The 5 Must-Have Tools for Copywriters
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In this week’s episode, I’m dishing out the top 5 tools that will transform your copywriting process. 🔥
From a powerful app that helps you clarify your writing to a simple email hack for inbox domination, these tools will supercharge your writing — whether you're just starting out or you're a seasoned pro. 🚀
Available now everywhere you get your podcasts.
Tools mentioned in the episode:
→ Hemingway Editor App: https://hemingwayapp.com
→ Email Subject Line Previewer: https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/email-subject-lines-tester
→ Coschedule Headline Studio: https://headlines.coschedule.com/headlines
→ Asana: https://www.asana.com
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(This is transcribed by 🤖 so please excuse the funky sentence breaks, misplaced periods, and typos. The robots are doing their best!)
[00:00:00] I am totally in love with it. It is like an extra little part of my brain that helps me stay organized, stay on task, brainstorm, and just not lose anything that I need to keep handy when it comes to stuff that I'm working on.Hello and welcome to the Copy Lab podcast, the marketing and business podcast that teaches you how to write better, sell more, and ignite your business even if you suck at writing. I'm your host Sara Estes, entrepreneur, copywriter, marketing strategist, and founder of Copy Tiger, where I help changemakers, disruptors and dreamers get their message to the masses.
Let's get started.
Hello, hello and welcome to this week's episode of Copy Lab. As always, I'm super happy to be here with you. When I say that, it kind of reminds me of my 8thgrade journalism teacher. His name was Mr. Medic, and every single day at the beginning of class, he would stand up at the front of the class and say, “It's a great day to be alive!”, And then he would make all of us say the exact same thing in unison. At the time, I thought it was so corny and terrible as an angsty little teenager. I did not want to say that, but. The older I get, the more I think that was really sweet and he was really onto something. He was a super chill dude, and I kind of love that he did that now.
Anyway, let's get into it. So this week I wanna tell you about my top five favorite tools that I use for copywriting. Now I narrowed it down to five because these are the ones that are really kind of game changers for me. And if you aren't using them yet, then I really, really recommend it. So we're gonna talk about all five of them, and I'm obviously not including things like.
My computer or other stuff like that, that's super obvious that you need to, um, be a writer. But these are kind of new-ish. Some of it is not new, but software that I'm using are programs that I use on a daily basis for everything I write. That helps me tremendously. So let's launch into it. All right. My number one favorite tool to use when I'm copywriting is the Hemingway editor app.
If you have not been acquainted with the Hemingway app yet, it is amazing. From the second I started using it, I absolutely fell in love. So I wanna tell you about it, how it works, what it does, and then also how I use it in my copywriting. So the Hemingway editor is a browser tool. They have a desktop app too, but I just use it straight out of the browser because it's really cool in the fact that you don't actually have to log in.
You can just type in Hemingwayapp.com and you get taken right to the interface, which is pretty badass if you ask me. So when you go on there, what you'll do is you'll basically delete the text that's already in the editor. You'll see like kind of a big text box. And what you do is you copy and paste your writing into that box.
And what it's gonna do is it's gonna highlight. In all different colors where your writing needs work. Now, what the Hemingway editor focuses on when it comes to making edits and suggestions is how to simplify your writing. So how to take it from being kind of maybe a little overly written, meaning the words are too big or it's hard to understand, or your sentences or run on sentences.
What it does is it's gonna take your writing and it's gonna suggest ways to simplify it. So it's gonna tell you where maybe you have too many adverbs or adjectives. It's gonna tell you when your sentences are too long, making them hard to read. It's gonna tell you when you can use a shorter word. To replace a phrase or a sentence.
So it's basically gonna say, here's how you can consolidate this and make it a shorter punchier buzzier sentence. And one of my favorite parts of the Hemingway editor app is it flags passive voice so that you can change it to active voice. Now, if you've ever taken any kind of writing course or you know, back in school, this was always harped on and I actually didn't pay attention to it until later on in my writing life.
And now I swear by it. But passive voice is basically when you write in a way that doesn't describe who is doing the action. So instead of saying, I cooked dinner, you would say dinner was cooked. And what it does is it's basically just not as accurate and it's not as powerful. So putting someone in the subject.
So putting someone in the. Action. Taking position, whether it's you or another person or you know, whatever, whoever the subject of the sentence is. When you make it active, it's clearer, it's more correct, in fact, and it's more enjoyable to read. And it's surprising how often we actually use the passive voice when we're writing, and it can be kind of a crutch when we're not sure what we're trying to say or when we're trying.
To remove the blame or the pressure on a particular thing. So passive voice can actually be a good tool if you're trying to create distance or you're actually trying to hide or veil sort of who was the person acting. But for the most part, when you're telling a story or when you're writing copy, you really don't ever wanna do that.
