Fun and Funny
Unless you’re a comedian, your product is not a joke. But
that doesn’t mean you can’t use humor to sell a refrigerator. Fridges are
funny. They’re built like football players and keep things cold. Things like
beer. Beer is funny. This paragraph isn’t. Maybe I’ll rewrite it later.
If you spend all of your time going for the laugh, you might
have a hard time communicating anything serious. But if you get people to smile
at just the right time, they’ll like you, trust you, and buy from you. I do my
best to work just the right amount of humor into everything I write.
Punch Them in the Face
One way to get someone's attention is to punch them in the
face. A more polite way is to write a catchy headline or slogan. Faced with a barrage of stimuli,
people’s attention spans have become hilariously short. If you can’t engage
someone’s imagination with your first ten words, there’s a good chance they’ll
never read your next thousand.
Your headlines and slogans are your most important copy. A crafty opening line can provoke an emotional response, get people to read your content and make them more likely to like what you have to say. I research which words draw eyes and get clicks, and I specialize in saying a lot with a few words. If that fails, I’m also a pretty good puncher.
Passion, Ping Pong, and the Poker Viking
In 2012, I went on an international poker sojourn. I lived
in Germany, Costa Rica, Canada, the UK, and Sweden for weeks or months at a
time. My last stop was a small town in central Sweden, known for its table
tennis team. I stayed with my friend. Let’s call him the Poker Viking, since
he’s Swedish and an absolute master at my favorite form of poker.
While the Poker Viking brought a great amount of passion to
the poker table, that’s not what I want to tell you about. One day, we went to
the local ping pong hall. It was an enormous warehouse with about 40 table
tennis tables. He spoke of his days as a semi-pro ping pong player, and showed
me how to serve, slice, and spin the ball. I love all sorts of games, but table
tennis was never my favorite. But listening to the Poker Viking passionately
explain the intricacies of the game, I developed a new respect for the sport.
It doesn’t matter what you do or what you’re trying to sell.
Someone somewhere is passionate about it. When I write about any topic, I do my
best to excavate this passion from the subject. If I’m here to write about your
videos of paint drying, I’m going to pick your brain to find out why on earth
you found it interesting enough to pursue. The passion is in there somewhere.
The key is finding it.
Make your copy search friendly
Make your copy search friendly
