As terrible as you’ll ever be

“We don’t tell ourselves, “I’m never going to write my symphony.” Instead we say, “I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.”

• Steven Pressfield, The War of Art

No matter how well you write you’re going to cringe, think it’s crap, and hate what you’re putting out there.

The stark and cold reality is that it will be.

Your early words are going to feel painful.

I’m not sugarcoating it because I feel the same about my words.

I’ll probably look at this in a year’s time and think “I could have said this better and I can’t believe how clumsy that looks”.

This is part of the process.

Writing “good enough” in a way that talks to the customers you’re serving is all you need.

You’re not crafting world-class prose, you’re speaking in the same language as your audience does.

The way you get better at speaking like your audience is by continually hanging out with, engaging with, and serving them.

I’m a proficient marketer who has worked across a huge range of industries.

Yet I’m pretty sure I couldn’t parachute into the Summernats drag racing events team and start writing better promotional copy than they do.

That’s not just because I can’t relate to that world one iota it’s also because their team lives and breathes that world and understands how to talk to their fans.

You can figure this out.

You’ve got some formulas, concepts, and examples.

The rest is up to you.

Remember that your 10th time is going to look better than your 1st, and by the 100th time you commit to this, you’ll be the agent of action that punches out more effective copy.

I’ve seen this movie play out before and I’ll leave you with this.

Nathan was a student stuck inside his head. He had a physical product within a niche that is so effective it’s astounding. He’d spent nearly a decade fine-tuning this thing and had not launched yet.

In the morning of our workshop I asked him to put a post out on his social media that committed to launching.

There was all sorts of resistance. Patents, competition, I’m not ready, and blah, blah, blah with many more objections.

He did it, and the workshop continued.

Later in the day Nathan looked at me with a gleam in his eye:

“I can’t believe it - that post has blown up.”

We are our own worst critics keep putting words out there in the spirit of progress.

We’ve assembled the offer, and learned how to word the offer.

The next section is all about how it looks.

Much to the chagrin of my professional friends, I’m going to give you a crash course on designing offers.