Real Money Makers - 10 Top Tips To Writing Adverts That Sell

The trick of good copywriting for advertisements is to ensure your advert converts prospects to customers. Here are the top 10 tips to ensure your ad achieves positive results and maximises customers!

1. Target Those Who Will Respond
Know your audience and write directly to them. Forget trying to invite the world to buy your product or service. Concentrate on those who can and will respond to your offer. Make your offer as appealing and persuasive for those people as you possibly can. Know your market!

2. Write to Sell Not To Impress
Put the thesaurus away. The point of your advertising is to increase sales and profits of your real money maker, not to make people gasp in astonishment at your eloquence! Americas top copywriter Gary Bencivenga says, Effective copywriting is salesmanship in print not clever wordsmithing. The more self-effacing and invisible your selling skill, the more effective you are.

3. Sell One Thing at a Time
Do not try to sell the entire shop in your copy. Offer just one product, one service or one real money maker idea in your ad. You can always tell customers about your other fabulous products and services in other ads.

4. Tell Your Customer What to Do
This may seem obvious but is often forgotten. Too many advertisements do a great job of educating and persuading customers but leave out the most important bit. So tell your customer to buy now and then lead them through the buying process.

5. Provide Convincing Reasons
Your copy must provide convincing reasons why your product is better than all the others, why prospects should believe what you say is true and why they should act IMMEDIATELY.

6. The Headline is Crucial
The most critical part of the ad is the headline. It is the hook that captures your customers attention and motivates them to continue reading. It is the first step you take in persuading anyone to buy. A headline not only gets attention, it selects the target, delivers a complete message and draws the reader into the body copy. To determine whether your headline is strong enough, use the 4Us formula created by copywriting expert Michael Masterton. Ask yourself whether your headline is urgent, unique, ultra-specific, and useful.

7. Keep it Simple
Keep your customer in mind when you write your copy. Always make it personal. Use the word you throughout to emphasize the point that you are addressing the reader directly. When you have finished, put the copy aside for a few hours, then pick it up and read it aloud. Does it still make sense? Do you stumble over phrases or words? Can you take out some long words and replace them with something shorter or snappier? Have you used any jargon or technical language relating to your real money maker that your customer will not understand? This of course depends on your target audience. If you know they will understand your jargon (and possibly ignore your advertisement if you do not use it), then by all means cram it in!

8. Best Benefits First
If you have a great offer, reveal it (or at least make mention of it) at the beginning, do not be too coy and make your reader wait until the end to discover your great offer because they may not bother reading that far and you will have lost an opportunity for a sale!

9. Write like a Thriller Writer
Keep your words, your sentences and your paragraphs short. It makes it easier for your reader to understand what you are saying and keeps their interest. Think of how the authors of best-selling thrillers construct their chapters. Each is about three pages long. They want readers to stay reading, to keep turning the pages, to retain their interest. Whatever you think of those books, they sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year. It obviously works, so do not fight it! Use what works.

Break your copy up. Great chunks of copy look intimidating and even boring. If you are writing a long sales letter, break your main points up with catchy interesting sub-headings. Make liberal use of bullet points, numbers, dots and dashes. Anything that makes it more visually appealing.

10. Powerful Words to Use
The word free is still the most powerful word that you can use in advertising. Everybody wants to get something for nothing. The word free acts like a drug for many people.

Other powerful words or phrases include: How to, Why, Sale, Quick, Easy, Bargain, Last chance, Guarantee, Results, Proven, and Save. Do not be put off using them just because they are so frequently used. They are used because they are so powerful and real money makers!