Strategic Sales Copy

Strategic Sales Copy

This chapter is going to be about what I call Strategic Sales Copy. This has to do with the layout of your sales copy, what to put where, how many times to use something, etc. Let me preface this by saying that this is probably the most complex part of writing sales copy because there are so many possibilities. Because of this fact, you MUST test EVERYTHING you do. What works in one sales letter may NOT work in another because of your target audience. Also, not everybody reacts the same way to sales copy strategies.

For example, link placement, which I am going to go over in detail in this chapter, can really convert well for some people, if you use many sales links in your letter, and turn others off who think that you’re just trying to be a pushy salesperson. You won’t please everybody. Remember that!

Okay, so what do I mean by strategic sales copy?

Let’s look at what it means to have a strategy and then maybe you’ll understand the concept a lot better.

Let’s take, for example, a baseball team and the manager. Each manager has a different way of trying to go about winning the ball game depending on the players he has available to him. A manager who has a real speedster at the top of the lineup is more likely to steal and play hit and run more often than a manager who has mostly slow players but lots of big bats. That manager will most likely play for the big inning. A manager with a good pitching staff will concentrate more on defense late in the ball game than a manager who knows that he’s got to score many runs to win because his pitching staff is sub par.

I could keep going but I think you got the point. Even though we are playing the same game, each manager is going to run his team differently, depending on the abilities of the players he has.

When writing sales copy, you’re going to write it based on what your target market is, what they usually respond to best and what your particular abilities are as a copywriter. Yes, there are certain basics and rules, but once you understand them; you can break them if you know what you’re doing and have a strategy for doing so.

Let’s look at your writing ability.

If you find that you’re really good at writing sales copy telling stories, then by all means capitalize on that. Engage your reader with your storytelling ability. If however, you feel that telling stories is not your strong point but you’re

good at pointing out the benefits of a product, then focus on that. Make bullet points a main focus of your sales copy. Everybody is going to have a natural flair or feeling for certain aspects of sales copy. You want to accentuate what you’re really good at and downplay what you’re really bad at. The truth is, if you’re a lousy story teller and you base your whole ad copy on telling a story, you’re going to lose your audience in the first paragraph.

Okay, what about the layout of the sales copy itself or more specifically, the order in which things come? Well, some things are basic and you’re not going to want to mess with them simply because they work. For example, almost all sales copy starts with a headline and maybe even a pre-header. But after that, just about anything goes.

For example, you might want to follow your headline with a powerful testimonial from one of your customers. As a matter of fact, one piece of ad copy I read was one long testimonial. It was written from the point of view of one of the users of the product. Spliced into it were bullet points and benefits that the copywriter himself put in. This was a very effective piece of sales copy, but it won’t work for every case.

The main thing that you have to keep in mind is the various pieces of your sales copy. Between your headline and your signature and PS, there are basically the following items:

· Bullet Points

· Story

· Testimonials

· Proof & Credibility

· Guarantee

· Price

· Bonuses

· Call To Action

These items can be arranged in almost any order. Yes, you want your call to action to be pretty close to the end of your sales copy, but even at that, you can certainly include more testimonials after your call to action to push those over the edge who might not be sure that they’re ready to purchase yet. You could show more proof, reinforce the price or do just about anything after you’re asked them for their money. The PS is a great way to throw in the last minute monkey wrench, such as announcing one last bonus that you’ll give away if they order today.

Please take a look at my Honest Income Program sales copy and see how I mixed things up. This keeps your reader interested because they’re not seeing the same thing all the time. Also study other sales copy as well and

write down the mix. Make a chart of how they design their sales copy. You’ll see that there are many ways to skin a cat.

The point I am trying to get across here, and I hope it is not being lost, is that you shouldn’t do this haphazardly. You want to plan out your sales copy every step of the way. In other words, that same outline that you end up getting from looking at somebody else’s sales copy, you want to create that outline BEFORE you even write your sales copy. You need to know EXACTLY what you are going to put where BEFORE you do it. After that, it’s just a matter of filling in the blanks. Yes, as creative as sales copywriting can be, it is also a science that can and SHOULD be planned out TO THE LETTER.

I said earlier that I was going to touch on sales links in detail, so let me do that now.

I am a proponent of NOT throwing a ton of sales links at my prospect. I present them with my sales copy and then after the call to action I present them with my sales link. I may include one more after the PS, but that’s it. Now, you will see some sales copy that has sales links for just about every page of sales copy. Many people place a link after the first product description, or where you usually see the ebook cover for the first time. There is nothing wrong with this. Like I said, everybody will react differently to it. Just make sure that you decide what you’re going to do before you do it. Also, test your results with many sales links and only one or two and see which converts better for your niche.

Strategic Sales Copy is like fighting a war. You have all your weapons at your disposal. The key is what to fire and when. There is no be all and end all to that problem. Again, you need to study sales copy, preferably for the niche you’re going to write for, and see how people put their copy together, structure wise. You’ll find that no two people do things the same. So you have two choices.

The first is to take one of the structures and copy it, simply putting in your own words, bullet points, descriptions, testimonials, etc.

The second choice is to come up with something on your own. Personally, I don’t like to reinvent the wheel. Why should I? Go to the Clickbank marketplace, take a look at what the top sales page is for the niche you’re writing for and understand what makes it work. Again, this isn’t rocket science. Years of study have gone into copywriting and all those who have come before us know what sells.

Use it!