The longer your required word count, the more time it’s going to take to write. Right?
That’s an understandable assumption. A logical one even.
Yet it’s not necessarily an accurate one. It often greatly depends on the project.
For instance, in my line of work, I take care of a few main tasks for my professional clients:
Writing new blog posts
Writing new articles or article intros
Editing already written blog posts
Editing already written articles.
[Editor’s Note: Contact me here to see if what I do can work for you!]
For the record, I love every bit of it. I’m always learning something new on the job.
Just last week, for example, I learned that Arctic hares can bound at 40 miles per hour. Forty miles!
Meanwhile, tortoises have been sent up to space before. They even circled the moon! (Take that, you long-eared, cotton-tailed scamps.)
I suppose I can learn similarly fascinating details in the fifth main task I offer, which is writing marketing material. But, overall, I’d say I discover much more about the power of the written word…
That and how very time-consuming putting that power into play can be when you’re working with limited space.
This isn’t to say that writing market material – advertisements, promotional brochures, etc. – are always on the shorter side.
Nor is it to say that everyone will find themselves slaving over such projects despite flying through everything else. As I said before, it truly depends on the writing project. And the writing person.
But if you’ve never written ads before, understand that they might take more time and mental effort to complete. And allocate your time accordingly.
This is because of their very nature: They’re designed to persuade people not to an opinion but to an action: an action to buy or subscribe or otherwise affiliate oneself with the product or service at hand.
More often than not, those persuadable (or not-persuadable) people don’t go looking for such things. They’re not asking to spend their money or give out their emails.
Instead, they clicked on a news story or opened up a magazine or turned a corner for some other purpose… quite possibly information, a distraction or just getting from point A to point B.
Regardless, you probably have limited room to convince them that their attention is better committed elsewhere. And when you’re working with limited room, you have to make every.
Word.
Count.
When you have to make every word count, there’s a lot more thought involved. For instance, forget the fluffy adverbs and adjectives.
They should only be in there if they’re absolutely needed. And the same goes for additional descriptive details, explanations, and examples.
It’s not that you can’t have them in there. It’s only whether you should.
For some copywriters, it might be the actual writing part of the process that takes the most time: trying to figure out what to include and how to include it. For others, it might be the editing aspect: weeding out what doesn’t belong there in order to make the remaining words flourish.
Or, again, you might breeze through it all. You might be a copywriting natural.
In that case, congratulations. Truly. I hope you find clients or an agency who appreciate that skill for all it’s worth. Because it most definitely is a skill that's worth its weight in clicks.
Just don’t assume you're a nature. Prove it true or expect to spend a bit more time to make your ad copywriting everything it can be.