Praxis’ Module 3 week 4 is focused on Marketing Copy. The deliverable for the week is a video assessing the copy of any website.
Critiquing other’s work helps you develop methods to better your own.
I put my own spin on this challenge. I took an amazing article by Copyblogger called 7 Ways to Write Damn Bad Copy. It had some amazing insights that clicked even with someone like me, who is new to copywriting.
I wanted to put these ideas to the test for several reasons:
- To concrete the ideas in my mind.
- To grow my skill in copywriting.
- To see these examples in action rather than as abstract concepts.
But where could I find websites that demonstrated the concepts? There was no way that I could think of 7 websites off the top of my head, much less fit them to the specific issues the blog post laid out.
So I googled “bad website examples” and a whole host of articles came up. I combed through several of them. Yes, I ran into dozens of bad websites in the process.
I picked out 7 websites that fit the points Copyblogger made. I found the article to be scarily accurate. Bad copywriting turns people off. (They should have titled the post “The Seven Deadly Sins of Copywriting”.)
To someone who is a copywriting veteran, the points may seem self- explanatory or even useless. But I learned so much just by creating this video, working through what I read.
This project goes to show that putting ideas into action teaches you more than any amount of theory can.
Here’s the video: