Stay sane in three easy steps

# advice# copywriter# getahead

It’s not easy to survive as a copywriter these days. Here are some tips to create your best copies day by day.

Quick association = easy win

The most common task in your daily routine is trying to establish a connection betwen two, otherwise completely unrelated things. A classic example: there’s an illustration you can’t change and now you have to apply this totally unrelated campaign message to it. So you’re stuck having to put these two together.

It’s part of your job to create a context in which they can work together nicely. Sometimes it’s not a walk in the park and you have to be a truly twisted, conspiracy theory junkie to find the best idea.

What if the equation looks like this: a picture of an amoebae + a chocolate sweepstakes = X? What copy would you write to that? Challenge your brain every day!

Just focus on a single topic a day and keep an eye out for inspiration as you go about your day. Try to create a catchy copy to the most odd and unlikely things and always stay focused on your chosen topic. It can be a cute dog or even a garbage truck.

What doesn’t kill you helps you enhance your workflow!

Tight text > tight bottom

You are in the mood to re-write War and Peace even longer beacuse you are able to paraphrase almost anything with artistic sentences.

As a copywriter you have to constantly fight with quantitative restrictions. In the brief you get the key informations from the client and it’s your turn to make them as compact as possible.

The key element here is to create the most compact copy possible – depending on the client’s wishes of course.Here begins the math. You have the obvious restrictions of the SM channels. For example Facebook canvas limit is clear: you have only 45 characters for the headline and 90 characters for the description. Sure, you can write on the image as well, but text elements can’t exceed 20% of the image.

You should strive to keep it simple and compact even without a strict character limit. People only read the tl;dr anyways. Be smooth and short!

It’s a pretty hard game to make a text shorter and shorter without losing key information. Fortunately you can train your brain easily. Write down all the most important tidbits and use them as puzzle pieces. The process might take a couple of tries to get down to pat, but it’s not a sin as long as you

Never give up, never surrender!

„Omg, the first version of my copy was fully approved!” – that’s the sentence that you will hear four times. Per year. So prepare for a series of amendments and don’t lose your sh*t. In 99% of the cases you have to re-write your copy at least once. Or more times. Or more than a couple of times.

It’s part of the process: the parameters can change and the expectations of the client will change. That’s just fine.

Take a short break before every modification and do something else so your brain can reboot.

Save a file for every version – pro tip: use a version manager for that - and hope for the best!

Author: Etelka Fejer