In 1934 copywriter Robert Pirosh decided he wanted to become a screenwriter instead.

Here’s the letter he sent to all the directors, producers, etc., he could think of:

Dear Sir:

I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. I like solemn, angular, creaky words, such as straitlaced, cantankerous, pecunious, valedictory. I like spurious, black-is-white words, such as mortician, liquidate, tonsorial, demi-monde. I like suave “V” words, such as Svengali, svelte, bravura, verve. I like crunchy, brittle, crackly words, such as splinter, grapple, jostle, crusty. I like sullen, crabbed, scowling words, such as skulk, glower, scabby, churl. I like Oh-Heavens, my-gracious, land’s-sake words, such as tricksy, tucker, genteel, horrid. I like elegant, flowery words, such as estivate, peregrinate, elysium, halcyon. I like wormy, squirmy, mealy words, such as crawl, blubber, squeal, drip. I like sniggly, chuckling words, such as cowlick, gurgle, bubble and burp.

I like the word screenwriter better than copywriter, so I decided to quit my job in a New York advertising agency and try my luck in Hollywood, but before taking the plunge I went to Europe for a year of study, contemplation and horsing around.

I have just returned and I still like words.

May I have a few with you?

Robert Pirosh
385 Madison Avenue
Room 610
New York
Eldorado 5-6024

Thanks to that letter he landed a job as a writer with MGM and went on to become a writer for the Marx Brothers and wrote a script that won an Academy Award.

I love words too.

Click here if you’d like me to write some for you.

(H/T Letters of Note)

Whenever you come across a news headline that interests you, especially if it’s about a topic in a market you sometimes write copy for, make a note of it (if you don’t already have a headlines document in your Google Docs or on your computer, start one).

Each day take a glance at the headlines in Google News, New York Times (especially their most popular articles), Huffington Post (check out this article about their headlines and how they test them) and a news site in your local area.

Obviously you won’t be able to swipe these headlines word for word to use as a copywriting headline. The purpose is to give you inspiration and raw material to work with to tweak into a headline you can use.

It’s common for copywriters to study and swipe successful copywriting headlines but I find it adds freshness to your copywriting to also study the news headlines. Because news headlines tend to be pithy they also can provide inspiration as email subject lines.

I’ll share a few I came across this past week:

“What’s the biggest money mistake you can make?”

This is a curiosity headline from a news site in my local area. With a little tweaking you could turn this into a copywriting headline for copy in the financial/debt management niches. You could use it word for word in an email subject line.

A headline like this also meets the “3 a.m. test”  that Gary Bencivenga talks about: if you woke up a person in your market at 3 a.m. and read them your headline, would it create such a sense of urgency that they would want to hear more or would they roll over and go back to sleep?

“If you had more money than you knew what to do with, would you want more?

A good example of a question headline from the New York Times. If you write copy for financial services or products this would also make for a good email subject line and topic.

“Raising pigs and this baseball thing really go together.”

Another example from the New York Times. I like the use of contrast here. One doesn’t normally associate pig farming with baseball. Making note of a headline like this will remind you to use contrast in your copywriting headlines whenever possible because it’s one of the best ways to provoke curiosity.

“$5 debit card fee got you mad? Time for deposit-only banks.”

This is from Google News and an example of an emotion headline that targets a very specific frustration of the people in your market. It would be very easy to adapt this to a copywriting headline.

Another benefit to this daily exercise is it will help you stay informed as to what’s going on in the world. There have been countless times I’ve come across a factoid or statistic in a news story and used it in email and sales page copy.

You get to look over his shoulder as he writes the email and chooses the subject line. Then he takes you inside his Clickbank account 24 hours later to see the results.

At the 3:39 mark he mentions the #1 thing that causes emails to bomb and talks openly about an email he recently sent to a list of 5000 that resulted in no sales because he made this mistake.

It’s very rare to come across a free in depth video like this with pure content about email marketing, as well as honest discussion about recent successes and failures with email. Take a look. Nothing is being sold, it’s just helpful information.

But there was a game here in Madison, WI last Saturday that was so big, with so much hype surrounding it, that even I started paying attention.

I even found myself reading articles about the Nebraska Cornhuskers. What?

So I figured if even I was noticing the game, then there must be a marketing lesson or two in it.

Sure enough there is.

The Nebraska Cornhuskers had been in the Big 12 conference for 100 years and then joined the Big 10 (Wisconsin’s conference) this year.

