The Essential Copywriting Questionnaire
Before you can write compelling copy, you have to spend time doing the grunt work and gathering the facts. If you take short-cuts and skip the research stage, then you increase the risk that you will miss some vital piece of information. This could be the bit that determines whether someone buys your product or not.
Immerse yourself in the product before you start to write and check you have all the relevant information. Avoid making the mistake of thinking that, because you are familiar with the product, you can write about it easily. A large part of copywriting is about following a process. The more you follow a process and stick to it, the easier and faster the exercise becomes.
My Copywriting Questionnaire is designed help you with this.
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Copywriting Dynamite: ‘Scientific Advertising’
If you are a serious student of marketing you will want to read and study Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins. Published in 1923, it continues to be an invaluable reference work for copywriters and marketers. David Ogilvy claimed that it changed the course of his life.
Claude invented test marketing, sampling by coupon and copy research. He was forever experimenting and testing new ideas in search of better results. “Almost any question can be answered, cheaply, quickly and finally by a test campaign. And that’s the way to answer them - not by arguments around the table”, he wrote.
7 Tips On How To Write Effective Web Copy
Writing copy for a website is different from direct mail. You have even less time to attract the attention of the reader. This means you have to be astute about what your reader is looking for and how you’re going to satisfy their need.
1. Don’t Forget The 1% and 8 Second Rule
Only 1% of visitors to your page will take some form of action. This means that on average only 1 out of every 100 will make a purchase, sign-up to receive something or telephone your office.
And you have only 8 seconds to convince your reader that they have arrived at the right place, after that 50% of them will go in search of something better.
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5 Sales Letter Writing Mistakes To Avoid
The copywriter Jay Halbert wrote: “The answer to every business problem is a good sales letter”. Unfortunately, sales letter writing is often low on everyone’s list of priorities because most of us:
• Hate writing them
• Are not very good at doing them
• Don’t believe they work terribly well
As the recession settles and the New Economy dawns, it looks as if we are all going to have to get better at writing such letters. Not just one-off letters but a series of consistent letters targeted at different market sectors.
Why Long Sales Copy Works
Most people don’t believe that long sales copy works. They are convinced that if they write long copy it will bore the reader and it won’t be read. This is a common misunderstanding and one which costs you valuable leads and sales.
You are thinking about the copy from your point of view, not from the point of view of the reader who might be interested in your product or service.
Direct mail and advertising are full of long copy examples that have delivered exceptional responses.
Copywriters such as David Ogilvy and Steve Abbot knew this, as do leading copywriters of today such as Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer. Here are some of the reasons why:
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The Power Of The ‘You’ Word In Copy
When communicating with visitors to your web-site, remember these two rules.
The 1% Rule - this is the tiny percentage of people who, on average, take some form of ‘action’ when visiting your web site. By ‘action’, I mean visitors who subscribe to your newsletter, contact you about your service or directly place an order. This means that you may be losing 99 out of every hundred visitors to your site.
The 8 Second Rule - research shows that on average, 50% of visitors to a typical web-site make a decision about whether to stay on that site within 8 seconds.
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