Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 13th, 2009
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 
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 6th, 2009
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
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 4th, 2009
Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes
There is a lot of ballyhoo about the importance of headlines in copywriting. If you are just getting started it is easy to take this stuff out of context.
The importance of the headline IS paramount in several different formats of copy – in situations where the headline MUST grab the readers attention an effective headline is the difference between success and failure for the ad.
One of my pet peeves is super-long headlines that try to cram a detailed description of what the product is or does into the headline itself. This is usually not a good thing, but of course in the hands of a skilled copywriter a long headline can work well indeed.
Most writers doing online marketing these days cranking-out verbose headlines are not particularly skilled however – their headlines are like the desperate guy trying to get a date from every girl who walks by; rattling off a meandering list of benefits hoping she’ll hear one she likes and stop and talk to the guy.
Does that sound like a good way to get a date?
No. It doesn’t
It’s fairly easy to find examples of this kind of headline writing in copy ebook authors and
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 3rd, 2009
Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes
Perhaps unique to copywriting is the idea of “swiping” sales appeals from winning letters written by yourself or other copywriters. This is not, and should not be approached as, strict copying of others’ work, for a couple of reasons. 1) plagiarism is illegal and will land you in hot water because you WILL get sued if you do it in direct marketing, and 2) there is an art to adapting a proven sales message STRUCTURE to the thing you want to sell and the state of AWARENESS in the marketplace at the time.
That’s another way of saying that running old copy won’t work – it must be adapted.
How to get ideas to create winning copy for today adapted (“swiped”) from yesterday’s winning copy:
Any salesletter written by a A-level copywriter that has the APPEALS in it I need for whatever I am working on at the time. Don’t make it hard on yourself by studying Gary Bencivenga’s food letters (which I believe he still writes mostly because it’s fun) and try to apply the methods to selling info-products.
Get the appeal right. I know this seems very basic and
Written By Loren Woirhaye, June 3rd, 2009
Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes
Perhaps unique to copywriting is the idea of “swiping” sales appeals from winning letters written by yourself or other copywriters. This is not, and should not be approached as, strict copying of others’ work, for a couple of reasons. 1) plagiarism is illegal and will land you in hot water because you WILL get sued if you do it in direct marketing, and 2) there is an art to adapting a proven sales message STRUCTURE to the thing you want to sell and the state of AWARENESS in the marketplace at the time.
That’s another way of saying that running old copy won’t work – it must be adapted.
How to get ideas to create winning copy for today adapted (“swiped”) from yesterday’s winning copy:
Any salesletter written by a A-level copywriter that has the APPEALS in it I need for whatever I am working on at the time. Don’t make it hard on yourself by studying Gary Bencivenga’s food letters (which I believe he still writes mostly because it’s fun) and try to apply the methods to selling info-products.
Get the appeal right. I know this seems very basic and