This was Nebraska’s first game against Wisconsin since 1974 and their first game with Nebraska as part of the Big 10.

Both teams wear red and white so it was Big Red vs. Big Red. It was billed as the biggest Wisconsin game ever and 81,000 fans crammed into the stadium.

Wisconsin has been to the Rose Bowl and has had its share of important games, so why was this such a big fat hairy deal?

Well, Nebraska doesn’t have a pro football team, so the Cornhuskers are the main attraction for football fans in Nebraska.

Also, even though the college football season is fairly short, there’s at least one article in the Nebraska newspapers every day of the year about the Cornhuskers. (Hint: that’s marketing lesson #1: consistency in telling your story).

Madison was overrun with Nebraska fans last Friday and Saturday and the energy of that was fun. I’ve never seen so many fans from the opposing team strolling the streets and stores of Madison. Apparently not even a recession can stop Cornhusker fans from spending lots of money on tickets and travel.

All of this piqued my curiosity and made me tune into the game and watch almost three full quarters of it (I shut it off after Wisconsin’s lead became insurmountable).

Which brings us to marketing lesson #2: In marketing and sales, curiosity draws people in even more than desire does.

Here we had a “product “that was more than 100 years old, predictable as can be, and yet a new story gave a freshness to it and made even non-fans who have no desire for college football curious and interested in it.

By the way, just so you know, curiosity… stories… freshness… these are all things that email copy can deliver day after day.

To make matters more fun, the street I proceeded to drive on had broken glass all over it.

I was already in a nervous state because I was lost in the bad part of town, as they say, and the scenery was, um, not very inviting. I hoped my front tires weren’t damaged, as I didn’t want to get stranded there.

Well, I was in a big city, actually, not a town. One I had never driven around in much before all by myself so I was relying on my Blackberry’s GPS.

Of course the GPS sent me to the bad part of town instead of my actual destination.

I should have trusted my instincts and taken the exit that I was actually familiar with, and figured out my way from there, instead of trusting stupid GPS, but I thought GPS would be more efficient. Ha!

I picked up my Blackberry and tried to find a different address to plug into the GPS, but I didn’t have my reading glasses with me and I was feeling too panicked anyway to have the patience to type on a tiny keyboard, so I tried calling my daughter so she could Google a different address for me from her computer.

Of course she didn’t answer, so I threw my phone on the floor and decided to use my wits to get out of the bad part of town.

Well, what do you know. Using my wits actually worked! Funny how that happens.

Sometimes when running a business we end up in the “bad part of town” too.

You know, those panicky moments that happen when, say, a marketing campaign didn’t have the results you wanted.

Or a piece of software that was critical to a particular task didn’t work the way it was supposed to.

Or a member of your team wasn’t there when you needed them.

It can be scary in the bad part of town, but your fears must be your agenda every day, even in business, so those trips to the bad part of town are a good thing.

As Tim Ferriss says, “What we fear doing is usually what we most need to do…Resolve to do one thing each day that you fear.”

Here are four ways to write believable copy (quotes below are from Bernice):

1. Love people.

2. “Sharpen your powers of observation. Learn to look at a thing as if you’ve never really seen it before in your life.”

3. Be inquisitive and acquisitive. Good copywriters are “curious about people, curious about new products, curious about everything.”

4. Write what you hear. This means writing the way people in your market talk.

It’s been said Hemingway looked at everything around him as if it was his last day of being alive. A copywriter – especially an email copywriter who has to come up with multiple stories for email copy on a regular basis – should do the same.

He wrote in six 33 minute blocks of time every morning and took 5 minute breaks in between.

In my case, it also works when I do 2-3 blocks in the morning and the remaining in the afternoon or evening.

I’ve since learned that the six 33 minute segments should be done in their order of priority.

Do the most difficult task first,  or the thing that will most move forward your business today, whether it’s writing bullets for a sales letter, writing a blog post, prepping for an important phone call, etc.

I reply to emails and dabble in social media and Google Reader outside of those 33 minute segments.

33 minutes of concentrating solely on one particular task with pure concentration is always more productive for me than, say, three hours of writing a little, checking Facebook, writing a little more, checking email, doing some research, etc.

It helps if you choose the 6 tasks the evening before and list them in their order of priority. I list mine in Gmail’s handy little task list.

I use this free online egg timer when timing my 33 minute segments. It doesn’t have a pause button so it really keeps me on track. The buzzer is nice and loud.

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to stand up and take at least a 5 minute break doing something completely different when the buzzer goes off.

