Sales Letters Mastery

How To Write Sales Copies That Sell!

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 Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................. 3
What is copywriting? ..................................................................... 5
It’s as old as business itself… ....................................................... 5
What is the net copywriting ‘angle’? .............................................. 7
Before you get started ..................................................................10
Fame and fortune – one is far more important than the other…! ......10
But I can’t write…! .....................................................................10
Why effective research is the key ...................................................12
The importance of knowing your perfect prospect…........................12
Your essential research portfolio ..................................................15
How much research and what to do with it? ..................................23
How to write highly effective copy ..................................................26
Different kinds of sales page .......................................................26
Using Clickbank to find effective copy… ........................................26
Do you know why it works? ........................................................30
Other top copywriters to follow and mimic ....................................33
Make it flow… ............................................................................34
Finding customers ........................................................................36
How to charge your customers .......................................................39
Conclusion...................................................................................42

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Introduction
All over the world, each and every day, there are thousands of people
generating millions of dollars in revenue through the internet.
The way that each individual is doing so varies enormously as there is a
huge multitude of different ways of making money online. Even so, it is
still a fact that there are millions of dollars being made online on a daily
basis.
And the best part is, this is a business world that is open to anyone and
everyone and whether they have got a college degree or whether they
dropped out of high school, it doesn’t matter. Furthermore, previous
business experience is not required nor is a truckload of start-up cash
because no matter who or what you are, you can get started today.
Of course, if you are just considering whether you should attempt to
grab your share of this online goldmine or not, one of the first
considerations has to be how you can do so. What is the best way of
making money online in other words?
Even if you have tried to generate cash from the net already in various
different ways (or perhaps in just one way up to now), you may well
ask exactly the same question.
It’s all very well talking about making money from the net, but how do
you do it? More accurately, how do you make good money without
going to college to get a degree in software or graphic design or
something like that?
This book is going to address this question by introducing you to a way
of making money online that is far less well known than many other
money making idea.
I am going to highlight why the relatively ‘hidden’ nature of this
business is actually a strong point rather than a weakness. You will also
learn why if you can master the basic skills – and trust me, the required
skills are very basic – this business can generate a very handsome
online income for anyone who masters it.
What I am talking about here is a craft or an art known as copywriting,
which can be incredibly lucrative as you are just about to discover.
And by the end of this book, you will have everything you need to know
to get your own copywriting career off the ground, so you can literally
hit the ground running.
When you run, you always get to your destination more quickly than
you do if you walk or (more likely) stumble towards that target, so if

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you want to grab your share of the copywriting millions, this is where
the journey begins.
However, before beginning, there is one point that bears mentioning.
Whilst the primary focus of this book is on how you start a business
where you get paid to write sales copy for other people, you can also
use this information to create highly effective sales pages for your own
products or services too.
As exactly the same principles and ideas apply to the research and
writing skills that you apply to writing your own copy or writing copy for
a customer, applying what you read in this manual to your own sales
page will be every bit as effective as it would be if you were selling your
copywriting services.

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What is copywriting?
It’s as old as business itself…
If you are interested in the idea of making money from copywriting, the
first question you probably have is, what exactly is it?
The answer to this one is dead simple. Copywriting is the art of writing
copy, or more specifically, the art of writing successful advertising copy.
This is basically all there is to copywriting, creating advertising
materials.
Now, as you are no doubt already aware, advertising was not
something that was invented when the net came along in the way that
net-focused activities like web site design were. On the contrary,
advertising is a feature of everyday business that has been around
almost since the very first day someone decided to trade a product or
service for whatever represented currency at the time. As soon as
someone started selling, advertising was born and it hasn’t changed a
great deal in centuries.
Every time you turn on the TV nowadays, you are bombarded with
adverts every few minutes, and behind every one of those adverts,
there is a copywriter earning their keep by applying their creative skills
to producing that hard-hitting advertising copy. If you open a
newspaper or a magazine, the story is exactly the same and no matter
where you find yourself on the net nowadays, you are almost certainly
going to see advertising materials on pretty much every website you
visit.
The idea of copywriting is therefore not a new one, nor is it something
that is restricted to the net.
On top of this, many of the tried and tested advertising principles and
theories that have been passed down over the decades are still just as
effective today as they were 100 years ago.
The classic ads from those days still work (with a bit of modernizing)
every bit as well now as they did back then.
As an example of both of these factors, take a look at the AdClassix
website where there are in excess of 1000 classic ads dating back to the
dawning days of the 1900’s.
Open up any category of advert on the site and you will see that there
are dozens of individual adverts. If you open any of these adds up, you
might be shocked to see that ad copy that was effective back then is
not all that different to the advertising that you see nowadays on the
TV, in magazines, at the movie theatre and on the net:

