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Copywriting How to Start – Best Guidelines to Start from Scratch

Alex Foxx-Lee 2 June, 2022

We often repeat that content is king because everything depends on it – from the popularity of a web resource to conversion rates and the number of sales. Any virtual interaction begins with an acquaintance with the filling of web pages or online applications, which determines the level of motivation and the value of data. We have talked yet about how to create, manage and edit media data, which make up 50% of success, but we have never considered the text component in more detail. Well, it’s time to fix that and talk about copywriting and how to start – the basic concepts, directions, and niches that you can take in this area.

What Is Copywriting & Why Is It Essential for Web Sphere?

The answer to the question of what copywriting means is simple and trivial. It is a specialization that involves writing texts for web resources and advertising. Its primary purpose is to create content that increases sales or promotes specific products, services, ideas, or personalities. In general, copywriting and marketing are very closely interconnected, forming a powerful professional symbiosis, but more on that later.

Сopywriting Ideas

It is much more difficult to explain what a copywriter does because it is not limited to writing the usual informational and promotional articles. These specialists create ALL text content that we encounter daily in everyday life:

  • filling websites, including not only general information but also technical details such as titles, buttons & menu labels, texts for cookie notifications, and privacy policies;
  • messages and posts in social networks;
  • information in advertisements and email newsletters;
  • blog articles and product manuals that you can study or download from any online store;
  • descriptions of goods and services that you see on websites, in catalogs, or online magazines.

Copywriting and Marketing – Most Powerful Union of Ages

Although content creation is a trendy profession in today’s world, it is sometimes difficult for us to understand what copywriting means for web technologies and online marketing. In short, marketing methods are a strategy that defines our goals, and “selling” content is a tactical and operational way to achieve them. In turn, the functionality of web technologies is a set of auxiliary tools that helps us to release copywriting ideas. All parts of this chain are tightly connected with each other and cannot exist separately.

What copywriter does

Plunging into the world of professional content creation, one way or another, you will have to learn the basics of marketing, web development, and online promotion methods. If you are ready for this, then welcome to the theory and practical advice on copywriting how to start!

Modern Copywriting Niches – Choose the Best One

The versatility and a fantastic selection of copywriting niches are one of the main advantages of this profession. You can effortlessly choose the most suitable option for you among the many available and focus on improving your skills in:

  • SEO copywriting is the most common specialization, involving the creation of texts with particular keywords to increase the position of sites in search results.
  • Copywriting for digital marketing – the ability to create ads, “selling” descriptions, content for newsletters and advertising campaigns, CTRs, and more.
  • Blog copywriting – creating narrow-profile articles containing expert opinions, valuable tips, recommendations, etc.
  • Technical copywritingcreating technical manuals and documentation, and reviews of IT products, services, and technologies. Such specialists also often act as a buffer between customers and software engineers, conveying information about projects in an accessible language to each participant.
  • SMM copywriting – creating content for social networks. You will be surprised, but writing an amateur text for high-quality account promotion is not enough. Social media optimization professionals are often well versed in online marketing. They know how to create strategies and work with media content.

How to choose the perfect content-making option for you? First, be guided by your feelings, constantly try new copywriting niches, and objectively evaluate your achievements and desires. Versatile specialists exist and are in demand in any business. However, the best solution is to focus on 1-2 directions and become an experienced expert in your field.

Copywriting Guidelines – How to Start to Do It Professionally

Copywriting How to Start

Actually, copywriting is one of the basic subjects of most modern philological specializations that you can get in college or university. Plus, many educators and coaches often list this as a separate course that anyone can take. However, I can assume that if you are interested in copywriting how to start, you, like me, have never heard of it before.

I have two degrees in software engineering, which has long ceased to be of interest to me, and I have never taken a copywriting course. I obtained all knowledge, skills, and recognitions due to many years of experience, trials, and mistakes. As I upgrade my skills and learn more about how to start a copywriting business, I understand how it works much better. Do not be like me; study the theory first. 🙂

Determine Your Goals

When reading advice from articles like copywriting for beginners, I’d like to add some advice about choosing your goal, like this:

  • the desire to learn how to create high-quality content for your own resources;
  • mastering professional features and requirements for an objective assessment of someone else’s work;
  • motivation to get a new qualification for a new job or starting a business.

Of course, you can set yourself all of these purposes, but individually these tasks have different restrictions and requirements for copywriting how to start.

Find a Mentor

It could be a person who will examine and supply you with copywriting ideas on an ongoing basis or a specialist whose work you can refer to. Try to rewrite someone else’s text in your own words or write a short note, imitating someone else’s style. I often had to finish other people’s work, which helped hone my skills and bring professional habits to automatism.

In any case, in the beginning, you will also need an editor who can correct your texts and help you bring them to perfection.

Practice and Learn

The immense pain for me as a leader is seeing the same mistakes my subordinates make after studying copywriting guidelines and professional Tutorials. Therefore, let’s agree in advance that you will always consider the opinion of your mentor and work on your mistakes. Everyone has failures, and that’s okay. Especially if you are just starting to understand copywriting how to start.  But you should be able to draw conclusions and correct your failures in new works and old texts, if possible.

Learning should never stop, even if you have already achieved your goals and are a famous author. Practicing to help automate your skills is also vital and should at least be there to implement the new theories.

Familiarize Yourself with Requirements

Work on most projects begins with studying requirements for content, structure, design, content, etc. So if you want to understand copywriting how to start, start with requirements and theory. For example, familiarize yourself with SEO сopywriting and how you should implement it in commercial texts – the choice of keywords, the frequency of their inclusion, the size of paragraphs and headings, and more. Next, proceed to the semantic requirements – WHAT you need to write, ABOUT WHAT, HOW.

Even the most remarkable text will lose value if it does not meet the tasks and requirements. It’s rare for an editor and employer to want to spend a lot of their time redoing your work.

Don’t Hesitate to Ask the Experts for Help

Specialists in a particular industry are not only people who can ask for good money for their work but those who have spent enormous resources on improving their skills and knowledge. The main difference between a professional and a beginner is not really about the work quality but about experience and practice, which play a decisive role.

Expert Knowledge in Copywriting

Experienced copywriters are great mentors and pioneers of innovative copywriting ideas. These people have dozens and hundreds of successful projects in their portfolio and taught them to achieve excellent results in the shortest possible time. They are guided by their skills and professionalism, not by inspiration and sudden desires. These are people for whom the content is a whole picture, consisting of small details, each of which they treat with fantastic carefulness and attention.

Professional copywriters are specialists who can create great content for you and help you with learning, acting as a mentor or role model.

Copywriting as an Integral Part of MotoCMS Web Development

MotoCMS has been specializing in developing and delivering top-of-line web solutions for business and private clients for more than ten years. Surely you know us as an independent creator of ready-made website templates and the most convenient content management system with an online builder. However, the support of our solutions is not limited to the functionality of the visual editor. We have also been cooperating with the best hosting providers for a long time and offer the broadest range of services to improve and promote web resources.

MotoCMS Web Design

At MotoCMS, you can find a massive collection of responsive website themes for every taste and top-notch web copywriting and content creation services. Offering affordable prices and excellent terms of cooperation, we maintain the premium quality of our offers with many amazing bonuses like:

  • Professional SEO optimization focused on bringing your web resources to the top of search results.
  • Creating content for narrow-profile niches with a detailed study of your professional field, its unique features, and requirements
  • The wide variety of copywriting niches that allow us to do a great job with both creating content for website filling, as well as blog articles, social media texts, and much more
  • Opportunities to work on existing projects because we respect your desire to improve your web resource, and MotoCMS experts will be happy to help you with this

Whatever you want from professional copywriting, the best MotoCMS experts can offer, effortlessly adapting their capabilities to your desires and needs.

In Conclusion

Copywriting is an indispensable specialty in modern technology, as it is responsible for creating content from which any online interaction begins. However, you have the right to decide whether to learn these skills on your own or delegate the text creation to specialists.

The desire to master this profession and understand copywriting and how to start is a good goal that will help you learn how to create high-quality content optimized for your resources and understand how it works in general. Even basic skills will help you objectively assess someone else’s work and develop technical specifications for future projects.

When delegating copywriting tasks to specialists, do not forget about the importance of observing the following rules:

  • The more complicated the task, the more professional the specialist, should be – you should not entrust complex SEO projects to beginners. Better take care of attracting experienced experts who can at least create a content plan and pick up metadata.
  • Take care of creating a clear and understandable task in advance. Of course, experienced copywriters will help state your wishes and requirements in more detail, but you must understand the goals of attracting them.
  • Remember that experts can always bring professional touches to your idea. “Selling” and well SEO-optimized texts may look different than what you intended – for example, sometimes we have to sacrifice “literary beauty” or some grammar rules to include perfect keywords.
  • Having found good specialists, do not let them go – the more time the copywriter has to study your business, the better the content will be created.

And, as a bonus, we would like to offer some helpful information if you want to learn about copywriting and how to start a career in this industry.

Bonus: If You Are Planning to Make It Your Full-Time Job

Working with commercial texts for seven years, I have repeatedly received questions regarding employment in copywriting niches. There are many reasons for this – from additional good earnings to the opportunity to broaden creative horizons. However, for some reason, many people thought that starting working as a professional copywriter was enough just to write texts or posts on social networks.

Someone destroyed this myth as they developed professionally and built a successful career. Others were disappointed after the first attempts and abandoned it. That’s why you always need to consider some points if you want to understand copywriting how to start doing it professionally:

  • You will have to deal with the technical nuances that limit your creativity. No matter how good and informative your posts are, there will always be requirements for sizing, formatting, layout, and more.
  • You will have to learn and develop constantly. And this applies not so much to obtaining new information and studying the topic of your articles but to technical issues like mastering the basics of SEO, HTML, working with CMS, online marketing tools, and e-commerce.
  • You will have to learn how to manage your time and get to the point quickly. Of course, in-depth knowledge will be helpful for all copywriting niches, but what if today you need to write an article for a well-known clothing brand, and tomorrow – for an IoT startup in which you understand nothing?
  • Knowledge of current trends and requirements will also be must-have for you. Each proofreading platform has its own characteristics, and each new employer has its own needs, which you should ALWAYS consider and implement.

Some Cons You Will Most Likely Face

Finally, don’t forget the prospect of work depression and the influence of inspiration. At first, it seems like magic with an unlimited supply of copywriting ideas. Over time, this turns into a work routine that you need to be able to cope with. Personally, I like to change activities at such moments – for example, I turn to a blog when I get tired of creating SEO content for clients’ websites.

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Tags: content sharing marketing SEO text content web content optimization
Author: Alex Foxx-Lee
Alex is an experienced content maker, online marketer, and longtime MotoCMS friend. Creating unique and engaging content is her main passion and the foundation of all creative pursuits. She enjoys exploring, learning, and working with details, which helps her with creative projects. At work, she improves business websites, filling them with high-quality & readable texts. In everyday life, she photographs, designs, and proceses images :)