I’m a giant and devoted fan of Bob Bly and anything he writes about “writing.” This is a particularly great article in DM News this month on copywriting and how to best meet the challenges in writing great copy where Bob relates a ton of other expert copywriter tips.
Honestly this article alone should be printed and excerpted and passed around to anyone who is responsible for generating sales copy. Fantastic.
And leave it to Bly to find a superb ending quote from copywriter Milt Pierce,”A good swipe file is better than a college education.”
If you don’t know what a swipe file is, find out and start building one. Here’s a good article on swipe files beyond what Bly has in his article.
In PR you can do the same thing with really stunning press releases. Read them, collect them and glean eye-catching nutgraphs from them that you can then apply to your own releases.
A nutgraph by the way is a journalist’s term for the core paragraph of any story. If you don’t know the nutgraph of what you’re pitching – how the heck will the journalist possibly understand it?
Now go and swipe!
