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Guest post by: jon leuty Become an Author

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Writing great sales copy (or having it written for you) can turn your business into a world-beater, having said that mediocre sales copy can have an adverse effect, so it is of paramount importance that you know the difference. So following are my 5 top tips on writing highly effective sales letters that are working now and will continue to work in the future. Become great at writing sales copy and you can write your own paycheck. 1.You Have to Know Who Your Talking To: -

More commonly known as identifying your target market, the more specific you are at this point the easier it becomes to write your sales copy. Why might that be the case? Simple really, you will know who they are, what problems they need solving and how you can provide the solution they are looking for, and the great thing is, the more specific you are the more your prospects will relate to you.

2.Focus on Your Customers Pain (What's Keeping Them Awake at Night?): -

So what's the point here? Well do you think that people lie awake at night worrying about their problems and challenges, of course they do, and your going to help them aren't you? If somebody is being kept up at night by their problems, do you think they are motivated to find a solution? Damn right they are. Many people wake up in the morning with their problems being the first thing on their mind, whether it is debt, stress over their job, lonliness, health issues etc, and sooner or later they will sit down at their computer and begin to search for the solutions.

3.Write Benefits NOT Features:-

This one is probably the most critical part of your sales copy, but probably the hardest one to understand and is the most common mistake I see in marketing literature. You just need to remember that people buy benefits not features, so if all you write and talk about is features, then you may as well be asking your customer not to buy. So what are the differences between features and benefits? Well let's begin with features. Features are a description of a product. E.g. If say you are talking about a luminous watch, you would say quite simply "the watch lights up in the dark". But if you talk about benefits, you would say "the watch lights up in the dark which means that you can tell the time easily at night" Another example of the difference between features and benefits we can use is diet pills. The feature of a diet pill, is it's a pill, and nobody says "I want to take more pills, so I will take a diet pill" no they take them because they want to lose weight and they want it to be easy, so the benefit of the diet pill is exactly that. So you need to think about the solution your product or services provide and write about it.

So how do you write features and benefits, well there is a simple exercise you can do to help you understand this a little better, it goes like this: -

•Draw a line down the middle of a piece of paper.

•List your product's features on the left hand side.

•On the right hand side turn your features into benefits.

•Use the phrase "Which means that".

How does this work? Here's an example using the suggested method above: -

Of course you now have to imagine your piece of paper with the line down the middle, in the following sentence the first part would be on the left of the line and the second part on the right, with the phrase "which means that" separating the two.

"Mobile phones are small and portable, which means that you can easily take them everywhere you go".

You see that just by using the phrase "which means that" gets you thinking about the benefits, and you can go deeper, just keep repeating "which means that" in conjunction with "so" or "so that" See what happens when we do that: -

"Mobile phones are small and portable, which means that you can easily take them everywhere you go so that you never need to worry about missing an important call ever again".

You see now that we're really getting into the real benefits, why would people want to carry a mobile phone around with them? Certainly not because they like the idea of carrying around the latest technology, but because they want to be able to make and receive calls were ever they are. And why would they want to do that, not because they always want to take phone calls, but because they might miss something if they don't have access to a phone. So that's what you need to do. Get as deep as possible into the benefits. Then, once you know what the benefits are, that's what you tell your customers.

4.Overcome Those Objections (They are going to come)

The first big objection you are going to have to overcome is money. No matter what your product or service costs there is going to be an objection, and your sales copy has to deal with it, you CAN deal with it in the following manner: -

•Acknowledge the objection

•Show the value of your product to be greater.

•Price comparison.

Price comparison is very important in this sense because you can compare the price of your product to a similar one in the market place, or maybe a similar service that you offer, e.g the difference between a home study course and one to one coaching. Another great price comparison is to compare your price to an everyday purchase that people are happy to pay for, such as a cup of coffee. If people are happy spending a certain amount on something like a cup of coffee, you can transfer this purchasing comfort to your product. Obviously depending on what market or industry you are in, there could be objections specific to that market, you need to find out what these objections are and work them into your sales copy.

5.Don't Forget The Call to Action.

It is very easy to assume that your customers know what you want them to do, they don't, YOU need to tell them what to do next. If you don't, chances are they won't do anything. If you wanr people to buy, you have to ask for the sale. I have seen many hard working salespeople fail simply because they don't ask for the sale, your sales copy is no different there has to be a point were you ask for the sale. So exactly what is a "call to action"? it's quite simple really, you are telling people what action you want them to take next, typically calls to action can say:-

•Visit Now

•Call now

•Buy now

•Hurry in today

•Click the link now.

•Hurry offer ends today.

You notice with the above calls to action that they all have something in common as well, and that is the words "now" or "today" or "hurry". These are great emotional triggers and encourage your customers to buy today, not put off the purchase for some other day. Because guess what, unless your offer is incredibly unique, they probably won't be back, so you want them to make a decision NOW. To help you in writing your call to action, just follow this easy step by step formula, this is the same step by step formula I teach my paying members:-

•Figure out The Purpose of this call to action - Why are you writing it, is it to generate leads? Get people to buy? Getting your name out there?

•Write it down.

•That's it. That's your call to action. Whatever the end result is you want, is what you should be asking your customers to do. It's quite simple really.

So that's it for this article, obviously I have tried to squeeze as much relevant info into here as I can, but there have been whole books written on this subject so you can surely see it is simply not possible to cover all the bases, but hopefully it will help you grasp the basics. Just keep educating yourself, that's all I do.

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Referred by: http://carboncopypro.com/

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