Copywriting Basics are the building blocks to million dollar, profit pulling copy so grab your favorite drink and read on...

If you have made hundreds or thousands selling things in print then I believe this free online tutorial on Copywriting won’t suit you. This is very basic, to say the least, and very minimal. Nothing fancy just straight ‘wham-bang ‘ here’s what you do when you want to write copy.

And this time I’ve decided not to create a Pdf download for this. If you want to read about basics of writing copy which includes web copywriting, writing for SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and more, Bookmark this post and come back again.

So here goes…

Copywriting Intro

For those of you who are not familiar with the art of copywriting, this article will focus on giving an introduction to the subject and why it is in such high demand today.

The field of copywriting is large and continues to expand every year.  A way to describe copywriting is putting a creative message in front of a consumer.

In the book, Copywriting, it is mentioned that copywriting is based upon three fundamental principles.  When you are writing to a customer, there has to be an involvement between the customer and the seller.  You must then make sure that you explain the rewards as far as when the customer is purchasing a product.  The final piece is achievement and that is what you as the writer will be focusing on.

Whenever you write copy, you are looking to have a certain effect upon consumers.  Usually this effect will be for consumers to desire a certain product because they will want to gain certain rewards.  You know that you’ve achieved your objectives by hitting certain sales goals that have been set for your copywriting.

There are many writers in the world but there is a specific niche for copywriters.  Copywriters are the ones who write messages but mold them in a way that it brings about an interest in a consumer.  With the number of advertisements out there today, consumers will not respond unless it is something that specifically interests them.

This is why it is more important than ever to have a clear focus when you are writing your copy so that you know which particular niche you’re trying to hit within the broader population.

There will always be a need for copywriters no matter whether the economy is in a recession or in a boom.  Companies must always put out a message to consumers and as long as this demand is needed, copywriters will be in high demand.

If you are interested in working as a copywriter, you will have many different places to look for work.  You can decide to work for advertising agencies, on the Internet, or be your own boss.  There are many different markets for you in these three that were just listed.

When you are writing copy for a seller of a product, the key is that you must remember to put yourselves in the shoes of the consumer.  This is done through doing extensive research and studying what goes through the mind of that particular consumer.  Each niche or group of people will be different in what will motivate them to do certain things.  By doing this research, you will have a better idea of where you need to go with the message that you are trying to convey to your target audience.

This article on copywriting is meant to give you a broad overview of the field.  The demand for copywriters will always be strong due to the need of companies to send messages to their audiences to buy their products.  If you do not employ someone to promote your product, you will be left behind.  This is why copywriting is such a good field and is in such high demand.

Learning Copywriting

If you are a good writer, you should be able to pick up copywriting.

The key behind copywriting is that you must understand that you’re writing in a different style and to a different audience.

A good quote that will be used to start this article comes from the book The Copywriter’s Handbook, A Step-By-Step Guide to Writing Copy that Sells, “A copywriter is a sales person behind a typewriter.” (p.1 of book mentioned above). This is the key when you are learning copywriting.

You must learn to communicate with the audience in a way that persuades them to buy the product or service that you are writing about.  There must be an initial connection that is made or else you’ll find that you’ve lost the audience’s attention.

In this day and age, people are inundated with the number of advertisements that they see every day and quickly discard any advertisement that does not fit within their perspective immediately. You must realize that your writing cannot be for the entertainment of an audience now but rather to sell a product or service.

As a quick introduction to some of the important points on learning copywriting, the first key is to pay attention to the headline.

The headline is read more often than copy at an exponential rate.  If you cannot catch someone’s attention with the headline, you have wasted the rest of your sales copy.  A sales letter essentially only has about five seconds in which you can grab a person’s attention and the headline is one the most important factors in being able to pull that attention.

This is just an example of copywriting and what you must look for.

Copywriting Procedures

There has been a great deal of copywriting done through the years and it is not necessary to reinvent the wheel every time you want to write copy.  We will specifically be focused upon the sales letter because this could have the greatest impact for you, especially if you decide to do SEO copywriting.

