Copy Writing: When to finally put your pen down

Copy writers ask themselves this question all the time: When is my sales copy/direct letter/headline ready to go "Live"? Especially if you are doing client work, this question can burn holes in your head and keep you up at night as you ponder the difference between Ready-To-Go and Better-Than-Ever.

So what do you do? Iterate eternally or just finish strong?

A combination of both might be your best bet. The beauty of your copy shall always lie in the eyes of beholder, and, hopefully, there’s a lot of beholders (traffic) out there reading your copy.

So, sitting at your desk debating yourself or your partner will never do you any good, because ultimately the market must decide. So stop wasting your time.

Write to a point that adequately covers your customers’ concerns, properly describes the benefits and features of your product, gives credibility, etc, and then put it out there asap.

With a strong letter, you’ll hopefully get a respectable response, and this should be your starting point. From there, begin tweaking the critical elements (like headlines) until you get to a response rate you deem successful.

This combination of "good enough" copy writing and persistent tweaking should greatly decrease your development time and should also get you better results (not to mention less pre-launch stress). Your opinion matters little when compared to that of the market, so make it easy for them to decide… by getting your copy out there and testing it.