Copywriting Tips – Bits and Pieces

I often get asked what the best way to tackle a sales letter is. Truth is, there is no best way. Each sales letter is different. A lot depends on the product itself. For an inexpensive product, a short sales letter can probably do the job quite nicely. For a high end product, a longer sales letter will usually be necessary. It is for those longer sales letters that I suggest you take them in bits and pieces. This article is going to explain why and how to do it.

Let’s start with the why. Usually, when you write a sales letter, you try to map the whole thing out in advance. For most inexpensive products, this can be done quickly and easily. From there, you simply put all the pieces together to form your finished letter. I’ve sometimes knocked off a sales letter in less than two hours for a $27 product. It’s not hard to do.

But what if you’re selling something that goes for $997? In that case, you need to do a lot of pre-selling. Prospects are going to be reluctant to part with that much cash without a whole lot of convincing. If you’ve seen copy for products in that price range, you know that they read like novels. These pages are not written in two hours and certainly not written in one sitting. Your brain would fry trying to get through it. That’s the reason WHY you want to break it up into bits and pieces. The question is, how?

Sales letters read from top down. At least traditional ones do. So what you want to do is start with the very top of the headline. Work on it until you are absolutely convinced that it’s the best one you can come up with. Don’t think about the first paragraph or the bullet points or anything else. Just concentrate on that headline and work on it until it’s done.

Then, and this is very important, keeping that headline in your mind, think about what you want to write for the first paragraph that will compliment the headline. You don’t want to start off in one area and then go in a completely different direction. You need to keep a feeling of consistency throughout the copy. This is easy to do when you’re writing something in one shot, but not so easy when you’re doing it in bits and pieces because of the time lapse between each section. So, what you want to this is read everything you’re written BEFORE you begin to write the next section.

What this does is it puts everything fresh in your mind as if you had just written it. The time lapse is no longer a factor.

Doing this, you can start writing your copy on Monday, go back to it in Thursday and not miss a beat.

Try it sometime. You just mind find that writing your sales letter this way makes the whole process go a lot smoother and easier.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim