Most copywriting advice is bullshit. There's so much horrible copy out there. And there are truckloads of even worse copy advice. You'll find lots of fake gurus especially on YouTube.

Establishing yourself as a freelance copywriter is the same as building a business from the ground up. Everyone is born as a clean slate including the genius Einstein. Think about the time taken in his thought experiments.

Writing is a rational activity and a valuable activity. To say that writing is rational means nothing more than that it is an exercise of mind requiring the mastery of techniques anyone can learn. Obviously, there are limits: One cannot learn to write like Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. You can become a genius by reading a book.

But you don't have to be a genius to write clear effective English. You just have to understand what writing involves and to know how to handle words and sentences and paragraphs. That you can learn. If you do, you can communicate what you want to communicate in words other people can understand. This article will help you by showing what good copywriters do.

Rest assured, you don't need to be a legendary copywriter to make it in this industry. We all want to write that attention-grabbing headlines and see our content spread. So we all need to practice and practice.

Writing is a valuable activity and it is worth learning. It is of immediate practical benefit in almost any job or career.

There is another, more profound value to writing. We create ourselves by words. Before we are businesspeople or lawyers or engineers or teachers, we are human beings. Our growth as human beings depends on our capacity to understand and to use language. Writing is a way of growing. No one would argue that being able to write will make you morally better. But it will make you more complex and more interesting – in a word, more human.

An audience gives you anywhere from seven to 15 seconds to establish credibility. After which they decide whether to stay tuned in or switch off. That's why you need to choose your opening words carefully.

Sales copy isn't sales copy unless it sells your prospects on your offer. In fact, it's just an article – a hype filled, exciting article – but an article nonetheless. So, what does it take to turn that dull, one dimensional article into a sales pitch that really works? That's what we're going to look at in this short guide.

Preparing to Write

Before you even touch your keyboard to work on your sales copy, consider some of these preparatory tasks you can complete. You'll be better engaged and prepared when it comes time to write your sales copy.

1.Look at Other Sales Copy and Study Competitors: One of the easiest ways to learn more about sales copy is to look at what works and emulate it as much as possible. That’s why I always recommend you take a closer look at your competitors, as well as high gravity sites in Clickbank. Take careful notes, review what they do differently from one another and try to find common themes among high gravity, high sales volume sites. Just don’t steal anything directly from their sites. You can borrow the idea for a flying popover, but don’t take their HTML or text. It’s bad form and often illegal.

2.Research and Understand Your Customers: Your customers are going to be very different from those of another niche. Even if you feel like you’ve learned everything there is to know from looking at competitor sites or high gravity pages, you'll still need to learn what your customers need and how you can communicate it to them. What are their biggest fears? How can a product you sell benefit them? What are they willing to part with? Remember, you're selling a solution to a problem, not a product. To sell that solution, you need to understand everything you can about the people who have it.

3.Know the Action You Are Targeting and Have Goals: Every sales page has one or more calls to action. You need to know not only where that call to action will be, but exactly what it will be. Ask yourself and your customers what you want them to do and then word it exactly as you have practiced. In addition to outlining and defining your calls to action, make sure you create goals that can be monitored and checked up on intermittently throughout the life of your page. Have newsletter conversion goals, click thru goals, and actual sales goals you can analyse in real time.

4.Develop Your Hook and How to Put it to Use: Every sales page needs a hook. What single phrase can you use in your headline or first paragraph that will capture the highest possible percentage of customers in your niche? Read other sales pages and talk to your customers to get a good idea of what fits the bill here. Most hooks are very simple – asking a basic question or highlighting a problem your readers might have.

5.Target Only One Audience in Your Copy: I've seen far too many marketers think that they can target a wide swath of people in their sales copy and get away with it. Sure you might be able to sell a marriage advice guide to people about to get married, but is that your target audience? No, your target audience is the couples who are already having marriage problems and need immediate solutions. They are most likely to make immediate, impulsive purchases.

6.Know how to Answer "What's In It for Me?": Every person on this planet will eventually ask you "what's in it for me". They don't care how amazing your product is or how many people have bought it. All the psychological mumbo-jumbo in the world is meaningless if you can't tell them to their face: 'you need this because it will help you XYZ'. Your sales copy should be littered with statements that tell them exactly what they gain by reading your copy, signing up for your list, and ultimately buying your product.

7.Use Above the Fold Properly: Above the fold refers to the space viewable on a website when it first loads. The header, navigation bar, headline, and any images you place at the top of your sales copy is the first fold and it should be used to the best possible results. The goal here is to convince them to go to the second fold and beyond. They need to see something that will drive their eyes down, convincing them that if they keep reading, you will solve the problem they have been facing for some time.

8.Use Captions with Photos: If you use photographs on your sales page, make sure you use captions or descriptions to highlight the point you’re making. Many people will read through sales copy at high speed, scanning for headlines, bullet points and images. If your images are only being used as placeholders, you’re wasting valuable real estate. Along with captions that highlight the text, work on building images that make selling points – such as charts, graphs, or visual representations of your niche.

