I once got so excited about a content strategy framework that I literally clapped my hands together and said “oh, that’s delicious” in a restaurant. My dining companion looked at me with a mixture of affection and alarm, the way you’d look at a dog who’s just discovered a tennis ball machine.
I am not cool. I have never been cool. And every piece of effective copy I’ve ever written has come directly from that uncoolness, from the part of me that gets genuinely, embarrassingly thrilled about how ideas and words can change what people do.
Here’s the emotional truth most copywriters won’t admit: the moment you try to sound sophisticated is the moment your copy dies. Not quietly, either. It dies the way a balloon dies, a slow, sad deflation into a wrinkled puddle of unconvincing nothing.
I call this the Enthusiasm Gap, the distance between how excited you actually are about your topic and how excited your writing sounds. Close that gap and your conversion rates will take care of themselves.
Write While the Fire Is Hot
When something gets your pulse up, an insight, a turn of phrase, a customer story that makes your jaw drop, write it down immediately. Right then. Before the phone buzzes, before the meeting starts, before the feeling evaporates into the ambient fog of your Tuesday.
Professional writers keep capture tools everywhere. Notebooks. Index cards. Voice memos. (I have yet to crack the shower-writing problem, which is where roughly 80% of my best ideas arrive, dripping wet and unreachable.)
Don’t judge what you’re capturing. Most of it will be junk. That’s fine. You’re not building a monument, you’re panning for gold.
John Caples, one of the greats of direct response, put it this way:
“An advertisement that has been pounded out in the white heat of enthusiasm can be tamed and made effective. But it is impossible to put life into dead copy.”
Read that again. You can edit enthusiasm into shape. You cannot edit life into something that was born dead.
Write fast. Write messy. Write while your heart is pounding. The shaping comes later.
The Fakeness Detector
You’ve seen those Saturday Night Live ad parodies, the ones that lampoon the breathless, over-the-top enthusiasm of real commercials? They work as comedy because we’ve all encountered that specific brand of phoniness. The smile that’s too wide. The exclamation points that are doing too much. The energy that feels like it’s being projected from a different, more caffeinated universe.
People can smell fake enthusiasm the way dogs can smell fear. From a distance. Instantly. And it repels them just as fast.
There’s nothing wrong with manufacturing energy sometimes. Even Tony Robbins probably has Mondays where he’d rather stay in bed. But if you’re “faking it till you make it” as your default operating mode, your readers know. They always know.
When you feel the fire going out, don’t reach for a louder font. Try this instead:
- Talk to a customer who genuinely loves what you do. One real conversation about real value can fuel weeks of writing. (This is probably the single most underused tactic in all of marketing.)
- Sit down with the product creator. Let their geeky energy transfer to you like a beneficial virus.
- Go research-hunting. Dig until you find the one fascinating detail, the statistic, the story, the mechanism, that makes you sit up straight. Then translate that into a benefit that makes your reader sit up straight too.
And if none of that works? If the topic has gone genuinely cold and no amount of journalistic effort can thaw it? Start looking for your next gig.
Life is too short to read boring copy. It’s definitely too short to write it.
The Dork Mandate
Here is the uncomfortable truth about writing with genuine enthusiasm: it will not make you look cool.
Enthusiastic copy is not polished. It is not sophisticated. It is not the person at the cocktail party holding court with an air of detached amusement. It is the person at the cocktail party who got genuinely excited about a cheese and wants to tell you why.
It’s dorky. Unabashedly, unselfconsciously dorky.
And that is precisely its power.
Any creative person worth a damn has an inner dork, that part of you that gets irrationally, disproportionately excited about something other people don’t see the magic in yet. Business writers dress it up with the word “passion” to make it sound more dignified, but let’s be honest: the engine underneath is pure, unapologetic dorkiness. (I’m a dork about content and relationships. There, I said it. I feel better.)
In a world where machines can produce technically competent copy in seconds, genuine enthusiasm is the one thing that can’t be simulated convincingly for long. Your readers sense the difference between a sentence that was constructed and a sentence that was felt. Between content that was generated and content that someone actually cared about.
Your Dork Signal, that thing you care about so much it makes you a little breathless, is not a liability. It’s your competitive advantage. It’s what separates writing that converts from writing that exists merely to occupy pixels.
Capture your enthusiasm while it’s hot. Shape it with craft. And never, ever apologize for caring too much.
The readers who matter will love you for it. The ones who don’t? They were never going to buy from you anyway.