Hi Everyone,

Wondering if any of you follow a structured methodology or checklist when you perform a copy critique.

If so, can you describe it - unless, of course, it's uber-mega proprietary and confidential

Truly,
--Eric

Yes -- but not for the postings here -- these aren't full critiques. These hardly qualify as partial critiques for a variety of reasons. Most people will scan through and mention the top two-to-five things that jump off the page.

That in no way, shape or form should be called more than a casual look-see.

Since there is no way in almost all cases to gain a full understanding of the product or service, the working information is limited. And posters are notorious for "name, rank, and serial number" posts with zero background information.

Nothing about the situation should lead posters to think they got something for nothing. While a several people may have a checklist, I doubt they bother to apply it here. Much of my checklist concerns research -- and you'd have to be kidding yourself to think you got more than ten or so minutes on any critique.

In the interest of saving time however, I have posted articles which cover those recurring problems I see in critiques: No/weak USP; features with few benefits; graphic design and layout; lack of coherency - checklist elements without a central theme or story; and serious deficiencies in what Eugene Schwartz calls "belief structure."

Make no mistake, you're not getting free copywriting by posting here.

And -- like swipefiles -- the checklist approach can become a crutch. Posting such a list would be a recipe for disaster: Even more letters which are no more than a loose collection of elements.

For example, one big problem with a lot of letters is thinking "Now I have to 'build rapport' for three paragraphs." The mistake is thinking you can't do several things with one piece of copy. It it the ability of good-to-great copywriters to walk and chew gum at the same time which make copy-by-checklists extremely misleading.

Related:

After you've ignored what I just wrote, you can check out Mark Stodard's The Marketing Power of 117: Or, Unleashing the gorilla marketer within you The "117" refers to a one-hundred-seventeen point checklist.

If you've read Bob Bly's books, go back over them. You can kinda sorta piece together a checklist from fragments throughout the books, although I couldn't recall which specific ones.

Headline & Opening Critique Please is like what happens with copy-by-checklist. You don't 'build rapport' in paragraphs 1-4, you do build rapport -- especially with B2B copy -- by showing your respect for the reader's time by getting to the point.

Skilled copywriters can build rapport and advance the selling story simultaneously. Boring copy is one-paragraph for one checklist-item.

For critiques on this board, I generally just kind of look for what ever jumps out at me. For requests that come from my site, I go a lot deeper. I usually start with some research on the industry itself. In fact, I look at the competition and see what they're doing.

Then I try to focus more on the target. I try to find forums where they openly talk about the products my client sells. I look for what they rave about and what they complain about. If I'm writing, I look for 'the big idea'. If I'm just doing a critique or analysis, I more or less just get a feel for the industry in general.

Then I look at the ad itself. I once had a checklist that I went through...but that gets kind of constrictive. After doing this for a while, a problem in a letter should just kind of jump out at a good copywriter.

Among the things I look for are:

uniqueness
readability
friendliness
frankness
timing
flow
selling power

These are pretty general terms, but again--I don't think about each one of them separately anymore.