80% of copywriters fail at the bottleneck period. What should we do?

Being confused about the bottleneck of copywriting is a worry for most copywriters. Rather than being a hurdle for novices, it is an obstacle that is difficult for everyone to overcome and an inevitable experience.

During these years of work experience, I have seen many people change careers, give up, and finally persist in being copywriters (I mean those who make a living purely by writing). Except for places like newspapers and magazine publishing houses, there are very few others.

I remember hiring a chubby girl a few years ago who was determined to be a copywriter. She did work hard for a while in the early days, but gradually she lost interest and soon asked for a job transfer. On the one hand, it was because "the imagined copy was too beautiful", and on the other hand, the bottleneck was very serious. She felt too tired, and "what I wrote almost every day was similar," was her lament.

"Persistence is not easy. Not only do you need to persist, but you also need to think more and summarize more." This is the sincere feeling of many people who have experienced it. However, having said that, it is not easy to apply it in practice. A good article does not necessarily become a hit. A hit article may even seem “simple” sometimes. In addition to the quality of the article itself, there are many other external factors.

Apart from "number of reads", "forwards" and "collections", most of the criteria for judging copywriting are emotional. This article briefly analyzes the key points that are usually not paid much attention to in copywriting training from four aspects. I hope everyone can find a method that suits them to break through the current bottleneck period.

• The “factions” of copywriting
• Copywriting and "writing style"
• Analyze your own work from a data perspective
• Eating carpet, rolling around, laughing strangely, these are some of the things you have to experience

1. Factions of copywriters

As a copywriter who changed career paths, online writing was once an unfamiliar field for me. I thought that since I could write detailed research reports and various high-end official documents, other types of copywriting would be a piece of cake. Facts have proved that I was wrong.

In our actual work, there are many kinds of writing work, such as writing work reports. The manuscripts that we often see leaders and government officials holding on the stage are written by special people. This type of copywriter has rigorous wording and requires a deep understanding of policies, work, and company conditions, so this type of copywriter is generally over 35 years old and can make good use of their experience. Their job titles are not called "copywriter" but rather "propaganda minister", "planning manager", etc.

There is also a type of writing that specializes in "XX industry research" and the like. It is common for the word count to be around 100,000 words. It requires tight logic and solid reasoning. The source of the quoted parts must be marked. The main writers of this type of copy are usually consultants in certain industries, and their income is also very high.

Of course, there are many types of copywriters, such as newspaper news editors, magazine planners, in-house reporters, and so on. The copywriting that everyone is paying attention to now mostly refers to "commercial online articles". For example, readers of "Everyone is a Product Manager " focus on "how to write articles that become popular on the Internet". This type of copywriting belongs to the category of "commercial online articles".

It takes a lot of time to learn cross-field. Although it is still copywriting, the fields are different, and the competition landscape and experience requirements are completely different. Why do so many people like to write about spiritual things? Because the domain characteristics of this category are not strong, and everyone has their own insights after living for decades, so everyone can write about it.

Although understanding the "factions" and "categories" of copywriting may not be of much help to your current work content, it can help you clearly know your future direction. Some young copywriters only know that they want to "do copywriting", but they do not have a clear future plan.

From the most realistic point of view, the income in each of the copywriting fields mentioned above is not low. As a person who is determined to engage in copywriting work for a long time, you need to choose your own direction and field, whether it is advertising copywriting, health and wellness, or being a professional article writer in a certain industry. You need to explore it yourself for some time.

2. Copywriting and “writing style”

For a long time, I believed that "writing style" was the key to the success or failure of copywriting. I would like to use a metaphor to describe the relationship between copywriting and writing style.

For example, when learning a musical instrument, one always maintains great enthusiasm at the beginning, but over time one will begin to doubt: "Why should one repeatedly practice a meaningless movement?" As a result, practitioners may give up practicing these "boring movements". The end result is a huge gap in level between you and the masters, and every master is honed in this way.

Many copywriters write day and night, and run several self-media at the same time when they go home. They have many years of writing experience, but they are unable to break through the "last mile". This may be due to the lack of certain basic skills. For example, in writing exercises, a scene and some keywords are often given, and writers are asked to associate and write based on these elements. This seems to be a long-term, boring and tedious task, and most copywriters have never done similar exercises (except geniuses).

"Writing style" refers to a kind of "intuition" that comes from the accumulation of experience and is not a synonym for gorgeousness or emptiness.

In real life, when people praise you for your good writing skills, most of the time it may be because of your good choice of words and sentence structure, rather than the quality of the article. Copywriting is like the metaphor above, it is a musical instrument, a "thing" that we can eventually control, and writing style is composed of various boring techniques and actions, which can only be truly mastered through repeated practice.

For a period of time, I once doubted that copywriting does not require literary skills at all. Most of the current self-media are patchwork and fabricated, and there are very few people who write on their own. Later I found out that I was wrong. When my writing skills were not good enough, I could not use them at all. So I kept fighting against myself over and over again. Practicing while competing means I haven't fallen behind.

If you feel that your writing style is similar to someone else's, but there are gaps in some aspects (or reading rate, etc.), it is probably due to the lack of basic practice. How can you make a breakthrough in just one or two years when others have decades of writing career? In this regard, you need to put yourself in the right position and practice hard. How to practice? Practice paragraph by paragraph. A few hundred words are enough. Write until you are satisfied.

3. Analyze your own work from a data perspective

If a piece of copy is a distillation of your own thoughts, then you should let this article be "tested" by data.

Although copywriting is a quiet job, it cannot be done behind closed doors. Copywriting should be work that can stand the test of time. Whether it is a report, a work manual, an online article, or a commercial copy, you can find the corresponding method to test it to see how the audience reacts to the content of the copy. The feedback is extremely valuable.

Taking everyone’s favorite self-media platforms as an example, the easiest way is to submit articles to the corresponding platforms according to your own style, such as Toutiao , Dayu , Baijiahao , NetEase, Jianshu , etc. After your article is completed, in order to test its actual effect, it is necessary to let netizens judge it.

The article has a high reading rate but a low collection rate, which proves that the title may be good, but the content cannot resonate with people. If the collection rate is high but the forwarding rate is low, it may be that the stance created in the article is misaligned with that of the reader and cannot represent his "identity recognition." Below I have listed some reference forms for hitting the target, you can check them out, there are more combinations, you can try to figure it out.

• High reading rate, low collection rate
• High collection rate, low forwarding rate
• High reading rate, low comment rate
• High open rate, low completion rate

4. Eating carpet, rolling around, laughing strangely, these are some things you have to experience

It is said that the great writer Tolstoy once ate carpets when his writing inspiration was slow, and Hemingway would roll on the ground. Most famous authors have had "weird" behaviors. In the movie "The Catcher in the Rye", Thomas Wolfe's various weird movements when writing are exactly in line with the real state of copywriters. Especially when a person is writing, he always feels like going crazy when he encounters "obstacles".

Everyone has the skill of copywriting, but not everyone can write well. There is a direct gap in the time and experience invested. More importantly, the various mental states and bottlenecks encountered in the writing process are all necessary steps. If you can persist through this painful period, your writing ability will be significantly improved .

For example, many people feel overwhelmed when they think about writing several thousand words, and they are afraid of the fact that they can write several thousand words. However, no matter what you write, it will be effective if you keep writing it for a long time. Suddenly one day you may find that you can write anything with ease and your thoughts will flow like a spring. Although the quality is still not good enough, it has logic and structure, not to mention the number of words. In the past, you may have thought that long articles written by others were only written by "professionals", but now you can write them down in full yourself. This kind of progress is imperceptible but real. It’s like a person who practices weightlifting every day and has no idea that he has become stronger.

If you encounter a big bottleneck, try to take a few days off, completely forget about writing, and then start writing again, and inspiration will come again. Another method is to read cross-disciplinary articles. If you write in the humanities, you can read articles on physiology and medicine. These readings have a rigorous style, clear logic, and are well-founded. They can help you increase your grasp of the structure and logic of the text, etc.

Quantitative change to qualitative change is more effective in the early stages. If you are in the early stages, you must practice a lot, no matter what you write. Once you've gotten through the early stages, you need to broaden your horizons and cover a wider range of topics. The more you know, the shorter your bottleneck period will become.

If you have some strange movements and habits when you reach a bottleneck, don't panic, there are many people like you, maybe he is eating the table.