Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye » copywriting

The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions

Loren Woirhaye — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 15:22:57 +0000

The Simple Mind “Hack” That Can Earn You Millions is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Selling something is the only way to make moolah in the marketing game. Duh, right?

I’d like to take a couple minutes (well, maybe 3) of your time to give you a few tips – stuff that took me years to figure out, distilled to a drinkable, yet buzz-inducing brew.

Here’s how you can:

Adapt the mindset of the best salespeople to your own personal quirks and interests.

Discover how to stop wasting energy marketing what you want to sell and start selling what people want to buy. There’s a subtle, but meaningful difference.
Become a marketing sleuth to locate areas where you can make money with your present skills

Also:

The simple daily way I grow my writing skills, market my services, and blunder into good ideas – all simultaneously – and easily expand them into articles and sellable information products.

Sound good?

Let’s start then.

Writing Is The Core Skill

Marketing is a writer’s game. Even if you market by cold-calling, you still work from a script. All writing is just expression of clear thinking, and effective writing wins the dollars in marketing.

Mindset

I prefer to write mostly about the nuts-and-bolts marketing stuff I know best, but I do believe your beliefs and mindset have a lot to do with the results you get in business.

Nowhere is the quality of your mindset more apparent then when you try to sell something, like your services, in person or on the phone. If your price is cheap enough you can shuffle your feet, look at the ground and do the “awww shucks” routine” and you’ll still make sales because you’re giving away your product.

However – When you want to command market-parity prices or prices higher than the competition, salesmanship matters.

Salesmanship skill is complex. There is no simple secret to winning at sales. But be diligent about refining your game, and persistent about working the market and you’ll always win.

The correct mindset is “never quit”.

Some people think that “never quit” means you should be stubborn and always follow your own internal counsel, as if success in business is a matter of a mentoring dialog between you and yourself.

I don’t agree with this at all. Often to succeed at selling you’ll need to get real about the marketplace. That means selling what people want to buy. Finding out what people want to buy can be a trial and error process that costs you a lot of time and money, or it can be a methodical, research-oriented process.

Both methods have merit. With trial and error you may blunder into ideal opportunities where your interests and skills intersect with market demands. You can find some real sweet spots this way so always be on the lookout for good ideas.

I get a lot of ideas for good stuff to sell by browsing and commenting in online forums. The WarriorForum is my favorite for marketing info. If somebody likes something I wrote and thanks me for it I often copy and paste my own forum comment and expand it into an article or blog post. String a few articles together and you’ve got the beginning of an ebook product you can sell – and this sort of thing evolves in a gradual and fun way.

The thing about the serendipity approach I enjoy most is the thinking and writing happens naturally (it’s unforced) and often my own ideas are nicely expressed. Clear writing beats rambling volume in today’s marketplace, so when my own rambling habits go well, I hold onto those ideas and try to expand on them.

The other approach to finding profitable niches and ideas for your own products is niche research. I have to confess I don’t like the keyword research part of internet marketing at all. I find it tedious, finicky, boring – a necessary evil.

If you’re at all like I am, you’ll want a system to make the time you invest in market research as effective as possible.

That’s why I’ve put together a comprehensive course on niche market research.

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–> To get the discount:

1. Just go to http://zerodollarmarketer.com/nichesleuth

2. Read the letter to make sure it’s the right product for your needs, then click on the order button.

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4. Click on the “Update form” button and the price will go down from $37 to $27.75.

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Cheers,

_Loren Woirhaye

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.

3 Easy Ways To Get More Free Traffic and More Free Leads From Your Articles and Blog Posts

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:44:15 +0000

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

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

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

Not enough people are searching for keywords you are using to draw traffic
You aren’t making a really attractive free offer to build your list
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.

Three Essential Persuasive Copywriting Books You Should Have On Hand

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:20:48 +0000

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

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

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.

copywriting – persuasive graphics use

Loren Woirhaye — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 07:40:02 +0000

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

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

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,”.

Exposing the myth of internet marketing

Loren Woirhaye — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 16:18:24 +0000

Exposing the myth of internet marketing is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 7 – 11 minutes

re: the myth of internet marketing

Bear with me, there’s a little back-story here, and you can skip it if you like – but I recommend you don’t because there is some valuable insight buried in it.

Ok… I am unabashed about calling myself an internet marketer and entrepreneur. I started selling stuff on eBay in 1999. In those days there was no PayPal. I didn’t have a digital camera so I shot my pictures on 35mm film and scanned them to upload to eBay. Digital cameras weren’t even close to film-quality at the time and they were silly-expensive to boot… big-boy toys really.

Even before 1999 I had been involved with the old BBS communities as a teenager. My brother and I ran a BBS on an Apple 2 computer using a phone line we put in. People who used the BBS were very supportive and sent donations, which helped cover costs (we were kids, remember, so we didn’t have much earning power ourselves).

So you could say I’ve grown-up with the internet. At 37 I remember having a rotary phone in the house… and black-and-white TVs, so I don’t take the instant gratification of today’s downloadable culture for granted, but I did learn and adapt as changes came along.

It may surprise you to know I’m not a computer-geek. I’m a marketing geek. Computers are just tools, like the saws and planes I used when I was a cabinet-maker before I went full-time into marketing. The machines are a means to accomplish the end.

I was starting with my own business-ventures in the early 1990s – before the internet became a viable marketing medium for anything I wanted to do, so I used old-school marketing methods first, then adapted to the internet as it became bigger and more interesting. More importantly, it became a way to reach more people.

As I became aware of this I started to think differently about who my customers could be. As a woodworker I was dealing with a local market only. As an internet marketer it was a different situation entirely, though when I got started my customers were almost exclusively in the US and Canada.

These days the internet is a worldwide marketplace. I’ve sold stuff to people in dozens of countries.

As the world transforms into a global marketplace with very little barrier to entry, you or me or anyone with a computer and a connection can start a business and have an opportunity to flourish.

BUT – there’s a big myth out there…. and if you aren’t careful you could spend a lot of time floundering around, chasing money-makers instead of building a real sustainable business. I can tell you from experience, because I, myself, invested a lot of energy in chasing money-makers instead of making a real plan for a sustainable, long-term business.

A lot of other marketers made the same error. They chased the quick money – selling whatever people would pay money for, even if it was no good… and consumers, burned too many times, started to become very skeptical.

And NOW, as a reward for all our short-sighted behavior, all marketers are now confronted with a skeptical and cagey customer.

This customer, well, he turns to the internet and researches our products and services in depth before we even become aware of his presence. He doesn’t need a salesperson to get educated… in fact he won’t even agree or request a phone conversation unless, in general, he’s pretty sure he is open to buying.

What this means is that there is a silent majority of prospects for your business you aren’t even aware of because they choose to remain invisible to you, observing your marketing but remaining anonymous. This is not the same as in a brick-and-mortar store where people will come in and look around and not buy; because in that situation you can at least observe them, the way they dress and so forth and talk to them about what they are looking for.

With the internet media the conversation is most often one-way, and while your prospects listen and absorb your marketing message, they seldom give you meaningful feedback as to why they don’t buy. You only usually get feedback when they do – because at that point they invest in entering a dialog and relationship with you. Up to the point where the customer opens that relationship with you, the vendor, you are usually flying blind, relying on a generalized impression of what your average customer might want rather than the sort of valuable, specific feedback you could get if you could only engage your prospects in a dialog.

The solution is, as with all real-world solutions to growing your income, not, as they say, “easy-peasy”.

In fact, it is hard.

And because it IS hard almost nobody you compete with directly will go the distance to implement the solution… and thus if YOU strike forth with indomitable will to succeed you will have an advantage your competition will gnash his teeth over, fretting “that sucker’s no better than I am at this business, why is he kicking my ass at marketing and sales results?”

