Understanding the Psychology of Copywriting and Webpages. A Review.

In August 2019,
I decided to become a copywriter.

The first obstacle: Making sense of all the content out there.

There are thousands of ‘gurus’ preaching different things or contradicting each other. Every day new breakthrough methods are presented online. And everything gets confusing pretty quickly.

And let’s just forget that they all pretty much say the same thing. As if they copied each other… *cough*

The second obstacle: Choosing a framework for writing copy.

I think most people are afraid to look for clients because they think they’re not good enough. And ohhhhh boy, am I one of them!

Well, not so much anymore as you’ll see as you keep reading.

Oh and, if you’re like me…

The third obstacle: Being a non-native English speaker…

… that makes it even harder to start a freelancing career working with international clients.

That’s quite a few obstacles you have to deal with, isn’t it?

Anyway.

One day, I came across an interesting website. It’s a website that teaches marketing professionals essential skills like product messaging, the art of split-testing, content-marketing, and much more.

In fact, in this blog post, I will be reviewing that website, more specifically, the ‘Digital Psychology & Persuasion Mini-Degree Program’.

This program allows students to earn a certification from the CXL Institute. If you haven’t heard of CXL before you should take a look at their website.

Especially if you want to start a career or you’re already working in online marketing.

Why? Because I truly think this might be one of the best marketing educations out there. Especially if you’re serious about becoming a marketing professional yourself.

Not only can you earn a certification from a certified LinkedIn partner…

But, if you want to go the extra mile…

… or, if you’re a non-native speaker like me who HAS to go the extra mile…

… this can be a chance for you to prove to your future clients that you know your sh*t.

This is the reason why I decided to take the certification program. And if you can relate to any of this, let’s get to the review.

First things first…

I haven’t even watched the whole program yet. But here’s the thing…

For the next upcoming 12 weeks, I’m going through the ‘Digital Psychology & Persuasion Mini-Degree Program’. And every week, I will write about my experiences, discoveries, and thoughts on this certification program.

Plus, I will share with you if and how it has helped me to become a better marketer and copywriter.

Before we continue, let me share one thing with you right off the bat…

Their ‘Product Messaging’ course is hands down the best copywriting course I’ve ever enrolled in. And I will explain to you why in a minute. But first, let me tell you what this is all about.

There are 3 modules in this course:

1. Psychology Foundations

2. Neuromarketing and Persuasion Models

3. Applied Behavioral Psychology

Each of these 3 modules tracks consist of several courses covering all sorts of topics.

• Module 1 covers everything from the psychology of attention to the psychology of emotions and even the psychology of learning and memory. Super valuable stuff!.
• Module 2 goes in-depth into neuromarketing, and specifically, lots of persuasion models and cognitive biases you need to know as a marketer
• Module 3 goes into how to gain trust from people, how to use urgency, social proof, emotional targeting, and even specific things like capturing attention in emails for example.

You also get a study guide which tells you which video lessons you need to watch to prepare for the exam.

So you don’t have to learn EVERYTHING to get certified, but you’ll want to go through everything because there is so much information that you’ll want to absorb.

What I noticed first:

They really explain the WHY of digital psychology.

You get an in-depth understanding of all the basic and most important principles of digital psychology and how to drive higher conversions, get and keep attention, and how to structure your copy, webpage, and much more.

Plus, to illustrate the lessons they’ve just taught, they show you many great examples of websites using the principles you just learned about.

So it’s not a quick course. There is A LOT to discover! And it’s from leading authorities and scientists from around the world, which I really like.

In this first week, I went through the ‘People and Psychology’ course (from Module 1) and the ‘Product Messaging’ course (Module 3).

The latter one is basically a complete copywriting course teaching you how to write and edit a sales or landing page from scratch… just way more in-depth than any other course I’ve ever watched.

Let’s start with the ‘People and Psychology’ course.

People and PsychologyPsychlogy

The course starts off with Cialdini 6… no, 7! principles of persuasion. I didn’t’ know there is a new 7th principle. So I immediately learned something new right from the start.

It then goes into motivation psychology.

How does motivation work?

What are the 3 types of motivations you can speak to?

How can you influence certain behaviors and what type of behaviors actually exist?

And which of these behaviors are most often triggered online? And how should you do it?

You then get an impressive list of persuasion techniques and cognitive biases you should always be aware of when creating or testing your webpages. It’s a brilliant reference guide basically.

Finally, you get introduced to a few emotion principles and a really interesting e-commerce case study, where they researched the connection between value perceptions and image sizes of products online.

The results were actually super counter-intuitive and interesting to keep in mind when trying to increase the perceived value of your products.

Everything is broken down into digestible chunks of information and explained really well.

Product Messaging

Now comes the most exciting part. This course gave me a clear step-by-step plan on how to go about my research for writing copy…

And not only that…

The process they teach makes so much sense!

They explain to you, all the core psychological concepts you need to know to write persuasive copy.

And you get introduced to a data-driven step-by-step process you can follow to hit all the key components for great copy. I absolutely loved it.

From basics like Cialdini’s principles to essential rules from Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising as well as a framework to craft your unique value proposition…

… all put together and demonstrated how they are working together to craft an effective sales message.

And the best part? You get templates and extremely useful spreadsheets for your research and copy structure.

It’s kind of like an automated researching process, that lets you type in customer voice data, categorize it after appeal, type of data, etc. and then creates a sorted google sheet for you.

You then can use this sheet to construct your web copy without having to think much about what to write and where to write it. I can’t stress how awesome that is and how much time it can save you.

I used to clunk tons of words into one Word doc before… and pick out whatever I need looking at the doc over and over again.

This new method allows me to sort everything and save massive time. Because it’s all categorized, sorted, and clearly presented for me to use immediately. Brilliant.

Plus, they show you demos of how they use it. So you can start using everything they give you right away.

It’s like a clear and MODERN approach to copywriting, instead of using confusing old formulas from the 1960ies… because you know… learning copywriting means reading 100-year-old books. :)

So for me, it’s definitely the FIRST complete ‘system’ I can follow to write copy for any page. A TRUE step-by-step and data-driven approach to copywriting. Genius.

Oh, and one more thing…

They provide you with a 2 minute-checklist to validate any sales or landing page.

Do you know how valuable this is? It’s one of the best things when looking for potential customers in my opinion.

It gives you the ability to scan literally ANY site and cold email potential clients by giving them value upfront.

This alone can literally bring me my next client. And more importantly… it gives me the confidence to actually approach potential customers!

And one last thing…

There was a lot of text to read, even though the product messaging course consisted of 100% video tutorials.

This might come across like reading textbook after textbook for some people.

Personally, I don’t really mind, but I thought I should point this out since some people prefer video or audio over text. So let’s see how the rest will be like.

Conclusion so far:

If you’re like me and your brain craves a reason why for everything you learn, this is the course you should be watching.

Plus, if you want the best course on copywriting and product messaging I’ve ever watched… you should consider getting this. No doubt.

For the next week, I’ll go through the ‘Attention Basics’ course, teaching how to get and HOLD attention online. Can’t wait for this one.

Till next week,

Sascha