Master copywriter and marketer Dan Kennedy, in his highly popular and successful copywriting seminars, likes to tell his students that "sometimes good enough is good enough" when it comes to a piece of sales copy.

What does Dan mean by this?

Simply put, you don't need to reinvent wheel in order to write successful copy. What has worked in past can and will work again.

Learning to effectively "swipe" from winning sales letters is one of most important skills you can develop as a copywriter. And, contrary to what you may sometimes hear, there is nothing "unethical" or "sleazy" about it. Every great copywriter employs swipe techniques to some extent.

The key to writing good swipe copy is awareness. By keeping focused on a few key areas you'll quickly develop a sense of what can work for you and your market.

Here are a few tips for writing swipe copy that works.

1) Be on lookout for parallel markets

Parallel markets to your own niche offer great opportunities to borrow elements for your own purposes.

For example, let's say you're writing a piece for a website that sells dog toys.

Your first possibility for a parallel market would be any website that sells pet toys (other than dog toys). You'd also want to look at sites that sell children's toys (although I certainly don't want to imply that dogs and children have a lot in common!) :-)

After this you could stray further afield and look at sites that sell other pet accessories. Keep in mind that you are looking for successful sales elements that might work for you. Anything and everything that looks like it could work for your own campaign needs to be taken into consideration, as long as it's been proven successful. Parallel niches offer a golden opportunity because of their similarities to your own niche.

How do you determine if a parallel niche site is successful?

Use Alexa to see what kind of traffic they get. Search around Web a bit and see how often their name pops up. More than anything though, just use your marketing instincts to sniff out quality of what they're doing in terms of direct response.

If you think they may be doing OK then sign up for their newsletter or f.ree report or autoresponder series. Study their marketing diligently.

If you get even one idea for your copy from a parallel marketer then you've done well.

Occasionally marketers hit jackpot and find a full letter that fits their market's purposes to tee (with a few alterations needed here and there). But more often it's an approach or an element of sales letter that proves useful.

2) Know your target market's level of awareness

As you know, you need to be on a very intimate level with your market. You need to know their wants and needs inside out.

For freelance copywriters this can be a particularly troublesome area, because freelancers often have difficulty just jumping into prospects' shoes at drop of a hat. Thus many freelancers choose to specialize in a few select niches whose target markets they do have a good understanding of and/or can learn about without an inordinate amount of work.

But beyond a good working knowledge of your market's wants and needs there's also a knowledge of its level of awareness or sophistication.

You'll want to determine how much knowledge your prospects have of techniques used standardly in sales copy which targets them. With our dog toys example, online market's level of awareness would be fairly low. New ads for this market could be brought in from other parallel areas without much fuss.

But with a market like online marketers, for instance, level of awareness would be quite a bit higher. Copy aimed at this audience needs to take that higher level into consideration and not make mistake of using worn-out copy from past that every marketer has seen a million times.

Over time market's level of awareness will increase (and with Internet we find that online shoppers' levels of awareness in general are increasing, thus making some of techniques seen even a few years ago less effective). And so you need to stay in tune with what's going on in whole marketing arena for your product or service.

From perspective of a business owner, webmaster, or marketing manager, change exhibited by Internet is profoundly exciting, yet profoundly disturbing. The information (and misinformation and disinformation) it offers, business benefits it promises, and rules it is governed by change at such a rapid rate that it’s almost impossible to keep up.

These changes have led to a growing appreciation of value of quality web copy. This appreciation has, in turn, led to an influx of opportunistic ‘copywriters’ promoting themselves as website copywriters or SEO copywriters. Don’t get me wrong, there are quite a few excellent SEO copywriters out there, and you should definitely shop around. The purpose of this article isn’t to scare you; it’s to help you find SEO copywriter who’ll deliver honest service and excellent results.

So with that in mind, take a look at following ten tips. These are things you have a right to expect from anyone wearing a name badge that reads “website copywriter”, “SEO copywriter”, “internet copywriter”, or “web copywriter”… (See also 10 Things to Expect From Your Website Copywriter and How to Make Most of Your Website Copywriter.)

1) An understanding of SEO

Obviously, your SEO copywriter must have a solid understanding of essentials of Search Engine Optimization. They must know that ranking is essentially result of a website’s relevance (i.e. keywords) and importance (i.e. inbound links). There are a whole lot of other factors involved, but if your SEO copywriter doesn’t understand these two basics, you should look elsewhere. If you’d like to ensure your SEO copywriter knows a little more than just basics, take a look at SEO for CEOs, Writing SEO Copy, SEO Trade Secrets, Web Copy - How Much is Enough?, and How to Top Google by Writing Articles for some clues as to what you might like to ask in order to assess their knowledge.

2) Proven experience

The proof is, as they say, in pudding. It’s not enough that your SEO copywriter can talk talk; they must also be able to walk walk. Ask to see some examples of websites for which they’ve obtained some good rankings. Note that it may be very difficult to find an SEO copywriter who has actually worked on both keywords and link generation, so if you find one who has, and they write well, snap ‘em up! They’ll have a very broad and useful working knowledge of search engines.

3) An understanding of how many keywords to use

You don’t want to fill every page up with every keyword you’re targeting. This simply dilutes your site’s relevance and reduces readability. Ask your SEO copywriter how many keywords they would recommend targeting on each page. Hopefully they’ll suggest no more than 3, preferably 2. By targeting 2 keyword phrases per page, you can use them a lot without impacting readability.

4) Clear agreement on who will provide keywords

Someone needs to perform a keyword analysis in order to figure out what words you should be trying to rank highly for. Your SEO copywriter should be able to do this for you, but it’s quite often more cost-effective if someone a little closer to business does it. Either way, make sure your agreement with your SEO copywriter makes it very clear who is performing this task. Don’t assume SEO copywriter is going to do it, because they may assume you’re going to do it, and then you’ll blow your budget.

5) Keywords or keyword phrases

Expect your SEO copywriter to offer some advice regarding how specific you should be with your keywords. In most industries, competition for keywords is so fierce that you’ll be forced to target very specific keywords in order to rank – at least at outset. For instance, if you’re in IT, you probably wouldn’t start out by targeting keyword “IT”. The competition is immense (at time of writing, there were approx 3,240,000,000 results for this search in Google.com) and IT giants already dominate search engines for this keyword. Instead, try using a more specific keyword phrase like “IT infrastructure consulting new york” (at time of writing, there were only around 4,000,000 results for this search in Google.com). The other benefit to targeting more specific keyword phrases is that you’ll generate more relevant leads.