One particular school of thought speaks to making your website one large online sales letter.  Continuing in this train of thought, this could present a great opportunity for you. You could write for both off-line businesses as well as for online business using the format of a sales letter.

Within a sales letter, there are three main components that will make a difference whether or not your product will sell.

The first component is the headline.  If you do not grab your prospects’ attention right away, you will have wasted your time in developing the rest of the copy.

The second component of a sales letter is the offer.  This part is important as you must be explicit with the offer to give the prospect what he or she now wants.  It must be something that will entice the prospect to take action upon the completion of reading the letter.

The final component of a sales letter is the postscript.  This is the second most read portion of a sales letter after the headline.  When you are writing this, this is the extra incentive that you will be using to motivate your prospects to take advantage of the offer that you presented right away.

When you are focusing upon writing a sales letter, you should take each particular step of the sales letter in order.  You do not sit down and just writes a sales letter completely through but rather take it step by step.  This entails writing the headline followed by writing the offer and then followed by writing the postscript.  Following these copywriting procedures will ensure that you will have set yourself up for great success.

If you do not have a great deal of experience within copywriting, make sure to follow the examples of copywriting procedures set up by some of the foremost experts.

Copywriting Tutorials and Lessons

Copywriting is a field which you can learn through practice and education.  If you find that you’re a good writer, the only nuance is that you must learn is how to write in a way that sells.

Copywriting will not be easy to learn and it is a lifelong subject which you will continue to improve at if you work at the subject.  To paraphrase a quotation from Stephen King, he said, “…copywriting, really writing in general, is a subject that you continue to improve on.  It would be similar to lifting weights for 10 years.  You will develop muscles.”

If you write every day for a certain period of time, you will develop writing skills to the point where you become a very good writer.  If you focus on copywriting and write everyday, you will become a very good copywriter.

If you look online, you can find a great deal of websites which will offer you free tutorials on how to write good copy.  This is probably the most critical skill when you are looking to start a website because your written words are going to be the engine which drives your online sales.

You can have all the flashy graphics and animation that you want, but if there’s no content, people will only spend a certain limited amount of time on your website.  It is the people who write good content who have the greatest success.

Copywriting Tips

Lets look at how you can acquire more clients as well as improve your writing skills.

Improving these two skills will allow you to have a meteoric rise in the income that you bring in.

Many copywriters are very strong in their profession but are not very good at procuring clients.  If you are able to sell yourself to potential clients, you’ll never find yourself short of work.  The ability to sell yourself is what will set you apart from all the other freelance copywriters out there.

You must make sure that you have a portfolio of your best work. Within this portfolio, you’ll want to have a letter explaining your qualifications along with samples of your writing as well as testimonials from your previous jobs.  If you are able to e-mail this to your potential clients, this will help set you apart.  They can see the professional work you have done in the past as well as the client base that you currently work with.

If you are able to reference Fortune 500 companies  you have worked with, this will continue to improve your credibility. If you are just starting out in the copywriting field, delete the potential references and replace this with more work that you have done in the past.

If you have worked for an advertising agency and are beginning to freelance, make sure to include some the work that you have done at the advertising agency.

Two possible ways that you can acquire clients are to post at different contracting websites such as elance.com

You can also research companies who you can potentially see if they need work.  If you spend time reading the business section every day, cut out articles that might be within your particular field and keep them in a centralized location.  This could be a potential source of leads for you depending upon how the companies are doing and if it is in a predicament where your skills may be needed.

Copywriting Tips and Tricks

“How you can take a sales letter and maximize its usage in eight different ways?”

Copywriters have a very interesting niche in that you can use your own writing to help you develop leads.

If you find that you had many inconsistent advertising methods, think about developing a sales letter to help bring in qualified leads.  If you develop a successful sales letter, you can send this out in quantities which you pre-determine.  The beauty of this is that you can quantify the amount of work that you want to do in a given month and mail out that many sales letters.