Anyway, that’s my tip for the day.

Get that wrong and your subject line and email won’t get read at all.

Let’s take this email I got from the Netflix CEO today as an example:

Like most people, I quickly glance at the from column in my inbox first.

I noticed “Reed Hastings, Co-Founder” and didn’t know who the heck that was. I almost trashed it but gave it a second chance because of the subject line.

It turns out Reed Hastings is the CEO of Netflix. Who knew? I didn’t, even though I’ve been a customer for several years. I probably don’t know the names of the CEOs of any of the companies I pay bills to every month.

The from field should have read, “Reed Hastings, Netflix CEO & Co-Founder.” Then “Reed Hastings, Netflix” would have appeared in the from field of my inbox and I would have opened it without almost accidentally deleting it.

If you’re a copywriter, always ask a client what they intend to put in the from field and advise them accordingly. It might seem like a trivial detail but it’s not.

By the way, I like the rest of the Netflix email. I always admire it when someone has the courage to open an email with “I messed up. I owe everyone an explanation.” Plus, I’m a happy instant streaming customer, and hate messing with DVDs, so I’m not in a snit over their new biz model.

I drew WTF looks from drivers but I didn’t care.

There was a cockatiel in a tree and I was determined to rescue it.

I knew I had my work cut out for me, however, because I was a stranger to the bird and didn’t know his name.

Cockatiels are friendly birds but won’t fly to the shoulder of just anyone.

He was cheeping the way cockatiels cheep when they are anxious or calling out to a cockatiel buddy.

I imitated that cheep as best as I could and made eye contact with him. He calmed down.

He wasn’t budging, though, so I walked to the other side of the tree and started whistling songs cockatiels usually know: the wolf whistle, the Adams Family and Andy Griffith theme songs.

He kept staring at me and gradually felt safe enough to fly to a lower branch.

I wanted to close the deal, however, especially when the waiter at a nearby Mexican restaurant… the guy who made me aware of the cockatiel’s presence in the first place… said sadly, “If you don’t rescue him, he’ll die, won’t he.”

Pressure.

Stress.

Plus, cockatiels are nomadic creatures when in the wild, so I knew I had to close the deal now or never.

This anxiety was making it hard for me to continue to whistle, so I switched tactics and started saying words a cockatiel might know:

“Food.” “Water.” “Step up.” “Pretty bird.”

I used a sing song-y voice in a higher register than my normal speaking voice because cockatiels like higher pitches.

Those words really got his attention and he kept dropping down to lower branches one at a time until he was on the lowest branch.

Suddenly there was a flurry of feathers but I remained still.

He landed on my head.

I ever so carefully walked to my car and slid into the front seat.

He insisted on remaining on my shoulder so I let him stay there during the drive home so as to maintain my bond of trust with him.

Sometimes he hopped onto my head, which probably drew more WTF looks from drivers, but I didn’t care.

The moment I put him into the bird cage at home (we have a small aviary of parakeets and cockatiels at home) he wagged his tail from side to side vigorously, the way cockatiels do when they are happy.

Then he ate and drank for 30 minutes straight.

Which brings us to the “La-Di-Frickin’-Da, what does this have to do with my business” part of the post.

First, there isn’t any one thing that closes the deal when selling to a customer.

Sure, I could conclude that my using words like “food” were what closed the deal, and that I should just launch straight into that if I ever happen upon a cockatiel in the wild again.

Just like some marketers think their fancy-pants sales page is what closes the deal and they fixate on that and neglect their email list.

But it was a large sales funnel, so to speak, beginning with his previous owner, who, based on what I now know of his temperament, clearly had a loving bond with this bird, enabling him to give me the time of day in the first place.

She probably cried and kicked herself for days afterwards when he escaped during a half second of inattention, but her care for him the years beforehand played a huge role in my being able to save him.

The other parts of the funnel:

I spoke/whistled in his language.

I very clearly communicated I had something he desperately needed – food.

I focused completely on him and drew upon the very specific knowledge I have about cockatiels so I could build trust. I didn’t focus on myself at all.

I didn’t rush or push for the sale.

See?

Marketing really is for the birds.

Talk soon.

P. S.  Bottom line: send out a variety of emails to your list. Use a combination of stories and how-to info to gradually build trust.

Eventually one of those emails will finally hit the right hot button and snag the sale, thanks to the funnel that came before it.

It’s a tough thing to do on your own, however, so have a copywriter do it for you.