#1 What’s the Problem?

Always strive to answer this question first. What is the problem your prospect is facing? What is their pain? What are they experiencing and how is it making them feel?

For example, if you offer a ghost writing service, then your prospect may be feeling the pains of not enough time to get all their writing done. If you are selling a book on how to find the best coffee maker, then the problem your prospect may have is that their coffee pot keeps breaking or makes terrible coffee.

The problem that your prospect is feeling or trying to overcome will be identified very early on your sales page. In fact, it is often stated right in the headline. For example, “Tired of Replacing that Cheap Coffee Pot?”

#2 Incite Emotion

People buy for emotional reasons. They justify their purchase with logic. SO that means you want to first appeal to their emotions. You want your prospect to make the decision to buy right away. Then you can spend some time justifying their decision with facts, testimonials and other tactics. Use emotional words in your headline, subheadings and throughout your copy. In the example used above, “Tired” is an emotional word. It describes how your prospect is feeling.

#3 A Call to Action above the Fold

Often, a person will visit your sales page and make an instant decision based on reading your headline and a quick glance of their screen. They may not ever scroll down. Take advantage of these quick decision makers, and support them, by providing a call to action above the fold. The fold is the point at which your visitor has to start scrolling down to see the rest of your page. It’s the bottom of their computer screen.

#4 Use Formatting Wisely

Have you ever visited a sales page where everything is bolded or in all caps? It makes it very difficult to know what you’re supposed to pay attention to. The result? You don’t pay attention to anything.

First and foremost, make sure your headlines and subheadings stand out. Use bold fonts, larger fonts and you might want to try a different color. Make sure your page is easy to read with plenty of white space between sentences and paragraphs. And simply highlight, bold, or underline those keywords that draw the eye down toward your call to action. These will be words or phrases that promise or stress a benefit to your prospect.

#5 Call to Action

Test and track your call to action. Try various phrasing to see which works best. For example, does a call to action with a post script, PS, work better for conversions? Does your audience prefer a button to click or a link?

When it comes to writing top-notch sales copy, remember that we buy for emotional reasons and justify our purchases based on logic. Hook your prospect by calling out their problem, promising a solution and then showing them why and how your solution works.

With a bit of hard work and determination, even beginning copywriters can be crafting sales letters that convert quite well in a short period of time. Here are a few tips to help you learn the art of good copywriting quickly.

Read Sales Letters for Fun

Make it an obsession. Get absorbed in copywriting. Read everything you can about great copy. Read record-breaking ads for fun.

Much like an art collector admires art, so a great copywriter admires copy. Read good copy over and over and absorb all the nuances of what really made it convert.

Why did the writer choose this word instead of that? Why did the headline work? What kind of emotions did the piece of copy invoke? How did the copywriter structure the call to action?

Read both the classic ads (i.e. “They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play …”) and high-converting modern ads.

Then, take it a step further. Write out winning ads by hand. You’ll absorb a lot more of what the author was thinking by penning a letter by hand than just by reading it with your eyes.

It may seem like unnecessary hard work, but almost every world class copywriter today started their career by handwriting past successful ads. If you truly want to become a great copywriter, this kind of training is really required.

Build Your Power Words Vocabulary

Start paying more attention to words and phrases that paint pictures and invoke emotions. These words and phrases are the bread and butter of any good copywriter.

Anytime you come across a word, phrase of technique that you might want to use in your own writing, write it down. Keep a file of these words. As the list grows over weeks and months, you’ll soon have a powerful library of words at your disposal.

Start Writing and Ask for Reviews

As much as you can learn by studying others, the only way you can really learn to write copy is to just start writing.

Write your first piece of copy. If you’re working at a small company or website, see if you can get them to split test your piece. If you’re a freelancer, see if you can find a free client or two to start with.

Ask for reviews from other copywriters. Sign up to different copywriting and marketing forums to meet other copywriters to compare notes with.

Finally, look at your actual results from live sales letters. Were they what you would have expected? Why or why not?

Learning to Write Great Copy

Learning to be a great copywriter isn’t easy, but it’s incredibly rewarding. Start studying successful past letters, build your vocabulary and get writing. You’ll have both successes and failures; study both. Figure out what’s working and what’s not in your writing and move forward from there.

Let’s go into two of the most important elements behind the buying psychology: emotions and logic.

Buy on Emotions, Justify It with Logic

Does someone buy a Mercedes because it logically makes sense? No – they buy a Mercedes because of how they believe they’ll feel when they own the car. The luxurious feel. The envy from others. The sense of pride, of power.

Then they tell themselves: “I’m buying it because I need to impress clients.” Or “I’m buying it because if it helps me land just one deal, it’s almost paid for itself.”

The reality is, however, buying decisions are almost always made on desire. Only once a strong desire has made the decision, then logic is used to justify the buying decision.

How can you use this to your advantage?

First of all, perhaps the most important skill you can master as a marketer is the ability to create desire. If you can instill a sense of excitement, of urgency, of tangible desire to own your product in your potential customers, your ability to sell will go up dramatically.

The other thing to take away from this principle is how important it is to help lay out the logic your client needs to justify the purchase. If you can explain why they’ll make their money back from their investment, you make it much easier for them to give in to their desire to own the product.

The Importance of Believability

Marketers and salesmen often try to make huge claims. It’s almost as if they’re in a competition to see who can make a bigger claim that nobody believes.

The most important thing in getting people to buy isn’t making big claims. Instead, it’s getting believability.

If I could convince you that I could show you how to make an extra $2,000 a month for no additional effort, all it would cost you is $50 and you believed me 100%, how likely are you to say yes?

On the other hand, if I tried to convince you I could make you a million dollars and you didn’t believe me, how much would you pay me for that?

The most important thing really isn’t how big a claim you can make, but how big a claim you can make your customers believe.

Desire is built on claims people believe. If someone really believes their lives can be better, they’ll get excited. Logic is also built on claims they believe. If someone really believes that buying that new Mercedes is worth the investment, they’re much more likely to spend the money.

The psychology behind buying is in some ways simple. Get people to want your product and remove the logical reasons why they shouldn’t. It’s also a skill that can take a lifetime to master.

This is the kind of knowledge that can really make a difference when planning your next marketing campaign, since the longer your material stays on the minds of your target audience, the more you get from each dollar spent getting that message out to them.

The book breaks down the creation of sticky ideas into a formula made up of six element; simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions and stories. Using examples from the real world including sticky ideas ranging anywhere from real world ad campaigns to urban legends that everyone has heard of and no one can forget, the brothers do an excellent job of clearly demonstrating the application of the principals that they write about.

Over the next few weeks we’ll do an series of six posts, an element by element review of the theories put forth in Made to Stick, analyzing the ideas set forth in each section and seeing if the ideas the brothers are presenting are in themselves sticky! Make sure to check back often, so as not to miss any of the six parts!