If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Inspired by a recent blog post made by fellow internet marketer John Szram, I’ve decided to put together a 3-part blog post containing a few essential copywriting tips for writing your own ads.

Enjoy!

Tip #1: Your Reader = Your Best Friend?

When you’re writing a sales letter that will potentially be seen by thousands of people across the world, it’s all too easy to become a little… daunted! What’s important to remember, however, is that it’ll only be one person on their own reading it, at any one time — in 99.9% of cases.

It’s therefore necessary to write your letter as if you’re writing to just one person: your reader.

Personal-style letters that address a reader as if you’re speaking to them one-on-one, tend to be more successful and get read far more often than letters that appear to be written with numerous people in mind. And the easiest way to do this is…?

Pretend you’re writing to a friend.

And not just any friend. It should be a friend that you communicate with quite frequently and share a lot of banter with.

So… when writing your letter, just picture your friend in your mind and imagine you’re having a normal conversation with him/her then put it into the words of your advert. You can always edit later, so don’t worry about making it too personal in your first draft.

Just make sure that your writing connects with your reader on a personal level and doesn’t come across as stiff, ‘corporate-speak’ which is usually a massive turn-off even to the most discerning reader.

Tip #2: Don’t Bore Your Readers

The last thing you ever want to do, when it comes to writing sales copy, is to be boring!

There’s nothing that will murder a potential sale quicker than a bland sales letter.

I’m not saying you should make your advert “hypey” — far from it. Instead, I’m talking about injecting words into your advert that make your writing appear to ‘come alive’.

Consider the following sentences:

“John opened the door and walked into the room”

“John flung open the door and burst into the room”

Now, that’s an exaggerated example. But I hope you can see that the second sentence creates a livelier mental image in your head about what’s going on in the story. And it’s this mental image that keeps your prospect hooked and willing to keep reading — instead of switching off and becoming bored by your advert.

The tip here is to sprinkle action words (verbs) throughout your writing, in places where you can bring mental images to life in your reader’s minds. Don’t put them in every sentence, otherwise you’ll overwhelm your reader and come across as ‘too keen’. Just drop them in here and there — especially in places whereyou want to convey strong emotion — and you should see your readership numbers start to soar.

Tip #3: Less is Definitely More

When writing adverts, it’s vitally important to understand that people in general hate reading — especially online! So with that in mind, you don’t want to give your readers too many words to pore over.

By this, I’m not saying you should shorten your advert by chopping out big paragraphs or totally removing the last page etc, just for the sake of making it shorter. If there are important points contained in those paragraphs, then they should stay — for obvious reasons.

You just need to communicate your points with fewer words.

This is actually an editing technique and you need not worry about it whilst writing your first draft — for this you can use as many words as you want. But, when you get to the editing stage you need to go back over what you’ve already written and start tightening things up.

Try playing around with sentence structures and word order to see if you can take out words that are simply taking up important space and aren’t necessary for getting your selling points across.

When you do this, you’ll find that your advert should be easier to read and will put your points across with much more speed and precision than a huge, waffling advert that tends to stray from the main points.

Tip #4: Don’t Overdo It!

When it comes to adding emphasis, it’s easy to fall into the trap of using too much highlighter and making too many words ‘bold’ in your advert. You really only want to emphasize the most crucial key points, otherwise with highlighter and bolded words all over the place it can turn into a great, big mess of ’sameness’.

And this actually has the adverse effect.

You see, if it becomes ‘the norm’ to have highlighted or bolded words in almost every paragraph, then the desired effect of making the words ’stand out’ will be seriously reduced.

Another factor to take into account is that, as a reader, it’s a little overwhelming to have so many “important” points being dramatically thrust at you every step of the way. It gets to a point where you can no longer judge exactly what is important and what isn’t… and it’s easier — or less confusing — to simply stop reading.

So… just don’t overdo it, yeah!

Tip #5: Be Interesting!

This tip actually follows on from tip #2. You see, not only is it wise to ’spice up’ the individual words of your advert, but it’s equally important (if not more) to pay attention to the actual content of what you’re saying.

In other words, you need to be interesting.

It stands to reason that if someone’s going to take their time to read your advert, they’re obviously going to have some kind of interest in the subject matter that you’re writing about.

So why not educate or wow them with fascinating facts or ideas about the subject matter to gain their interest and — as in tip #2 — not bore your reader into clicking away.

Remember, the key to do doing this right is to tie in your fascinating facts with the selling angles of your product. Don’t just randomly spew out facts for the sake of it. Make them relevant to your advert and try and relate them to how your product will make your reader’s life better off after they’ve purchased from you.

******************************************************************************************************************

Okay well that’s it for the first installment of my 15 copywriting tips. Check back in the next few days for parts 2 and 3.

If these tips have proved helpful, then please share them with others using the buttons below.

Thanks for reading,

James Teale

Pure Selling Secrets