9.Keep Sentences and Paragraphs Short and to the Point: The dreaded wall of text can kill your sales copy faster than anything else. People are intimidated by having too much to read. If you compared the results of a 400 word paragraph and a 1,000 word sales letter with 20 shorter paragraphs, the latter would almost always convert better because it would get more readers. Don't get choppy, but use short, sure statements to make your points and convince readers to keep with you.

10.Don't Talk Over their Heads: Sure, you’re an expert in your field, but your readers are not. That's why they're coming to you for advice. There is a fine line between understanding a niche and overdoing it. If you use big words, complex technical terms, and deep analysis that goes over your readers’ heads, they will either get frustrated or assume the product is too complex for them. Write for the Everyman, using short to the point sentences at a 7th-9th grade reading level.

11.Highlighting and Formatting Text to Make it Stand Out: I'll give you this tip, but keep in mind that it is very easy to get carried away and go too far with it. If you have a particularly bold point, feel free to use a yellow highlighter on it or bold it to draw attention. Also, use the white space on your page to draw attention to single statements. Don’t turn your sales copy into a paint by numbers, but feel free to apply carefully selected formatting to highlight points and attract the eye to key factors that may help you make a sale.

The Headlines

The single most important part of any good sales copy is the headline. It's the first thing your visitors see and if you do it wrong, it can be the last. So, the headline needs to be perfect, in how it looks, how it reads, and the action it calls to in your readers.

12.Find the Single Most Important Thing to Your Audience: Ask yourself a very simple question. What is the single, absolute most important thing on your audience’s mind right now? This can be the longest research piece of the entire process as you start working on your sales copy. It is vital though and it needs to be at least alluded to in your copy. The moment you can determine what your readers want most and then highlight in the first fold, your readership will jump.

13.Remember they Are Buying a Key Benefit, not a Product; Stop trying to sell your readers a product. They're not there for a product. They can get those anywhere. You're trying to sell them a benefit that will help solve their problem. Headlines that discuss the "best new dating guide" are missing the point. You're not trying to sell a guide. You're trying to sell a solution to the problem of not having any dates. Hit on that key benefit both in your headline and throughout the rest of your guide to drive conversions.

14.Use Preheadlines to set the Table: A short preheadline will appear before your full, size 25 font intro and will usually be a teaser of sorts. For example, you might say, "Find out how 23,432 people were able to…." And then lead into the thing that those 23,000 people were able to do with your product. The idea is to add a small amount of context without creating a headline that is too long. You want your core message in the headline to be short and to the point, but there are other bits of information that you can use.

15.Video Presentations to Boost Credibility: Not every website needs a video. Many people can make millions on a new product launch with text alone and will continue to do so for years to come. However, nothing works better to build credibility than to produce a video that directly confronts your reader’s doubts about your headline’s claims. For instance, if you sell a Clickbank course and claim that you have made over 10,000 sales in the last five months, you can easily show them with a video those 10,000 sales on your Clickbank account page. It's short, it's simple and it’s incredibly effective for building credibility.

16.Credibility Elements Above Your Headline: Other credibility elements have become very popular in recent months when placed above your headline. Having seals that show you are a registered business, a safe site, or that your content has been featured on any number of media outlets will draw immense attention and trigger trust in your readers before then even see what you're selling. Don't just place these seals on your page though. They need to be real or you could get in trouble with the FCC for false claims.

17.Brainstorm Multiple Headlines: The first headline you think of will never be the one you end up using. Even $10,000 copywriters with thousands of headlines under their belts will sit down and write dozens of possible solutions before settling on just one and putting their site together. The best part about this is that the ones you don't use are not necessarily useless. You should keep them in a file somewhere and come back later if you launch a new site or would like to split test your page with a new headline.

18.Make Your Headlines Scannable: The main headline at the top of the page should be short and to the point with no more than one solid sentence that outlines your reader’s needs, but don't forget you'll have more headlines throughout the rest of your page. These headlines should be clear indicators of what that part of the page is about, and should always be entirely scannable so that if someone just skims your page they can still get the gist of what you’re selling.

19.Asking Questions: A great trick for a headline that engages your readers is to integrate questions into the text. Simply ask your readers a basic question that either stimulates their imagination or hits on a topic they've been wondering about for some time. Simply asking them “Are you ready to…" can drive action, enticing them to really wonder if they are ready. If they are, you can bet they'll read your page immediately.

20.Using Numbers: Numbers are a natural device to measure and analyse data. Your brain sees a number attached to something and immediately views it as more legitimate and trustworthy. Use that psychological connection with your readers to capture their attention and to showcase the numbers behind your product. You can tell them how many people you’ve helped, how much time you’ve saved, how much money you've made, etc.

Conclusion

Copywriting is just as much art as it is science. There are dozens of rules and theories that are constantly tested and retested by the industries best, but at the end of the day your job is still to move someone emotionally and convince them to make a decision. So, listen to your own heart and what you feel when you work with your product. Use the tips in this guide wisely and always be on the lookout for ways that you can adjust them to fit your particular audience. Testing, retesting, and experimentation are what have created some of the world's greatest marketers. Don't forget that and you'll almost always be okay.