How to have good ideas.

When it comes to writing content and copy that grabs the attention of your readers and keeps them engaged, you need good ideas. New ways to say things people have heard before. New metaphors and stories that illustrate familiar concepts. Different ways to phrase headlines and hooks.

And the best way to have good ideas, is to have lots of ideas. And when we say lots, we don’t mean two or three. We mean dozens. Maybe hundreds.

A long time ago, when I was just a few years into my copywriting career, Sally Hogshead, a young copywriter working at Fallon McElligot on the BMW motorcycle advertising account was assigned to write eight ads. She knew if she didn’t come up with a good idea, she would lose the assignment and her opportunity to prove her worth as a copywriter would vanish. So she sat down to write 800 headlines—100 for each of the ads. Most of them were bad. Sally said, “they suck bigtime.” But others were so good they won awards. But she never would have written the award winners unless she had first gotten many of the bad headlines down on paper. You can’t shortchange the work. You have to put in the reps.

Over the past few years we’ve interviewed several people on The Copywriter Club Podcast who have shared their processes for getting ideas down on paper. You might want to listen to our interviews with Dave Harland, Joe Schriefer, and Dan Nelken. Each of them shared different approaches for finding ideas to use in their copy. 

We’ve included a special report all about how to have great ideas (it’s actually a copy of a newsletter we shared a couple of years ago with the members of The Copywriter Underground. It outlines some of our best thinking around how to set yourself up for success by coming up with tons of great ideas. You’ll find it with your other course materials. Be sure to check it out.

Download Finding Big Ideas (access code: molepeople).
Download How to Have More Big Ideas.