HOW TO BRAINSTORM (THE SMART WAY)

Every sales letter has one goal: Turning a reader into a buyer.

Your page must drive conversions. But before you can even get your reader to the end of the page (you NEVER want your buy button at the beginning), you must give them a reason to keep reading.

Eliminate your reader’s fears, frustrations, sadness, disappointment, and anger, then replace those negative emotions with the promise of a positive result.

1. Your reader is searching for a solution.
2. Your job is to provide one.

But you can’t rush the sale and hope to close the deal.

Highlight your reader’s fears and frustrations, then twist the knife into the meat of their problem enough to make your solution stand out as the best answer amid the rest of the online noise.

One of the biggest mistakes unseasoned copywriters make is highlighting the benefits of their products while ignoring obvious pitfalls. Benefits are important, and you should definitely focus on them more than features. However, making your reader understand the biggest benefit of your product is the most important thing you can do — it will eliminate their pain or relieve their suffering.

Questions you should consider during this phase:

1. What are your market’s three biggest fears?
2. What are your market’s three biggest pain points?
3. What are your market’s three most frequent frustrations?

Hopefully, you know your market well. If you’re writing a sales letter for a niche you’re less familiar with, you will need to use other avenues to research your market, such as competitor sales pages, competitor testimonials, discussions in the comment sections of popular blogs and forums in the niche, and my personal favorite — Amazon.com.

Knowing your potential market intimately is the best way to speak directly to it.

I start my research with blogs and forums first and save Amazon for last. The mediums are slightly different. Forums and blogs are more conversational, while the reviews on Amazon are closer to the direct language you will want to use when writing your sales letter.

Finish your brainstorming by answering the five following questions:

1. What are the three biggest frustrations of my market?
2. What are the three biggest fears in my market?
3. What are the three things that most anger my market?
4. What is the one solution that will satisfy my market?
5. What is the one promise strong enough to hang my solution on?

Answer those questions well and you will have the fuel to drive buyer behavior. Next, we’ll go over the exact formula you’ll use to get your rough draft in place.

THE FORMULA

1. Grab Your Reader’s Attention With An Engaging Headline

The opening headline is your first impression. If your promise isn’t compelling, you have zero chance of converting that reader into a buyer.

If you make your headline impossible to ignore and keep it congruent with the problem presented and solution suggested, the odds of pulling your reader into the first sentence, then leading them all the way down the body of your copy to the Buy Button, are greatly increased.

2. Identify The Precise Problem Your Reader Is Facing By Using The Everyday Vocabulary Of Your Market

If you can enter the conversation taking place in your reader’s mind, you will gain instant credibility and the rest of your letter will have more of a natural flow.

The more specific you are, the more effective your sales letter will be. You can cast a wide net, but you’ll catch more fish if you drop it where the schools are swimming.

3. Provide A Solution

Like your target reader, and the problem presented, the more specific you can make your solution, the more compelling it will be to your potential buyer.

Cut the core from their obstacles by offering a tailored solution to a problem you clearly understand.

4. Present Your Credentials

Countless marketers, both online and off, would love to sell your reader on a solution to their problem. It’s your job to let your market know why YOUR empathy and experience make YOU the perfect person to help them.

All your brainstorming and research will pay off throughout the body copy of your sales letter by giving you effective language to use when speaking with your market. But your credentials must always be honest.

5. Show The Benefits

Highlight the features of your product, but dig DEEP into the benefits to clarify how your potential buyer’s life will be better after they use your product.

Questions to ask yourself:

1. What does your product do for the buyer AFTER they use it?
2. How are your benefits different from other products?
3. Have you made a clear distinction between the features and the benefits?

6. Provide Social Proof

Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

If your readers see how your product or services have helped others who were dealing with the same or similar issues, nudging them toward the buyer’s mindset will be easier.

7. Make Your Offer, And Make It GREAT

You’ve managed to lead your reader this far down the page; that’s fantastic — you’re now ahead of the pack. It’s time to give your reader an unbeatable offer that’s difficult to click away from.

Your reader wants a solution, otherwise they wouldn’t have wasted their time reading this far. Yet, not just any solution will do. Phone it in, lose the sale.

Create the right blend of price and product with an appropriately compelling hook that makes your offer impossible to ignore, and your reader is sure to stay on your page at least a little longer.

1. Have you researched the competition to see how your offer measures against other similar offers?
2. Would you buy your product if you were in your target market’s position?
3. Can you make any small tweaks that would take your offer from good to GREAT?

8. Inject Scarcity

You want to give your buyer a reason to buy immediately, but you never want to use false scarcity to trick your buyer into a purchase.

Supplies are NEVER limited regarding digital downloads. Be honest and use discounts, but never be insincere or say anything that will soil your hard-earned reputation.

Suggested discounts could include:

Bonuses limited to the first X number of sales.
Additional coaching or access.
An additional discount offered for buyers who act immediately.

