Writing That Killer Sales Copy -To Win New Customers

Selling services or products over the Internet can be done in two ways. You can either sell through catalog style e-commerce marketing or through direct response marketing. Catalog style e-commerce marketing involves putting a range of services or products with their specifications, functions and uses before the eyes of prospective buyers. Pretty easy. The buyer makes his choices based on the information he sees.

In direct response Internet marketing, you must be able to move your reader to take action (often it is to buy your product) simply by communicating through the written word. You must be a master at writing eyeball-grabbing sales copy.

Here are three elements of great sales copy.

Firstly, your copy must have an attention-grabbing and captivating headline. It must stop the reader in his tracks so that he reads nothing else except your copy. Firstly, you write the main benefit of your product into your headline. Notice it's benefit, not feature that you must highlight. Suppose you are selling an automated blog post making software. Writing, "Introducing the World's Best Software that Makes Blog Posts to Your Blog Automatically" is writing about the feature.

Features of your product are important, but not in the headline. If you read the headline above, your most natural question would be 'How is this accomplished?' and you will likely read on. Once you get your reader thinking like that, then your headline has done its job. Now comes the body of your copy.

The body of your sales copy must be riveting and engaging. Every word must be written for the sole purpose of getting your reader to read the next sentence. Here's one simple technique to accomplish that.

Think about the old bucket system of dousing a fire. Each person in the line passes a bucket of water to the next person until it reaches the end of the line and the water is poured onto the fire. It must move the reader to read the next line and subsequently the next paragraph until he comes to the end.

To do that, your each sentence must lead on to something in the next sentence that your reader wants to know. And the last sentence of each paragraph must leave the reader with some missing piece of the puzzle such that he is compelled to read the next paragraph. Look at the last line of each paragraph of this article. They were designed to lead you to the next paragraph. (as in the first two paragraphs), you covertly challenge the reader to find out something he does not yet know. Another way is by stipulating a certain number of points beforehand (as in the fourth paragraph) then your paragraph does not cover all the points you said you would bring up. The reader then concludes there are more points in the following paragraph and reads on.

Another way to write like a 'bucket system' is by using the last line of a paragraph to 'introduce' what's in the next paragraph (as in the 5th and 6th paragraphs). Yet another way is to pose a question in the last sentence (as in paragraph 8).

Finally, great sales copy must have a clear call to action at the end. Your call to action must be convincing and compelling enough for your reader to take the action you want of him (usually it is to buy your product). Your call to action can be made more convincing by answering your reader's objection, favorably comparing the price of your product with another similar product or challenging him to make a change by buying your product instead of remaining the way he is.