The best copywriting courses can benefit copywriters of all skill levels, from beginners to veterans. Continuing to learn and grow throughout your career helps you keep pace with industry trends and stay competitive when vying for jobs.
As copywriters, a healthy feeling of accomplishment can sometimes give us the sense that we’ve “made it.” We’ve learned what we needed to learn and crossed the finish line. But that would be doing a disservice to ourselves, our clients, and our craft.
Whether you come from a non-marketing field, like teaching or journalism, or consider yourself a seasoned marketer, there’s always something new to learn.
Copywriting Is a Journey, Not a Destination.
In the marketing world, trends change rapidly. The skills you gained yesterday may not be the ones you need tomorrow.
Search engine optimization (SEO), digital marketing, and cutting-edge Internet technologies are constantly evolving. Staying current with best practices lets you and your clients stay one step ahead of the competition.
Even for the most seasoned professionals, it’s important to maitain the tools in your copywriting toolbox and know how to wield them.
Copywriter Exchange wants to help creatives learn new and relevant skills that keep them at the top of their game—in fact, it’s one of our core missions. Here’s what you should know about the best copywriting courses for experienced copywriters.
What Can the Best Copywriting Courses Teach Us?
When you’re a beginner, you’re learning both how to run your business and write high-performing copy that meets clients’ expectations. This can be a bit overwhelming, and you may start out learning a little bit of everything.
As an established copywriter, you may want to brush up on the basics now and then. You may also be looking for more specific and specialized information from a copywriting course—building on what you already know.
This may include:
· Effective approaches to writing and editing content
· Core marketing strategies
· Freelance business management and growth skills
· Advanced SEO strategies to drive brand awareness and engagement
Not only are there always new skills to learn as a copywriter, but building off each of these skills means you’re always growing and staying competitive in the marketing world. Here are some of the best copywriting courses when it comes to honing these important skills.
Best Copywriting Courses for Craft
Whether it’s writing an attention-grabbing hook, ending on a strong CTA, formatting your copy effectively, or nailing the brand’s voice, the best copywriting courses can help you fine-tune your craft. You may be surprised that even after copywriting at a professional level for years, there’s always some new trick or surprising approach to help improve the presentation of your copy.
1. Advanced Copywriting (Udemy)
Udemy’s Advanced Copywriting course focuses on the sentence level of crafting effective copy. This course goes step by step through the process of using words to elicit surprise and enrich the reader’s experience, as well as how structure, sound, and the overall content strategy impact the copy. It also points out some common mistakes to avoid and how to refine your copy.
This course contains several hours of on-demand video lectures as well as lifetime access to several additional resources, allowing you to learn at your own pace and on your own schedule.
2. The Strategy of Content Marketing (UC Davis)
Learn about actionable content marketing strategies with this intermediate-level course created jointly by Copyblogger, UC Davis, and Professional Education. This course focuses on the strategies that will help you acquire and retain customers for your clients and prove the value of your work by meeting measurable goals.
Some of the topics covered include developing a content strategy from start to finish, writing compelling copy using a strategic framework, and analyzing and measuring how effective your content is. This course is fully online with flexible deadlines. It takes about 20 hours to complete.
3. Master Class on Writing (Malcolm Gladwell)
Learn how to improve your content from a storytelling perspective from accomplished journalist and New York Times bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. Gain a broader understanding of effective non-fiction writing, learn how to make complex ideas accessible, and use anecdotes and statistics to tell a story with your copywriting.
This online course contains 5 hours of video content—24 lessons to improve skills like communication, research, interviewing, data interpretation, and critical thinking.
Best Copywriting Courses for Freelance Business Skills
If you aren’t working as a staff writer in-house or at an agency, chances are you’re working freelance. If you’re a seasoned copywriter, you’ve likely already built up your freelance business to the degree that it’s successful. But without continually updating your knowledge or running a freelance copywriting business, you may fall behind important shifts in the industry or plateau on your earning potential. These courses will help your business keep growing.
1. Path of the Freelancer (Jason Scott Montoya)
Learn how to become a successful freelancer with author and freelance business, marketing, and sales expert Jason Scott Montoya. In these specialized courses hosted by Copywriter Exchange, you’ll learn how companies and freelancers work well together, how to build a steady stream of paying clients, and which steps to take toward long-term success as a flourishing freelancer.
In addition to these courses, you get access to all of the resources—copywriting articles, guides, templates—that Copywriter Exchange offers to writers of any background or experience level.
2. Launch Your Online Business (SUNY)
This online course by SUNY offers 16 hours of education and a certification for building your own online business. It will teach you different business models, how to create your brand identity and customer personas, how to build a Unique Value Proposition, website production, foundational marketing knowledge, and how to create a Pitch Deck for landing potential clients.
Even if you’re already familiar with how to do these things, this course will allow you to brush up on the current best practices and incorporate the perspectives of experts into how you approach running your freelance business.
Best Copywriting Courses for SEO
In the marketing world, SEO is a fact of life. Effective SEO will help your clients expand their digital footprint and domain authority and improve their rankings in organic Google searches. While you wouldn’t have made it this far without foundational SEO knowledge, the fact is that best practices for SEO often change, and you need to keep up or get left behind by the competition.
1. Learn Advanced SEO with UC Davis
If you want to brush up on SEO fundamentals, try UC Davis’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Specialization course. The course focuses on optimizing digital content to improve search rankings, with topics such as “on-page and off-page optimization, optimizing for local and international audiences, conducting search-focused website audits, and aligning SEO with overall business strategies.”
If you feel you already have a strong SEO foundation, try Advanced Search Engine Optimization Strategies. This free course developed by UC Davis “focuses on technical, mobile, and social strategies for increasing site traffic.”
It’s an intermediate level course with roughly 24 hours of valuable content. You’ll earn skills such as data analysis, analytics, marketing, and mathematical optimization.
2. Getting Started in Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a critical tool for analyzing how a domain and its online content are performing. The Coursera Project Network walks you through the key steps in setting up and effectively leveraging Google Analytics data to improve website performance.
The course teaches you step by step how to create a Google Analytics account and connect your website, how to utilize the tool and interpret data, and how to understand how the data is used to represent “the funnel.”
Regardless of which courses you use, Copywriter Exchange believes that creatives benefit from always learning and growing. Whether it’s improving our copy, building a long-term business strategy, or honing our SEO skills, when we work to better ourselves and our craft, we win.
Author Bio
Connor Holmes is a content writer with Content Workshop who comes from a diverse writing background. He worked as an award-winning public safety staff writer at his hometown newspaper, The Cape Coral Daily Breeze. He earned his MFA in creative writing and has professionally published fiction and poetry. He has also tutored English to students from grade school to grad school.
At Copywriter Exchange, we’re a group of master content marketing pros who bring their diverse talents and backgrounds to bear on the art and science of creating high-performance content tailored to your needs. We exist to help copywriters thrive in today’s economy by connecting them with the resources they need to step up their game. Join now to access our templates, guides, and courses to help you grow your career, skills, and network.