So you always wanna have active sentences. So another factor of Hemingway is it tells you what grade level your writing is at. While you might be proud that your writing is at a grade 12 level, it's actually not good for copywriting. So for copywriting, you want. You're writing to be at a grade six at the most, and there are actually people like Alex Hormo, I don't know if you follow him.
He is, um, kind of a business, business guy who actually has a lot of wonderful thoughts on copywriting. I lo his Instagram has some pretty good reels where he will post about his, um, copywriting rules and they're totally on point. But what's pretty crazy is that he suggests. And what he does is he writes at a third grade level for all of his copy, and he swears by that, which is very interesting.
So the reason why you want to keep your writing simple, it's not because you're trying to dumb things down, and it's not because people can't read at a higher level, but really what it's about, Is the speed of reading. So think about it for a second. If you're trying to get someone to read all about your offer, all about what you're doing, and maybe you have a long form sales page and you want them to get all of that content, you don't want them stopping to try and figure out what a sentence means.
You want it to be so easy to read that they're flying through it. That does a few different things. It makes them feel really good about being able to move through your work very easily and quickly. It kind of feels like an accomplishment, a box checked, so it makes the reader feel really good that they're just reading through and just coasting on by.
Whereas if you have really long, difficult sentences with a lot of commas and a lot of phrases and things like that, it just. Stops people up. So you end up getting these certain places where there's a bottleneck. It's hard to read and sometimes people just stop reading cuz it's not fun anymore and that's what you want to avoid.
So Hemingway can be a total lifesaver because it can be pretty surprising when you paste your writing into that document. And then you've got a lot of places that are highlighted red because I think as you're writing it can be easy to create long sentences because they're kind of. Flowing in your head and you're trying to be accurate and you're trying to be really clear and descriptive about what you're saying, and really most of us kind of overdo it.
So the Hemingway app is really awesome in that it kind of pulls back a little bit from that over-explaining overs, describing that can often happen, especially if you're writing for. A like physical product or something like that. So when you put your work in there, you're gonna tweak it, you're gonna edit it, you are going to basically try and get it to where it's all just white so there's nothing highlighted.
And then you're gonna look at that grade level and you're gonna see what grade level you're at. And anything below, like I said, anything below a grade six is pretty. Good. If you can go for grade three, see if you can simplify, cuz really simple writing is not easy. It's actually very, very difficult because. What it means is that you have to know exactly what you're talking about and exactly what you're trying to say to say it simply.
I really like the user interface of this. It's super simple, very sleek, very intuitive to use, which I always appreciate in any kind of software, any kind of tool that I'm using. So that gets five stars from me. I highly recommend that app. Go check it out. If you haven't played around with it yet, it's totally free to use.I think they probably have a paid version of it, but I don't use that. I just do the free one.
All right. The second tool that I want to recommend is an email subject line Previewer. If you have not used one of these, if you've ever written emails to anybody, if you have an email newsletter, if you write sales emails, if you have any kind of email process in your business whatsoever, I highly recommend using a Previewer tool to see how you're Subject line is going to look when it comes into someone's inbox now, so what it does is it will have three forms and I'll include the link to the particular email subject line previewer that I use. It's emailtooltester.com, and then you go in and you find it, I'll put a direct link to it in the show notes.
If you haven't visited my show notes yet, I basically have everything on my website and there's a link to it in the description of this podcast. So if you're in Spotify or Apple Podcast, you can just click down in the description and it will take you to the show notes and you can see. You know, anything that I talk about I usually link to.
So the email subject line previewer will show you how an email is gonna look when it comes into someone's inbox. And the real beauty of this is that subject lines can be way shorter than you think they are in terms of how many characters show up. When someone's on their phone, and it's important to remember that most people are checking their emails on their phone.
So that character limit of what gets shown to someone is really important because if you have a sentence that really depends on that last word coming through in order to make any kind of sense, then you wanna make sure that it all shows when someone's. Scrolling through their inbox list. So what the Previewer does is it's basically got a little form that has, you know, you put the from address, you put the subject line, and then you put the preview text and right below it, it's got a little picture of the phone, a little mock-up, and it shows you exactly what it's gonna look like.
And it's amazing because you don't have to continue to send test emails to see what they look like on your phone. Cuz that's what I did before I found this tool. I would just like send tests to make sure that. The entire subject line was visible, and I have found also a little added benefit to this is that when I see something mocked up like this, I can.
Tell what's wrong about the copy? So if the subject line just isn't intriguing enough or it just doesn't pull any kind of weight, I can see that when I see it on a phone. I think it's just, I can imagine someone reading it a little better than. When I'm typing it into like my convert kit form where I'm doing the whole email automation sequence or something like that, it just is a lot more clear and helps me come up with better ideas for my email subject lines.
Preview text can be tricky. Also psa. If you're not using preview text, if you're not taking full advantage of that little gold mine, the little treasure chest, that is the preview text. If you're not sure what I'm talking about, that is the little bit of copy that shows up right under the. Subject line. So most people think that it has to be just the first part of your email, but that's not true.
You can actually put the preview text that you want in most email service providers. So you're gonna put the subject line, you're gonna put the preview text, and it doesn't have to match what that, what the first couple of lines are in your email. So you always wanna take advantage of that. You want to use the subject line and then you want to have that preview text respond or in some way support that subject line.
So if you're sending out emails, please pay attention to that preview line. All right. Now the third tool that I absolutely love is co schedules Headline Studio. And what this is is a magnificent way to score your headlines and make your headlines better. So headlines can be tricky. It can be hard to know what is going to have a broad appeal.
And sometimes the stuff that you think is really catchy and really, you know, a great hook might actually not be. And it's really important to remember that with headlines, it's not so much about how catchy the words are or how cool it can sound, it's more about are you actually getting the point across and hooking your reader?
So what this really helps to do, Is to make sure you're using, they kind of score you on like emotional words and what they call power words, and they have all different types of words that they wanna make sure that you're putting in the headline so that you're making it as rich as. And a punchy as possible.
So what you can do is you can go to the site and like I said, it's co-schedule dot com and they have a little, um, dropdown, I'll link to this as well. Um, and you can go to the headline studio portion. I pay for a subscription to this, actually, because I use it for virtually everything. So, I wanted a subscription to it, but they have a free version where it's just you get a limited amount of like headlines that you can test.
But I've found it really, really helpful. And the other huge perk of using this for writing headlines is that it gives you an SEO score as well. So keep in mind that headlines have a lot of weight when it comes to seo. So when. The little SEO crawlers are crawling on your site, taking note of what's all on there, and it's all, you know, this is how they rank your site in search engines like Google.
So if you're gonna come up at the top, you know they've got crawlers on every website, so, What they do is that they actually put more weight to headlines than other parts of the text. So typically headlines are written in what's called like H one or H two. So when we select something and we put it into the H one or H two mode in whatever text field that we are writing in.
So you know, if you're on Squarespace and you put in a block of text on your website and you. Select your headline and you turn it into an H one or an H two. That means it's going to register that as essentially a more important part of the website, which is why you need to be using that H one and H two, and not just sizing things randomly.
So you know, putting in like 36. Point font or whatever, use those H one s and H two s, because what that's gonna do is it's gonna tell the SEO crawlers to pay close attention to that particular line. So with that in mind, you really want your head headlines to be super SEO friendly. So you wanna make sure that they have the right keywords in them and that they're making the best use of each and every word.
So that. You get better SEO functionality out of it. So that's part of the reason why I love using the co-schedule headline studio. So when you go there, you'll type in your headline, and if you're doing a few, at first, it can be really disheartening because you get a low score and you're like, oh, I thought.
I thought that was a good headline, but once you get past the brokenheartedness of the fact that you had a shitty headline, you start to tweak it and make little changes. You change this word, you switch around the structure a little bit, so they're scored on a scale of one to a hundred, 100 being the best, and it also goes from red, yellow to green.
So if you put in a headline and at first it's yellow, you can start tweaking it, changing a word here, switching around the structure, adding in more power words, adding in more emotional words, and you'll slowly see the scores start to rise if you're, if you're going in the, the right direction with it. So once you get to something green, that means your headline is pretty good.
Now, the general benchmark from what I've collected from my peers in the industry. Is that if you can get in the seventies, in the high seventies, you're doing pretty good. If you've got a score that's like in the eighties or nineties, you are gold. Go with it. Don't try and tweak it anymore. So really anything above that 75 mark is.
ACEs. So that's what I'm always aiming for. So if you aren't sure about your headline, and it doesn't have to be just a headline for a website, it's, I'm talking about titles for blogs, titles for podcasts, titles for basically anything. If it has the pressure of getting people to click, then you need to know if it's a catchy headline.
So keep in mind that this can be used in all different kinds of ways. And it's really fun actually to, it's kind of, it kind of gamifies the writing process, which I love. And you can kind of see your score changing as you switch things around. And you can also see what words work best. So if your headline's lacking, and you need to put a better word in there, they have an entire word list that you can choose from.
So you just, you know, look through them all and pick the word that works best for you. So I love using this. It's super fun. I don't. Always go with the headline they suggest or the one with the highest score. Sometimes I believe in my heart that one that just happens to score lower on theirs is actually the right headline, and I've been in the right a lot of those times.
So, you know, take it with a grain of salt. It's a machine, it's a program. It's not a human heart, but it can be a really great litmus test to how well your headline is gonna do once it's out in the world. Alright, the fourth tool that I absolutely love is kind of obvious. It's Google Docs. If you're a working copywriter or writer of any sort, you need to be using Google Docs.