9. Offer A Guarantee

Your buyer wants reassurance, so let them know they are 100% safe. Risk is one of the biggest buyer objections; make sure it belongs only to you.

The guarantee is a great place to go over the top and elevate the perceived value of your product. Create a guarantee that is as much in your buyers’s favor as possible (without it actually costing you money).

10. Tell Your Potential Buyer EXACTLY What You Want Them To Do

Again, be specific. If you want them to “click the button below,” you must say, “Click the button below!”

What may seem clear to you won’t necessarily seem as clear to your buyer. Leave no room for ambiguity. Spell out everything for your reader with step-by-step instructions and don’t worry that you might be oversimplifying.

11. Give Your Reader A Warning

Paint a vivid picture of what might happen to their life if they decide not to buy your product or service. Will their world be worse off than it was the day before? Will their problems escalate if they don’t take action immediately? Will your solution give them the happiness, relief, or sanity they seek?

Restate the primary benefits of your solution, but do so in a way that leaves your reader wondering what will happen if they leave the page.

What will life be like if they ignored the solution?

12. Close With A Reminder

Postscripts are perfect for this. Summarize your solution, along with all the potential benefits and overall offer. Give your potential customer another reason to click.

P.S.’s are often the first and final thing a reader sees.

Nearly 1/3 of readers will scroll down to the postscript, reading that first, before returning to the top of the page.

Make your postscript outstanding. This will help you increase conversions when readers reach the bottom of the page, but it will also multiply the number of readers you have in the first place.

OUTLINING

Before you can actually start writing your sales letter, you should organize your research and brainstorming into a logical outline using the 12-step sales letter roadmap from above.

Don’t worry about writing Pulitzer Prize-winning copy. The point is to lead your reader from the promise in your headline to the Call To Action at the bottom.

The best way to do this is by making sure you hit every one of the 12 points along the way by plugging in your research, then blending it with your own insights, instincts, and general experience.

While writing your sales letter, your potential buyer will likely ask themselves the following questions:

Can I afford this solution?
What will happen if I don’t like it or if it doesn’t work for me?
What will happen if I don’t buy today?
How do I know this can really help me with my problem?
What if I don’t have time to use it?

Those are some of the most common reader objections. Be prepared to answer those in your copy, along with anything else you might think of while you’re writing.

NOW BLAZE THROUGH THE FIRST DRAFT

REVISION

Revision is everything.

The difference between a good sales letter and a great sales letter could mean the difference in a full digit to your conversions. And the difference between good and great is often nothing more than attention to the details.

Expect to spend longer revising your sales letter than you did writing it. Unlike writing a sales letter, no simple roadmap or shortcut exists to cleaning it up, though you can follow the below suggestions to create your best possible sales letter.

Examine your word choice – Use power words, always go for clarity over cleverness, and never leave yourself open for ambiguity
Look for consistency – As you move from paragraph to paragraph, ask yourself if the flow of your letter feels clear and complete
Keep your college in the closet – Voice is more important than anything you learned in school
Online, people scan – Keep your sales copy clean with short paragraphs of no more than four or five sentences
Trim the fat – Ditch your emotional attachment to the copy so you can make it the best copy possible
Read your sales letter out loud – Even if it’s just your solitary voice bouncing against the walls of an otherwise empty room
Read backwards – When you read a document backwards, the unfamiliarity of the copy will allow you to catch things you might have otherwise missed

I always allow a bit of breath between the rough and the edit. This can be as little as an hour, but is often more than a day. By allowing distance between rough draft and edit, you will approach your writing with fresh eyes better able to catch errors.

This sales letter template is a great start. But it isn’t enough. Know why this particular sales letter engine purrs and you can maximize the biggest benefit — all your writing will improve.

The laws of persuasion are universal. Master them and you can write page-turning copy, even if you’re writing about sand.

Take the Sales Letter Shortcut Video Training

Last year, I was lucky enough to have a world-renowned copywriter go over a few of my sales pages on a screencast, watching as he edited my copy line by line. One of these three sales letters led to a million-dollar product launch for one of my clients. The other two filled in a few blanks about what it is truly necessary to make passive income online.

When writing this sales letter template, I thought how awesome it would be to watch an expert write a sales letter live. Though I’d never seen a product like it, I knew it was EXACTLY the type of training I would have absolutely loved and happily paid for.

So I created a four-video training course as a companion. You can get the FREE training here:

http://thedigitalwriter.net/member .

Whatever you do, don’t stop. You can write any future you want to. Start writing a better future today, then keep right on typing tomorrow!

EPIC Copywriters That Every Digital Writer Should Get To Know

David Frey – Marketing Blogger
Robert Cialdini – Influence At Work
John Carlton – The Rant
Joanna Wiebe – CopyHackers

Of course, this EPIC Post would not have been possible without the awesome book,”Sales Letter Shortcut (Earn More in Less Time).”

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Until next week!