See, the MYTH of internet marketing is that it is easy because there are large aspects of it which present opportunities for leverage, economy, and automation. But this does not make marketing easy; it merely gives it the potential for efficiency and big profits.

Business, my friend, is often anything but easy – but the rewards of overcoming challenges of business can be enormous, both in terms of who YOU become and the amount of money you earn.

So, it’s worth it to do the hard stuff, because the willingness and ability to do the hard stuff is what separates the ordinary achievers from the people who get incredible results.

And which group would you rather be in?

###

Let me go back to my earlier business experiences; I had a small cabinetry business. If you’ve been reading my stuff for awhile you know that woodworking was close to my heart but making a living at it was tough. Not only did I have to be good at doing the craft and doing the work on schedule, I also had to market and manage my business.

At some point I realized that I was more interested in marketing than woodworking and I began to make a career shift. This is relevant to YOU perhaps because if you are like a lot of Americans your previous career skills may no longer be in demand. I found an article on CNN.com that cited a study showing in the next ten years employers are going to shift from about 29% dependence on outside consultants to about 41% – which means 12% of the jobs that pay benefits and steady salaries are going to vanish.

What this means for YOU, is that if you want to get ahead in the next few years you either need to have some sort of in-demand skill like specialized computer programming, or you need to be able to market YOURSELF, either as a free-agent independent consultant like me or just to land a steady salaried job until that employer decides to eliminate it and put YOU back out in the job market again.

Either way you slice-it, we are entering or already are in an era when your ability to market your special skills are what determines your earning power.

You can either look on marketing yourself as a dreadful burden, unfamiliar and scary – or you can see it as an opportunity to create the lifestyle and livelihood your parents never imagined, tied-down as they were to employers and by geographical obligations to stay close to where the work was.

I think you should seize the opportunity. That’s my style and it’s my pleasure and self-appointed duty to inspire and lead you, according to my own talents and gifts, towards a life of more self-sufficiency than you’ve perhaps ever realistically imagined for yourself.

It all starts with your commitment however – your solemn, heartfelt commitment to bring great value to the marketplace. This is the part of it that is easy to miss because, for the last ten years or so, there has been so much CRAP sold on the internet, get-rich-quick schemes and such, that consumers are justifiably resistant to marketing messages which do not come from a source of complete and verifiable congruency.

… which is another way of saying you better be a real good con-artist or you better be real good at your chosen specialty – and passionate and committed to marketing yourself as the BEST solution to the problems your clients face.

…which is another way of saying you must believe wholeheartedly in the goodness of your mission in the business of earning your livelihood.

###

Lots more coming.

I’ll either be doing an audio-podcast, perhaps weekly – or maybe video. I’m leaning in the direction of audio because video takes a lot more time and energy to produce and honestly I don’t think most people like watching talking heads on the internet, at least not for very long.

What’s your opinion or preference?

Loren Woirhaye prefers to play gypsy music on guitar or accordion – but when he isn’t doing that he writes direct-response copy, consults with clients to help them make money with their websites, coaches people who want to fire their employers and blogs about success, life, his personal foibles, and online marketing at http://malibumentor.com/blog

The weakest link in the chain…

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:45:47 +0000

The weakest link in the chain… is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

the weakest-link in the chain…

Success in your own business requires many disciplines people who work in secure jobs rarely possess. When you are out on your own marketing your own products and services, covering your own bills and maybe even covering a payroll of employees who work FOR YOU, it’s tough to find enough hours in the day to do everything you need to do.

Prioritization is key.

As is time management… which happens to be my biggest bugaboo, personally. I hate waking-up to an alarm clock and I love to stay-up as late as I want. I was up til 4 a.m. last night, for example.

There’s a benefit as well as a penalty for making your own hours, as I do. The advantage is I can work in my peak hours, according to what my body-clock wants to do. The drawback is I am seldom in-sync with the 9-to-5 crowd.

