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As a copywriter, I naturally have some strong feelings about the advice that other copywriting “experts” give their students.

One popular piece of advice that I have decidedly mixed feelings about, is the idea of doing “DIY” copywriting for your own products.

This is an idea you’ll run into in some of the more popular copywriting handbooks out there, and it is definitely an idea that a lot of internet marketers tend to come up with independently.

The theory behind this advice goes like this:

“As the owner of your business, you understand your products and services better than anyone else; therefore, you will be more able to accurately communicate the benefits of using them than anyone else who is just learning about your business.”

This idea was popularized by one of the world’s most successful copywriters, Dan Kennedy, in his best-selling book”The Ultimate Sales Letter.”

Although I’m a huge fan of Kennedy’s work (he is one of my own top influences), I don’t really like this advice in particular, for three basic reasons:

1. The Style Element.

No matter how well you understand your business, there are stylistic aspects to copywriting that you can’t learn overnight. These include:

• Writing style (engaging and conversational vs. dry and boring).
• Visual style (positioning of text, healines, bullet points, etc).
• Formatting.

It takes a lot of practice to learn each of these elements; so, if you need copy now, it’s better to hire someone who knows them, than to try and “DIY.”

2. Some businesses are built around affiliate programs and/or resell rights.

Actually, I think that most people who get into internet marketing get started by taking on affiliate programs, promoting products that they themselves did not play any role in creating.

Now, of course, when you promote affiliate programs, you can always direct your customers to the main vendor’s download page, using their copy to drive your own profits. However, you are going to want website, blog, and e-mail copy to get people interested in the products you’re promoting. When running affiliate campaigns like these, you don’t have any information advantage or special insights into the benefits of your products; so, that’s not going to give you an edge in writing the copy.

3. Even when you’ve made a product yourself, you don’t necessarily know what aspects of it are going to appeal to people.

This is one thing that consistently amazes me when I interview clients who own their own businesses and products. So many times, they have an absolutely fantastic product that they just can’t sell, because they don’t know who the customer is. A great example of this is the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Paul Graham, who didn’t know that his startup was geared toward direct marketers, until well after he had created the main product.

A good copywriter knows how to identify the key benefits of your product that will appeal to consumers. This is something you may need help with, particularly if you’ve developed a product based on a business idea you read somewhere, rather than an industry you have lots of experience in.

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Now, before I conclude, I must stresss one thing: this article is not meant to dissuade you from writing copy for your own products. If anything, I recommend that you give it a try, especially if you’re a good writer with sales experience. But remember that in many areas, the “DIY” approach comes with hidden costs, and copywriting is definitely one of these areas.

Hey.

After a week and a half of furiously typing out research papers, I am now finished my college career, and therefore am finally able to reurn to blogging to finish my three part epic on planning and research in copywriting.

So, without further ado, the belated final installment of Proper Planning And Preparation: “Writing The Outline.”

What Is An Outline?

If you’re an experienced copywriter, you might think that the definition of an “outline” is obvious.

Of course, everyone who’s written a high school research paper will understand the basic idea of what an outline is. At the same time, outlining occupies a crucially central place in the world of long form copywriting, and for this reason, deserves some special attention in this article.

The basic definition of an outline, which most readers will probably be familiar with, is a series of points and sub-points (written in bullet or numbered format) that shows what basic information will be communicated in a piece of writing.

For the purposes of sales page/sales letter copywriting, then, an outline is a series of points and sub-points that shows what information will be used to persuade the reader to take an action (most likely, make a purchase).

Outline Structure

The structure of a sales copy outline is the same as for pretty much anything else you would write. You use bullet points, numbers, or letters to illustrate each key piece of information in a condensed form.

So, a good outline for a long form sales letter covers all the essential elements that will make up the final copy, including:

• Headlines.
• Bullet points highlighting key features and benefits.
• Testimonials.
• Objections.
• “The close” (i.e. asking for the sale).
• Concluding “P.S.” notes.

The specific order of these pieces will of course depend on the individual writer’s style, as well as the needs of the project. However, as a general rule, you want to follow this order:

1. One large headline at the top of the sales page that identifies (or hints at) the key benefit, along with several sub-heads (one at the start of each section)
2. A background story (why you’re making this offer).
3. A section for testimonials.
4. A strong ask with a price.
5. A series of 3-5 post-script (P.S.) notes to re-cap the main selling points before you close.