After having used a consistent sales letter for a certain period of time, you will know what the response rate is and this will allow you to know how much business you should potentially get from mailing a certain number of letters.  This can make sure that you always have clients coming into the door when you want them to.  It can also help you better pattern the business after your life and lifestyle so that you can pick up the pace when you have extra time and slow things down when other parts of your life become busier.

If you have quite a few clients who are telemarketers or you would like to start developing telemarketers as potential clients, you may want to look into developing a sales letter for one of these companies.

Telemarketing has become much more expensive and more inconsistent these days due to new laws and it is an industry with very high turnover.  Developing a sales letter to send to qualified prospects in the beginning can make telemarketing more effective for these companies and potentially reduce turnover.

If you are able to quantify the savings in training employees as well as in better sales, you will find yourself called upon by many telemarketing companies because you will have put yourself in their shoes and can understand the business struggles that they go through.

The final way that we will use a sales letter and one way in which you could increase your business is to focus upon dentists and doctors office.  Often these professionals are consistently looking for new clients and this could be a way to help them out.

You could use a sales letter to help stimulate referrals.

Web Copywriting

A closer look at copywriting in general and how to succeed in this particular niche of copywriting.  Copywriting is a growing field but some of the greatest growth is coming in the niche of Web copywriting.

There is a great deal of demand for Web copywriting today as more and more people realize the importance of good web content.  This is critical for two reasons and explains why there is such a demand for Web copywriting.

The first reason is that there are more than 4 billion web pages out there according to Google and this number continues to grow in leaps and bounds every day.  With such a large number of web pages, it is very hard for your website to get noticed if you’re writing average content that no one wants to read.

The second reason that is important to have good web content is that it will give you a better chance at having your website indexed.  The way that websites are indexed is that search engines have search bots go through and find different web sites.

The search bots analyze the page and look for particular keywords.  To truly know what you should write when developing a website, you need to have some knowledge of Web copywriting.  There are many different factors that go into getting your website indexed and noticed by the search bots so this is where experience in this arena can greatly help.

If you have experience in Web copywriting, you will find that you will have a great deal work available for you.

You can write Web content for websites as well as sales letters and other types of marketing materials for websites.  In addition to the reasons that you must write good web content, this content must also be easy to read for your prospective audience so that the traffic driven to a client’s website can be converted into sales.

Web copywriting will continue to grow in leaps and bounds due to the difficult nature of this task.  You must work to get your website noticed by both search engines as well as human audiences.

This is a difficult task because you’re writing for two audiences as opposed to one and making sure that you can sell at the same time.

Search Engine Copywriting

Search engine copywriting is a field that continues to develop each and every day.  Copywriting as a field continues to grow but this particular niche is growing at a much faster rate than the overall field.  As the Internet continues to grow, more and more companies are relying up on the Internet for a higher percentage of sales.  This will ensure that search engine copywriting will continue to be in demand.

To give a general background on search engine copywriting, we must first look at why this field is growing so rapidly.

The number of searches that are done on the Internet is in the hundreds of billions annually. The way that most people are able to get to a website these days is through search engines.  It is much harder for your website to be highly ranked without being optimized for search engines.

The number of pages on the Internet has grown to over 4 billion so increasing importance has been placed upon the fact that your webpage is easy to search and is indexed by search engines.

If this is not done, you will find that you will not have the sales results that you would like from the Internet. You are able to buy traffic to come to your website but you will find that you are missing out on an important piece of the sales pie by not focusing on organic traffic.  This traffic can often be more highly concentrated and better leads for you then can traffic that you buy to send to your website.

To get your website indexed within the search engines, you must have original content that is in high demand.  Search engines index web pages by sending their search bots through these different web pages.  The search bots are looking for many different factors but the key is that your writing on certain topics and at the information is valuable.

