Tips on writing persuasive advertising copy.

Introduction.

People don’t want baby laxative in their cocaine or stems and seeds in their marijuana. (Or so I’ve been told.) It’s the same with persuasive copy. People like high potency.

In advertising, you want to create desire and convince members of your audience to take action (usually, the action of spending their money). It’s very rare in advertising that you have a lot of space or time to do this. That means that you need to be quick and powerful.

In this series I’ll attempt to pass on some of the most important lessons I’ve learned during my decades of writing advertising copy. I’ll try to adhere to my principle of using the smallest number of words to convey the most amount of useful information. The undisputed masters of this method are William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White, as illustrated in their vital book The Elements of Style.

My first tip? Read their book. Every sentence teaches something valuable about becoming a good writer. It’s a small book, but extremely potent.

Read more about The Elements of Style.