How To Write An Outline

Once you understand the basics of sales copy structure, writing the outline for a sales page/letter is easy.

All you have to do is build a skeletal structure for your copy, and filling out that “skeleton” with bullet point details.

Here is the process summed up in 4 simple steps:

1. Write a series of bullet points outlining the background story you will use to explain your qualifications for selling what you’re selling. For example, if you’re selling a health product, write a series of bullet points describing your journey from couch potato to fitness freak.

2. Write a list of the key benefits that with your product or service, from most to least important.

3.  Write the headlines for each section. One sign of effective headline writing is that if you take out the body content, the headlines themselves should serve as an effective general outline of your sales letter. So, make sure you know what you want to say, and write headlines that underscore all the key points.

4. Under each headline, insert all the key information that will go in the corresponding section (again, in bullet point form). For example, you’re going to want to have one or two sections that cover all the major points of the background story, another section or two that covers all the benefits, another section that includes the testimonials etc.

And that, in a nutshell, is how you write a sales copy outline.

Of course, the process isn’t entirely linear, so you can complete the steps above in a different order if you prefer. Everyone writes differently, and it’s ultimately better to follow your own style than to foll0w any set of guidelines too strictly.

Alright, it’s time for “Proper Planning and Preparation,” part two: building your ideal customer profile.

No matter how hot your writing is, it won’t do a lick of good if it isn’t relevant to your ideal customer’s needs and wants. The phrases that stimulate interest in specific market segments are as niche-specific as the structures of persuasion are general. So, all successful sales copy is comprised of basically two things: 

1. Niche-specific, benefit-rich language,

2. Structure and content that make it as easy as possible for your readers to take the desired action.

The contents of part 2 are universal, and will not vary depending on the type of reader you are targeting. The contents of part 1 will depend on the kind of reader you’re interested in; so, in order to craft them effectively, you will need to develop a basic profile of your ideal customer. And that will be the focus of today’s lesson.

How To Create An Ideal Customer Profile

It’s pretty easy to learn how to build an ideal customer profile, though it takes some patience and discipline to really master the skill.

The process of customer profile (or “avatar”) building is basically an extension of your market research. Through your market research, you uncover the basic, essential facts about your potential customers, including:

• Age.
• Gender/sex.
• Location (country, state, city, etc).
• Income level.
• Profession.
• Political affiliation (if applicable).

These basic demographic elements make up about half of your ideal customer profile. A lot can be discerned from just the hard data on your customers; for example, based on a group’s age and gender, you should be able to determine whether or not they’ll be likely candidates for membership in a Justin Bieber fan site.

So doing your basic market researh and collecting information about market segments (see my last post for more on this) is the beginning of building an ideal customer profile.

The second part of the process is much more subjective.

Once you understand the demographics of the market segment most likely to buy your product or service, you need to start “coloring” this faceless data with some specifics. You need to start asking questions like “what keeps this customer up at night?” and “what does this customer like to do with his free time?” You can’t fall back on statistics to answer these questions, you need to use a little imagination and take a chance on what your intuition tells you.

The best way to find out what a customer wants is to flip the question from “what do they want” to “what would I want if I were in their position?” You need to really imagine yourself in your ideal customer’s position, then answer questions that are relevant to their deepest wants and desires. For example, you might ask yourself the following questions:

• If I were a potential buyer for this product, what kinds of problems would I be facing in my day to day life? What would stress me out the most? What problem would I want solved?
• If I were a potential buyer for this product, what would my main goals, ambitions and aspirations be?
• If I were a potential buyer for this product, what would I be worried about?
• If I were a potential buyer for this product, what would I find annoying or irritating?
• If I were a potential buyer for this product, what kind of newspapers and blogs would I read? What forums would I post on?

Once you have your market research in place, and have answered all of the questions above (note: that list is not definitive, read Dan Kennedy’s “The Ultimate Sales Letter” for more questions to answer), you have the building blocks for a great ideal customer profile. All that’s left is to organize this information in a coherent fashion. A list of bullet points will suffice, although some people like to write a brief essay for their ideal customer profile. Once you have your ideal customer profile in place, it’s time to create your sale’s letter outline.

And that’s exactly what I’m going to show you how to do in the next and final installment of this series, so be on the lookout for it next week!

Until then,

Happy copywriting,

Andy.

Hey guys.

It’s for the first installment of the three part series, “proper planning and preparation.” As you may have guessed, in this article, I’m going to talk to you about the first step in the pre-copywriting process: preliminary research.

Ah, yes, preliminary research. Exiting, isn’t it? Calls to mind all the hours you used to spend slaving away in the library for college papers, or perhaps the hours you spent burning the midnight oil at your first “grown up” job after graduation.

Well, preliminary research might not be glamorous, but unlike paper shuffling at an office job, it can pay off… in a big way. Read on to find out exactly why that is, and how you can use this reality to your advantage.

Preliminary Research in Copywriting: Market Research

In copywriting, preliminary research is more or less synonymous with “market research.” While there are a variety of product-related  facts you should know when writing copy, you know them already if you’re writing copy for your own products, and you can work them out in a phone call with your client if you’re writing as a freelancer.

So, why is market research so important in copywriting?

The answer is that you need to know your market in order to understand what that market responds to, and what your market responds to is not always what logic and intuition would tell you it is.

A study conducted by global advertisers showed conclusively that most people respond to marketing materials emotionally, rather than logically. The study also showed that a consumer’s emotional reaction to a product’s marketing piece, was often not the same as what non-consumers of the product predicted it would be. Therefore, simply writing ads based on your intuition about what a reader will respond to, is not likely to pay off. Instead, you need to gather concrete research about your customer to find out what they need and (more importantly) want.

How To Do Market Research

Obviously, market research is a huge field, one that employs thousands of people and involves a huge amount of survey work and statistical analysis. For the average entrepreneur or copywriter, it’s not realistic to launch a full scale market research campaign with a team of telemarketers, statisticians, and so on.

It is possible, however, to do some “guerilla” market research for your own project, relying on existing market research, as well as your own ability to “tease out” the emotional hot buttons that connect a given market segment to a product. The following are some specific strategies you can use:

1. Search the internet for market research reports on your niche, done by professional market research firms. Use search terms like “research summary” and “market research,” along with keywords specific to your niche. Look for reports by very well regarded companies, like Nielson or Ipsos.

2. Look for TV advertisements in your niche, and pay attention to the emotional hot buttons being emphasized. Look for these advertisements on Youtube and other video sharing sites; or, if you watch TV regularly, pay attention if an ad comes on that seems to be related to your niche.

3. Read blogs and web forums related to the niche you’re going to be writing for, and pay attention to the descriptive language that participants use in reference to products.

4. If you have any friends who regularly buy products in the niche, ask them what kind of factors guide their purchases. Don’t just take their answers at face value, though; try to read between the lines and see what benefit a person is getting when they emphasize the value of a specific feature.

5. Try using the products yourself, and make note of what features you get a benefit from, as well as the deeper feelings or desires that emotion is tied to. Write these observations down and reference them against the more concrete information you gathered in steps 1-4.

As you get a bigger audience, you might want to try doing some more sophisticated market research; for example, creating your own simple surveys and sending them out to your mailing list. You can find more about these “professional” market research techniques here: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/55680

That’s it for today though. Stay tuned for the next installment of the blog, where I reveal the next step in the market research process. And by the way, if you liked this article, stay tuned for my e-guide, The Seven Secrets Of Successful Sales Copy, which will be released mid-July through this blog.

Alright, I’m currently busy at work for my first ever book about copywriting, tentatively titled ”The Seven Secrets of Successful Sales Copy”. This book should be hitting the internet as a digital product sometime around July of 2012; however, before the book comes out, I want to give my readers an introduction to some of the topics that will be covered in it.

The first chapter of the book, titled “Proper Planning and Preparation,” discusses the importance of pre-writing. Pre-writing is everything you do before you actually sit down to write your copy. One of the most important (yet overlooked) parts of copywriting, it includes everything from market research and  avatar building to planning and outlining.

As a preview for my readers, I am going to publish a series of three posts that cover all of the topics in the first chapter. No, I am not going to give a preview of the chapter here on the blog; instead, I’m going to write three unique posts that cover the same topics, so you can get a feel for what will be covered in the chapter. The topics I will be covering include:

• Preliminary research.
• Building an ideal customer profile/avatar.
• Writing a sales letter outline.

I will cover these topics in the first, second and third posts in the series, respectively. I will be releasing the first post on Monday, and will publish the second and third posts over the course of the week.

Later, I may actually release a sample chapter for people who are interested in the book but aren’t sure if they want to buy it. If I do this, I will most likely post it to the Warrior Forum as a free download WSO. The full chapter will cover the same topics mentioned above, but will be more thorough in its treatment of them. Look for it before May of this year. Oh, and be sure to check in on Monday for the series launch. This is going to be a mega-information packed post that will explain exactly how to find and organize all the information you need to write a killer sales letter; so if you’re preparing to write copy for a product launch, you’re not going to want to miss this one.

Alright, later.

- Andy

If you want to run a serious marketing campaign, you will need to get a seriously effective sales letter.

There are three reasons why sales letters occupy such a central place in direct forms of marketing.

1. Your sales letter is your most direct form of communication with prospects. With it, you can directly convey the features and benefits of your products, so your customers understand what your products do and why they should buy them.

2. Your sales letter is your most personal form of communication with prospects. With it, you can speak to them as you speak to a friend, and by doing so, establish a relationship of trust and connection.

3. Online sales letters have the power to elicit a “direct response,” where all the reader has to do is push a button at the end in order to buy. Sales videos and other forms of advertising are not as effective in getting direct responses (although they are improving).

Obviously, your sales letter is important enough to your marketing campaign that you should spend as much time as possible crafting a good one. If you’re not a copywriter yourself, you should hire an experienced one to write your sales letter for you, because it is an art that takes a lot of time to master. Otherwise, keep the following sales letter dos and don’ts in mind as you attempt to craft your profit-pulling masterpiece:

Dos

- DO put a lot of thought into your headline. The headline is essentially the most important part of your sales letter, because it determines whether your intended audience actually reads the thing. Don’t hesitate to write and re-write this part of your sales letter many times over.

- DO use bullet points wherever possible. The modern reader has a serious case of ADD, and you’ll benefit from playing to it with easily digestible chunks of key information.

- DO tell a story. Make the sales pitch personal by describing how you got to where you are, and how your story relates to your ideal customers wants (and of course, relate this to your product’s key benefits).

- DO emphasize features as well as benefits. Yes, it’s important to play up the benefits to your reader as much as possible using highly descriptive, even emotional, language. However, tying these benefits in to specific features will lend these descriptions credibility.

- DO close with several P.S. (P.P.S., P.P.P.S., etc) notes. Most people just skip to the end of long form sales letters. Good post scripts get your reader to actually go back over the body content of the letter to soak up the key information.

Don’ts

- DON’T wait to get to the point. From the very beginning of your sales letter, you should be getting the key features and benefits out. Don’t ramble on about things that aren’t related to your product.

- DON’T use negative language (i.e. “don’t write sentences like this one!”) The human brain does not process negative language (“no,” “don’t,” etc) very well, so keep the use of this language to a minimum, and try your best to avoid using it altogether.

- DON’T include a lot of distracting pictures in your sales letter. Only use images that draw attention to key text (e.g. arrows, “warning” signs, boxes, etc). Including your corporate logo or some random “cute” image will only distract your readers from what matters: the message.

- DON’T use all caps text to emphasize a point. If you want to emphasize something (e.g. a headline), just enlarge the font and capitalize the first letter in every word. Capitalizing entire words creates a “screaming” tone that can turn readers off.

If you follow this list of sales letter dos and don’ts, you will hit the most important key sales letter elements while avoiding the most damaging sales letter pitfalls. However, keep in mind that this advice is far from comprehensive, and that writing truly effective sales letters is an art that takes years to master.

One of the most commonly written pieces of advice on copywriting is not to use “hype” in your message.

Ask any successful copywriter their opinion on whether it’s a good idea to use a lot of hype in your sales copy, their answer will invariably be “no.”

And yet, in spite of this, you can look all over the internet and find plenty of sales pages that appear to be full of hype.

Even more perplexing is the fact that a lot of these pages have been written by the same “elite” copywriters who will tell you not to use hype in your sales copy.

So, what’s going on here?

Before I try to explain why a lot of copywriters use hype while counselling their readers not to do the same, I am going to try to explain exactly what hype is. Most people probably feel they know the definition of the word hype; but if you look closely, you’ll see that this term is misused pretty frequently, even by fairly smart people.

I would propose the following as a pretty adequate definition of hype:

“Hype is any promotional tactic that uses dramatic language, images or sounds to stimulate interest in a product or service.”

I realize that this is a fairly narrow definition of the term, and that hype can be used for a variety of purposes outside of promoting a product or service. However, since we’re talking about sales copywriting here, this definition will suffice.

Now, I’m going to return to this definition in just a minute. But before I do, I want clarify an important distinction that every good copywriter understands: the distinction between a cold campaign and a warm campaign.

As anyone in sales knows, approaching a prospect cold means approaching them without any prior introduction, while approaching a prospect warm means approaching them after having sold them something in the past. The same applies in copywriting: somebody who has purchased from you before is a “warm” sell, while someone who hasn’t, is a “cold” sell. 

However, beyond this basic distinction, I think you can further speak of “degrees” of cold and warm sells in copywriting. Just for convenience’s sake, I’ll use a four level hierarchy to illustrate this concept:

The Four Degrees Of Selling

1. Cold selling. Selling to someone you’ve never sold to before. Someone who reads your landing page for the first time is a cold sell.

2. “Lukewarm” selling. Selling to someone who has never bought from you before, but who has expressed some interest in the past. Someone who has opted in to your life is a “lukewarm” sell.

3. Warm selling. Selling to someone you’ve sold to before.

4. “Hot” selling. Selling to somebody who you’ve not only sold to before, but who is also an active and avid fan of your material. An active poster on your business message board who owns all your products and subscribes to your message board is a “hot” sale.

How The “Four Degrees” Apply To The Topic of Hype

The reason I brought up this distinction between cold and warm selling, and laid out different levels of each, is because the these distinctions have some bearing on when it is appropriate to use hype in your copy.

While, as a general rule, it is inappropriate to use hype, it depends on the type of audience you’re writing for. If you’re writing copy for an audience made up of people who have mostly never read any of your material before, using a “hypey” tone is a clear mistake. The same is generally true for audience of people who are vaguely familiar with your material (“warm” prospects.)

If, however, you operate an active forum or blog community with enthusiastic and dedicated followers who routinely purchase your products, it can be an effective tactic to use a certain amount of hype in the lead up to a launch.

For example, if you operate a forum with 5000 active members, 40% or more of whom have purchased several of your products, you could have a certain amount of success building up a big launch as a “revolutionary” or “paradigm shifting” addition to your product line, provided you take the time to explain what exactly you’re going to be introducing that is so revolutionary. You could write a series of posts on your forum, over a period of months, where you talk about how you’ve been testing out your new product and getting results that blow all your old products out of the water, or release a series of videos that talk about how “groundbreaking” your new product is. If you do this, though, make sure you actually follow up with a product that brings legitimate innovations; otherwise, you risk fiving your loyal fans a serious case of buyer’s remorse.

Yes indeed, here we are: the final installment of the e-mail copywriting series.

The topic of this article is what most people would consider to be the meat and potatoes of e-mail copywriting: composing the body of the e-mail messages.

However, while the bulk of the actual writing in an e-mail copywriting campaign does indeed go into composing the messages, this part of the campaign is in many ways the most straightforward. There are two reasons for this:

1, Once you have got the reader to opt in to your list and open your e-mail, there is a good chance they will invest the time to read the entire message, so you don’t need to be as “salesy” in the body of the message as you do on the squeeze page or subject line.

2, If you are using your e-mail sequence to sell something, you don’t need to make an aggressive sales pitch directly from the messages; you can just include a little bit of value-adding information about your topic, then politely insert a link that takes the reader to your sales page on your website. This gets the reader to the sales pitch without creating the impression that you’re spamming their e-mail inbox directly with sales pitches.

Those are two good reasons why you shouldn’t fret too much about composing the body content of your e-mail sequences. However, there are still a couple rules you should follow when you write autoresponder copy, to get the most out of the list you have worked so hard to build. The most fundamental of these rules are summarized below:

1, Make the headline sound like a natural conversation topic.

