[RESOURCE] 103 Copywriting Tools, Tricks and Hacks- the Ultimate List
Lots of copywriting tools in one place. Bookmark this bad boy immediately.
Edit: a couple of list-eye’s said some things
This is everything you need to start copywriting immediately.
You are opinionated about your Master Subject, charmingly persuasive and have an exceptional, enviable vocabulary. The final thing you need to start your copywriting career, is this list.
I combed through every open tab, LinkedIn post, overdue library book and lead magnet download to pull together 103 copywriting tips and tricks for every possible situation.
All of the methods, techniques, styles and edits are here, categorized for easy referencing.
Now open up a crisp new Google doc and get typing!
Top Picks in Each Category
1. Free Stuff: HubSpot trial. They’re worth checking out. For real.
2. For Beginners : step-by-step blogging with HubSpot
3. Worth the Money: Webflow website builder (way better than Wordpress)
4. Online Subscriptions
5. How to Write
6. Do Not Use These
7. Top 5 Musts for Success
8. Lucky Last
Free Stuff
We’re starting off strong with the freebies.
The Grammerly Writing Assistant is an industry favourite. This app cleans up spelling and grammar while highlighting any plagiarism problems and clarifying tone. Sign up for free.
The Google Search Bar. Hear me out. Search your subject and then scroll down to the “people also asked” section. If you’re stuck for subheadings or topics, they’re right there.
Most tools on Hubspot are free, and their library of guides, how-to’s and templates are free too. Hubspot has become an industry go-to, mostly due to their consistent, reliable, educational content.
Ubersuggest hosted by Niel Patel is a full suite of SEO tools- keyword finder, SEO report, content ideas and back link data (to name a few).
Google Digital Garage is the mother load of free online courses in everything digital marketing. Each course is certified and teaches up-to-date and emerging techniques and skills. Perfect for any experience level.
Smash out a quick keyword check at KeywordTool.Io. Identify your subject and this keyword tool will suggest everything that people are searching for around your target.
If your project needs author quotes or UGC book reviews, GoodReads has a purpose built search tool for exactly that. Author quotes in particular can lend authority to an article, and using this tool replaces the need to request interviews.
Thesaurus.Com is the go-to site for synonyms.
It’s partner site Dictionary.com can confirm that the word you just used does mean what you think it means.
Analyze your title on Coschedule. Generate a report on your title’s word count, character limit and word balance. Titles can be challenging, making this tool especially popular
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Answer the Public graphs exactly what people are typing into search engines when they are looking for answers about your subject. As a content tool, this one is hard to beat.
TSS Reader is a text to speech application that allows you to hear your copy out loud. Hearing your work helps you to pick up mistakes or clunky phrasing and appreciate how your copy flows. Many users claim this tool has improved their writing overall.
The Readability Test hosted by WebFX gives your copy an overall readability score. If the number is too high, your copy is too complex for the majority of the online audience.
SmartBlogger, created by Jon Morrow, is one of the world’s largest websites about blogging and writing. His lead magnet cheat sheet promises to take you from beginner to paycheque, so use it at your own peril.
A cliché rarely hits the way you think it will so swiftly delete that malarkey with Cliche Finder.
Nail short form copy like Tweets and meta descriptions with Word Counter. Type directly into the tool and perfect these short forms before thrusting them onto the internet forever.
Unsplash is home to more than a million free images. This gallery is far from the cursed stock photography we used to have to suffer with. Carefully selected beautiful pictures break up walls of text and increase the time site visitors spend on the page
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A LinkedIn profile is one of the best actions you can take in your copywriting career. Not only to search for jobs, but for networking with colleagues in the field and massive amounts of educational content, it’s amazing that it’s free.
MozBar is a plug-in extension which gives you instant SEO insights for any website you’re browsing. It’s link metrics tool is especially useful for highlighting followed and not followed links and you can compare these metrics across sites. Great information for clients and for what links to include in your own content.
Google Docs is the most well known cloud based document sharing software. For writing and content creation, applications include collaboration, mutual edits and secure storage. It’s free to download and free to use.
For Beginners
Tools I wish I had when I was new.
Research is key to your success. There is no possibility of writing great copy off the cuff. This is going to sound very harsh, but everyone hears it at the start- no matter how good you are at writing, you don’t know how to do copywriting…yet. But you can learn. And you start learning with research.
Introduction to Marketing by Lumen Learning is a student led course teaching you what marketing actually is. Before putting finger to key, explore the subject and ask yourself if it really stirs you up inside. Digital marketing is good money, but it’s not easy. Sometimes it is excruciatingly frustrating.
