Writing copy is still one of the most profitable activities a business owner can do, except maybe spending time convincing a superstar copywriter like John Carlton or Gary Bencivenga to write it for you without ripping your eye out and draining your bank account…

The problem with most copy is that it’s boring. Even when the copywriter ‘thinks’ that they are talking about a subject the reader enjoys dearly, it is still boring. I often read sales letters for products in which I have no interest whatsoever and I can tell a really good sales letter when by the end of the sales letter I become interested in the subject… now I don’t buy, but I become interested…

However, about 9 out of 10 sales letters I read, I get lost right around the first third of the copy… usually the first couple of paragraphs. Actually this reminds me of a tip I wasn’t planning for this blog post, but the short of it is, you should almost always cut out the first couple paragraphs on your sales letters… they were just warming you up to write.

I know it’s hard to delete even a word out of your 6 days worth of work, but it’s a must.

Your copy should be about a third of what you wrote initially. That’s what this blog post is about… condensing your sales letter so you can tell your complete story without boring your customer into clicking the back button on his browser…

To do that, your copy must be filled with action verbs and paint pleasing pictures in the readers mind… it should mimic the structure used by many fiction books that sell millions of copies and well scripted movies… they use the same condensing strategy to tell their story…

So here’s a quick guide to make your copy snappy, strong and more uhmmm… readable so it turns traffic into happy paying customers…

I call this “Los Tres Money-Making Amigos”… and they are the Subject, Action and Outcome…

When most people get started with writing, they write with a ‘descriptive’ tone of voice using all kinds of adjectives and fluff.

Aight, let’s dig into it… Say you wrote…

“I don’t have much of my precious time to tell you about a strategy that scam artists are using every three days to make money by virtually stealing your hard earned cash. This means you are losing your retirement money while they get rich”

This is just how most of us write, but there’s a simple way to cut this down… First off, identify the subject, action and the outcome…

Subject: Scam Artists
Actions: Steal Your Hard Earned Cash
Outcome: You Lose Your Savings

Then identify if the other details are important enough to be included and if so note them down…. “there isn’t much time and it happens every three days”… (and no I’m not referring to product launches… those happen every hour)

Now we can re-write this as follows

“The short of it is, every three days these scam artists use this strategy to steal your hard earned cash out of your savings account”…

Boom, short, snappy….

Now we’ve got our basic structure… but we can still wordsmith and make it better… how bout’

“The short of it is, every three days, these flim-flam artists use this strategy to secretly suck wealth out of your savings account”

How’d you like that?

This is a line swiped from one of the most successful publishers who used nothing but direct response marketing to build his multiple businesses, if you can guess who it is, you’ll be my hero…

Now it doesn’t end there, it builds up… this whole sentence can be a subject alone in a parragraph… or it can be a sentence long parragraph… This is how you should structure your paragraphs, following this order… it makes your copy easy to understand and it pulls them in deeper.

It doesn’t stop there though…

Most of the sales letters I’ve written add up to about 8 pages on microsoft word and the whole story is still broken down to into these same three steps… maybe you’ve heard of the great slaes formula Problem + Agitate + Solve = $$$$

Well the problem is the subject, agitate is the action, and the solution is the outcome…

That is how good copy is structured and even though there are tons and tons of variables that affect it, this is the backbone of a message that sells…

Tags: copywriting secrets, copywriting tips, how to write copy that sells, writing good copy