I’m going to tell you how to do something that is not always easy.  If you do use this information however you will be building enormous wealth creating potential into your business.

To start, your business name is very important.  If you have an existing business or website, you may be restricted in how you can rename or rebrand it,  but if you are thinking of launching a new business the following is must-know information for you.

What’s In A Name?

Coming up with a name for your business can be a challenge—especially when you need to match the name-branding to a domain you can get.  If you’re promoting a website and trying to do any kind of branding you should not consider using anything other than a .COM.

The problem with domain types other than dot-coms is that, in general, people are going to go to the dot-com first.  They won’t remember that you’re the  other “Flowers To Go” —they’ll just go to your competitor’s website.  Basically, if you don’t get the dot-com you’ll be driving traffic to your competitor on your dime.

You might want to call your flower store “Flowers To Go” but if you tried to get the dot-com you’d be paying through the nose for it if it were even for sale.

Ugh.

What’s the SOLUTION then?

Well, you need to be a little creative to get an available .COM nobody else is squatting on and only willing to sell for a fortune.  You’ll have to find a way to make an available .COM memorable.

The store name doesn’t have to be identical to the URL but there should be a memorable and sense-making connection between them.  If you think in terms of how you can connect the two at the beginning you’ll be much better off in the end.

Don’t Get Cute

In terms of coming up with a name for the business, going cute is usually a dumb idea.  Lots of pet grooming businesses, nail salons, and hair studios have stupid-cute names, but  I challenge you to find any business with a cutesy name that’s really grown.  ‘Nuff said.

HOT TIP

1st Criteria: Telling What Your Business Is In The Name

A lot of business names gratify the ego of the founder/owner.  That’s fine if that person’s name on the business is an asset because he or she is already well-known,  but in most cases the public won’t know or care who you are or what your personal name is.  They only want  to know, “what’s in it for me (to pay any attention at all to you)?”

That’s right!  Not a single one of your prospects or customers gives a rat’s rump about you!  They only care what you will do for them!

This classic rule of advertising (the WIIFM rule or “what’s in it for me?”) is even more important today.  Due to copious media exposure and  sensory stimulation, people have learned to instantly seek ways  to categorize and pigeon-hole new resources.   If they can’t easily figure out where your business fits in their lives, they’ll  delete it from their memories.  Thus the  business name you choose should ideally tell what your business does.   This is not the only approach to naming a business but probably the best.   The more instantly graspable what your business does for customers from its name is the better.

Examples of of business names that tell what we need to know

• Toy’r'Us
• International Business Machines (IMB)
• Dunkin’ Donuts
• Burger King
  

The Mind-Control Trick That Makes Your Business Instantly Memorable

Madison Avenue agencies know a thing or two about mind control.  They don’t always do it well, but the most inspired and effective advertising in the world usually has mind control working in it.

Mind control in marketing is actually not voodoo and I wouldn’t even call it unethical,  it’s merely a way of making your advertising more effective and memorable.

One of the most powerful ways to brand your business is with a strapline.  A strapline is more than a slogan.  Ideally it contains a customer-benefit oriented statement specific to your brand.  When the strapline is powerfully memorable, conveys a strong benefit to the customer, and has the business name, URL, or phone number completely integrated, it functions as a powerful competitive advantage for your business.

This was done well by  the 1-800-flowers people.  I don’t even know if it qualifies as a proper strapline but it delivers a powerful marketing message:  that all you have to do it pick up the phone and dial this toll-free, easy to remember number and you can get flowers over the phone.  I don’t even remember the proper strapline, if there was one, but I know the number because that’s all I need to remember.  Killer.

Don’t Make This Dumb Mistake and  Subsidize Your Competitors’ Advertising—At Your Expense!

The strapline was botched by the “Say it With Flowers” people because they failed to tie the memorable phrase to their brand (FTD).  Effectively this slogan advertised the whole flower/flower delivery industry.  That would be fine if every company in the industry footed a share of the bill.

“Say it With Flowers” is a brand-advertising fail as an audible slogan because effectively they were advertising for their competition by promoting the idea of buying flowers, not the idea of buying from FTD.   Whether it works better in print I don’t know.  I do know I had to look it up to remember what company uses that slogan and I’ve heard and seen the ads hundreds of times.

How To Tell The Difference Between  Slogan and A Mnenonic Strapline That Also Meets the 1st Criteria

Here’s a bunch of straplines, some of which contain mnenonics.   Look through them and notice how many fail to embed the actual name (or URL) in the strapline.  Some of the straplines still worked due to massive ad-spend and cleverness, but imagine how much better some of them would have been if the specific name of the business was embedded in the strapline.

You’ll notice as you browse through those slogans that not many of them actually contain the brand name in the strapline itself.  By far the best way to create your strapline is to have your brand or domain name actually attached to it in an integrated way, so the strapline doesn’t sound right without your business or domain name in it.

How To Create Your  Most Powerful Strapline

One of the most powerful ways to brand your business is with a mnemonic strapline.  This is more than a slogan.  A mnemonic is usually a verbal twist, a little poem or catchy turn of phrase that makes the whole phrase more memorable.  Musical mnemonics are what make songs so memorable.   A musical mnemonic  strapline is impractical unless you have the budget to run TV and radio ads, but even without music a mnemonic makes a strapline instantly more memorable.

Remember the Roto-Rooter jingle?

“Call Roto-Rooter, that’s the name, and away go troubles down the drain.”

The jingle is annoying, but brilliant and memorable because the name of the business is locked into the jingle in such a way that it would be impossible to not remember the name  correctly.  The Roto-Rooter jingle contains multiple mnemonic devices.  First, the business name itself is an alliterative mnemonic.  That means each word starts with the same sound.   The tune itself is memorable, plus “down” and “drain” are alliterative.   The jingle also has a sneaky embedded command to “call” and at the end the jingle tells what result the customer will get: “troubles down the drain.”

Is that powerful or what?

The best strapline may contain alliteration, rhyming, or perhaps a clever mental image that locks the strapline to your business name.   The mnemonic is the device that makes the strapline memorable.  The entire strapline may not be a mnemonic device, but if it is not the name, URL, or phone number When the person remembers the strapline, they remember your business name, phone number, or URL.

Furthermore, it’s best if you can build one or more powerful memes into the strapline which function to make it more memorable and effective.  Memes are a fascinating concept and can be used powerfully in advertising and in fact many advertising writers use them without knowing it.  Using memes intentionally to lock advertising into the public mind is very advanced advertising stuff and there are not many sources which tell how to do it well, but your most useful tools are your own brain and your skill at using it to invent ideas.

Today I won’t write about memes, because it’s a deep topic I’ll write about later.  For now I’ve given you some good material to work with in naming and promoting your business.  Go put this new knowledge to work right away while it’s fresh in your mind.

Perhaps you’d like to join in a discussion by commenting below or asking questions.  Please do.

The Ultimate Formula For Creating An Instantly Memorable Business Name and How To Create The Most Effective Slogan For Powerful Advertising Results is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

In the next few minutes I’ll share with you the 3 “secret” ways I’ve used to get more traffic and leads from articles and blog posts. Using these three methods you’ll easily double, triple or even quadruple the effectiveness or your articles, sending your list-building into overdrive. At the end I’ll tell you how to get a free guide that teaches you an automated traffic method you can use to get free web traffic with push-button ease.

Picture this common list-building scenario…

You’re putting up squeeze pages and writing articles. You’re getting some traffic, but that traffic isn’t converting to email leads very well. Sure, you’re getting an opt-in here and there, but you’re looking for the secret that will explode your opt-ins.

Right Under Your Nose…

I’ve been testing different copywriting approaches for years and isolated key elements that cause articles to succeed and get traffic. The answer to your problem is right in front of your nose. The reason you don’t see the answer is because there’s so much confusing information out there.

You need to get clear why people don’t opt-in or why your traffic results aren’t what you want them to be.

3 Reasons Articles Aren’t Drawing More Subscribers

1. Not enough people are searching for keywords you are using to draw traffic
2. You aren’t making a really attractive free offer to build your list
3. Your writing is confusing to readers and they lose interest

You might be aware that many people are short of time. Therefore it’s important you tell people what they are going to get and assure them that to get it won’t take much time or effort. The real thing you are competing for as a markter is not readers’s time, it’s their attention.

Three “Structural Persuasion” Secrets

Secret #1: The best way to get and retain attention in your articles is to make a promise at the start of the article. I like to quantify the time investment too. I did it at the start of this article and if you got this far, it worked on you. If it worked on you, it will work on other people too. Telling readers how long it’s going to take them to get the information they want may see a little goofy, but it works, so start doing it.

Secret #2: The easiest formula is “3 easy ways” formula. Title your article with a promise of 3 easy ways to make something they are doing better or easier. This may seem like a slow-pitch promise, like you’re writing for dummies. But guess what? It works so use it. You can mix things up and use “5 simple ways” or whatever, but always a straightforward promise to deliver your information in bite-sized chunks. The number of points you are promising your reader doesn’t matter as much as the fact that you’re promising to divide the information up into easy bullet points. People crave and respond to well-structured communication and this titling method is an easy way to start doing that.

Secret #3: The offer at the end. Article traffic is all about getting readers to click on your link at the end. To get a lot of click you need to offer a very attractive free goodie. Make an effort to imply that the goodie is an almost magical solution to all the reader’s problems. While it may not be in reality, you need to whip that reader into a feverish excitement to get him to click. If you’ve built some momentum into your article and offer at the end, many readers will just click through and opt-in to your free offer, which takes some of the pressure off your squeeze page.

When you use these 3 secrets in your articles, you’ll be writing the way real copywriters do. Copywriters know that every step of the persuasion process has to be easy-peasy for the reader. When it is, lookout! because your results will be much better.

Start looking for ways to use these 3 secrets in every article you write. They don’t always all fit with all article types. I don’t always use them myself (because I get lazy sometimes) but when I do I get clickthrough rates as high as 40% of readers checking out my offer. There are other ways to write a good article, but if you’re after opt-ins for your email list, the formula I just shared with you works great.

Now you know the basics of writing killer articles using structural persuasion principles.

You can expand what you’ve learned here.

How about a system for getting unlimited free, automated traffic to your website?

Well, I’ve got such a system and I wrote a guidebook about how it works. You can have the guidebook for free.

Your Free Traffic Guide awaits.

If you want an internet money machine, you’ll want to learn more about how to use software to get traffic. Just grab the Free Traffic Formula for free and find out how.

3 Easy Ways To Get More Free Traffic and More Free Leads From Your Articles and Blog Posts is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

There are a bunch of lists out there of the best books on writing copy.  I’ve read a whole bunch of books on copywriting, many several times.  My opinion is that different books may help you at different stages of skill development.

For example – “Breakthrough Advertising” will probably be over your head if you are just starting out but if you’ve got the basics under your belt and you are really serious about understanding how persuasion in advertising works, you must read it.  It is a watershed work.

I recommend starting with the easy stuff.  Then you won’t be stuck slogging through advanced books you aren’t ready for yet.

THE CORE TRIO

The trio are the basic books just about anybody can read and comprehend at the beginning of your copywriting journey – and they are worth re-reading if you are more experienced since they deal with the fundamentals of writing copy.

1.  “Scientific Advertising” and “My Life in Advertising” by Claude C. Hopkins. The first you should read several times.  It’s short but very potent.  Everybody who writes advertising should internalize Claude Hopkins’s stuff.

2. “How To Write A Good Advertisement” by Victor Schwab.  Subtitled “A Short Course in Copywriting” it is just that.  It walks you through Schwab’s 5-step sequence of what every ad needs to accomplish in the first half, and in the second half are observations about direct mail, ad layout and so forth.  If you advertise online only you’ll find the first half valuable, since the second half of the book pertains largely to the problems of print advertising.

3. “Tested Advertising Methods” by John C. Caples.   I have the fifth edition, but some folks say the 4th is superior.  All I can say is the book is packed with good information and insight, but I find reading it front to back a little dry.  The book has examples from catalogs and brands we are familiar with today.  Allegedly the 4th and earlier editions are more fun to read, but  less contemporary.

Do get these books as soon as possible, and read them.  If you just read internet ebooks you are missing-out on the proven fundamentals of advertising.  Between the 3 of them, the authors of the above books had over 120 years experience when they wrote their books.  That’s a lot of wisdom.

Three Essential Persuasive Copywriting Books You Should Have On Hand is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Writers have to write A LOT to get good.  Talent and intelligence may play a roll in writing skill, but I believe effective writing is a learned skill like any other.  You have to practice a lot to be at the pro level.

Today’s consumers are over-communicated to, pressed  for time, and perhaps a little lazy. They want to  know what it’s about fast and they don’t want to  read your languid prose.

It’s  frustrating, but we have to accept that the longer and more detailed our writing gets, the less likely we are to seduce readers into accepting our ideas.

Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat?

At worst, readers  take one look at your long salesletter, bloated video run-times, sprawling blog posts and articles… roll their eyes (or yawn) and move on (I’ll tell you why in a bit).

At best your readers are fans who have decided they like your  writing. Don’t count on getting too many of these rare birds on your lists though.

Writing To The Common Denominator

People want clarity and brevity. They aren’t stupid -  they just prefer easy.

It’s not just about selling products, it’s about  selling people the idea they should be paying attention to what you want to tell them.

At regular intervals in your written communication -  perhaps once or twice every page - you should be placing markers of some sort that help your readers to scan and interpret the shape and meaning of what you’re trying to get across.

Making Better Markup

These markers can be bolded text emphasizing some relevant concept, cross-headings and section headings, bullet lists, Johnson boxes, callouts, sidebars, colored or italicized text, different type faces and font sizes…

Of course if you throw all those together in one  web-page it starts to look like it came from  HTML Hell.

We’re in an era of Visual Communication

… and the young people now are accustomed to, and expect, a style of communication that is frankly  “dumbed down”. Print-era writers are probably  more skilled readers than many many of today’s smart young folks – and it will probably hurt our ability to reach them if we don’t bring our writing to  the level they prefer.

In short – just because today’s buyers prefer short, dumbed-down, visual communication doesn’t make them stupid – but it is foolish for us professional  communicators not to adapt to their preferences.

Does Your Writing Suffer From Gassy Bloat? How To Reach Today’s Overstimulated Consumers is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

You won’t ever get much out of life unless you can persuade other people to do  stuff.  You get a job by persuading somebody to hire you.  You get a date by persuading somebody to go out with you.  Children are natural persuaders.  

But as adults who want to make money on the internet you and I are in the persuasion trade – we need to persuade other people to part with their money.  If you learn how to do it well the sky is the limit for your income.  

Better persuasion skills = more money.

Check this out:

SalesPersuasionMastery  is having a big 24-hour launch celebration which includes giving over $2,000 in gifts to anyone who buys one of
three  sales, persuasion and NLP books before midnight on 30th March. I’ve read and reviewed two of them – I especially enjoyed Rintu Basu’s “Persusaion Skills Black Book”.  It’s a tight, concise journey into using hypnotic language patterns in everyday persuasion  situations.  Also, it’s written using the same language, which makes reading it a bit of a strange experience but you start to almost download how to write more persuasively, straight into  your subconscious mind.  Cool  stuff.  

If you’re new to NLP or want to learn more about how to use  “sleight of mouth” in all sorts of situations the Black Book is very usable.  These persuasion techniques are powerful, so I hope you’ll use them to help other people in good ways, but also to  help yourself to prosper more too.  In fact, you can use the  same language patterns on yourself to program your own thought patterns for success in anything you want to achieve.

Kenrick Cleveland – world-famous creator of the controversial Dark  Side NLP Program and founder of MAXPersuasion.com, contributed
a specially recorded top secret bonus.  You will also find free audios, videos, sales event tickets, ebooks and reports from other big names in the sales, persuasion, influence, NLP and hypnosis fields.

Details of all the goodies waiting to be had, along with how you can get it all, can be found here…
Sales Persuasion Mastery Bonuses

Cheers,

Loren Woirhaye

PS: One of my ebooks in part of this giveaway – a fresh revision of my guide “50 Ways To Make More Money”.  I’m helping out a friend, author Rintu Basu, and getting some subscribers in the bargain -  which, btw can be a good way to build your email list if you can come up with an attractive goodie to give away.  

Persuasion Mastery – Tons of Free, Relevant Gifts is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Check out this persuasive use of graphical elements in a recent Robert Kiyosaki promotion.

What I like about this is the messiness of it. Artistically speaking this piece has what is called “informal balance” – which means the parts on the left visually balance out with the parts on the right.    In this case we’ve got a big thing on the right, the book, and a bunch of busy stuff and lines on the left.

Messy layouts can work very well in direct response.  The idea is to stimulate the prospect and keep re-stimulating him.  If you make everything orderly and pretty, he tunes out or dozes off!

A lot of website designers are talented at making nice-looking websites, but they seldom understand the dynamics of messy visuals in direct response.   Look at the junk mail you get, especially sweepstakes promotions and stuff like that.  It’s very messy.  It jiggles your eyeballs to look at it.  The designers who do the big sweepstakes mailings know what they are doing so pay attention to that stuff.

Personally I like cereal boxes and toy packaging too, because it’s designed to get kids to beg for the one specific toy or cereal, out of many choices.  The accelerating world of information we live in today presents so much choice and variety it makes your head spin.  Get on the other side of it, as a marketer, and take a critical look at how your own graphic design and copy is breaking through the confusion consumers feel today.

If your stuff doesn’t grab people in under 2 or 3 seconds, they tune you out and move on.  You don’t  want them thinking “oh, that’s pretty”  you want them thinking ,”Wow!  Let me check this out,”.

copywriting – persuasive graphics use is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

      Joe Sugarman is one of my favorite copywriters because a) he wrote some books that influenced me a lot and b) I used to read his copy when I was a kid. Sugarman promoted electronic gadgets through space ads running in magazines like Popular Mechanics in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The technology of microprocessors was undergoing revolutionary upgrades every few months in those days – and the digital watches, calculators and primitive personal computers of the day seemed pretty miraculous to a ten year old kid.

     Of course in those days I didn’t have money to buy $200 digital watches but I drooled over the ads anyway. I’m not that interested in technological gadgets these days, because even though I find the wizardry interesting I prefer to stay engaged with it only to the extent that I can use it to get my goals.

     Last summer I ran across a bunch of old magazines with Sugarman ads in them at a flea market. I was there with my lady (who is a talented multi-media artist) looking for old tools and other assorted junk that interests me, and the magazines were a lucky find. What’s most interesting about these is the context of the advertising.

     One thing you need to really grasp about advertising is that it is contextual to our culture and times. People buy from advertising when they identify with the images presented there. People get their sense of self, their identity, through a combination of inner exploration and external role models. Advertising presents role models which teach us what it is, in our culture and times, to be attractive, sexy, smart, virile, hip, and so forth. None of us are immune to it’s influence, but as you get on the other side and basically start manipulating people’s minds with advertising you start to think more like a puppet master and behaving less like a puppet.

     This may seem a bit sinister, but it’s just a byproduct of learning about psychology and persuasion. Advertising is about selling, and people want to buy what they believe they are supposed to want. You present images of pretty young white moms in your advertising and and white young moms will respond to it emotionally, somehow forming a small part of their identity from the images your present. The effect is cumulative – it takes a lot of investment for cigarette companies to continue to make smoking look virile, sexy and cool when there is an onslaught of public service advertising and social pressure teaching that it is unhealthy, smelly and dumb.

     The war for the public’s favor is waged every day in the trenches of mass-market advertising. But Sugarman (and yours truly) are direct response guys. We run ads with phone numbers and order forms on them. We aren’t trying to win a preference for our brand of toothpaste in your mind so strong you march down to the drug store and ask for it. Instead we are asking for something altogether simpler: your order, right now.

     Here are the videos:

Swiping From The Best is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Coming as I do from a background as a small business owner who manufactured and marketed a tangible custom-made product, I know a thing or two about the way consumers perceive products as commodities: to be bought primarily on lowest-price criteria. I ran a small cabinet-making business in Los Angeles; small meaning basically me, and Los Angeles meaning I was competing against craftsmen from Mexico who usually marketed on the seductive premise of “real cheap price”.

Cabinets are basically just boxes and you can get them at Big Box stores or have them custom-made in L.A. by the Mexican guys pretty cheap. The challenge of doing the business as a job (as in I personally did much of the labor) was that to most customers the end-product was basically the same – a box with a door on it.

I had some success in the business, actually, but exhausted myself in the process. Primarily I would win jobs based on a combination of personal charm, ability to write articulate bids representing intelligence to my mostly college-educated clientele, and a balance between price and speed of delivery. While my portfolio of work no doubt played a role in my landing some jobs, inevitable I would hear something along the lines of “we aren’t looking for a work of art,” – which translated means, “we’re already over budget on our remodel and we’re praying we can get this done right without going broke,”.

I am no stranger therefore to the insidious dual forces of commoditization and marginalization, which affect nearly every business under the sun.

Despite the exciting opportunities presented by the internet, the reality is that with opportunity comes competition… and with competition comes commoditization. This is an understandably confusing and distressing issue to businesspeople, both the experienced in the “old marketplace” and the newcomers, because the challenges of competing in such an open and crowded marketplace are unprecedented in history.

Offline the convenience of your location is a factor. Online it is less so – though a lousy buying process can cause a high rate of “shopping cart abandonment” where people get confused or frustrated and just give up and buy elsewhere. This is one way the tight-ship of a good e-commerce business can have a massive leak.

Price is actually about number 5, on average, on the list of what people look at when making a buying decision. I don’t have the list handy – but quality, service, convenience, confidence in the product – these things are important to people too.

We’ve all had the experience of being unable to distinguish qualitative differences between commodity items.

Have you ever heard the Neil Young song “Piece of Cr@p”? Try to find it if you haven’t.

We may lack the knowledge, for instance, that Chinese wrenches are made from brittle metal while American made ones last and last. So we buy the China wrenches and when put to heavy use they break – then we have to go buy another set. Lesson learned.

Having had that experience, that low price sometimes denotes poor quality we become skeptical of bargain-basement deals.

In fact – low prices can turn-off buyers who like your product but assume that because it’s cheaper it must be inferior.

Perception, in selling, is everything. People want more, they want better, and they want what other people want or have, and they want what other people don’t have so they can feel good about themselves.

A big driver in sales is self-esteem. Buying is empowering. The boost in self-esteem we get from spending money is short-lived and, well, not very authentic, but as a marketer you’ll do better if you embrace the dark side of the issue. People spend money to help themselves to feel better. Happy people don’t spend money – they’re already satisfied, they don’t need to add to it. The unhappy people (and most folks are unhappy about something in their lives) are the ones you sell to.

Today more and more people buy the Experience – they will pay more, sometimes much more, for an experience they perceive to be superior. Buying superior things makes the owners feel superior. It raises their feelings of self-worth. They’re going to engage in this behavior of spending to feel good, sometimes called “retail therapy”, so why not put yourself in place to receive their money when they do?

Fortunes can be made exploiting this factor in how people buy. People buy not only to get the thing itself and what using it does for them – they buy because the product carries embedded perceptions about how owning it furthers their social identity.

Why do you think people buy Lexus? It’s not that different from a Toyota… and parts are much more costly.

But the experience… ah! The experience at a Lexus dealership is indisputably superior to the experience at a Toyota dealership. It’s a luxury experience (notice how “Lexus” shares sounds with “Luxury”) compared with what the riff-raff get at the Toyota shop; the ordinary.

There are many powerful motivators people consider, many of them subconsciously, when they make a buying decision -

• “what will owning this say about me to other people?”
• “how will I feel about owning this brand?”
• “will I regret buying the off-brand even though I’m saving money?”
• “When I give this as a gift will the recipient be impressed?”

Collectively all this stuff contributes to the consumer’s story about himself; his identity. Identitification is what sells Nike shoes. Of course younger consumers are tremendously susceptible to building their own self-images around products they own, brands and labels – but as we grow older and our incomes increase identification is still a massive factor in purchasing decisions. Do you think when a rich man buys a yacht, the brand name on it doesn’t matter to him? Of course it does! Because he may buy the yacht to enjoy boating for himself, the reason he buys a bigger, newer, nicer-looking, more feature-rich one than he really needs is because he wants to show both his peers and himself that he is powerful and abundant. Cars, jewelry, vacations – the luxury end of the market is as rife with selling to consumer’s self-image as any other part. The selling at the high-end is often done with more subtlety, but the psychological principle is the same.

In short: we buy not only because we want the product for what it does, but also because of the way possessing the product bolsters our feelings of self-worth. Furthermore it matters to most people that others are impressed, so the perceived ability of the product to impress others is vastly important too.

Why You Will Sell At Bigger Profits Only By Knowing The REAL Reasons People Buy is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

I have what you might call a flair for writing copy – I don’t think I’m the world’s greatest by any measure but some of it comes more easily to me than it might come to you.

The ability to write and communicate well is a fine thing, however it is trumped by the king of all marketing skills: Conversion.

Copywriting of course plays a big roll in conversion but it is far from the whole enchilada – there’s the skill of getting traffic in a cost-effective way, there’s knowing how to structure a back-end offer, or two, or three.

Then there is coming up with the angle that gets people to act immediately. Sometimes it’s making the price so low compared to the value on offer that the decision is a “no-brainer”, but often it’s a matter of creating scarcity of some kind: threatening to run-out of the item or close the doors on the offer when all seats are filled.

I once bought a ticket to 1000-seat seminar… and then when I got there I saw were 2500 seats in the house. I felt mildly gyped but still got a lot of value – and it was the fear of not getting a seat that goaded me to make a decision and buy the ticket – and honestly I can say that seminar changed my life for the better.

While devices like these are communicated in the copy, or the sales pitch, the idea of the offer is not in the copywriter’s hands in many cases. It is the direct-response marketer who structures the offer that gets folks to whip out their wallets – the copywriter is merely the messenger.

A skilled copywriter (like moi) can boost response by turning-out the kind of copy the marketer may have no time, nor the skill to create – by no means do I want to denigrate the copywriter’s skill. Merely I want to point-out that your willingness and ability to create and structure the irresistible offer is the vehicle of your success in direct response marketing.

Want a massive increase in sales?

Massively increase the value of your offer.

Assuming you had an offer in the first place people wanted and bought, increasing the perceived value by adding high-value bonuses can be a great way to increase response by 100% or more – in fact the sky is pretty much the limit.

Of course you have to back-up your claims, and that, my friend, has to do with the quality of your product and customer service – if you botch this part of the equation you may rake in some cash but you’ll also get a lot of grief from unhappy customers. Don’t promise more that you can deliver.

Is Copywriting the Most Valuable Skill in Online Marketing? is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Persuasion in print is largely structural.  When I explain it here it’s going to seem abstract, but when you study good salesletters in the future look at the structure.

There are obvious things of course: headline, subhead, testimonials, and so on… and those are elements and by default some of them occupy specific places in the letter… but these are not what I mean when I say that persuasion is a structural challenge.

When you understand the role structure plays in written persuasion you can then start to deploy persuasive elements intentionally for precise effect at specific points in your copy.

In short, when you understand how structure in copywriting works you start to grasp not only what to write, but where to write it in your letter.

Learning any skill is awkward at first, then it becomes comfortable, and when you become highly skilled it starts to feel natural and even works at an unconscious level.

Salesletters are structured, generally, with a bold headline making a claim or otherwise attempting to capture attention from the target audience: the people most likely to have the problem the product solves, the desire to do something about it, and the means to buy.

When I was building high-end custom furniture I would send out postcards to designers in my area.  The simple headlines I used were like this:

“Designers: Are You Frustrated With Your Current Cabinetmaker?”

The postcard says who it’s for, designers.  Then it asks if they have a problem – and from experience I knew that problems usually had to do with poor quality work or late delivery.  The body copy of the postcard mentioned those issues ane encouraged designers to call for a free report.

I got tired of working wood for a living, but the direct-response marketing I do today is similar in many ways, even though my products are different.  I try to get the salesletter in front of the right people who MIGHT have the problem, ask if they do (sometimes not directly) and offer my solution.  It’s all common sense when you study direct-response a bit – but the writing itself has a huge affect on response and there is arguably both an art and a science to the writing.

Structural persuasion usually takes the form, after the initial problem is stated or implied, of  making a claim, getting your reader to agree the claim may be valid, then moving on to another claim which – if you can pull it off, is a little more outrageous than the first claim.  The reader, because he has already agreed with the first claim, is psychologically invested in your sales message already.  This is a little hard to believe but it does really work this way.  The structural copywriter then proceeds to build a series of agreements that “X is a problem” and “here’s the solution and it makes sense, right?”  (Of course this is not the way real copy reads, I’m just explaining it in unsubtle terms to make the structure clear).

The reader agrees in his head that the problem is real and the solution seems plausible.  There is generally only a glimmer of desire to buy at this point however.  As we progress through the copy we restate the problem from different perspectives and try to intensify the reader’s internal experience of the problem.  If the reader does not get stirred emotionally with a mental image of himself suffering from the problem the sale is not made… but when you hook him in and get him to OWN the problem by visualizing himself having it you have him partially sold.

Even when you have the reader (who could be a woman  but I’ll use the masculine pronoun here throughout) experiencing and visualizing the problem as a “mind movie” you still need to build a hot desire for your solution and to that ideally you have to get the guy to embrace some wild claims that he wouldn’t have at the start of the letter, because they seem too far out.  People are skeptical these days, and if you make the big claims that will get the sale while they are only involved on a mental (and skeptical) level you will find it hard to close the sale unless the price is super-cheap, which is usually not a good thing for your bottom-line.  If you want to make some real money at this stuff you need to get an emotional involvement from your prospect so he feels the pain of his problem intensely and is motivated to solve it immediately.  When he accepts the plausibility of all your claims (and he wouldn’t if he were not emotionally involved) then the sale almost “closes itself”.

There is an art to closing the sale as well, but emotional involvement is absolutely necessary if you are to get some big dollars with your marketing.  In the close you may have to justify a price which is higher than the guy would prefer to pay, but he’ll pay more than you might think if he is solidly persuaded with the structural method I’ve outlined here.

Copywriting – The structure of persuasion is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye