Advertising copy, marketing text is built in the edit, not in the first draft. Now, obviously, there’s kind of a sliding scale between the value of a particular marketing asset and how much time you spend on editing and refining it.

So, for example, a daily piece of social media content, you might do a very quick pass, a proofread for style and sense, and hit publish. Whereas something like an evergreen, high-converting, high-ticket group program, or anything that you’re sending cold traffic to, or something that’s going to last in perpetuity, like a book, for example, you would spend a great deal more time editing and refining, and making sure that the word choices and the grammar and the rhythm, so the whole tone of the piece is an accurate reflection of your desires for it.

Okay? Editing for mistakes, proofreading, in other words, is one thing entirely, and I highly recommend you get an external pair of eyes to proofread any kind of meaningful piece of copy. Check that you’ve chosen the correct form of your or there, that your full stops and commas are in place, that there’s speech marks around quoted speech.

But before that happens, before you send it out to be proofread, editing is a different beast, right? When we’re editing, I edit a lot of copy, right? I edit copy for my clients, I edit my own copy, I edit a lot of AI copy that’s sent my way. I spend much more time editing than I spend writing, and I want to give you kind of a checklist of what I’m doing, what I’m looking for when I am editing copy so that you can do the same.

If you are one of my private clients, I’m already editing your copy, so you don’t need to worry about this. But if not, this checklist is going to get you somewhere. Now, like, there’s a caveat here. I’ve been editing copy for 20 years, it comes naturally to me. I was super good in English at school, much more terrible at maths and science and PE and everything like that. But English, I was ace at. So this comes like really naturally to me. It may not come as naturally to you, but it will help you get there.

And if you find it difficult, if it’s a barrier for you, if you feel like no matter how hard I try, my words just aren’t landing, then your job as a business owner is to dissolve that bottleneck by outsourcing it, by finding creative uses of AI. Your job is to problem solve that rather than let it take up a whole lot of time and energy.

Okay. The number one thing that I am doing when I’m editing copy is reducing the length, cutting the repetition. Cutting the repetition where the same idea is rehashed in multiple ways over multiple paragraphs. AI in particular is absolutely terrible for this, for just including absolutely loads of waffle. So I will be choosing the strongest way of expressing that idea and making it happen once.

That often involves making a kind of composite out of two or three different ways of expressing the thought, just so that we can say it once as clearly as possible. Cutting repetition also means cutting out repeated uses of the same idiosyncratic, less frequently used words. For example, I have a client who is a career transition coach, and she talks a lot about people preparing for a promotion. And as a result, her copy is full of uses of the word promotion, promote.

Now, because human beings are pattern-seeking creatures, we very quickly notice the repetition of that word because it’s an unusual word, it doesn’t crop up every day. So when all of a sudden we hear it or read it eight times in close proximity, our brain unconsciously is going ding ding ding ding. That’s an unusual occurrence of that word. So we’re paying attention to the pattern rather than paying attention to the meaning that we’re trying to express.

Okay? So cutting repetition of ideas, cutting repetition of words. The easiest way I have found to identify repetitious words is to have somebody read my copy aloud to me, to listen to somebody else saying it. It’s very difficult to hear it clearly in your head from reading it, but if I listen to somebody else reading it, I will notice where they stumble. I will notice where they naturally hesitate before repeating this word again.

So we’re looking for the repeated ideas, ideas being the same thought appearing more than once. We’re looking for repeated words. Brevity. Okay, most of the art of editing is removing superfluous words. The reader’s attention is very finite, and if I look at each individual sentence and consider how I can express that thought in the fewest possible words, the easier in general it will be to comprehend.

Now, obviously, there’s a point at which this breaks down. There’s a minimum number of words in which you can express what you need to express. It means that the reader is reaching the meaning, which, after all, is what you want them to take from reading your copy. They reach the meaning more easily and more quickly because they’re having to do less work to get it, right? You think of it as data processing. They’re having to process fewer words, they’re having to work less hard to understand what you’ve written.

Okay? We know all about hooks, and very often I just want to cut a hole. So by a hook, I mean grabbing somebody’s attention in the first three seconds or fractions of seconds when they see your copy. Usually I end up deleting at least the first one and a half sentences, if not more, so that we get straight to the point at the very opening of the text.

Um, in journalism we would call this burying the lead, which means we’re making people have to work in order to understand what they’re reading, in order to understand what the point is. In order to understand why this is interesting and why they should keep reading, that needs to be plain from the very, very beginning.

So, for example, the famous example would be if you start a video saying, “Hi, my name is…” By the time you have finished your name, you’ve already lost your audience, rather than just jumping in right with what’s interesting and unique and unusual. And we can have a whole discussion about what makes a hook. It boils down to surprise, and I think I’m going to talk more about it later in this class.

Okay, so cutting the opening. The art of reducing and simplifying and streamlining each individual sentence is very often a case of choosing your grammar quite carefully. So making your sentences active rather than heavy and indirect.

Let me see if I can give you, like, okay, the classic example of the passive versus the active tense is the phrase, “Shots were fired.” It doesn’t tell us anything about who did the shooting or the context in which this occurred. So, some other examples which might be a little bit more relevant to the type of copy that we’re writing: instead of inviting people to make a decision, we can invite them to decide. Instead of inviting people to give some thought to, we can just tell them to consider or think about. Right? So the same meaning, but reducing the number of words that I’m using to deliver it.

You may come to the realization that we can say, “you will realize.” Human beings are wonderfully and poignantly suggestible creatures. So if we have anything in our brand’s tone of voice, our brand language, that is the kind of emotions that we want people to experience when they are thinking about working with us, when they come across our brand, are really like embarrassingly simple and sneaky way to achieve that, this is simply to name the emotions in your copy.

“You will be excited to learn that my clients are reassured to understand…” Dot dot dot. Simply by naming the emotions that we want people to experience, we can encourage them to experience it. That’s how mirror neurons work.

Some more ways to reduce the copy and a thing that’s kind of throat cleansing, throat clearing. So we often use these little phrases that say absolutely nothing before we then say something. So it’s worth noting that. The fact of the matter is, needless to say, I just wanted to… If we can trim those out. That was not to say I never break my own rules. Of course, I do. And of course, a well-deployed throat-clearing phrase used strategically to allow a pause in the copy, allow the reader to digest some truth bomb that has just been dropped, is perfectly acceptable, but we want to use these devices intentionally.

Long sentences, AI tends to go too far the other way. Personally, I can’t bear AI-generated copy that is just line after line after line of three to five word sentences. I like to credit my readers with a little intelligence that they can read grammar. But any sentence, a paragraph over about three sentences, I would definitely want to cut.

Having more like empty space on the page, as it were, the screen, having space between sentences, between thoughts, is really useful just for allowing people to understand information. All of these rules can of course be broken, but I want you to understand about marketing is that we have the benefit of testing, right? Marketers with enormous budgets and access to huge audiences can test things easily, like whether more people respond to a charity fundraising campaign if they are presented with a block of text versus if they are presented with text evenly spaced.

And they can look at the results and give us, hand down, hand into marketing law, what is best practice, what people in general prefer, even if it’s unconsciously, but are more effectively able to use. So long sentences is one of them. By all means, you know, they can be run on, but if they’re getting too long, divide it into sentences.

And I like to, when I’m editing copy, I’m also thinking about the rhythm of the sentences. So I don’t want everything to be a very long sentence with multiple ellipses, and I don’t want everything to be like a three-word declaration. I want there to be a bit of a dance, a bit of a rhythm, a bit of a swish and swoo and change between the two.

Okay, yes, we’re getting into nuance, but this is the purpose of editing. And very often, if it’s an important piece of copy like your book, for example, or like your main sales page, for example, it is not something that you will write once, edit once, and that will be it, done forever. It will be an asset that you will revisit and maybe have more than one person edit it and make suggestions for it.

So rhythm and sentence length I have spoken about a little bit and white space on the page. And then we talked about repetition of specific idiosyncratic, less commonly used words, which will be probably unique to your business and your methodology and the kind of people that you work with. But you can use that to your advantage, right? Get a bit of a word nerd persona going, log into a thesaurus, brainstorm with AI, and just ask for some alternative choices, okay?

By choosing less obvious, generic verbs we can evoke more interest, engagement. When people are interested in what they’re reading and they’re being kind of carried along for the ride, it becomes more memorable. They remember the experience of having read it and it evokes emotion in them, right? Whether it’s surprise at the word choice, entertainment and laughter at the word choice, anything that we can do to slightly change our readers’ state of mind, even if that’s just by piquing their interest, like that, “Oh, that’s an interesting word,” we are building neural pathways around our brand in their mind.

That’s what it’s all about. We’re influencing people’s behavior and choices through the words that we use. That’s what marketing copywriting is all about. So replacing… It’s not even about replacing generic verbs, but just finding alternative, more whimsical, more interesting, more evocative words to replace the phrases that come up all the time in your messaging. Cliches, check for cliches, game changing, moving the needle.

