Read The Product

Read The Product

This step will apply to whether you are writing copy for your own product or for a client’s product.

When I say read the product, I mean READ the product. You will need to understand this product as well as if you wrote it yourself. If the product is in video form, watch it and make notes. If it’s in audio form, do the same. If the product is a web site, go through each page of content and understand what is being sold there.

Okay, why are you doing this?

Let me give you a very simple example and you’ll understand why this step is critical.

You get an email from a potential customer and he asks you if you’ll write sales copy for him. The product he is selling is a book on how to write articles by following a simple step by step process.

Now, your initial reaction, especially if you’re already a writer of some sorts, is that article writing can’t be that tough. All you do is think of the subject you want to write on and then start writing, right?

So wrong!

There is actually a process, which is followed by every great article writer, to writing great articles.

So what happens if you don’t read the book? Will you know what the process is? If you’re going to accurately depict what a person is going to learn from this particular book, you need to know what’s inside of it. There is no way around that.

Okay, so what exactly are you looking for when you’re reading the product that you’re writing sales copy for?

For starters, you’re looking to understand what the actual content of the product is. You need to understand the content as if you wrote it. You need to be able to do whatever the book says to do, if you had to. That’s an awful lot of knowledge cram but at $2,500 a sales copy it is work well worth it.

There’s another reason why you need to read the product thoroughly. A lot of your sales copy, believe it or not, is going to come from the product itself.

This is especially true with products that have a number of examples inside or products that are very descriptive.

For example, there was one product that I read that had a lot of examples of people using the methods in the book. Some of the examples were excellent. In fact, they were so good that they were easily incorporated into the sales copy as selling points. So you want to look through the product to see if there are any such examples. These are gold.

Granted, not every product is going to have these sterling examples. Some products, quite honestly, will be poorly written. In these cases, you have two choices. The first one, which is the one that I always choose, is simply to turn down the assignment. I refuse to write copy for a book that is so poorly written that I can’t get any decent material out of it. Ultimately, even if I wrote excellent copy for it, the refund requests would be off the charts.

The second option is to bite the bullet and write the best copy that you can. Naturally, your work is going to be a lot harder if you don’t have much to work with. Now, in this case, you can contact the author and ask him questions about his product and even make suggestions on how to improve it. This is going to be a judgment call on your part. I can only tell you how I would handle it. Again, at $2,500 a pop, you might want to put in the extra work to get the best copy you can out of the deal.

Another reason you want to read the product is to get a feel for the flow of how the sales copy is going to go. Many times, this is dictated by the product, especially if the product is a step by step process.

For example, one product I read literally translated into the copy. The product was a step by step, chapter by chapter process for curing acne naturally. The sales copy basically walked through the book and explained each chapter and how it would magically make you acne free. Naturally, you need a well written product to be able to follow this process, but again, that’s why you read the product. It will ultimately make YOUR job a lot easier. And isn’t that what you want, to make writing sales copy as easy as possible?

As you are reading the product, you want to make notes of the key points. You’re going to use these key points for a great part of your copy. The more key points there are, the longer your copy is going to be. I’ll touch on sales copy length at the end of this book. Yes, it does make a difference, but you want to keep it proportional to the price of the product you’re promoting. But I’m jumping ahead. More on that later.

After you’ve read the product and made notes, it’s then time to move on to the next step.