Create a daily writing practice. Following prompts is the easiest way to start. Open up a notebook or fresh document and practice different techniques- describe objects, imagine being in someone else’s shoes and write from their perspective, tell 5 and 3 sentence stories. Daily writing is a transformative exercise
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Masters of Marketing Secrets is a copywriting course by Robert Collier. He will guide you through the steps of writing sales letters, a skill that is in demand and can kick off your career.
Join online forums of like minded people. The subreddit r/Copywriting has a newbie thread and plenty of copywriters of all types and experience level you can bounce ideas off or ask for help.
Warrior is another forum and marketplace to discuss industry news and network with professionals.
Start exploring job postings, like the ones on ProBlogger. Look at what potential clients want from a copywriter and use these job requirements as writing prompts. Practice generating samples, which are part of the pitching process to clients
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While I don’t suggest writing for free, volunteering at a non-profit is a meaningful way to build your portfolio. These are real jobs for real clients that won’t require you to lower your value in the private sector. Reach out to your favourite charity and ask what’s available.
For motivation and a creativity boost, try The Most Dangerous Writing App by Squibler. This fun and high stakes writing game pits you against yourself. Stop writing, and everything is lost.
While all copywriting has the same goal- to generate engagement- each type of copywriting has a specific technique. Even large marketing departments fail to acknowledge that to generate many different types of copy, you require an extensive skill set. Take the time to explore methodology and double down on your strengths.
Make a plan for your career. This marketing plan generator powered by HubSpot asks you to think about your goals and it will generate an outline for your strategy. Your freelance work is in part dependant upon how you market yourself. A plan can help you assess your progress and gives you a path to follow when you’re out of ideas.
Google hosts free, drag and drop websites for blogs and portfolios. These are the perfect option for beginners to get a site up without any overheads.
Before you start your new career, read and memorize this article. In it, John Stonos takes you through the questions and conversations you must have with every client and why. God I wish I had this article when I started.
Worth the Money
Sometimes you’ve got to pay the bux for the good stuff.
Flick Hashtag Finder and social media scheduler for social media posting. Streamline your efforts and let Flick do most of the work. They are always working on upgrading their tools, so your membership is regularly updated.
Build a creative website to showcase your skills and capture clients. This website builder by Folio is intuitive and provides case study prompts for you to flesh out your portfolio quickly and professionally.
In his book Newsjacking, David Meerman Scott explores the viral and sometimes disastrous marketing technique of piggy-backing a trending news story for views.
Many writers swear by the Hemingway App. It is a useful editing tool to clean up overly wordy or complicated copy. The features are also highly intuitive to UX.
A/B testing is an important process that ensures you’re always posting your best performing content. Convertize automatically manages A/B testing of your content and provides data comparisons for you and your clients
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Spy on your competitors with SpyFu. Spying is the most useful when you use the data to inform strategy. Understanding the landscape of your competitors and yourself can lead to tactical content creation and a deeper understanding of your target audience.
Easy graphic design software doesn’t come more comprehensive than Canva. For creating infographics, graphs, blog images, covers, e-books, presentations or video content, anything to be honest. A Canva subscription gives you all access to the platform and unchained possibilities.
Accounting software is your friend. Managing a freelance business is tricky when you try to DIY. Look for software that can be connected to the tax department directly. Regular reporting and paying tax saves stress and income. Please research your tax department website and take their advice and recommendations.
Sometimes described as the bible of copywriting, Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples will ensure you’ll be specializing in direct response copywriting, the most lucrative of all the copywritings. Shout out to chapter 5.
Are you thinking about completing some training? The American Writers and Artists Inc Copywriting Course is one of the top, professionally recommended, courses online. Course contributors include Brian Clark, the founder of CopyBlogger and Clayton Makepeace, celebrated direct response legend. It’s exy, but an investment in yourself.
Online Subscriptions
The most important one is #6.
Get back-link opportunities sent straight to your inbox everyday from Searcheye.io. This free subscription enables you to build up the back-links to your site quickly to lock down that SEO.
Niel Patel is back on the list with his great blog. These are more like lengthy, in-depth tutorials about everything to do with digital marketing. Patel’s posting schedule isn’t spammy and his content is consistently high value.
CopyHackers is arguably the best site online for every copywriter at every experience level. Endless free educational content. Join their 42k strong subscriber base.
Sign up to Help A Reporter. Twice a day you’ll receive a list of requests from journalists seeking expertise in a wide range of disciplines. They also seek people with lived experience, like school leavers or midlife divorcées (as examples). This is a unique opportunity to reflect attention back to your own site and experience first hand the professional interview process.
