3 Copywriting Exercises to Improve Your Skills [FAST]

Want to learn some copywriting exercises that can help to improve your skills right away?

Today I am going to share three copywriting exercises you can do every single day.

These are just little things that you can implement and start working on right now.

And most importantly, these tips are proven to improve your copywriting and help you get the results that you want.

I personally practice these exercises and they have helped me become better at copywriting…

And they are part of the reason why I was able gross over $7.1 million in sales in a single year as a professional copywriter.

These three exercises were born from advice from the publisher (and fellow copywriter) at Agora Financial, Joe Schriefer.

Joe is not only a great guy, but one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.

The three copywriting exercises are:

1. Read a piece of copy a day
2. Write a page of copy a day
3. Come up with an idea a day

Practicing these three exercises have helped many people, including me, to build upon their copywriting skillset.

And if you want to dive deeper into this topic and improve your copywriting skills you should check out my book, Take Their Money.

This sales guide is the first of its kind specifically designed to immerse you in the secret language of copywriting.

Now, let’s go over these tips and connect all three of these copywriting exercises together.

But first…

Before we dive in, I want to touch on the subject of Deep Work.

I believe with two hours of Deep Work per day you can achieve pretty incredible success.

You can read more about Deep Work and time management for copywriters here.

But, essentially, Deep Work are the type of core activities related to your work that are going to progress your career.

During my Deep Work time I shut everything else out and focus on these core tasks.

I mean my cellphone is in airplane mode, I am not talking to anyone, my headphones are on and I am laser-focused.

My daily Deep Work time is spent researching for copywriting and writing copy.

But you may want to spend an hour doing these 3 daily copywriting exercises.

If you want to learn more about this topic, check out Cal Newport’s book on time management, called Deep Work.

Likewise, you can also find more time management tips and tricks for copywriters here.

I believe that if you do the big things, the little things will take care of themselves.

But… I think this goes both ways.

I also believe that if you do the little things consistently, the big things start to take care of themselves as well.

Copywriting Exercise #1: Read A Piece of Copy A Day

But don’t just “read” copy…

I want you to practice the art of active reading.

What I mean is I want you to use this time to dissect and analyze the copy…

Determining what makes it successful and how to apply the principles to your work.

I can spend around 30 minutes or more going through the first two pages of a lead.

And I can spend more than two hours going through a promo.

So you do not have to go through an entire sales letter.

Simply select a piece of copy…

And actively read through it for however long it takes, or whatever time you’ve allotted for that.

Then you are going to mark notes in the margins and highlight important sections…

Whatever it takes to get you immersed in the language and really thinking about what goes into creating successful copy.

When actively reading copy, you want to be able to answer certain questions:

• “What claim is the writer trying to prove?”
• “What objections are they trying to overcome?”
• “What emotion are they trying to evoke?”

As a result, you are going to improve your copywriting skills.

Understanding how to analyze a piece of copy comes down to understanding how copywriters use the Big 4 Emotions.

These four emotions are: New, Easy, Safe, and Big.

Understand that the very best copy succeeds not because it creates new desires…

But because it plays off of the emotions that are already present and focuses them on to the product.

Anyone who hopes to achieve any level of success in copywriting must understand how to use the Big 4 Emotions.

So, the first daily exercise is to actively read a piece of copy a day.

As you actively engage with successful copy you will immerse yourself in the language and become better at copywriting every day.

I explain how to perform active reading just like professional copywriters from Agora Financial…

And I explain the Big 4 emotions in monster detail…

Inside my copywriting book, Take Their Money.

Next, is Daily Exercise #2…

Copywriting Exercise #2: Write a page of copy a day.

Let’s say we want to write just a page of copy a day.

You don’t have to produce groundbreaking work…

It doesn’t have to be a page for a sales letter or your next project, either…

This can just be sort of doodling around, just getting your hands dirty.

Our goal with our page of copy a day is not so much to collect a million sales…

It is much more important that you are practicing the skill of copywriting with this exercise.

Copywriting is a professional language, after all…

And as I have said before…

You have to immerse yourself in the language of copywriting to be successful.

While reading copy is a great way to accomplish this, you will not become a better copywriter until you write.

It sounds simple but you just need to sit down and write.

You need to focus on trying to evoke the Big 4 Emotions with your copywriting.

To help you accomplish this exercise, I have a copywriting hack that I use for this exercise…

Simply write out an entire page of copy by hand with a pen.

Then go back and mark up the margins of the hand-written work you wrote.

In addition to writing, you are will also use this time to practice active reading, like I touched on before.

As a result of analyzing great copy, you will inherently start to notice patterns more clearly.

You will become familiar with how the writer speaks and how they structure sentences…

This exercise can really help you to get a feel for how things should look.

By getting intimate with the copy in this manner you will start to notice little things that you never did before.

So now we are combining the first two daily exercises.

When you sit down and hand-write a piece of copy you are practicing actively reading, as well as writing a page of copy.

It is vital that you are not just sitting and copying the text.

I want you actively read, write in the margins, show where the writer is trying to prove their claims and show where the writer is trying to handle a specific objection.

Copywriting Exercise #3: Come up with an idea a day

This does not have to be a big idea or something that is meant to change the world.

In fact, most ideas are not big ideas!

And that’s okay.

Your new idea could be something as simple as a cool subject line that you came up with while writing copy…

Or applying something new you learned during your active reading.

Small ideas tend to beget more ideas which tend to lead to bigger ideas.

In fact, my buddy, James, says that you should come up with ten ideas per day to take the pressure off of yourself to make that “one” idea great.

Even small ideas can make a bunch of money.

And I will share a hack for the third exercise as well…

And that is to combine Daily Copywriting Exercise #3 with the first two.

You can develop your daily idea while you are handwriting and actively reading a page of copy.

And you may even find that this sparks even more ideas.

All of your daily exercises can be done on a single piece of paper in a legal pad.

At the end of your session, your page is full of some really successful copy and you have done something to improve your skills.

To help you get off the ground, I have made my swipe file available to you that contains only high-performing copy.

You can go there right now, check out one of those pieces, and start filling up your legal pad!

Start with completing a single page and then go back and actively read what you have copied.

Mark it up. Dissect it. And immerse yourself in the language.

Pick out how the copy evokes the Big 4 Emotions and figure out what claims and objections are being handled.

Then, try to come up with just one idea from the page you copied.

Maybe you noticed the writer did not mention something that you thought of while actively reading the sales letter.

Or maybe you come up with an idea on how to put an emphasis on one of the Big 4 Emotions that was not utilized.

That’s it, that’s an idea, it’s that simple.

There you have it…

Three daily copywriting exercises…

And I even showed you how you can even group them all together.

And you can accomplish all of this on a single page of a legal pad.

I really hope you will start implementing this and you can see how it will improve your copywriting skills.

I preach these exercises and I practice them.

If you are interested in learning more proven strategies that make you rich, check out my book, Take Their Money.

In my book I talk about the strategies that helped me gross over $8 million in my first year as a copywriter.

And don’t forget that I also offer you my super helpful YouTube swipe files so you can start doing these exercises every day.

Give these three daily exercises a try, and come back and let me know what you think.