Why A Copywriting Course Will Make You Lose Money

If you're looking to invest in a copywriting course, read this first. Because you're about to lose hundreds of dollars.

You want to get good at writing advertising. Here you are looking for a course that's supposed to do that. I don't know. Maybe you want to be taken by the hand and lead to greatness.

Here's the cold, harsh reality of copywriting courses. You can get the same education from the classic direct response advertising books you can get used for less than $10 on Amazon and 2/3 the original price at eBay.

Books like:

- Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples
- Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins
- Advertising Magic by Brian Keith Voiles
- The Adweek Copywriting Book by Joe Sugarman
- Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Dr. Robert Cialdini
- Cash Copy by Jefferey Lant
- How I Raised Myself From a Failure To Success In Selling by Frank Bettger

If you get all these books today, I guarantee you'll get much more quality information than if you took a copywriting course over the internet.

It's not that copywriting courses are bad... They're just bad investments.

Let's take AWAI. Sure this is what master print salesman Bob Bly says about it:

"This is the best correspondence course for copywriting I have ever seen - in fact, the best copywriting course I've seen anywhere, in any form. Anyone who wants to get into direct response copywriting would benefit enormously from taking it."

No doubt! You'll write an ad so hot that you'll be getting sales left and right. You'll get so cocky and on-top-of-the-world that your own spouse won't recognize you. Wrong...

Do you seriously need someone to take you by the hand and make you write so you can be graded? If so, that's the only reason why you would want to take a course. And the grading isn't all that strict (they want you to pass).

It's not the same stuff you learn from working in the trenches of direct response marketing. Not at all.

In the trenches you learn that writing and testing alone is only going to make you a good copywriter. You never really know what's going to work until you test.

In the trenches you learn that psychology plays a bigger role than a course might tell you.

You think applying exactly what you learned is going to make you rich. When it doesn't.

Besides the fact that you can get a better education from books (and it's cheaper) than taking a course, you don't learn much from being graded by instructors. The only grades that tell you how well you're doing are the ones that come in dollar signs. You either get an F or a $.

Copywriting courses can't give you experience. Only failing, figuring out why you're failing, and correcting it can teach you for real.

Take my advice. You don't need to take an online course on writing advertising. Just hit the books. And write and test.

That's my opinion.