In spite of the fact that you already caught attention with the subject line, you should still include a headline in the body copy of your autoresponder e-mails. It’s not that it’s really necessary, it’s just that it won’t hurt, and will help you keep the attention of readers who are prone to losing interest. However, you shouldn’t make your e-mail headlines similar to your sales page headlines. Don’t make the headline hypey or intrusive, just include a simple question in quotation marks, like “hey, have you ever wondered about…” This approach is effective without being overly pushy or aggressive.

2, Open with information your readers want to know.

Read some blogs and message boards in your niche. Make note of the most commonly asked questions in these places, and make sure each of your e-mail messages addresses at least one of them. If you want to include a direct sales pitch in your e-mail copy, make sure you precede it with a couple paragraphs of value-adding information.

3, Keep it (relatively) short and sweet.

I’m not sure exactly why, but people don’t have much patience when reading their e-mail. The same people who wouldn’t buy a product from you unless your sales page is 3000 words long, won’t read your entire e-mail message unless it’s less than 500 words. Accordingly, you should keep your e-mail copy between 250-500 words, inserting links to your website sales copy throughout the message if you are trying to make a sale.

4, Make the call to action count.

Inevitably, if you want to make money off your list, you will eventually need to to ask for the sale (either directly or through a link to your website). However, if you pepper every single one of your messages with sales links, you will come across as spammy, and get sent to the appropriate box. So instead of including a call to action in every message you send, try to include one call to action in every other message, and make the call to action (the “buy now!”) as clear as possible. At the end of your message, state the most important benefit, then immediately insert a button that says “buy now” (you can make one of these buttons easily with a paypal premier account). Doing this intermittently will be well received, but doing it in every message may not be, so take it easy.

And thus concludes our three part adventure tour of the wild and wonderful world of e-mail copywriting. This series wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t end with a closing thought, so I will tell you what I think is the most important principle in e-mail copywriting.

By far the most unique advantage of e-mail is the ability to build familiarity by repeated, regular contact with your list. If you capitalize on this effect by being personable in your communications, you will go from just familiarity, to (dare I say it) affectionate familiarity. So if there’s two things you should be doing in your e-mail list, they are: 1, communicating regularly; and 2, communicating on a personal level. If you can do that, and be informative at the same time, there is no limit to what you can achieve.

Alright, I was a bit tied up with work last week, so without further ado, here is part two of our e-mail copywriting series: writing the subject line.

The subject line is so crucial in e-mail marketing that it warrants a separate discussion, apart from all the other topics related to composing the actual e-mail.

The reason for this, is the fact that the subject line determines whether people will actually open your e-mail or not (there are other factors, like whether your readers trust you, but these factors are largely outside the scope of copywriting). Your “open rate” is obviously a huge factor in your e-mail copywriting success, because people need to open an e-mail before they can read it. So, getting that subject line down is a topic worth thinking long and hard about.

An e-mail subject line is much like a headline in a lot of ways, except that you can’t use clever formatting (large font, striking color) to make it stand out. So, think of an e-mail subject line as a headline that has to stand on the legs of the words alone.

With that in mind, there are three solid principles to keep in mind when writing your e-mail headline. These principles are really quite straightforward, because after all, writing a subject line is a pretty straightforward task. However, just because writing a good subject line is straightforward in principle, doesn’t mean it is “easy” in practice; writing good subject lines is a precise art that needs to be practiced before it can be mastered.

Three subject line writing principles:

1. Keep it short and sweet.

There are two reasons you should keep your subject line short. One, like any other headline designed to get attention, it needs to be direct and to-the-point. Two, your recipient’s inbox won’t show the entire text of a very long subject line, so you’re better off keeping the entire message short enough that your reader can get the point before opening the e-mail. After all, if they need to read well into the main body text in order to get the point, they may never get the point at all.

2. State or imply a benefit.

Benefits are the most valuable commodity in copywriting. It’s good to tell a potential customer what the product does, but it’s even better to tell them how it benefits them. If you can use your subject line to clearly state the most important or attractive benefit of whatever you’re selling, you will get a good open rate. If your most important benefit involves money, you might want to just imply it instead of outright stating it, because directly saying “LEARN HOW TO MAKE A MILLION DOLLARS INSIDE” will set of spam signals.

