I have been working in operations for 14 years. Come and see how I write copy!

Are you still worried about not being able to write a hit copy? The author of this article has 14 years of operation experience. Here he shares his secrets of writing copy and quick tips for writing a hit copy. Come and have a look!

I have been in the industry for 14 years and have seen many operations managers of large companies, as well as many independent entrepreneurs who have made millions or tens of millions of dollars a year. If I have to say what these excellent operations have in common, I think it is the so-called "writing skills"! Yes, you read that right! Writing copy is really a very basic and core ability for an excellent operation.

But for many newcomers, most of them think that writing copy is a very difficult thing. Why? Because...

I couldn’t even learn Chinese in primary school, let alone writing!

I don’t even know what to write?! Not to mention writing copy!

I am not good at writing, so I definitely can’t write good copy!

There are many excuses like this. But Lao Xie wants to say: As human beings, why do we always set limits for ourselves? Therefore, in Lao Xie's eyes, writing copywriting has two benefits. One is to sort out and summarize your past knowledge . Writing down what you have learned and done in the form of words is a very practical way of personal growth. The second is that if you write more copywriting, you will form a set of thinking patterns , which can help everyone to better sort out the SOP of the project.

In short, here Lao Xie also wants to tell you that writing copy is not difficult! There are methods, it can be nested and replicated! Because writing copy is not writing composition, you don’t need to master the writing methods of narrative, prose, argumentative, etc., which are for exams, not writing copy! Therefore, Lao Xie has sorted out his years of experience in writing copy into a "five-step method" and shared it with everyone!

If we compare a "person" to "a piece of copywriting", it is obvious that the person's brain is the "topic", the person's skeleton is the "copywriting framework", the person's flesh and blood is the "copywriting content", and whether the person's figure is good-looking is the result after your "copywriting simplification". Based on this, is it really difficult to write copywriting?

01 Determine the topic

Recalling the composition topics of the Chinese language exams in junior high and high school, there would be a description of the composition topic first, and then everyone would complete the composition around the topic. In other words, as long as your composition is around the topic, no matter how poorly you write, you will always get points. However, if the content of your writing does not match the topic, which is what we call "off-topic", then no matter how good your writing is, you will not get any points.

Therefore, the title of the composition is the topic of our article. In simple terms, the so-called topic is what is the core idea you want to express in this article? Take Lao Xie's article as an example, the topic is "teaching everyone to write a copy quickly".

1. Criteria for topic selection

Whether you are writing promotional copywriting for self-media or writing marketing copywriting for products, the topic selection should follow three standards: user orientation, value output, and high relevance.

What is user orientation? It means starting from the user's perspective, focusing on the user's core needs, and selecting and creating topics based on user needs. For example, why is the topic "What not to eat during weight loss" not as good as "How to eat hot pot and barbecue without gaining weight during weight loss"?

In fact, the answer is very simple. As a fat person, if you want to lose weight but can't, is it because you care about what you can't eat? No, even an ordinary person who doesn't want to lose weight knows what you can't eat, that is, beer, fried chicken, happy water and high-calorie food. What do fat people care about when they want to lose weight? It's the pain of giving up delicious food. Therefore, a good topic must be user-oriented.

Of course, it is not enough to simply choose a topic based on users. Your topic also needs to have value output, that is, to truly help users solve their problems. What problem is that? It is the problem of how to eat delicious food without gaining weight during weight loss.

Furthermore, an excellent topic selection requires a major premise, that is, your topic selection must be relevant to your account positioning. You can't say that I, an account in the financial field, choose a topic in the field of weight loss. This is not a question of whether the topic selection is good or not, but a problem in the fundamental principle.

Therefore, a good topic must meet three conditions, namely, user orientation, value output, and high relevance.

2. How to verify the quality of the topic

After knowing the criteria for selecting topics, what we need to learn is to verify whether our topics are good or bad! For example, taking Douyin as an example, the quality of the topic determines the upper limit of your content playback volume! Lao Xie asks everyone a question here:

Topic 1: How I get along with my mother-in-law like sisters.

Topic 2: How I get along with my daughter-in-law like sisters.

May I ask: For these two topics, which one would have a higher upper limit of views on TikTok?

Have you noticed that both are topics about the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, but topic 1 is from the perspective of the daughter-in-law, and topic 2 is from the perspective of the mother-in-law. The upper limit of the number of views of topics from different perspectives is definitely very different! We only need to use tools to easily verify which topic is better!

The verification method is very simple. Since the content is posted on TikTok, we only need to use "Jiuliang Suanshu" to verify the quality of the topic through the feedback of relevant data. For example, we enter "mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship" in Jiliang Suanshu to search, and we will get the following data feedback:

By comparing the population proportion and TGI index, we can easily draw a conclusion:

Women aged 31-40 account for the largest proportion, but their concern about the "mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship" (TGI index) is not as high as that of women aged 41-50 or above 51 years old.

In other words, mothers-in-law are more concerned about the topic of "mother-in-law and daughter-in-law relationship" than young daughters-in-law on Douyin. Therefore, since Topic 2 is from the perspective of mothers-in-law, it may be more likely to attract the attention of people like mothers-in-law. Relatively speaking, the data of 5-second completion and overall completion of Topic 2 are likely to be better than Topic 1!

