Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood.

Audio Recording

In Episode #1, I answer the question, “How do I know if my copywriting is good?”

 

 

Transcript: How Do I Know If My Copywriting Is Good?

Welcome to Write Bites, an audio series where we discuss writing, marketing, and freelancing during one of my daily walks around the neighborhood. I want to thank Kevin Helmy for sending in the question that’ll be the catalyst for the discussion today. He asked, “How do you gauge the quality of your copywriting?”

And that’s obviously a super important question. Anyone who’s serious about improving as a copywriter and building a career around the skillset should be asking that. But the answer is a bit more complex than you might think initially, so I wanted to cover it today.

So when we ask the question, “How good is my copy?” the ultimate answer, the truest answer really just comes down to, “How does the audience respond to it?”

If I’m writing an email for an audience of software users—say we’re in the finance niche, and we have an audience built around people who are into FinTech and using software for their financial purposes—if I’m set to write an email to them, and I want to get them to click over to a page, the data for that is quite simple: Do they open the email? Do they click through the email to the landing page? For the email, that’s super straightforward. At the end of the day, the data on “How did this piece of copy perform?” is the only thing that matters.

I’ve been doing this for eight—nine years. I can look at a piece of copy that you write—say you were to write that email, were to send it to me and say, “Hey, can I get some feedback on this before sending it out?” I could look at it and evaluate it based on best practices, based on my experience—based on this, that and the other, and say, “Hey, I think you should do this,” or “I think you should change this,” or, “Hey, I think this is good to go,” but at the end of the day, that’s just the best guess. Until you actually put it in front of the end user and test it, there’s really no way to say how good it is.

And depending on the copywriting niche you’re in, whether or not that end user testing is taking place can vary wildly. So for example, if you’re focused on email copywriting, analytics for email copywriting are much more straightforward: open rates, click-through rates, maybe sales rates on the landing page behind that, but even that’s going to have more to do with the audience you’re sending it out to versus the email itself…all that to say straightforward stuff.

But what if you do a home page for a website?

How do you gauge that?

You’ll find that probably 90% of the clients that you work with don’t even track traffic info. They couldn’t even tell you how many people are visiting their home page or clicking through to what. Maybe with some digging, they might be able to find it, but they’re not actively evaluating that information. So with a lot of these projects, you don’t actually know.

Even when we talked about a landing page, unless someone is running thousands of visitors to that page and paying you for multiple versions to split test—and again, only a very small percentage of clients are engaging in that level of tracking and analytics—if you happen to have those clients come to you, or find those clients, or ideally you focus on pitching those types of clients where you can really evaluate the quality of your work, if you’re not doing that, you could be doing projects for hundreds of clients a year for years and years and never actually have a piece of copy tested with the end user.