Candidate,
I'm going to talk more about GREAT WRITING for a few days.
Not Hemingway and not formal rules about the subjunctive tense — but battle-tested, everyday techniques you can use to make people WANT to hear from you.
All these people out there are talking about weird webinar tricks and Instagram hacks, but writing is a skill you can (1) get better at, (2) use to improve your relationships, and (3) if applied to business, use to generate millions of dollars.
I built a following of 750,000+ people — and an 8-figure business — by mixing tactical advice with jokes about Indian parents and how I think buffalo wings add more value to the world than life coaches.
You can write better and it will improve your life. Here's an example of using better writing at work. I got an email from a guy, Kurt, who works in human resources. Look what he said:
"I'm in HR, which is 20% comprised of sending out lots of information about inscrutable crap that very few people care about. My job is to make people care about it (or, barring that, to at least get people to read it). So my tactic is to make the emails ridiculous enough so that people actually enjoy reading them. Coworkers across the company actually tell me (unsolicited) that they look forward to opening emails when they see that they're from me."
ARE YOU READING THIS!? WRITE BETTER AND PEOPLE WILL EVEN BE EXCITED TO READ YOUR HR EMAILS.
Great writing sets you apart from everyone else:
- At work. As a hiring manager, if I see 2 job candidates and one is a better writer, I'd hire the better writer every day. You can be great at your job, but if you can't communicate, your career will plateau.
- In dating. God, stop being boring. You can send better text messages and emails to your friends. We even rewrote the copy on this guy's dating profile and got him 4X as many dates.
- With your friends. You get two party invites, which one would you attend: "Wanna watch the game? Kyle's here" or "Hey, my BBQ Olympics party is on! You should come. We've got the rooftop patio reserved and I made a cocktail for you."
Simple changes, instant results.
Let me give you a before-and-after example with real numbers.
This is a business example from my student Colleen Carroll's business, Innovative Reading, a site that helps parents teach their children to enjoy reading. Colleen is a student in Call to Action, our premium copywriting course.
Take a look at the two images below. They're two different versions of a landing page. At a glance, they both look similar. But one of them performed 281% better than the other.
That's nearly 3X as many email subscribers.
Version A: