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Reading time: < 1 minute Check out this persuasive use of graphical elements in a recent Robert Kiyosaki promotion. The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog. Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes 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
Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes 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. The post author, Loren Woirhaye writes sales copy and creates marketing systems for business clients who want to slash customer acquisition costs and position their businesses For 20%-30% sales growth in the next 12-18 months. He writes regularly about marketing and life at his Entrepreneur Blog. Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes 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 Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes 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 |     |   | ||||
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