How I Found My Copywriting Voice

When I started learning copywriting, my goal wasn’t to become a copywriter, it was to make money. One of the best pieces of advice I came across was to rewrite famous sales letters by hand. I did just that, copying letters late at night, not realizing how this practice would shape my future success in email marketing. Hear how this approach helped me develop my own style and how you can use similar strategies to accelerate your own marketing journey.

00:31

I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The ListBuilding Lifestyle. The podcast is for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best selling book, the list building lifestyle Confessions of an email millionaire at www.igorsbook.com
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01:18

I was learning how to write copy, when I was learning how to become a copywriter, even though I didn’t have a goal of becoming a copywriter. I had a goal of making money, but I just realized that writing copy was like a skill I really needed it.
So one of the most common pieces of advice that you would find reading any copywriting book or listening to any copywriting guru, would be: Rewrite famous sales letters, or successful sales letters that you can find, rewrite them by hand.
And I’ve literally, like, Dan Kennedy said you should do it. John Carlton said you should do it. Gary Helbert said you should do it. Pretty much everybody said you should do it. So follow these legends, and they say you should do something. You should just drop everything. You go do it!

02:07

So I remember actually sitting down late at night, after work, sometimes before work, early in the morning, but usually I would do it after work when my mind was like, not capable of making decisions, and I could just do mechanical stuff. And I really wanted to use the time that I had with some purpose.

I would grab a notebook or any piece of paper lying around, I would google and find images of newspaper ads, of physical sales letters, I would go to garyhalbertletter.com, I would find Dan Kennedy’s old stuff, I would basically open up copywriting books with, you know, like, images of different successful sales letters, and I would just write them by hand. I would literally just look at them and I would just rewrite them. I wouldn’t even think, I wouldn’t even read, I would just repeat everything that I was seeing there.

And I don’t know if that helped or not, and if I would become successful in my field without it, but I can assume that it did! I don’t have empirical evidence, okay? But I assume that it helped me internalize lots of the stuff that I say and I put on paper today! And it was just pure copy, copy, like, just copycat stuff!

03:38

Now, unsurprisingly, when I started doing email marketing, when I started sending out emails with offers. My first experience was to use a swipe file.
So I had several swipe files that I purchased, they were completely different styles, they were very different from each other, and I just copy and paste it!
Again! That’s the reason why you’re getting your swipe files from me, because that’s how you learn, before you know how to develop your own style, before you can even comprehend developing your own style, you learn by imitation.

04:21

So same as children, by the way, if you’ve got kids, you can, you know, you probably notice they imitate you very quickly, as well as anyone they like, like my son, I wasn’t careful with him, and yeah, I was watching a man united play and lose, as they usually these days

And the next day, when I was picking him up from school -he was only five and a half at the time- the teacher walked up to me and said, Mr. Kheifets, just wanted to let you know that your son uses, you know, he cusses! I was like, « what? » Yeah, I played it like, « No way. Not my, other kids, yeah, but not my son! ». No! I was like, « Really, wow, what did he say? » And then she repeated word for word what he said, and that was word for word what I said the day before, when I was watching the game, because man united were playing like crap.  So imitation is how we learn. It’s in the DNA. It’s in the way we operate, in the first step in the process.

05:30

So at first, please don’t be afraid to imitate! Please don’t be afraid to copy word for word, because you’re just not big enough. Okay, to worry about that. No one’s going to sue you. No one’s going to chase after you, and you’re not like being immoral or unethical, whatever. You’re just not big enough at that point. You’re not profiting from it to the extent of making the other person angry with you or the company angry with you.
So don’t worry about that at all. You can pretty much just copy and imitate as much as you want! until you’re making, you know, a decent amount of money.
Now, when that’s true and you’ve broken through that barrier, then you start developing your own style. Now, the way you develop your own style in anything, whether creating products, writing copy, creating images, kind of coming up with names for things, writing emails, building out your landing pages, anything at all! Even the general strategy for the campaigns using, remember!

I’m giving you the campaign structure, right now, it’s my campaign structure, In fact, like, my coaching program, So when I gave you campaign structure, technically, it’s like my structure, but, guess what? It was initially based on someone else’s campaign structure that I learned! nothing that I know, nothing that anyone knows I think at this point, we just, you know, we’ve existed for too long. So nothing that we have, is just a unique creation of any one person! We always stand on the shoulders of giants, as they say! We always learn things from other people.

07:09

So usually, whatever gets sold to you as this new thing is probably an old thing, upgraded or adjusted and developed, okay?
The only thing that’s going to make it new and it’s going to make it stand out, is, once you’ve made that slight change and added your own flavor to it, you can call it a different name! But fundamentally, Nothing is new! just so very clear, right?

So, once you’ve made some money and you’ve got good at imitating, and you’ve practiced that enough times, that’s when you start adding your own flavor to things, and it’ll come naturally to you.

You’ll feel when it’s the right time, and you’ll know that, okay, you know what? Up until now, I’ve been writing emails with a beginning and a middle and an end, so now I’m going to be getting a PS. Or now my middle part will contain a story instead of a fact! right?  So you’ll start experimenting like that, just because you’ll want to experiment, or at least that’s how it unfolded for me.

08:22

Like as soon as I started making money with templates. I, for some reason felt that it was time for me to experiment with my own style, and I started doing that. I can’t say that I was too brave about it! It took me some time to really get comfortable with that, but slowly but surely, I would change an element here, another element there, until eventually I developed my own thing!

But make no mistake, a lot of what I’ve done in the first, even the first five years, was based on all the people that I was studying. You know, primarily Dan Kennedy, primarily Frank Kern. I mean, I stole Frank Kern stuff pretty much word for word. And I’m pretty sure most people who started out around the same time I did, did the same thing!

But the interesting thing is that Frank Kern also based, and I say this term, loosely, based his stuff on what he learned from Jeff Walker, John Reese and then Kennedy and Gary Halbert and whatnot, right?

So, you can even say that the entire marketing industry, and under this term « Industry », I really, I think we should include every possible niche market! And both Internet and non-internet.

09:47

It’s very incestuous! So you see a lot of copying going on, and that’s okay! I think that’s one of the primary things that really drives innovation in marketing. Because I don’t know if you ever heard the term « Marketers ruin everything ».

I was just discussing this term with a good friend of mine yesterday, because as soon as something starts working for a marketer, a bunch of other marketers find out, and they start copying that thing, right? And once enough people have copied it, it is usually going to stop working, or at least not going to be as effective.

10:34

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle, get access to the previous episodes, transcript of today’s show, as well as other exclusive content at www.listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list buildings starting from scratch, plus I’ll give you 3,000$ worth of free bonuses, including my best landing page templates, email swipe files and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com, now to claim your free package!