Copywriting Examples, home of Harry’s Newsletter is stand-alone a useful site for understanding copywriting that got it right, and how they did it, but you can also sign up for Harry’s Newsletter and receive copywriting tips and tweets of the week.
For the best list of copywriting tools, industry commentary and exceptional educational content, subscribe to Copywriting Converts. If you have already subscribed, share with a friend who is still in the dark.
Competing with Copywriting Converts to be the best blog on the internet, Kopywriting Kourse has a free mini course you can take and a brilliant active blog.
Ben Settle AKA the email poet, is a contrary writer and master of email marketing. In his subscription, he answers reader questions and gives advice on how he’s done it, so I guess take that as you will.
Jenna Farmer, at The Bloglancer, wants to help people grow their blogs and online presence so they can earn a living from writing
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Empowering women writers is the passion of Javacia Harris Bowser on See Jane Write. The subscription alone is worth it, but See Jane Write is also an all encompassing community that proudly helps women to find their voice and their stories through writing.
Joel Klettke who writes Business Casual Copywriting is absolutely charming. He is also exceptional at conversion copywriting due to research, experience and a deep fascination with human behaviour.
CopyBloggers email series The Killer and The Poet will shed light on everything you wanted to know about content marketing and the creator economy.
How to Write
This is every possible resource that will help you kick off an entire copywriting career.
The reason you’re reading this list is because of Tim Hanson. Here is his succinct how-to explaining the steps to writing a blog post which elevates your authority within your niche.
These are the tried and tested foundational copywriting techniques that every writer should lean on. Styles and trends are going to change but copywriting is built on core fundamentals. Karri Stover describes them and you should probably start using them.
Writing a script? Here are 6 templates for the most common types of videos. Powered by Jasper.ai and written by Austin Distel, these templates provide a creative framework to build your script from and understand how to present a marketing message in this medium.
John Harrison uses his LinkedIn profile to serve up bite sized chunks of copywriting methodology. Read some of his work and then follow him.
Voice of Customer research is the process of mining online reviews to create copy that is written in, well, the voice of the customer. Respustate’s blog post takes you step by step through this research process.
Learn the knack of writing product descriptions. Stephen Courtney from Convertize picks out the 5 keys to a great product description in an easy to follow format.
Amazon’s “Working Backwards” model is the methodology used by Amazon for every product they create. The method starts with the customer’s experience of the finished product, before anything to do with creating the product has happened. Before you write, imagine a customers experience of your copy. Weird technique, but worth a try.
UX copywriting seems very micro niche, but it is a specialist skill within the design world. Jim Smurawa does a Swift job of unpacking what it is, why it matters and why having a knack for the technique could make you a copywriter in high demand
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One more from Morrow, powerwords and how to use them. This tutorial and accompanying PDF shows writers how to pepper their copy with emotive and persuasive words. According to Jon, powerwords create conversions, which I suppose is the point.
Sidra Condron details 20, next level, back link building techniques which should inform your blog promotion strategy. This comprehensive list is focused primarily on content creation, which won it its place here.
Create infographics to compensate for content. Especially for sales emails and social media content, infographics are particularly motivating. Your infographic should focus on one singular idea and simply explain it in a visual way. For example A powerful way to convey that your sales and consumer preference percentage has increased every year for the last five years is with a graph. See, much easier.
Everybody Writes by Ann Handley, is the guide to writing well. If you need to tighten up your storytelling game or create a unique voice, Ann’s got your back.
One more for Harrison, 6 simple steps to rework your homepage into your website’s conversion engine.
You Are A Writer by Jeff Goins could be the feel-good how-to manual of the century. Goins is your biggest cheerleader, taking you from wanting to start writing to growing your audience and pitching to clients.
You will work for businesses and brands that don’t have their own language style guide. Pro-tip: for excellent reviews, referrals and rehires, create them a style guide and add it to the brief. This one by Writer is gold standard and you don’t have to go this hard, but their template outlines what one should look like.
Again from Writer, the only guide you need for inclusive language. This is a very politically charged aspect of writing on the internet and understanding what to say and how to say it, elevates you above amateur. Bookmark immediately.
Write the most comprehensive copywriting client contract with Bonsai. They have all the instructions, information and downloads you need.
This post by Fery Kaszoni helpfully explains how and why you should set your price, and is a great confidence boost as well.
The best lesson in how to write is reading. When you are reading with purpose, reflect on what you’ve read. Highlight what makes the writing good, and bad. Why do you think that? What would you change or improve? What did the writer miss? Are you even the target audience? Who is? Actively engage with the copy around you.
Sharpen your understanding of rhetorical devices. In The Art Of Argument, Sean Glatch introduces 37 rhetorical devices and their uses. Brilliant jumping off point into further research.