To sum up, depending on the platform your article is targeted at, you can use the official or third-party tools of that platform to verify the quality of your topic. This is a very practical method.

02 Make the skeleton

Students born in the 80s and 90s must remember this famous scene, which is "I will form the head." This line comes from the classic cartoon "Voltron."

This classic scene in the cartoon is actually similar to the way we write articles. You know, after we have a topic, the next problem to be solved is the "article structure", just like the beginning of this article, where an article is compared to a "person". If the brain is the "topic", then the skeleton that constitutes the human body is the "article structure"!

Therefore, I usually use mind mapping tools to sort out the structure of this article. In general, we can use the form of general-specific-general to sort out the structure of the article. The general structure framework is as follows:

Introduction: Introducing the topic.

Content part: value output.

Ending part: summarize or sublimate the theme.

For details, you can refer to the following mind map. This is an article I shared with you before about the Internet project operation methodology. Before writing this article, I used a mind map to organize the article framework:

The significance of sorting out the framework of the article is to figure out what parts of your article need to be composed together.

03 Filling with blood and flesh

As mentioned in the previous article, making the framework of an article is equivalent to making a skeleton structure for a "person". Next, after the skeleton structure is in place, we need to fill it with specific content, which is the so-called flesh and blood. A convenient way to fill it with flesh and blood is to "speak" first and then "write".

There are many speech-to-text tools on the Internet. We can use such tools to output the content to be filled in the form of "speaking". After the output is completed, the speech can be converted into text. It should be noted here that you should not be afraid of being verbose during the "speaking" process. Just say whatever comes to your mind and try to say the whole content first!

After converting speech to text, you need to do the following:

Correct typos after voice to text conversion.

Modify the incoherent parts of the sentence.

Adjust the order of sentences to make the logic smoother.

If you do these three things well, 70% of the work of an article is basically done. Of course, if you have a certain logical organization ability, you can fill in the content by writing directly, just like "speaking", just "write" whatever you think of, and after writing, organize it according to the above method.

04 Further Streamlining

The third step is to write a long and complicated copy. The next step is to simplify the copy. For example, if something can be explained in one sentence, don't use two sentences. Secondly, reduce the use of modifiers and adjectives. The biggest difference between writing a copy and writing an essay is that the core of the copy lies in the output of value. As long as the value is highlighted, it is a good copy.

For example: if the copy content is "There are many ways to determine the topic, the common methods of a good topic are XXX/XXXX/XXXX", it can be modified to "The methods for determining the topic are XXXXX/XXXX/XXX".

05 Summary

Generally speaking, at the end of a copy, you only need to summarize the core content of the article. The method of summarizing is very simple, which is to extract the key points of the content. Many people may think that this is redundant, but in fact, another purpose of summarizing is to review the article. Once you develop the habit of extracting key points, you will be able to get twice the result with half the effort when writing other copies in the future.

Of course, in addition to summarizing, the ending of the copy can also sublimate the theme. This method is generally suitable for traditional communication copywriting or long video copywriting with opinions. Of course, this will be more difficult for beginners. The key is to accumulate. The more you write, the more ideas you will have. It will be much easier to write content that sublimates the theme.

06 Quick Tips for Creating Popular Copywriting

Finally, let me share with you a quick trick that Lao Xie often uses to create popular copywriting. The core method can be summarized in one word: “copy”!

Although "there are a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand readers", when you really disassemble 1,000 popular articles or popular videos, you will find that all popular articles or videos have one thing in common, that is, the structure of their popular copywriting is "similar"! As shown below: This is the content of a VLOG video with over a million likes on Douyin. I dug out its copywriting.

How about it? If you just look at the content of the copy, you may not feel anything. Then, if we divide the copy into simple sections, let's take a look!

Does it feel different? In the beginning, the author first raises a question that the target audience is concerned about to attract readers to read, and then uses his salary as bait to make readers wonder “Why do you earn so much at such a young age?”, and then they will be interested in reading on.

The second paragraph begins with a quote from a famous Harvard University writer, with the purpose of endorsing his own point of view and making readers pay attention.

The third paragraph is the typical value output part, which explains how you get your high salary. It is well-reasoned and, most importantly, logical.

The content of the last paragraph is a simple summary, and it uses rhetorical questions to stimulate everyone's interaction.

These are the structure and specific content of this hit copy. For this purpose, I rewrote a copy, and the topic of this copy is "very different" from this copy, but it is also a copy with hit attributes. Without further ado, let's take a look at the copy:

Let's make a simple summary! The writing method of popular copywriting is like "Russian nesting dolls"! The core essence lies in "cross-domain" "plagiarism", and the core essence of "plagiarism" is not "copy and paste", but the copying of the content framework of the popular copywriting!

In other words, the more proficient you are in using the "five-step method" of writing copy that Lao Xie has compiled for everyone, the faster you will master the quick skills of writing popular copy!

Author: Xie Yuxuan

WeChat public account: Lao Xie Operation Notes (ID: iteamnet)