shelves religiously, regularly coming home with piles of National Enquirers, income opp magazines, etc - ( which of course always led to some woman in line starting a conversation about the celeb gossip of the day – I realized early on that trying to explain you read these things for the ads is not so different than telling your girlfriend you’re reading penthouse for the social commentary)
Slowly but surely – as I’ve focused more and more of my own efforts on the strategies for more traffic, blogging, web 2.0, linking, etc…..you put the really great stuff aside and instead, focus on the tactic of the week/month/leap year/etc.
Anyway – just because, as my daily disaster of a life muddles on, the seemingly unending resevoir of my creative copywriting creativity has hit a solid stop. So I dug back in to the aforementioned bag of creative copy – pulling out buckets of old material just to sort of shock my brain back to life and get some fresh perspective and ideas.
I plugged in TWO separate headlines from the great (totally free) collection of great copy of years gone by here – (I just modified them to fit my content) and they are absolutely CRUSHING the stuff that I’m writing on my own. No other changes – same resource box, same everything else – doing 3X at least better than my own cognitively challenged brain is able to produce.
Two key takeaways? Great copy from 1950 – is great copy in 2008.
This is a people business - no matter HOW much we think it’s about software, or linking strategy, or voodo traffic strategy – it’s not – it’s about people - and thankfully – we haven’t changed so much over the past 50 years – ( although I’ve personally gained about 15 pounds in the last 2 weeks) what worked then, works now….and you don’t have to dream it up yourself to make it happen.
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