Punctuation

Punctuation

I have saved this chapter for now because punctuation is probably one of the most confusing parts of writing sales copy and without a doubt, the hardest to explain. The reason is because of all the rules we were taught in school. So let me get one thing out of the way before I go one step farther…

Throw out the rules! They don’t apply to writing sales copy.

Yes, I know…it’s hard to forget everything that was drilled into you during all those years in school. But trust me, the sooner you get all that instruction out of your head the sooner you’ll discover that you’re writing sales copy that actually captures the prospect’s attention and keeps it…all the way to the end of the sales copy.

To that end, I am going to show you some basic techniques for writing sales copy using punctuation that will get the job done. I will take each form of punctuation one at a time and explain how to use it or not use it.

Commas

Commas tell your prospect to pause, to take a breath, to gather himself. Get the picture. However, we don’t want the prospect to do this. We don’t want him to pause…at least not with such a big pause.

What I am basically saying is NOT to use commas. I know this is going to get your grammar teacher in a tizzy, but trust me…throw your commas in the trash. I will show you later on in this chapter what to replace your commas with…and they’re very effective.

Periods

Periods are even worse than commas. They not only tell your prospect to pause, they tell them to come to a complete halt. That’s the last thing you want. Now, you can’t write without periods. However, you will notice in the sales copy that is about to follow that I do NOT use periods in any of my headers or subheads. You don’t want prospects to stop at these points. You want them to keep on going. Only use periods in the body of your copy to finish sentences, but nowhere else.

Question Marks

These are very important. What’s even more important is why you use them. Asking questions in sales copy is a great way to get your prospect engaged in the copy.

Think about it. If you ask your prospect a question what are the chances that he is going to ignore that question? For example, if you were to ask the question, “If I could show you how to make $30,000 a month on autopilot…would that be worth 5 minutes of your time?” don’t you think your prospect is going to want to keep reading? Of course he’s going to at the very least answer the question in his own mind.

Exclamation Points

Many copywriters overdo these. Believe it or not, you don’t need to have a statement with three exclamation points at the end of it and you don’t need to have many statements in your copy with exclamation points at all.

The key is to use them and make them count. If you have three subheads in your sales copy with exclamation points, prospects will notice them. But if you litter your copy with them, they lose their effectiveness.

It’s kind of like being in a room of models. After a while, they all kind of look the same. But if you walk into a room with a bunch of ordinary people and there is ONE model in the room…guess what? She stands out.

Exclamation points…use them sparingly.

Ellipses

Okay, remember when I said (not too long ago) not to use commas? Well ellipses are one great substitution for commas. They connect sentences or partials sentences and make it so that you can throw your commas in the trash.

For example:

I was out of work, out of luck, and out of money. Could be replaced with…

I was out of work…out of luck…and out of money.

If you find that you’re writing a sentence that requires a pause…use ellipses instead of commas. Ellipses are also used to connect two items in a list like…

· 95% of Internet marketers fail with their online business and…

· Of the 5% who succeed…only 20% of them are earning enough to consider it a full time income.

They work great! (use of exclamation point that hopefully drives the point home)

EM Dashes

If you’re not sure what they are – the thing just before this section and after – that’s what they are.

I also use these in place of commas and also when I want to draw a reader’s attention to something. EM dashes are a great way to do that.

If you take a look at my sales copy from my Honest Income Program, you will find these all over the place.

They’re very effective when used properly.

Personally, I mix these up with ellipses so that my copy doesn’t get too “predictable.” There is an art to making your copy “look” good. This is something that is hard to teach, but as you do it more…you’ll get a feel for it.

Again, check out my Honest Income Program copy and make notes of where I used ellipses and where I used EM dashes. You will begin to notice a pattern.

Colon

Use a colon when you also want to attract attention to something. For example:

See how I used a colon there? I want the reader to notice what is about to follow because I feel it is important.