If you have the tendency to repeat yourself, or you’ve never considered it before, plug your copy into this word frequency counter by Wise Words. Use it to explore new and simpler ways to communicate.
Tal Valente is going to strengthen up your writing by putting you on weak word blast. Start deleting.
Every piece of writing is an act of storytelling, which is writing’s fundamental core. Always nurture your storytelling skills.
Class Central is an online course search engine that allows you to browse universities, accredited providers and institutions. If you are interested in finding a course, search here.
For breaking through procrastination or brain block, this is the most watched pomodoro technique video on YouTube.
To make sure you stay on track and reach your goals, try the Eat the Frog method. It was Mark Twain’s idea. Don’t shoot the messenger
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Do Not Use These
No links because I don’t want you to go there. Danger, Danger, Will Robinson.
Any AI writing assistant. The content they produce is garbage and fails almost universally to pass plagiarism and fact checkers.
SEO content creation courses. SEO is only focussed on appealing to machine learning search engines. The content is only created for that reason. The purpose of copywriting is engagement. Search engines do not engage. Rating number one in search does not guarantee sales.
Paid mentor programs. There are a million working copywriters online who give their educational content away for free AND you can talk to them on LinkedIn. Alternatively, post your drafts on online forums and ask for feedback. Asking for payment for access to connections is greed in my opinion. You can make those connections yourself.
Expensive courses run by randoms. Courses made by a random person who is selling it for hundreds of dollars from a StanStore is not a good deal. Resources or how-to guides less than $80 max are probably fine. But a full blown course or membership for $300 from a stranger on the internet? Err on the side of caution and go somewhere else.
Any membership that claims to be professionally run or teach you accredited copywriting techniques and is hosted on a private discord server.
A course that tells you they’ll get you a job at the end.
Tiktok videos to learn how to write
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A website that sells large business email databases. Cold outreach copy paste emails en masse is a terrible idea. 1- 99% of business owners recognize templates and immediately pass, 2- spraying into the void and seeing what sticks is a gross waste of time and effort, 3- targeted, personalized outreach based on business needs yields far more results than a mass email attack ever will and 4- anyone who takes money in exchange for an email list and a template is a grifter.
Advice that suggests offering your services for free to get your foot in the door. Even your first job, you are providing professional services and deserve to be paid for them.
Anything other than accounting software to track your finances. From someone who didn’t use accounting software to start with and had to transition halfway down the track because of the accounting disaster I created for myself, use accounting software from the start.
Portfolio templates suggested by UGC creators. Check the “worth the money” and “for beginners” categories of this list for paid and free options.
Pay agreements which give you a percentage of the sales your copy generates. You are being ripped off. How is the ROI data being collected? Is it a percentage of revenue or profit? This type of agreement is designed to make you work for free.
Tax or accounting advice from the internet. Spend the money, go to H&R Block (or equivalent) and get an accountant to set you up.
Portfolio audits. The people who do these have never hired a copywriter in their lives. Their opinions are meaningless. Look up portfolios of successful copywriters and how they market themselves through a blog or website. If you are clearly demonstrating what you can do for a client, your fine.
The promise of endless riches in your first three months as motivation for the industry. The money comes with time, experience, work and failures. Im sorry you’ve been misled.
An agreement for work that is anything other than a clearly defined contract. No email chains, no sending a completed piece first, no 10c per word malarkey. Clear, defined, agreed to contract. That’s it.
Top 5 Musts for Success:
You must love to write. As in you feel genuine joy from the act of writing. Because you are going to be writing every single day. You’ve got to love it that much.
You must have patience. Success could take awhile. There may not immediately be a flurry of desperate requests for your copywriting talents to save the day, and that’s okay. Keep going.
You must be flexible. Writers everywhere are constantly innovating and trying new techniques. And audiences want different things at different times. Trends change and you need to change with them. It’s good for you, keeps you young.
You must be resilient. One day, someone who couldn’t write their way out of a paper bag is going to crucify your copy and make you want to commit crimes. You need to know, that as long as you keep practicing and learning and improving your skills, that person will always be wrong. Because if they knew how to do it, why are they paying you?
You must back yourself. You need to believe, that given the choice, you would always bet on you. A creative career is notoriously difficult to get into and you’re already here. Keep that flame going. You’ve got this
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Lucky number 103-
Use these instructions and write your own list. Feel validated knowing that you just became an authority in your field.
All credit for this list existing goes to Tim Hanson.
Wasn’t that an incredible list?
Please check out all the places I linked to, they are amazing resources.
Also, please let me know what I missed. I regularly update this list and add reader’s suggestions. I would love to add yours too.