Raph is considered one of the “Founding Fathers” of MMORPG design, having helped create some of the most open virtual worlds ever built (including Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, to name but two), and wrote a book that should be required reading for game designers in my opinion, A Theory of Fun for Game Design. In addition to being a whiz-bang designer, he’s a very creative person.

This is evident if you’ve ever visited his blog, where he talks everything from poetry to music (both of them his) as well as game design. In December of 2011, he posted a nice free-verse poem on game design, and as soon as I saw it, I realized that most of the same rules apply to copywriting.

I emailed Raph and asked if he would mind if I posted a modified version of his piece, dealing with copywriting, and he replied “Go for it”.

Therefore, if you find this inspiring, it’s all a credit to Raph; if you don’t, it’s my fault. (I feel safe in assuming that, since “It’s your fault!” has been my wife’s mantra for 16 years and counting; say it out loud and you can have the incredible joy of role-playing my wife, and let me tell you, that’s a hot ticket.)

Don’t just read this…process it, thinking about every comparison it makes between good, bad and great copywriting, and ask yourself…which kind of copywriting are you doing?

(Next week, I’m going to break some of these individual stanzas down and examine them, so join me then…or, even better, subscribe!)

Good Copywriting, Bad Copywriting, Great Copywriting

Good copywriting is familiar.
Bad copywriting is boring.
Great copywriting is exciting.

Good copywriting embraces human nature.
Bad copywriting exploits human nature.
Great copywriting is humane and humanistic.

Good copywriting guides.
Bad copywriting controls.
Great copywriting invites.

Good copywriting drives habit.
Bad copywriting drives frustration.
Great copywriting drives passion.

Good copywriting teaches.
Bad copywriting lectures.
Great copywriting has you teach yourself.

Good copywriting is invisible.
Bad copywriting calls attention to itself.
Great copywriting calls attention to what you can do.

Good copywriting celebrates accomplishments.
Bad copywriting loudly celebrates minor accomplishments.
Great copywriting enables accomplishments.

Good copywriting does what the user wanted.
Bad copywriting does what the copywriter wanted.
Great copywriting does what the user didn’t know they needed.

Good copywriting is at the user’s skill level.
Bad copywriting never asked the user.
Great copywriting makes everyone think they can use it.

Good copywriting is intentional.
Bad copywriting is planned (exhaustively, on paper).
Great copywriting reveals itself while working in the materials.

Good copywriting gets people to pay for utility.
Bad copywriting gets people to pay as quickly as possible.
Great copywriting makes money as an incidental consequence.

Good copywriting makes companies.
Bad copywriting can make plenty of money.
Great copywriting builds legacies, cultures, and communities.

Good copywriting converses.
Bad copywriting tells.
Great copywriting connects people.

Good copywriting executes on the possible.
Bad copywriting ships on time.
Great copywriting reaches for the implausible.

Good copywriting has only the parts it needs.
Bad copywriting is cluttered.
Great copywriting has fewer parts than seem possible.

Good copywriting doesn’t fail.
Bad copywriting fails a lot.
Great copywriting fails even more.

I have done good copywriting.
I have done plenty of bad copywriting.
I always want to do great copywriting.

(Thanks Raph!)

While there are lots of things you can do to improve how your target market responds to your message, there is one that is (to me, at least) head and shoulders above the rest as far as getting more people to respond.

Know your target market.

Notice the period at the end of that sentence…do just this one thing, and your response rate will improve.

This isn’t new information; take any copywriting course worth a nickel and you’ll be told that this is a very important part of your copywriting process; however, I don’t think everyone understands what is meant by “know your target market”. Let’s look at a couple of examples.

“Internet marketers” is a broad niche…if that’s who you’re targeting, you’re firing too broadly. Don’t picture a “market”…picture your “target customer avatar” (i.e., your ideal customer). What do they want? What are their goals, their motivations and their desires as internet marketers?

The phrase “get inside your market’s head” is thrown around quite a bit, and it’s good advice. However, I think the tendency is to do it in a general way, and not try to get inside your customers’ heads.

Here’s an example:

A funeral home owner wanted to get people in to sign up for their pre-burial policies. Almost everyone that buys advertising for this type of thing takes a “caring but informational” approach…a general “If you care for your family, you’ll take care of this so they don’t have to” style of ad.

