Copywriting Basics - 4 Things Your Copy Must Have

Copywriting is a mixture of marketing and persuasion. Copywriting masters are revered within Internet marketing circles because of their uncanny abilities to sell. It can take years of immersive studying and a lot of practice to become a copywriting master, but for the average or aspiring copywriter, here are a few things that your copy must have or do in order to be able to sell:

1.Have a headline with a good hook. Unremarkable headlines cause the rest of the salesletter to be skipped. Headlines which are intriguing draw attention to the rest of the salesletter. A hook is something that is so incredible, unorthodox, or otherwise attention-grabbing that the reader can't help but continue reading. A heavy hitting headline is important because it is the first thing that a visitor to a salesletter sees. This is why small tweaks to the headline can result in massive changes to a salesletter's conversion rates.

2.Emphasize benefits, not features. It is really tempting, especially if you're writing copy for your own products, to start rattling off the great features of your product. However, this is not what most potential customers are after. Instead of telling the customer that your product will teach them how to write headlines, tell them that after going through your product, they'll be able to write profit-pulling headlines that will force visitors to continue reading down the page. It is a small difference if you think about it, but while people tend to dislike having to learn, they also love getting things.

3.Have a story. The purpose of having a story is to build rapport with the reader. In the old days of Internet marketing, it was much easier to sell things online because people hadn't developed their BS detectors yet. Nowadays, people come to salesletters with their detectors on and it is your job as a copywriter to get through to the reader. By including a story about yourself or whoever you're writing for, you are building rapport with the reader. The reader wants to know that the product owner really has their interests in mind and that the product owner knows what it is like to be in the reader's position. For example, a product owner in the golf niche would say how it was horrible to always get over 90 strokes per match, but now that he discovered the secret, he now consistently breaks 80 strokes. The reader would be able to relate to this and would therefore feel a lot more comfortable buying the product.

4.Killer Bullets. Some people just don't like reading salesletters which are fifty pages long. You need to have bullet points to summarize your entire offer, with each bullet being a sentence or two long. If you have too many bullet points, your reader will lose interest. You need to be concise and persuasive when creating bullet points so that a reader could skip your entire salesletter (although a good salesletter won't cause readers to skip) and still understand what they're getting by reading the bullets.

Remember, copywriting is about the reader, not the product. The copywriter's job isn't to sell the product, but the product's benefits. Once you understand how customers tick, your job of selling things to them will become much easier.