It’s not what you think.
But without it, no copywriter can produce good work.
I wrote about how I’ve been looking for a junior copywriter to join Conversion Alchemy.
Well, as I was jotting down the test assignment’s requirements and goals, I realized that the guy or gal I will hire must have this critical skill if they want to work with me.
I’m not talking about good English.
Not even about knowledge of persuasion and psychology.
No, not about proper grammar.
The skill that very few newbie copywriters think of when they step into the field, is the skill of “decision making”.
And the reason why, is because as a copywriter you’ll always get to the point in a project when you’ll be drowning in research and data.
Your clients throw stuff at you, you collect your own and the competition adds more to the mix.
It’s a lot.
You gotta have the stomach and brain capacity to handle it all.
And to make sense of it.
The only way you can survive and produce great work, is at some point, to make a call.
That’s what clients pay me for in the end.
It’s so I can use the experience accumulated over years of looking at different businesses and audiences, of testing hundreds of websites, of collecting the right data, and of looking at the results.
And when all is said and done, so I can make that call and decide on the direction we should take.
A good way to test it? Give your wannabe copywriter the task of looking at a few pages of research and write the intro of your homepage. And then limit their time to 3 to 5 hours.
Bonus: when they’re done, ask them to write down the questions they still have and weren’t able to answer with the research provided or the time available.
This simple exercise will tell you a ton about how they make decisions, how they think, and what they look for.
Constraints make people resourceful.
Pretty excited to see how this is going to work moving forward.
I’ll keep you posted.
Have a great weekend.
P.S. I’m posting older issues of this newsletter on my blog. You can check them out here (it’s 100+ of them).
