Big
Lessons From 30 Years’ Freelance Copywriting:
HOW
TO WIND UP WITH COPY THAT REALLY SELLSI got my first paid, freelance copywriting job 31 years ago.
I have since written copy consuming a forest of paper, for product from the
mundane to the weird and bizarre, for every media, including print ads,
direct-mail, TV infomercials, and the internet. Here are a few of the most
important things I have learned.
Never Trust The
Client. Or Yourself.
Even the poorest, most impoverished, homeless person still
has a wealth of one commodity: opinions. Every client I’ve ever worked with has
been rich in opinions and beliefs about his customers and prospects, prices,
competitors, etc., a goodly portion of which have been proven wrong. Most
people confuse their beliefs with fact. This is why unfettered testing is so
vital in direct marketing. It also links to one of my favorite marketing
principles: the only votes that count come with dollar bills attached to them.
Years ago, I got to know a very talented psychic who performed at all the
Playboy clubs. People put questions they wanted answered into a hat. He tossed
aside any not folded up with money. We should do the same with the opinions
about our marketing in general, our copy in specific from employees, spouses,
friends, peers, and anyone other than a real customer voting by buying.
Write Like Ya Talk
Doesn’t matter if you are selling fractional jet ownership
to a highly sophisticated Fortune 500 CEO or a tote-the-note used car on weekly
payments to a high school drop-out. You write like real people talk, over a
beer or a cocktail. Never how English teachers write. Selling via copy is
selling, and selling is a personal, person to person exercise requiring
rapport. This is a difficult thing for a lot of people to grasp, when they
believe their clientele is different. In truth, no clientele is different.
Never Take Readership
For Granted
One of the biggest flaws in many sales letters is the
presumption they’ll be read. People have to be compelled to read. They have other things to do. They ruthlessly
discard things unread at every opportunity.
Even when writing to an audience that has great affinity, that is
responsive, that are already good customers, you dare not assume readership.
Whether by gigantic, irresistible promise, arousal of intense curiosity,
manufacture of extreme fear, delivery of major news, clever gimmick, or other
strategy, you must stop the reader in his tracks, get him reading, then keep
him reading. People who attempt writing copy without successful experience
selling face to face or to groups, from the platform, are at a disadvantage,
because they do not have the skills nor the ingrained, automatic behavior of
keeping the other person “on the hook”, paying attention, interested.
Move Methodically Forward To The Call To Action
By all means, tell interesting stories, draw analogies, be
entertaining, make the reading/buying experience fun, but never let any of
those things become the point. Nothing has merit unless it moves the reader
further along towards the action you want him to take, in an organized,
straight path.
Don’t Be Subtle.
Don’t Wimp Out.
For 9 consecutive years, in my life as a speaker, I spoke 25
to 27 times a year on programs with Zig Ziglar. Most people know Zig as a great
motivationalist. Fewer know him as a hard-core sales trainer, yet his book
‘Secrets To Closing The Sale’ should be studied and used by every copywriter.
Anyway, one of the things I got in my head in my late teens, then listening to
Zig’s tapes, was: are you a salesman or a professional visitor? If you don’t
close, you’re just a visitor. In your copy, you have to close. To directly,
clearly, forcefully tell the reader exactly what you want him to do and when
and how to do it. Most ads and sales letters wimp out at the end.
Prove Your Case Every
Way You Can
I’m constantly dismayed at seeing lots of ads, sales
letters, catalogs, web sites absent testimonials, absent media quotes, absent
scientific facts, absent illustrations.
It is foolish and arrogant to think you will be believed because of your
own copywriting eloquence and brilliance. It is lazy not to get all the proof
you can. Specific to testimonials, what
a customer says is 1000% more persuasive than what you say, even if you’re a
1000% more eloquent. Of course, there can be bad testimonials. Plain vanilla,
uninteresting, attesting only to adequacy. You have to concern yourself with
both ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’ of proof. But as illustration of the importance,
I’ll tell you about an infomercial I worked on. In its first version, it was
about 50% interview of the person behind the product, 50% testimonials, and it
flopped. In its next incarnation, 30% interview, 70% testimonials, and it
nearly worked. Finally, at 15% interview, 85% testimonials, it worked
wonderfully. And the person being interviewed was a trained, skilled,
exceptionally effective “pitchman” in other venues.
Use A System For Writing
Unless and until you have written copy for years and years,
a lot, so that your subconscious has internalized all the disciplines and
checklists, you should consciously adhere to a step by step system, and go
through the same steps in the same order every time. Spontaneity is vastly
overrated, especially for really important, like piloting an aircraft, open
heart surgery or writing sales copy. In my book ‘The Ultimate Sales Letter’, I lay out the step by step system I
used religiously for the first dozen or so years. Every good copywriter I know
has a sequence of things he does in the same order, each and every time. And if
you need to be prolific and fast, this is even more important. Copywriting is
not really a creative activity, and should not be approached that way. It is a
mechanical activity; basically using templates and tested, proven strategies,
devices and hunks of copy, stitching it together, then smoothing out the rough
edges and the weld spots, finally getting it all into one distinctive voice. In
a creative activity, you might want to start with a blank piece of paper. In
copywriting, you do not.
Dan Kennedy is the author of the book The Ultimate Sales
Letter and numerous other business books. Find info at
NationalSalesLetterContest.com, NoBSBooks.com and dankennedy.com.
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