Copywriting Tips – Why Most Sales Copy Doesn’t Work
If you write, there’s a certain approach you need to have, if you want people to understand what you’re saying and buy what you’re selling.
You need to think you’re in the communications business, not the marketing or selling business. And you need to write clearly.
Effective writing is above all, easy to understand. And that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to provide loads of details and specifics. I’ve seen tons of ads and sales letters filled with stats and details, and in the end, I still have no clue what the heck’s going on or what the writer is trying to tell me or what they want me to do.
The biggest problem people have is that they just need to write in plain and simple English. The same way you speak, which hopefully, is also in plain and simple English.
And that means using words and phrases and analogies everyone’s familiar with.
Things like, “We’re headed into the dog days of Summer.” Or, “As sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, you can depend on…” Or, “Operating this mower is as easy as falling off a log.”
And once in a while you want to take people down memory lane, like this: “I stumbled across my old 8-track tape player, buried under some dusty shelves in my garage. It was as old as dirt. It reminded me of an expression my grandfather used to say, ‘Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.’ But even the best mousetrap stops working over time, right?
Well… not any more. You see, out in California, an unusual scientist has just developed…”
You need to use loads of cliches like this because that’s how people speak. And if you want to write clearly, you want to write in every day English.
You can never ever be too clear in what you’re saying, or say something too simply. Yet for some reason, most people write like they’re trying to impress their high-school English teacher. Remember though – your English teacher may know how to use proper grammar, but she doesn’t know how to make even one thin dime with that knowledge.
So ask yourself, do you want to be “right,” or… do you want to be rich?
Now go sell something, Craig Garber