The information must be valuable both to the search bots so that they index you as well as when people were searching for your information.  Search engine copywriting companies play an important part in this role because they can help develop your website to be optimized for search engines as well as convert traffic into sales.

While it is important for you to get traffic, the key is also to make sure that this traffic can turn into dollars in your pocket.

Search engine copywriting is a growing field which demands that you must have knowledge of how the Internet works as well as great copywriting skills.  If you are able to provide both of these skills, you will be able to write your own paycheck.

If you want to learn more about search engine copywriting, search on the Internet under the terms “SEO tutorials.” This can give you a great deal more information as far as what search engines look for and how different search engine copywriting firms operate.

There is a great deal of competition in this field today so if you’re interested, there is a great demand for your services.

SEO Copywriting

SEO copy writing will look at the specifics of a search engine optimization world and how copywriting pertains to that.

A brief introduction toward search engine optimization is that its goal is to position your website well within the search engine page ranks so that you can gain a great deal of natural traffic to your website.

One important part of the high page rank work is developing good web content.  The importance of copywriting within this field is that you must be creative in developing web content so that it can meet the demands of both the consumer looking for information on the Internet as well as the demands placed on your website by search engine bots.

There is a great deal of writing on the Internet today which is very boring and does not interest people.  The key behind SEO copywriting is that you are looking to impress both the search bots as well as the people who are surfing the Internet and stumble upon your page.  You do not get a great deal of time to impress your site upon these people so what you have to say and how you say it is going to be the difference between a sale and another lost lead.

Good SEO copywriting focuses on many different factors such as the good web content as well as keyword optimization.

Keyword optimization is making sure that your website has full use of a particular set of keywords so that when people search the Internet for these phrases, your site will be on the first page of results.

This is how you generate good organic search engine traffic.  This deal does go beyond just keyword optimization when looking into making a website work.

Take your time to learn more about this.  You’ll have a good idea of what you will need to become an SEO copywriter or give you some criteria on when to hire one.

Just as some general information, a good SEO copywriter should help you develop a high page rank within the different search engines as well as help build the sales at your website.

It is important to get traffic to your website but is also important that you have a good lead conversion ratio.  What this means is that you want more people to visit your sites and that gradually more of these visitors convert to quality sales for you.

By providing good content that sells, you are setting yourself up as a person who excels at SEO copywriting.

To your Copywriting Success

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That’s way too cool ey?
I mean the number. It was way too cool.
I can only imagine getting that maybe in 5 years time.

But I tell you what…

…You can ’swipe’ the whole thing and maybe you’ll get ‘lucky.’
Why I said lucky?
First, obviously you’re ‘copying’ what works.
And you can do that easily with the help of software (check my e-bookstore).

But…but…but…don’t get agitated first because…

…You need the right niche.
…You need the hot selling product.
…You need to bring in the traffic (free/paid).
…You need excellent, converting Copy-writing (which I know Ewen paid for it).
…You need to crank powerful ‘hook’ and ‘bait’ i.e freebies.
…You need a beautiful, customized e-book cover or report cover at least to go with that
…You need convincing e-mail follow up (of course, this is implied)

Um, looks like I’ve splilled the beans of the 7 secrets of a Super Affiliate.
And we thought having an excellent squeeze page is all there is.

Dream on…

…And I haven’t begin talking about ‘testing’ and ‘tweaking’.
And don’t expect Ewen disclose this freely to you.
But I might.
Maybe that’s why I’m not a Super Affiliate. Not yet maybe…

And that’s why we need to be together, to keep going on this journey.
It’s more fun that way.
I can guarantee that.

I’m testing out a few customized design using low-tech softwares on Traffic Exchanges sites.
If that works out, I’ll let you know.
Wanna a peek at one of them?
Go knock yourself out…

http://ebook-at-karungwang.com/affiliate-cash-secrets

This is created using a simple, low tech, low cost Article Page Machine software.

Here’s the dilemma…

I recalled reading a report by respected ‘MindValley Lab’ guys about SP.
Since these guys use PPC, that’s Pay Per Click marketing, a lot, I believe they are very aware of what they’re saying.
And they said,’Squeezepage should only have one prominent thing on it, and that the ‘opt-in’ form. No other distraction like other links whatsoever should be on it.’

Now, Ewen did a simple disect on his super-performance SP, and there they are — link to Privacy Policy, Earning Disclaimer, and About Us.

Hmm, I guess the best way to find out is to test.
And Oh! Ben Settle did an interview with two SEO geniuses (I forgot their names or comp) and they too said something similar.
“We had a squeeze page rank high in Google due to the article linking we put on it. And some of the articles had been around for sometimes. Best of all, we did not wrote those articles.”

Heck! That really made me thin, at times, Search Engines were so unfair.
But you know the fact: 70% of traffic you get naturally from SE are prone to buy from ya.
On with the testing now…

Stop reading

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Don’t you just love automation? If you have something routine like writing a sales letter for your direct response campaign online, having a software to support your task is a huge relief, so huge that you’ll be thinking,”Where would I be now if I got this piece earlier?”

That’s PARTLY true with Sales Letter Creator – a software that aimed to help you automated your direct response page creation and of course, creating your webpage, all at the same time.

Why did I say ‘partly’ true?

It’s true that Sales Letter Creator automate your sales letter writing process.

It’s true that this sales letter writing software is a huge relief.

But it’s NOT true if you’re thinking that this software will solve all your direct response writing issues!

Read on so that you’ll get a clearer picture on these issues…

Right now, I have opened my Sales Letter Creator software. I’m looking at it. And Oh! Make sure you’re Online when you open this software because I did open it Offline the other day and the Top graphic was missing.

It’s there…now…when I’m Online. The software looks so hideous without it

Once you open this sales letter writing software, you’ll see 9 icons on the Toolbar menu with 3 icons not clickable for the first time.

Underneath it is the HUGE header graphic I’m talking about, that perform a vanishing act Offline.

Immediately after that, you’ll see 11 tabs (like the tabs in your Microsoft Excel file) with headings such as Templates, Headlines, Setting, and so on. All these tabs actually presenting the steps you need to take or rather the Sales Letter Creator will take you through before you get your sales letter written.

It’s really simple. All you have to do is to fill in the blanks with some ready info, which the software ASSUME you already have before you open it.

And this is the part where the direct response issues come in and sadly, this is the part that the software can’t help you with. This is the part where YOU have to help you!

What make an effective sales letter?

I won’t bore you with all the details but for the sake of this review, and for the sake of the first time software users, I’ll touch on a few basic things.

It started with a ‘catchy’ headline.

Now, if you’ve heard about AIDA before (that’s not a person or an organization name), which summarize a proven formula for selling or advertising, the A that stands for ‘Attention’, is the part with the highest priority. If you don’t get your prospects attention, you lose them.

In our Sales Letter Creator case, the software won’t prompt you of the most effective, eye-catching, attention-getting headline.

You got to come up with one (or hundreds) yourself…

Do bare in mind that Online, there’s a bit of twist you need to add up in your headline to stir the desired response. That’s why I suggested elsewhere that you need a swipe file.

Huh?! Swipe file?…

If the word ‘swipe file’ doesn’t ring a bell, don’t be alarmed. It’s referring to a collection of proven ads or sales letter or campaign or whatever that you can use a source of reference for your own campaign.

So that’s one issue. Next…

When you click the ‘finish’ button for this software, you’ll be prompted with an option to save your project as an html file. In other words, you are creating your webpage.

Now, here comes another issue. Before you even reach the ‘finish’ tab of Sales Letter Creator, you’ll have to go through ‘Settings’, ‘Intro’, ‘Features’, and ‘Benefits’ tabs, and you need to put some text in them. I’m telling ya, if you know a little or nothing about SEO or Search Engine Optimization, and basic Copywriting, you’ll end up with a dead duck!

