Do you move your lips when you read?

And why does it affect your profits?

You may consider that first question – about moving your lips – insulting. You probably think I’m referring to folks who aren’t too smart.

If you’re thin-skinned you may even think it’s a crude way of implying YOU’RE not the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

But if you write copy – or content, as people have begun calling it – it really matters.

That’s because when we read – whether we are highly educated or totally uneducated – we “play” the words back to ourselves in our minds. And so do our readers.

What does this imply for your writing and your profits?

Well, here’s what a great advertising man – Fairfax Cone, co-founder of giant agency Foote, Cone & Belding – used to say when a writer showed him copy he didn’t care for:

“Would you say that to someone you know?”

And one of the great comic novelists of the 20th century, Evelyn Waugh, said:

“A good letter is like a conversation”

So let me ask you:

Is your writing conversational?

Or is it full of stuffy corporate jargon?

Formal and pretentious, striving to be literary?

Does it get people to act – or bore them to tears?

If your copy is like that – if it isn’t conversational – it won’t be read. And it won’t sell.

As Winston Churchill, whose persuasive powers moved an entire nation to beat Hitler said:

“Use simple words everyone knows, then everyone will understand.”

And as my old boss David Ogilvy noted:

“You cannot BORE people into buying.”

Well: are they buying?

Or are you boring them?

It costs no more to run copy that makes them buy – conversational copy – than guff that puts them to sleep.

How do you do it? Nick Usborne knows.

And who am I to talk?

You can see more about all of this at AskDrayton.com

Best,

Drayton

P.S. I originally wrote this blog for Nick Usborne at Conversational Copywriting.