Content Copywriting, is it Hobby or Duty??

Content Copywriting, why do you guys do it? Is it your Hobby or Duty?

 

What is your definition of Content Copywriting?

Copywriting to me is advertising on paper - which is a holdover from my pre-digital days. A more fitting definition for me now is writing words that sell.

Is that what you're asking about?

 

It is not a hobby nor a duty. It is one person's skills and ability to create a content which only few people are capable of. A more fitting description for Content writing is utilizing your skills and putting in in good use.

 

In my mind content overall is any collection of information.

Examples of what I mean are books, reports, articles, white papers, etc. They all consist of content.

I believe anyone is capable of creating content, although not everyone can excel at it.

"Content copywriting," I think, is a sub-niche (so to speak) of the niche of creating content. The copywriting area is a specialized activity. Copywriting in itself is the creation of a sales message. That can be a sales letter, an email message, a classified ad, etc. The information inside that message is created to sell something and that information is the "content" of the copywritten piece.

I believe that anyone is capable of learning how to write sales messages. There are plenty of courses online to help one do that.

 

So, basically you are telling us that anybody passionate or not if have the ability to create any type of information into a sales page or a content that can benefit the host is a content copywriter.

 

What I'm saying is that anybody can learn the skills of copywriting. That does not mean that any specific person will do so. Certainly, if the passion isn't there it likely won't happen. If someone does learn those skills and does not have the passion for putting those skills to work she/he most likely will not become a competent copywriter.

I still would like to know what your definition of "content copywriter" is.

 

It is my hobby.

 

IMHO @JoeSpirit nailed it on the 1st pass;

@mrb1129 - whether "passionate" or not, copywriting is one of the most deceptively simple disciplines that simultaneously few truly understand anything about and almost anyone who's not qualified to give advice on the subject has a so-called tutorial in. Your level of passion isn't going to make the difference between you and your competition; it's your technical mastery of the fundamental theoretical underpinnings of copywriting combined with blatant, florid language designed to tweak the maximum EMOTIONAL responses needed to be able to push the sales prospect into the conversion zone.

The passion that you have for the written word is what you need to inject into the copy in order to sell the product-at-hand. @mrb1129, I knew at the age of THREE that the craft of writing was going to be the only thing I was ever going to want to have to do as a job (yeh, even THAT age, I knew #WORK sucked, lol!) as it involved a very specific skill-set. Easy-to-learn, codified into a portable format (like Strunk & Whites' formidable treatise on English construction and usage), the discipline of writing had firm borders and parameters that I was very-easily able to expand rapidly within.

And, as many hundreds of pages worth of copy for salespages, "about us" pages, press releases, guest blog posts, and any other for-profit content enterprising, I still have thousands more of copy pages to craft before I'm even MEDIOCRE enough to start to convert visitor traffic between the 7%-to-12% range that's possible on the level of someone who's been in, say, the Mail Order business (CRAZY lucrative). It's almost depressing, but it's what must be faced if you're committed to your craft.

Copywriting is one of the best ways I've been able to eat when everything else seemed to have gone to crap for work prospects...not a hobby (lol!).
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I agree that passion won't differentiate one copywriter from another. As I stated earlier though, I do believe that the person who doesn't have a passion for becoming a copywriter won't normally bother to study and learn the skills needed.

I can't identify it as a hobby. If you're a marketer it's the sales letter (marketing message) that will decide how well your business does. It doesn't make a difference whether you write that message yourself or have it written you still depend on it to make the sales conversions.

And I absolutely agree that the best copywriters have a deep understanding of the person they're writing too - and from that understanding develop the skill to shape the words in a way that stirs the emotions to guide that person to realizing that he has no choice other than to make the purchase.

 

Don't take it as duty! take it as hobby so that you can enjoy it while copywriting! In case you take it as duty, you will be bound to do so with no interest from your inner heart, which might worse the output result. But when done with gr8 interest the outcome will be amazing and will give you like selling hot cakes!! trust me

 

I think that depends on your position in the copywriting niche.

Maybe if you write your own copy for your own business you can get away with approaching the effort as a hobby and do okay.

But I personally believe that if you do treat copywriting as a hobby you will never become a Gary Halbert, John Carlton, Clayton Makepeace, Michael Masterson, Ted Nicholson, or a Bob Bly.

If you want sure success take it seriously and study the greats.

 

The best way to improve your copywriting skills is to use split testing to see what words work best.

 

Every successful copywriter that I've studied with has maintained that the best way to improve your skill is to sit down with a proven to convert piece of copy, a pen or pencil, and a stack of paper and hand write that piece of copy repetitively until the techniques used are firmly embedded in your brain. Split testing is a great method for improving a particular piece of copy though.