Thus, I have to discipline myself to handle the essential tasks of making phone calls during reasonable hours. That’s why I prefer people to call me – because at any time I may be in a “peak state” and really great on the phone, full of life and lively ideas – while when I pick up the phone to call a client or prospective client mostly I’m thinking “I’m gonna get voicemail…”

Do you struggle with returning phone calls?

I don’t. I’m pretty good about returning calls, but chasing down people who request them is a P.I.T.A. – just not my bag.

Anyway – if time-management is something you want to do better I have something to share with you – not some course on how to manage your time, but a software I’ve had developed for the purpose. It’s simple and includes a contact manager (like a rolodex) in it as well as a scheduling application.

The Power Hour System – software to make your life – EASIER!

I’d like to invite you to check it out – at no cost to you – and tell me what you think.

Here’s the link to order through my download system:

Download the Software Now

Ignore the $49 price tag – I want to give this one to you free, because it’s part of a larger plan I am working on.

Just enter the discount code on the order form and the price will be reduced to $0.00.

Here’s the code: PowerHourJuly

Cheers,

Loren Woirhaye

P.S. Check out my new fee structure video at http://copymatch.com – I’m available for mind-blowing consulting sessions and building marketing systems for you at a quality and value you’ll be hard-pressed to find elsewhere.

P.P.S. don’t miss this chance to get his powerful software at no cost – I’ll even send you new updates when I release them for free.

Is Copywriting the Most Valuable Skill in Online Marketing?

Loren Woirhaye — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 00:34:53 +0000

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

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 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.

Copywriting – The structure of persuasion

Loren Woirhaye — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:48:40 +0000

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

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 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 Problem With Headlines These Days

Loren Woirhaye — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:34:50 +0000

Copywriting – The Problem With Headlines These Days is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

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 software designers have written for their own products. Because these folks are often making products that fit a narrow niche, they feel they need to sell the product in the headline.

Part of the selling DOES happen in any headline. How much of the selling depends on the state-of-awareness of the reader.

Example: “Bananas! .59 lb.”

Since we are completely aware of what bananas are the headline’s objective is to get our attention with a bargain price. There is nothing to explain of the benefits of the product because it is already so thoroughly familiar to us.

This is not, by the way, the sort of headline you, as a direct marketer, should want to find yourself in the position of writing – because it’s tough to make money when you have to scream “LOW PRICE!” to get attention.

A much better situation is when your headline can announce some new benefit to your product – either because your product itself is new and innovative, or because you are very clever and have found a way to reframe your old product in a new way – which can result in a real advertising victory by reviving a dead product and re-introducing it with a marketing twist.

In most cases when selling stuff online with salesletters we are dealing with the harsh realities of free-market commerce: that we have competition breathing down out necks – and their products are similar to ours and also they are willing to sell them cheaper – and maybe their stuff is even better in some ways.

Thus it is a good idea to try to find a way to select the battleground yourself – “positioning” your product in your headline in some way that makes it appear better in some way than other products in the niche.

For example: “Miracle Pill Melts Away Unwanted Pounds!”

This is not inventive these days because it’s an old headline. The idea contained here in the headline is that the pill magically just makes pounds disappear. That’s an exciting claim! If you are the first and only merchant to claim your diet-pill does such a thing you can profit enormously with such a promise… effortless weight-loss is one of the top 3 best direct marketing claims you could possibly make to sell your product – though there is the additional problem now that many advertisers have made similar announcements and consumers are skeptical because of past disappointments.

Hope does spring eternal however; the basic human needs driving the desire to lose weight are so powerful many people will never give up buying and trying new ways to shed unwanted pounds.

You should try, when writing your headline, to make the broadest specific claim you can in the headline, or imply it there, so you capture interest from the most people. Don’t try to tell everything in your headline or even the top of the letter. The sale happens at the bottom, in the order-form area – and only happens when you’ve guided your prospect through a series of agreements in the body-copy.

Agreements like:
“yes, I have that problem”
“yes, I have not found a solution yet”
“yes, this problem is causing me pain”
“yes, if I saw a real solution I would be very interested”

This seems very abstract here and maybe even corny.

Try applying this to a software product that is supposed to bring traffic to your website:

Headline: Amazing Software Magnetizes Your Website

(This is a curiosity headline… because I make a claim that is mysterious and hopefully intriguing, but I don’t try to explain how in the headline. Many of the writers today would have a bloated headline which tries to explain everything in one mouthful.)

An less-effective headline that tells too much, and tries to sell would be something like:
“Who Else Wants This Automated Software Driving Frenzied Flood of Traffic To Their Website, Credit Cards In Hand and Desperate To Buy?”

(This is a silly headline, yet it’s not too far-off the sort of thing I see a lot of writers putting out. There are a number of reasons it’s bad: it’s hypey and cliched in addition to being too verbose. I see a lot of headlines like this one, and longer – if you read them aloud you’ll instantly hear how off-target they are.)

After the headline we might ask a question or imply one like: “Don’t you hate it when you put tons of work into making a website and you struggle to get the volume of traffic you need to make any real money?”

Then we go on and say: “Getting enough good traffic is a common problem. I had it myself when I was just starting out. I tried a lot of so-called solutions for getting more traffic, but they didn’t bring me the results I wanted. Each method I tried either drained my bank account, was too much work for just a trickle of traffic, or just unreliable.”

(By the way, I just used “the rule of 3″ – because when stating problems it just seems more credible if you state them in groups of 3. There is a rhythm and rhyme to it.)

I am not going to write the whole letter here, but do you see how I already get you agreeing, in your mind, that getting traffic cheaply enough, and without working too hard, can be a bit of a problem? Most people who try internet marketing have these problems so it’s a safe bet if you are selling a traffic-generating product these problems fit the bill.

I started out writing about headlines – and I’ve digressed into body copy, because I want you to understand how the headline is an important PART of the selling process, but it is not where the process really gets going. If you are trying to sell in your headline, you are probably struggling to write good copy. You CAN state benefits in the headline, but when you try too hard to close the sale you’ll just turn readers off. Instead use the headline and the introductory copy to draw your reader in and guide him or her, through a series of “Yes” agreements to a point, at the end, where ordering your product seems like a sensible thing to do… and the main objections then will be not whether the argument is valid, but whether the reader believes you and whether your product’s perceived value exceeds the price you ask for it.

Copywriting – letters to “swipe” and getting the “appeal” right

Loren Woirhaye — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 18:52:58 +0000

Copywriting – letters to “swipe” and getting the “appeal” right is a post from: Breakthrough Marketing with Loren Woirhaye

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 obvious, but it’s the difference in most cases between
success and failure in my experience. If you have the right appeal you can get away with copy that isn’t very good, just as long as people understand easily what you are selling and the offer entices them. I learned this from Robert Collier, because in his book he claims he isn’t a great copywriter, but he was able to figure-out the appeal to sell a given product at a given time, ways to incite action or position his product as the best value. He was writing copy in a very competitive and cost-conscious era, so his “Letter Book”, while dated, is invaluable to study.

That being said, his writing is dated and the sophistication of today’s buyer makes borrowing his appeals challenging today, but from them, if you apply yourself, you can learn PRINCIPLES and apply them in your own writing.

Also – most of the greats specialize in a few areas.

Many of the letters in Dennison Hatch’s book are excellent to learn from and they are all proven winners you can model for a variety of sorts of products. They are all sort of mass-market and were all mailed in the millions, so you’ll have to account for that when borrowing ideas from them for more specialized niches.

Currently there are some secondhand copies on Amazon selling for insanely cheap considering it’s a $90 book… and worth it. Amazon.com: Million Dollar Mailings: Dension…