Writing killer sales copy, Getting Started
Before you begin preparing your sales letter, you need to have a thorough understanding of the product that you’re promoting. This is VERY important. Since you’re not the author of the product, I seriously advise that you buy the product (if you haven’t already) and test it out completely. You have to know your product to sell it. Only then will you be able to represent it accurately on your landing page.
The next step is to determine what the product ultimately does for the consumer. How exactly does your visitor ultimately benefit from buying it? The answer to that question is the unique selling point of the product or service.
Call it whatever you want: unique selling point, customer value proposition, biggest benefit etc. But the fact is, this ultimate benefit is what you’re going to use as the flagship of your landing page. This is going to be stressed all over your copy to the effect of “this is how you benefit from buying this product.”
Features and Benefits
Start off by distinguishing the actual benefits of the product from its features. The job of your landing page is obviously to persuade (or coerce) your reader into buying the product. But the only real way to achieve massive success with this effort is to base your copy on the benefits and not on the features of the product.
I’m sure you’re pretty savvy as to what a benefit is, as opposed to a feature but just in case you need a general guideline, use this: A benefit is the specific result of a feature. A feature is what the product or service already has built in. Here’s an example: A refrigerator has defrosting facilities. This is a unique feature. If that technology helps a customer get rid of annoying icicles, and helps keep his or her greens fresh and healthy, then this is the benefit of the original feature.
Your potential buyer
Alright, now you know how your prospects benefit from the product you’re promoting. But who exactly is this prospect of yours? Why do they benefit from your product? What stimulates this person to buy the item? Ideally, you should write down a paragraph about your ideal customer.
Something like “Rachel Penn is a divorced single mom of two children. Her bills are piling up; she has just been laid off, and needs to make money fast. She has heard of money making opportunities online but has little savvy when it comes to computers. She’s also pretty reluctant about investing on the Internet because there have been so many stories of rip-offs and scams online….” should do.
Actually it’s much better if you can go into more detail than that and derive as much information about your ideal target prospect as you can. What this allows you to do is gear your copy towards your most profitable visitor demographic and ignore all others. All of this might have sounded unimportant, but let me assure you: you should never, ever, start writing copy before you decide exactly who the copy is targeted at.
Following the A.I.D.A. Model
The AIDA model stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. What it represents is the process that goes on in your visitor’s head as he reads your landing page.
Your ultimate goal here is to make your visitor take action. But to do that, you’ve got to make him or her truly desire your product. For him to desire your product, he should first be interested in whatever you’re saying. And to get him or her interested in you, you first need your visitor’s attention, right?
So that’s how it goes: you first grab your visitors’ attention; then arouse interest; drive that interest to create desire, and finally persuade them to take the action that you want them to.
Step 1: Grab Your Visitor’s Attention:
Grabbing the visitor’s attention is the very first job of any landing page. Let’s face it – your potential buyer isn’t thinking about you. He’s thinking about himself; he’s thinking about his job; he’s thinking about what his wife’s cooking for dinner; he’s thinking about his upcoming weekend, etc.
So, when he reads your landing page, the question is “Is it strong enough to break through the conversations in his head and shift his attention to the conversation in your landing page?”
This is what you will be focusing on when you’re crafting the uppermost elements of the page; the sub-headline, headline, first paragraph of the copy etc. Once you grab the visitor’s attention, your job is…
Step 2: Pique Interest:
Okay, so now you have your visitor’s attention. Does that guarantee they’re going to read your entire landing page and make the purchase? Not necessarily. When it comes to internet marketing, a visitor’s attention hardly lasts longer than 5-10 seconds. This is the time they will spend reading the first few lines of your landing page’s body, and then skim the rest of it to see if this is what they’re looking for.
And while the body of your sales letter has many components, it has one overall purpose: to make your case. In other words, this is where the selling takes place – where you prove that the product you’re promoting is indeed the perfect solution to your prospect’s problem.
To gain your visitor’s attention, you would’ve likely made a very bold claim about the product in the headline; it’s in the body that you prove the claim. This is the right way to pique their interest and fully immerse them in your copy. So, how do you do it?
You describe the benefits and features of the product, and put them in an emotional state. It’s in the body of your copy that you provide testimonials (further proof), include guarantees, and address any objections the prospect may have.
We’ll talk about all these and more in the coming pages but for now, keep this in mind:
Your landing page will look a lot like a conversation you have with a friend at a coffee shop. When your prospect reads it, they should be able to feel the warm, conversational tone of your copy.
What this does is make sure that the prospect is actually involved in the page copy and reads through to the end of the page, absorbing your most important messages. In the end, their interest will have piqued to the maximum and they will actually be very desirous of whatever you’re promoting.
So really, inducing a desire in your reader’s mind comes naturally as you keep them hooked to your copy. Interest transitions into desire provided you do your job right.
Step 3: Capitalize on their desire:
You’ve sparked the interest of your reader and held this interest all the way through your copy. You’ve made your case, and you’ve even proven it. Your reader has completely fallen in love with your landing page and is almost ready to take action.
Now what? Simple: ask for the order.
This step, asking for the order, is simple and obvious, yet amazingly enough, many affiliates fail to take this crucial step.
I’ll be going into detail about how to craft effective calls-to-action later on in the next chapter. But know this: if you want them to order online, tell them exactly how to order (ex: “click the “buy” button below right now for instant access…”)
I’ve been tracking conversion rates for years. Know what I’ve found with calls-to-action? Landing pages that have a direct and specific call to action greatly outperform those without one. That means you don’t just say “order now,” but you tell them exactly how to order.
Done effectively, this will practically lock down the sale. Mission accomplished.
Summary
There are many elements of the landing page that come together to create a really compelling sales piece. However, we can boil down these multiple elements to three simple steps:
- Grab attention.
- Pique interest.
- Ask for the order.
Simply put, if your sales letter doesn’t do all three of these things, you lose the sale. And of course, the better you are at doing these things, the higher your conversion rate. That’s another reason for you to track and test different elements of your sales letter, so you know what works and what doesn’t work for your target market.

