Going from good to great as a copywriter (lessons from last 2 years)
From 2022 to 2023, I made it my mission to evolve as a copywriter.
I started out at Oxford Club in January 2022 and created my first front end product. It’s made close to $1 million in sales to our back end products after nearly 2 years of consistent publication.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned when it comes to creating a front end product.
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You really never know if it’s going to work out
I’ve tried creating content products before only to see them turn out to be complete duds. This product was no different. You can have a good idea, good execution, but you really don’t know if it’s going to work out until you put it out to the world. In this case, I’m happy Oxford’s existing audience responded well to it and bought our other products through my mentions in the copy.
2. Be comfortable not knowing if it’s going to work out
This is probably the most important and hardest lesson I learned when it came to creating a product. I had to create it all with the idea that my hard work wouldn’t pay off. It was a major ego killer because I didn’t want the product to suck, so I just listened to everybody’s feedback and made sure I gave it the best shot possible.
3. Strategy and thought process mean a lot more than copywriting
Before 2022, I considered myself just a copywriter, and I still do. But the creation process of the newsletter I created for Oxford in 2022 involved a lot of collaborating with managers and designers and a lot of rough drafts. It also involved planning how we were going to send this out to our list of subscribers, which ended up being very important since we didn’t want to spam them with something new without their consent. So there’s a lot of little details that I wasn’t aware of as a copywriter that ended up being important.
4. Products evolve over time
Since 2022, my newsletter has undergone several iterations. In 2022, I added cross promotion. In 2023, I started adding videos to improve click rates. As of 2024, we’re looking to take the template I’ve used for almost 2 years and create an AI version of it.
Right now the main challenge we keep encountering is the AI keeps lying to us. We keep trying to put in new prompts for it to take information that’s relevant to today’s financial news, but it keeps taking news stories. I’ll have a more detailed post about this once we finally solve this problem.