I drilled down through the actual target market (people that are going to die eventually) and found this:

• As a general rule, women are more concerned about this kind of purchase than men
• Also, women control the buying decisions on this type of purchase (again, as a generalization)

Just by figuring these two things out, I wrote the following copy for a radio ad:

His chair still smells like his aftershave. Sometimes, when you’re sitting in the room with that chair, you can almost hear the squeak of that spring he kept saying he was going to fix one day…but one day never came, and now it never will. He loved that chair, squeak and all…you kept trying to convince him to get a new one, but he said his old chair was just fine. You always wanted the best for him, because he spent his life giving the best to you and the kids. You sigh and touch the armrest where his hand usually rested while he watched TV…and wish you had the chance to give him the best one…more…time.

XXX Funeral Home…pre-burial policies available.

This was recorded with an emotional delivery, but not “over the top”, and ran for a month…until the funeral home canceled their advertising.

Seriously.

Knowing the man that owns the funeral home, I stopped by for a visit and asked him why he had canceled. The response?

“I’ll be honest, Dave…I’ve had a ton of response from that ad, and the signups for the policies have gone through the roof, but I’m just not sure this is the kind of ad that’ll work for us long-term. I’m going to finish up with the ones that have signed up from this run and then think about it.”

Sigh.

Figure out what your target customer avatar is, determine what their emotional triggers are, and then smack’em!

The golden rule is “test, test, test”…the trick is to actually believe the results of your test and then act on them accordingly.

To listen to the show and see a JV partnership form between two people that had absolutely NO idea they had a project waiting to be born, look below.

That changed for me when I made a few friends in the online marketing world and started talking with them on Skype. I had an idea for a product (based on my real-life work experience), but wasn’t really convinced it would be good enough to actually try to sell.

One of those friends said, and I quote, “Dave…you’re an idiot. Finish the thing and launch it! What do you have to lose?”

I’m a 25 year radio vet, and the product is called “Voice For Marketing”, where I show how to do a better job presenting in webinars, sales videos, etc…I finished it (22 pages, counting the cover and disclaimer page, along with a 45 minute mp3), set a launch date…

…and then had to be talked into actually sticking with the launch date by that same friend.

Mind, it didn’t make “WSO of the Day”, and wasn’t such a success that it changed my life forever…

…except it did.

To date, it (along with the upsell) has generated around $2,000 in revenue, with my take (after affiliate commissions, etc) around $700, building a list of just under 200 people that bought my product. Since the launch on October 4, my list has generated another $300 or so….admittedly, I’ve spent more time building the relationship than actually promoting offers to them so far.

This one product accomplished several things for me:

• Made some money
• Made some new contacts
• Made some new friends
• Learned a TON about this “internet marketing” thing
• Went from “I’m not sure” to “NEXT!”

The “NEXT!” led to just that…another product, still playing off my real-life experience. It’s only generated around $600 so far, but the amazing thing is that I’ve gone from “needing to know more before I do this” to “I know what’s wrong with this one!”…all from just jumping into the deep end.

One other thing…notice something about my first product…it’s not what you would call a “typical” “make money online” product. There are no promises of income, no “fast action, push-button automatic money-making tools”…in fact, one of the reasons I didn’t want to launch it in the first place is that it violated (I thought) one of the golden rules of marketing…

“Find a hungry market and give them what they’re asking for.”

No one…and I mean no one…was asking for this product. There was no outcry for help in this area, no questions on the IM forums, no pleas for a way to improve this area of their business…and yet…

…it sold, to glowing reviews.

Did I become a millionaire from it? No.
Did I quit my job because of its success? Nope.
Was it a “home run”? No way.

But…there are a lot of professional baseball players that make a very comfortable living off their ability to hit singles.

Don’t try to hit it out of the park…the first step is to get on base…and you’ll never do that if you don’t take a swing.

Your takeaways from this (hopefully)?

• Who says your idea isn’t good enough? Test it and see, then figure out what went wrong (and right).
• Who says you don’t know enough to make money online? Not your customers…they have their PayPal address in hand, waiting for something worth using it on.
• Who says you can’t do this? You…and that’s about it.

Subscribe, and we’ll hunt success down in its cave…and skin it.

Together.