3. Create a sense of urgency.

If you can convince your readers that they have only a limited time to read your e-mail before the incredible value contained therein expires, you will get a higher open rate then you would have otherwise. Use this to your advantage with phrases like “limited time only” and “offer expires on…” If done correctly, I can guarantee this will get you a better open rate than you would get without it.

Alright.

That’s it for this installment of ConstantCopy, but be sure to pop in for the next installment, when we conclude this three part series on e-mail copywriting with a discussion of how to use e-mail content to sell.

Because my last post on e-mail copywriting was so well received, I have decided to take the topic and expand it out into a three part series. These three articles will cover what I consider to be the most important aspects of e-mail marketing: getting the opt in, writing the subject line, and writing the body content.

This entry, of course, is part 1: getting the opt in.

When you first embark on an e-mail marketing campaign, you need to get people’s e-mail addresses. There are two ways of doing this: first, you can simply find people’s e-mail addresses (for example, on their websites); second, you can lead people to a website and have them opt in to your list voluntarily by offering them a free resource.

As you may have already guessed, the second approach is far more effective. Although cold prospecting has its place in marketing, it will always get you a lower conversion open compared to warm prospecting. Of course, if you don’t have any way of getting people to opt in to your list, then it’s better to contact them “cold” than to not contact them at all. However, if you’re going to be serious about e-mail marketing, you will need to find a way to get people to opt in to your list, so that when they receive your newsletter, they will see it as something of value, not as spam.

If you’ve studied copywriting or internet marketing at any length, you’ll know that a page where people opt in to your e-mail list is called a “squeeze page.” A squeeze page includes a brief sales pitch, followed by an opt in form where the visitor can give you their name and e-mail address. The actually coding of the opt in form is relatively straightforward, so the real trick to getting people to opt in is twofold:

1. Driving traffic to your squeeze page, and

2. Writing effective squeeze page copy.

Now, you could write a book about both of these topics alone, and I’m not going to cover them in full detail in this post. Nevertheless, it is possible to create a very general, yet helpful, set of guidelines of how you can get people to your squeeze page and then get them to opt in once they’re there. A rough sketch of such guidelines is as follows.

Part One: Traffic

In order to get people to your squeeze page, you need to open up communication streams that lead them there. You have two options for doing this: one, you can promote your website, through SEO, blog commenting, forum marketing, and so on. Two, you can buy traffic, in the form of a pay per click campaign or some other form of paid advertising.

If you don’t have the budget to buy traffic, you will need to get it by promoting your website through various communication channels. One way to do this is to post on forums related to your niche, and include a link to your squeeze page in your signature. Another way is to comment on blogs and include a link to your squeeze page (in the “website” field, not in the main text of your post). Still another way is to try to get your site’s search engine rankings up by posting links to it all over the internet, although you’ll definitely want to avoid doing this in an overt fashion, since Google will look at you with some suspicion if you create hundreds of links in a single day.

If you can afford to buy traffic, make sure you do some research and find out which terms are commonly searched for by readers and buyers in your niche. You can do this using search tools like Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst. Once you have discovered those terms, find out how much it costs to do a PPC campaign with them (contact Google about pay per click rates), and if the costs fit in your budget, then go for it.

Part Two: Squeeze Page Copy

Once you’ve got your traffic, you of course need to convert that traffic into opt-ins. This is where the copywriting itself comes into play. In general, squeeze page copywriting follows the same principles as sales letter copywriting; however, it must do the same thing in much fewer words, because few people will stick around long enough to read a full sized sales letter promising something as mundane as a free newsletter. The most important things to keep in mind when writing your squeeze page copy are:

1,  Keep the copy to less than 350 words.

2, Write a headline that tells the reader EXACTLY what they’re going to get (or LEARN) when they opt in.

3, Use bullet points to deliver all the benefits as succinctly as possible.

4, Tell the reader to opt in, using these exact words: “sign up now by entering your name and e-mail address in the form below.”

5, Make sure the opt-in form itself is visible. Include an arrow pointing to the form.

I highly recommend you read blogs related to SEO for more on the topic of traffic building. I assure you, it is a field of study in its own right. However, the points mentioned in this post will suffice as a general introduction to the topic. As for writing the squeeze page copy, you can supplement the advice above by checking out other posts in this blog, especially on topics like headline writing and internet marketing. Be sure to tune in on Wednesday, as I will be going into detail on one of the most important topics in e-mail marketing: the subject line.