Never use two colons in the same sentence. So if you want to draw attention to two items – use a colon and an EM dash.

Here is an example.

Point # 1 – Never use two colons in the same sentence: Instead use a colon and an EM dash. The order doesn’t matter.

I rarely will use a colon in a sentence that is even long enough to use two colons. If I have a sentence that long…I use EM dashes throughout or ellipses if I am combining a number of items.

Semicolon

I’ll keep this simple. Don’t use them. A semicolon is a punctuation that doesn’t know whether it wants to be a colon or a comma. We’re talking absolute no man’s land here. I have never used a semicolon in my sales copy. If you think you need to use one…think again.

Quotation Marks

This may seem obvious, but trust me…some people do use these when they shouldn’t.

Quotation marks should only be used when you are quoting something. For example:

John Doe said, “My name is John Doe and I’m a U.S. Senator.”

If you have a quote that is more than one sentence, only open the quote at the beginning of the first sentence and close it at the end of the last sentence.

For example:

Here is a testimony from John Doe:

“The Honest Income Program will give you a real income by using proven methods…

I have been using it for about 3 months and I am already earning about $1,000 a month.

I strongly recommend it to anybody who wants to make some easy money online.”

Notice where the beginning and ending quotes are.

Now, many people use quotes to emphasize things like “this” to get a point across. This is amateurish. I will show you a better way to do this soon.

Bold…Italic…Underline

Okay…here is the better way. See, I didn’t keep you waiting long.

If you want to emphasize certain words or sentences in your sales copy…use

bold, italic, or underline. You can even combine these for real emphasis.

Take a look at some examples from my Honest Income Program sales copy.

Bold

The 4 things you must NEVER do when writing an article...

Italic

The 8 secrets that you MUST know to turn your Ebay business into a

steady flow of cash...

Underline

How one simple and powerful change can turn traffic exchanges into an advertising gold mine...

And if you look through the rest of the copy…you’ll notice many combinations of these three. I mix things up to keep the reader’s attention. I don’t want to become predictable and boring.

In the next chapter…pay special attention to how I use punctuation in the real time sales copy that we’re about to write.

When used correctly…punctuation can make a huge difference in your sales copy.

A Real-Time Example

Well, in keeping with the tradition that I started with my article writing PDF, you are now going to see a unique thing being done in a copywriting book. I am going to, right before your eyes, construct sales copy. It’s going to be for a fictional product. Don’t worry, I will provide you with the information for this fictional product. I then want you to try to come up with your own sales copy based on the information that I give you. I will then write my own version of the sales copy right before your eyes in this PDF. There is no better way to learn sales copy than by actually doing it.

Ready?

Then let’s go!

The Product

To figure out what product to write a sales page for, what I did was go to Google and look up what our biggest problems are, at least according to the people out there who give us this information. I wanted to write sales copy for something that not only had a need for a solution but where a solution also exists, at least in theory anyway. Remember, this isn’t a real product so I had to take some liberties here…otherwise we’d never get this done.

I decided to write sales copy for a product that cures male impotence. Now, I did some research on this and there are natural products available that do claim to fix this problem. Since this is not something that I personally suffer from, I can’t test it myself, but at least we know that the problem exists and supposedly, a cure exists as well that does not involve taking drugs. That will be our USP, or Unique Selling Proposition. People are very afraid of drugs these days, especially with all the lawsuits against pharmaceuticals. Remember Vioxx? I certainly do.

Okay, so we have our product. It is going to be a natural way to cure male impotence.

The Steps

Okay, now what we have to do is go back to the beginning of this book and go through the steps of creating sales copy, which includes actually reading the product and making notes on it.

Now, I realize that we don’t have a real product here, so what I am going to do is pretend I have read the PDF and summarize the bullet points for you. It’s a very straight forward product so the PDF is not that long.

This is what it covers.

