Little Known Way To Get Skyrocketed Conversion Rates And Bottom Line

Before you sit down and write copy, you must intimately understand how your target market thinks and talks.  What kind of language do they use and respond to. 

What kind of day do they have and the conversation that goes on in their mind.  Their fears and frustrations.  What keeps them up at night or gets them up in their morning?  What excites and motivates them?

Here are three things you can do to quickly get your prospect on your side:

1. Know your prospect
2. Speak in your prospect’s language
3. Take the business of helping your prospect seriously

Know your prospect.  Don’t begin to market until you have a clear picture of just who you’re writing to.  Take the time to find out based on what you’re selling.  Think about what product or service would most appeal to them.  One good way to best know your prospect is to go out into the marketplace and ASK through survey questions.

Speak in your prospect’s language.  Put yourself on your prospect’s level.  Don’t preach to him or bully him.  Don’t talk down to him.  Don’t come off as being bigger, smarter, or more sophisticated than he or she is.

These are fatal mistakes many people include in their copy.  Your prospect will not be impressed with fancy prose and big words.  This is why it’s important to write the way you’d talk to your best friend – use short, simple sentences and words.

Take the business of helping your prospect seriously.  You prospect is reading your sales copy for a reason.  It’s because you’ve appealed to a desire or a need, likely through your headline, or email subject line.  At this point you have his attention and to a certain degree, you have his trust.

You’ll let him down if you offer flimsy solutions to his problems.

This is where research is essential.  Offer a solution to his problem – prove to him that it works beyond a shadow of a doubt by giving him or her details, facts and numbers.  If you make a promise, prove you can deliver.

When it comes to ad copy, keep humor out of it.  In sales copy, people aren’t reading to be entertained.  They’re reading to find a solution to their problem.

Humor plays on words, cornball expressions, and clichés steal credibility.  They tend to break up the momentum of your sales copy and interrupt the sales process.

Prospects Natural Resistance to Buy

In all direct-response sales transactions, there is the buyer and the seller.  The seller has their own agenda to get the buyer to do something… take his offer.  The buyer has an agenda too – he wants to avoid wasting his time and spending any money.

So due to these two separate agendas, there’s a natural tension between both the buyer and the seller.  The buyer isn’t a sitting duck. He moves. He thinks. He anticipates the actions of the seller and ACTIVELY TRIES TO RESIST.

You send a direct-response promotion email… the buyer sees it and their reaction is to send it to the trash folder.  This is the first line of defense.  But if you put some good copy in the email subject line, you can get the prospect to open the email to see what’s inside.  This gives the prospect a couple of seconds to figure out “what this is all about”… and because he doesn’t want to waste time, he makes an immediate determination about whether he’s interested in proceeding.

He wants to figure it out quickly and dispose of it so he can go on with his life.  He resists the seller’s efforts throughout the email at every point.  If at any point he comes to understand what the email is all about in a way he can dismiss, he will do so.

This is why logic doesn’t work in selling: “107 Reasons to Fix Your Life,” for instance.  The reader jumps ahead, figures it out and dismisses it.  He doesn’t want to spend the time or his money.  And it’s why “transparent” sales efforts don’t work either.  The prospect sees through them and is able to resist.

The hook should be revealed in the early copy or else the reader will avoid it.  The headline should get the prospect’s attention if you want him or her to along in your trip.  If the prospect knows he’s being sold something and consciously realizes it, he’s gone.

Buyers Never Sit Still

Buyers and the entire marketplace never sit still.  Sales copy when first introduced normally works well.  But after a while the market builds up a resistance to the copy.  Something new is needed and soon after the market will develop a resistance to this new innovation too.

It’s the direct-response copywriter against the market.  There’s no force available in the marketing world, so the copywriter has to rely on influence, persuasion and seduction.

In military strategy, battles are won by doing the unexpected.  Why?  Because, defensive positions are generally stronger.  It’s harder to take a hill than it is to defend it.  So, the opposing generals can anticipate where you’re likely to attack, they’re much more able to defend themselves and prevail.

So the customer can also see and anticipate the direction of your sales attack and put up his own defenses.  Then he says to himself, “you’re going to tell me how much weight I will lose from this new potion.  I’ve heard that before – and I didn’t lose a single pound.”  He prepares himself for the argument and rejects it.

Claiming The Victory

What you would do is attack at an unexpected angle, in an unforeseen moment and an undefended place.  This is how you get the victory. And once you attack, you also want to keep the potential buyer off balance by never letting him see exactly how you intend to proceed.  When he puts up his defensive positions, you go around them.

When he tries to see where your argument will lead, you go off in another direction.  He’s never able to see where you’re going, prepare his defenses, dismiss your assault and save himself the time and money he wants to save.

In a nutshell, this is the theory of resistance.  It’s a powerful insight into your prospect’s psyche – and if you understand it, it will give you a powerful edge over most business owners.

Planting Nuggets of Gold in Your Copy

Research is the copywriter’s “secret weapon.”  It’s often the most neglected component of copywriting and is the major reason why even powerful copy can sometimes fail.  Here’s how to do it and use it to your advantage. 

To use clear and powerful writing, cleverly structured arguments, persuasive language – mastering these techniques gives you the ability to write strong, winning copy.  This is what separates the professional copywriters from the posers and makes a good copywriter great.

To incorporate a magic touch into your work, mesmerize your reader and guarantee that you keep his attention, you embed your copy with fascinating bits of information that stimulate the prospect’s imagination and entice him to read more.

Research pays off every time as you plant little nuggets in your copy and they act as invisible hooks that grab unto your reader – hidden magnets that will keep his attention.

When you tell somebody something he doesn’t know by giving him some insightful information, you’re giving him something for free.  When your prospect thinks to himself, “Wow, I didn’t know that,” you’re actually sinking the hook.  On a subconscious level he feels he’s been given something for free – so he will feel gratitude.  That can make him more likely to respond to your offer, or at least keep reading your copy.

In the meantime, you’re also building credibility.  And that’s a critical element of copywriting.  When the prospect sees that you’re informed about the subject, it gives him confidence in what you’re telling him and begins to trust you.  Credibility is an important part of direct-response promotion and all types of sales.

For your copy to be packed with facts, information and ideas, you must do your research.  And with the abundance of information readily available on the Internet today, there’s no excuse for not doing your homework.  Nearly everything you want to know is readily available online.  The challenge lies in finding it and making sure it’s accurate.