Can you learn to paint like Rembrandt without experiencing how Rembrandt
did it? The same goes for learning marketing and sales techniques that
work.
I'm always amazed by the responses I get from many of my business coaching clients, and sales and marketing clients when I ask them to keep copies of the best and the worst ads and websites they've seen. I don't think I've ever found a client that had been doing it before. And when asked them to start keeping copies and learn from what they see they are afraid of "copying."
Let me take you back to my childhood. I can remember setting through art class year after year, and never getting any better. I never felt I had learned anything.
For the most part, I tried to learn from scratch, to do everything uniquely. That is what the art teacher kept telling me. However, one day I was watching TV and saw a program that was teaching how to copy some really good prints. They taught how to duplicate the strokes exactly as was on the print. We learned how to do a tree, a house, the grass, mountains, in "that style." The next week we started with another print and another style.
Before that I was taught to never copy. I had a total fear of having anyone think I might be doing something like someone else. Once I broke through that fear, I started using a light table, tracing over the original prints. Suddenly I was able to understand what kinds of strokes and colors worked. Only then was I able draw and paint, and not too bad at that. This progress happened in a matter of weeks. It had taken me years to get to this point, but weeks once I caught on.
The best way to learn to paint, or to write good ads and marketing material is to study the masters. And the best way to do that is to learn to copy them first. Once you understand what it takes to make something look somewhat similar to their style, and understand why they have done it that way, only then can you start to develop your own unique style.
Even the best marketing experts and copywriters keep a SWIPE file. They save copies of the best and the worst examples, sometimes with notes on them helping them understand why they filed it. Some are filed by the marketing style, some by an industry. When they get ready to write their own marketing copy they go back to the files to remind themselves what the best of the best looked like, and what they should avoid among the worst.
As you build your own SWIPE file you will discover that you will be finding better and better copy, and probably will start to throw poor copy out and keep only the best. That's how you'll learn to get better. As you get better and start learning the intricacies of what makes good copy you'll see that some of the copy you saved wasn't really that good, but now you'll be looking for copy that meets that new standard to replace the existing stuff
I'm always amazed by the responses I get from many of my business coaching clients, and sales and marketing clients when I ask them to keep copies of the best and the worst ads and websites they've seen. I don't think I've ever found a client that had been doing it before. And when asked them to start keeping copies and learn from what they see they are afraid of "copying."
Let me take you back to my childhood. I can remember setting through art class year after year, and never getting any better. I never felt I had learned anything.
For the most part, I tried to learn from scratch, to do everything uniquely. That is what the art teacher kept telling me. However, one day I was watching TV and saw a program that was teaching how to copy some really good prints. They taught how to duplicate the strokes exactly as was on the print. We learned how to do a tree, a house, the grass, mountains, in "that style." The next week we started with another print and another style.
Before that I was taught to never copy. I had a total fear of having anyone think I might be doing something like someone else. Once I broke through that fear, I started using a light table, tracing over the original prints. Suddenly I was able to understand what kinds of strokes and colors worked. Only then was I able draw and paint, and not too bad at that. This progress happened in a matter of weeks. It had taken me years to get to this point, but weeks once I caught on.
The best way to learn to paint, or to write good ads and marketing material is to study the masters. And the best way to do that is to learn to copy them first. Once you understand what it takes to make something look somewhat similar to their style, and understand why they have done it that way, only then can you start to develop your own unique style.
Even the best marketing experts and copywriters keep a SWIPE file. They save copies of the best and the worst examples, sometimes with notes on them helping them understand why they filed it. Some are filed by the marketing style, some by an industry. When they get ready to write their own marketing copy they go back to the files to remind themselves what the best of the best looked like, and what they should avoid among the worst.
As you build your own SWIPE file you will discover that you will be finding better and better copy, and probably will start to throw poor copy out and keep only the best. That's how you'll learn to get better. As you get better and start learning the intricacies of what makes good copy you'll see that some of the copy you saved wasn't really that good, but now you'll be looking for copy that meets that new standard to replace the existing stuff
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