I won’t move the needle in a piece of my own copy today. Hands up, I did it. I wrote about moving the needle. At the end of the day, level up. We can find other more interesting and fun and engaging phrases. That will express more about who you are. And when you’re looking at your thesaurus and you’re looking at synonyms, you’ll be surprised at what you find.

Speaking of surprise, it’s worth reminding you that before embarking on a creative endeavor which kind of relies on imagination and flow and confidence with how we wield words, it’s useful to connect with whatever spiritual practice helps you to access that state. As you know, for me, it is Mercury magic. We have a whole class up in the membership about connecting with Mercury as a planetary spirit and using that energy to help you with these tasks of communication, of trade and commerce, of the digital age, of anything to do with money, anything to do with healing and, of course, anything to do with passing ideas between the realms.

I’ve talked about the importance of naming the emotions, even something as simple as this is going to really help you. We prime people for what to expect. It’s reassuring to know. “My clients are excited to see…” It works because of mirror neurons. We’ve all heard about the phenomenon that when we see somebody else expressing an emotion, we’re able to access that emotion within ourselves.

Due to the behavior of mirror neurons, and this works even on the level of suggestion. On a micro level, we’re activating the circuitry associated with that emotion. So read “excited,” and there’s a tiny flicker of that emotion. You can remember what it feels like. It doesn’t need to be argued for. You don’t need to try to stimulate it any more than that, like simply by naming it accurately, that will get you most of the way there.

Okay, the key word is accurately. Let’s talk about hooks and like the most effective hooks. Somebody asked this in the free, quick and dirty marketing group today. What is an effective hook? And for me, the biggest one, the best one, well, there’s two, and they’re kind of interlocked, are surprise and intrigue, right?

Surprise is a great one because you’re grabbing people’s attention. So that could be a contradiction, a specifically odd detail, something that is disarmingly funny, you know, humour in a place where you wouldn’t expect to find humor. It could be a counterintuitive claim. It could be, yes, a humour that deflates a kind of pompous or self-serious concept. A confession would be a surprise. A direct address would be a surprise.

And the other thing that works really well is intrigue. And the main thing that does that is thinking about open loops. So half of a sentence, half of a thought. “These are the five things I noticed about topic.” You want to read what the five things are to close the loop. “Have you ever considered that XYZ may not be the answer to…” And then you want to read on to find out what it’s not the answer to.

Human beings have a dislike of open cognitive loops like that, so surprise and intrigue. Humour is one of my favorite types of surprise, especially if it is apparently incongruous with the area that you work in, like with marketing, for example.

We just spoke a little bit about proofreading at the top of the call. Like grammar and punctuation. I hate to sound like your headmistress, but I am your headmistress, and grammar and punctuation are there to make reading easier. Readers don’t consciously note grammar errors and unless they’re complete assholes. Even if they do, they won’t judge you for it. But those micro little frictions in reading and understanding the copy, they add up. The meaning of a sentence becomes harder to parse, which means at the end of every chunk of copy, you will lose readers sooner than if it is smooth and flowing and easy to read and easy to comprehend because the grammar and punctuation are doing what they are supposed to do.

Okay, the read-aloud test. We talked about the read-aloud test. Listen to yourself reading it aloud, listen to somebody else read it aloud. If you don’t have somebody else to read it aloud, record yourself and listen to it back. You get a different perspective on hearing it aloud versus reading it infinite numbers of times.

You will catch those sentences that don’t finish properly, the missing words, the rhythm problems, the repetitious words, or like the awkward sentence constructions. You’ll notice them in a different way when you listen to it being read out loud. So I’m going to give you posted in the membership a checklist of everything I’ve covered, and the goal, remember, isn’t perfection for its own sake. The goal is that the reader arrives at the meaning of your text with as little friction as possible, that we’re removing as many obstacles to their understanding as we can.

Okay? Style is the last thing that you add. Now it’s important that I mention this, and I probably should have opened with it, that this work is important refinement. But if you are not incredibly clear on your brand positioning, on your offer messaging, on your promise of your work, the promise of your offer, who gets the best results of working with you, what your methodology is, if you don’t have that solid foundation, editing in this way will only get you so far.

Excuse my language, but the metaphor is polishing a turd. You need to be completely clear on what the offer is, why it’s so good, why it’s differentiated, why it’s better than all the other solutions. You need to be able to express that before you can effectively do this refining and editing work.

When you have that, this is the layer that elevates it. This is the layer that we are doing before we start running ads to a landing page, for example. Or, yes, before we switch on any kind of evergreen marketing and start seriously driving traffic rather than soft launching.