If you are using Microsoft Word, honey, stop, please switch over to Google Docs. It has so much better functionality. It's amazing, and I just don't know how I lived without Google Docs. I wanna talk about why I love it so much and why it's such a great tool for writers who are communicating with clients, or if you're just writing your own stuff and you need to save it, first off, it's got a great collaboration aspect.
You can work in the doc with several people. You can make comments, you can do all of the stuff. So if you are collaborating on anything with someone, rather than sending. Microsoft Word versions back and forth a million times. Please hop on Google Docs and collaborate there. The other thing I love is, and this is maybe my favorite feature of Google Docs of all time, and that is the page list setup.
So the reality is, is that for most online writers, there's no need for those page breaks. When you see, like if you open a Microsoft Word document, the page is broken up into individual pieces of paper. Basically. That's how it's structured. But here's the thing, we rarely print out the stuff that we're writing, and for me, I write copy for online places only.
I don't ever print anything out, so there's really no reason for. My writing to be broken up into eight and a half by 11 pieces of paper. So when I'm writing a sales page, I actually just wanna see it as one document the same way it would look on a website. So something that you're just scrolling through, but doesn't have any of those eight and a half by 11 breaks.
So in Google Docs you can set up a page list document. So it's just one big long scrolling white document, and that's. Is amazing. That's what I write all my sales pages on. That's what I do all of my email sequences with. So I have it default to the page list setup, and I just think it's a lot more reflective of how we are actually writing and actually using long form documents today.
So, That's something I love. If you haven't set the page list view as your default, I recommend doing it. I find it to just be way better and make a lot more sense for writing in the digital age. Now, of course, if you print out a lot of stuff, great, keep it as the piece of paper look. But I think for a lot of us, in a lot of like marketers and copywriters who are working in the digital space, the page view is the shit.
I love it. All right. Moving on to our fifth and final tool that I absolutely love. This is a big one. It keeps my entire business in order, and that is, Asana. I have used Asana for going on seven and a half years now, I think, and I am totally in love with it. It is like an extra little part of my brain that helps me stay organized.
Stay on task, brainstorm and just not lose anything that I need to keep handy When it comes to stuff that I'm working on, Asana is a task management system. If you haven't used it, it is a really beautiful, easy to use, intuitive system. It's. Totally free to use. They have plenty of upgrades for like, you know, if you, if you have a lot of users that are gonna be on it, say you have a small business with a team, or you are working with clients who you want to be on it, then you have to pay.
But if you're just using it for your. Self, then it's totally free, which is actually amazing. Consider considering all the things that it does. So I make projects for every copywriting client that I have, every copywriting project, and I use it to take notes on calls, to write down all of my brainstorming ideas.
I also put in all the links to Google Docs or anything that clients send me, and I compile it all in the Asana task. I have the Asana app on my phone, so I can very easily look at things when I'm on the go, when I'm on the road, and I never lose track of anything. And you can view things in terms of deadlines and you can view things on the calendar.
So it makes it really easy to keep up with everything that you need to do. So if you are running a business or you are managing, even if it's just one other team member or an employee, Ploy or anything like that. I highly recommend incorporating this even if you don't have a lot of work going yet, or say you're just getting started in whatever business you're doing.
If you're a writer or a real estate agent, or a painter, or a graphic designer, whatever you're doing. Get started in this now because once you set up your systems, you can grow so easily if you know how to use it. And it's so much easier to start implementing these systems at the very beginning when you can kind of backtrack, change how you're doing things, experiment, play a little bit.
It doesn't feel like a huge mess or a huge undertaking to change how you're doing things. Whereas if you wait until you've got a lot of stuff going on, then it becomes hard to implement these systems and make little changes when you realize something isn't really. Optimized or how you like it to be. So that's my recommendation.
If you're running a business like me, go ahead, start using task management tools like Asana and it will change your life and just streamline everything and help you become more organized because that is the bane of existence for anyone who is running a business. If you're disorganized, you are in hell.
So sign up, get an account, start using this stuff and playing around with it. You will thank me later. Alright, we are going to end it there. Those are my five favorite tools for copywriting and if you have any thoughts on these things or you have other tools to recommend, I am all ears. I would love to hear from you.
Please DM me @CopyLabPodcast on Instagram. Or leave a comment on the post for this podcast. I would love to hear from you. I am always looking for the latest, greatest tools to use when it comes to writing. If you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet, head to copy tiger.com/newsletter and get on that.
I send weekly emails about this podcast, so you'll never miss an episode and I also share stories, content tips, and other things that only go through my email list. I don't share them anywhere else, so join me there. You won't regret it. It's fun stuff. Also, be sure to follow and subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And remember, the right words can help you make a huge difference in the world. So keep writing. I'll see you in the next episode.