And that’s not good for business. You won’t get your Golden Eggs (was it duck or goose? Hmmm…)

That means, even though you get a huge relief for your sales letter writing process, the Copywriting part and the SEO part are still a huge territory to explore. You save time on the writing process but I doubt you can save time optimizing it. Like they said, “There’s no such thing as something for nothing.”

So, how does all this add up to?

This is where I supposed to make my recommendation. This is where I supposed to rate this product, and this is where I supposed to tell you that you’ll miss BIG time if you didn’t own this software. I supposed to but…

Up to this point, having read what I have to say about Sales Letter Creator, I strongly believe that you can decide for yourself whether this is something you can or you can’t do without.

In my opinion, you can write an effective sales letter by simply swiping another effective sales letter, and type it on a blank template. Not only stimulating your brain for creativity, it is also said that process like this ‘condition’ your mind to recognize the effective elements of the sales letter.

But it’s up to you decide…

And whatever choice you made, make sure it adds to your effectiveness. This is what I hope for you as much.

(If you think it adds to your effectiveness, click this link to own your Sales Letter Creator

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Let me answer that for you. It’s writing and specifically writing your sales material.

Online, sales material usually takes the form of sales letter. Most of the time, these sales letters are in direct sales letter format, representing digital products – e-books, softwares or services like e-book cover design.

It’s still a fact that informational digital products like an e-book on making money with Adsense, is sellable. There is demand for such item. That’s why many marketers choose this route to create their income.

Clickbank is an example of a place loaded with this kind of digital printable information product.

Let’s say you also choose this route – selling printed material online (in e-book form).

You have the product created. You have the e-cover designed and you also have the overall ‘look and feel’ figured out.

So what you do next?

You sit down and start writing your sales material.

Some of the methods used by marketers were to follow a framework or ‘flow’, started with writing down the problem. This provides the ‘why’ for the product. In selling, it’s called ‘inflicting the pain’.

Create enough pain, and the targeted users are ready to buy into your ways of easing it.

After the pain or problem, you introduce your solution i.e. way to ease the pain, and this is represented by your product or the info contained in your printed digital material.

You then proceed with telling your users what your product has which make it able to do what it supposed to or the features of your product.

Then you tell them what the product can do, what it means to them, and the advantages it had over similar or current available product a.k.a the benefits.

After that you add what other people said about your product (testimonials), and extra things your user will get if they bought your product (bonus). You then close with your guarantee to make sure your customers’ minds are at ease if they chose to buy.

And that’s basically how you create your salesman or saleswoman in print.

Can you memorize all these steps?

Well, if you’ve written more than a dozens of time, these steps will become second nature. You won’t have to consciously think about the steps while doing them but if this is your first time or maybe your third time, then you might need to spend good solid hours, at times days, just to craft a masterpiece.

In this tight, race for position online world, time is too valuable. Your time is too valuable…

Is there a better alternative? Is there a way that allow you to utilize all the effective sales-in-print steps without compromising its’ value? And save your time?

Let me tell you there is!

It’s called Sales Letter Creator (UPDATE: I have delisted this product due to strategic business factor [cough])

It’s a software that ‘take you by hand’, and guide you through the direct sales letter creation to effectively represent your digital product, one of the perfect tools for creating your sales person in print.

But then there’s the challenge of creating a powerful headline, effective sub-headline, bullet-points, guarantee statements, etc. So how you go about solving this?

The Sales Letter Creator can’t think that out on your behalf.

Have you heard of swipe file before?

It’s a collection of proven ads, articles or written materials compiled by copywriters to help them when they took a project.

What I’m telling you here is that, your solution is in swiping a successful writing.

‘Swiping not copying.’ There’s a huge difference there.

I have such a collection here: Web Sales Letter Supreme.

Combine the Sales Letter Creator and Web Sales Letter Supreme you’ll have a sales person who’ll churn sales after sales for you in no time.

Don’t take my word for it. Be the judge of it yourself.

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