1. What male impotence is

2. What causes male impotence

3. What the symptoms of male impotence are

4. How to test for male impotence

5. Risk factors of male impotence

6. An alternative treatment that works

That last one is the key. The rest of the information, quite honestly, is background information and only added to pad the book. Truth is, a person suffering from male impotence is interested in only one thing, how to cure it. The problem is, if that’s all a product creator put in his book, it would be about 5 pages long and people would be screaming for their money back, even if it did work. Sad to say, but it’s true. That’s why you read so many books with so much fluff in it. Authors feel they need to pad it to make sales and keep refunds down. I hope you will notice that this book has almost no fluff in it. At least I hope not.

Okay, from the above information, we can start constructing our sales copy.

Read The Product

I will do this for you, hypothetically, and then provide you with the information that you will need to construct your sales copy.

Here is what you need to know about the actual cure for male impotence coming from the book.

1. It is completely natural.

2. It will bring about results in as little as 7 days.

3. Maintenance of male potency only requires 1 treatment a month.

4. There are absolutely no harmful side effects associated with the treatment.

In the product, the author tells about his own story of how he suffered from male impotence. Naturally, telling this whole story is beyond the scope of this tutorial, but I will provide you with a basic outline here. You will incorporate this story, right out of the book, into your sales copy.

The Story

I was 45 years old and married to my wife of 23 years when I suddenly found one day that I couldn’t perform. I was absolutely devastated. I immediately went to the doctor to find out what was wrong. The doctor told me he couldn’t find anything and that it was probably just stress…Please! I’d never been stressed a day in my life. I have everything a guy my age could want to have. Then I did a little research since it was obvious that he wasn’t going to be of any help. My research pointed to certain physical problems that I might be having due to deficiencies in my diet. So I did some more research. That’s when I stumbled onto this miraculous cure that I am going to share with you in my book…and so on.

I think you get the basic gist of his story. He couldn’t perform, went to the doctor, doctor couldn’t help him, so he researched and found this cure. He goes on to say that in 7 days his impotence was cured.

Simple enough? Sure it is!

Research The Market

The next step in the process is to research the market and see what people want. I actually had to do this in order to make this sales copy appeal to them.

Let me tell you, these people are desperate and miserable. Sex is one of the most powerful emotions among human beings. These men who can’t perform would give anything to be able to, short of taking harmful drugs unless they have to. So the emotional factor of this issue is so powerful that you can probably sell this item with just a few good testimonials. Trust me…natural cures for male impotence are not hard to sell.

Bullet Points

The next step is to create our bullet points. Well, we’ve actually done that from reading the product itself. Refer back to page 68 and you have them. No, there aren’t a lot of them, but what more do you need?

The Headline

Okay, let’s actually write our sales copy now, starting with the headline.

If you go back to the chapter on writing headlines, you will find that there are many ways to go about doing this. Personally, I decided that for this headline I would use this method off of page 17

The first way to go about creating a headline for your product, and

probably the simplest, is to pick out the one thing that your product promises to the consumer and use that one thing as the headline.

Based on this method, I came up with this simple, but very effective headline.

“Cure Male Impotence In 7 Days…Naturally”

It doesn’t get any simpler or more effective than that. Anybody suffering from male impotence is at least going to read what the sales copy has to say, even if they are a little skeptical.

Now, if you don’t see where we got this headline from, take a look at the bullet points that we came up with from the product itself.

It is completely natural.

It will bring about results in as little as 7 days.

There are two other bullet points, but these are the main ones we want to focus on.

Now, why didn’t I include the bullet point on the once a month maintenance? It’s work.

Now, it may not seem like a lot of work, but people want a push button fix it on the spot solution. Putting in the part about the maintenance will probably kill many sales. After they buy the book and see that it works, they might not mind so much having to take some kind of vitamin, or whatever it is, once a month. But you can’t tell them this up front.

Sales copy MUST focus on the easy and positive. You can’t put things in it that are going to make people think that there is work involved.

Okay, headline taken care of…Let’s move on.