Page 166 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

Copywriting Handbook by Joseph Sugarman, The Copywriter’s
Handbook by Robert Bly, and Drayton Bird’s two books: the one
above plus Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing.
Stuck for headline ideas? Caples gives you dozens of formulae.
Schwab has 100 headlines with a pithy explanation of their appeal.
Need ideas for building a sales pitch for a web page or email? Take
Bird’s books and replace “sales letter” with “landing page.”
Nowadays the fledgling magpie doesn’t just have the local library
or bookstore to raid. There are innumerable blogs, e-zines, Squidoo
articles, and websites to filch ideas from. If you’ve got deep pockets
and you spend enough time on eBay or Amazon you might even
unearth a copy of legendary hardback Reality in Advertising by Rosser
Reeves (that bloke wot invented the Unique Selling Proposition).

In practice

• Before you start chipping that lumpy square of rock into a circle

with a hole through the middle, why not check to see what other
copywriters have done?

• Copying another writer’s words exactly rarely works. You need to

steal the idea not the execution.

100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS • 157