The Copywriter's Handbook

Three of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of The Copywriter's Handbook pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first three.

1. Bly defines copywriting as salesmanship in print, not art. The test of an ad is never whether it wins awards or amuses people, it is whether it moves the reader to buy, call, or click.
2. The headline decides whether anything else gets read: about five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. A weak headline means the rest of your copy is never reached at all.
3. The 4 U's, a formula Bly credits to Michael Masterson, give you a scoring system: a headline should be Urgent, Unique, Ultra-specific, and Useful. Rate each on a 1–4 scale and rewrite until at least three score well.

The other 4 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 9 chapters

The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.

1. An Introduction to Copywriting
2. Headlines That Earn the Reader's Attention
3. The 4 U's and the Discipline of Specificity
4. Writing to Communicate
5. Features, Benefits, and What the Reader Actually Buys
6. The Motivating Sequence: Structuring the Sale
7. Long Copy, Short Copy, and the Myth of Attention Span
8. Format by Format: Ads, Mail, Brochures, and Digital
9. Working as a Copywriter