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Look right there are top corner of the ad listing page and you have the
ubiquitous Google advertising materials.
It’s the same at the top of every page on the site, proving what I
suggested earlier. It doesn’t matter what kind of website you visit, you
will be hit with advertising.
Now, as someone who is shortly to start generating an income from
copywriting by creating advertising materials, you should immediately
realize that this is a very good thing. The more widely advertising
spreads, the more demand there is for people who can create effective
advertising materials which is where you are going to enter the story
very shortly.
I would highly recommend that you add this site to your ‘Bookmark’ or
‘Favorites’ folder because once you become a copywriter, there will be
times when you need inspiration or new ideas. This site is a goldmine
for uncovering old advertising copy which obviously worked because
otherwise it wouldn’t be a ‘classic’.
Consequently, this is an immensely rich source of advertising ideas, a
ton of inspiration available for free, so make sure that you keep the URL
handy.
Classic advertising books like the timeless ‘Scientific Advertising’ should
not be ignored either, even though they are nearly 100 years old (this
particular book by Claude Hopkins was originally published in 1923).

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The advertising principles that were analyzed and recommended back
then are every bit as appropriate today as they were almost a century
ago as the basic principles of advertising that were discussed in the
book still apply.
Consequently, to master the basics of advertising, the two resources
highlighted above provide everything you need to learn both the theory
and the practicalities of creating effective, profitable advertising
materials even if you have absolutely no experience of doing so
previously.
What is the net copywriting ‘angle’?
As suggested, the ability to write successful advertising copy is not
something that is new, nor is it something that is restricted to the net.
There is however a specific copywriting ‘angle’ that is very specific to
the net, which is the ability to write successful sales pages for online
products or services.
Learning how to create sales pages of this nature for profit is the focal
point of this book.
If you have been surfing around the net for more than five minutes, the
chances are that you are already very familiar with sales pages for
products that are on sale on the net.
If however you have little idea of what I am referring to here, you can
find thousands of product sales pages by visiting an affiliate network
site like Clickbank.com.
Open up any category on the site by clicking a popular category name
on the Marketplace page such as ‘Money & Employment’. This generates
a list of products index under this particular category:

As there are over 10,000 products available through Clickbank, there is

never any shortage of sales pages, so if you need to clarify exactly what
kind of page we are going to focus on, take a quick look.

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Although you should be careful not to waste too much time with
Clickbank at this stage – it is an easy place to waste precious hours idly
browsing around – there is one thing that you would notice if you
looked at more than a handful of sales pages.
Study enough pages and you will begin to sense that the quality of the
sales materials varies enormously from those that feature top quality,
professional level sales copy to stuff that has obviously been produced
by someone who has absolutely no idea about advertising and online
promotion.
If you are anything like me, this raises a very important question. Why
would anyone who has a product or service to sell online be interested
in employing someone else to write their sales copy for them?
Here is the perfect answer in a real example that happened a few years
ago.
At the time, a very well-known online marketer was about to launch a
brand-new product which he knew would be a real killer. The guy
behind the product had already made millions through his online
marketing activities but he nevertheless recognized that his strength
was (and still is) selling and marketing whilst there were other people
capable of writing more powerful sales copy.
He also recognized an essential truth of online marketing which is the
fact that if a particular job or task does not play to your strengths, it is
almost always better to get someone else who is an expert to do that
job for you.
By getting an expert involved, you usually save yourself an inordinate
amount of research and background work, as well as a huge amount of
time. Moreover, the finished product is always going to be better than
you could have made and you can use the time that you save to focus
on your strengths to make 5, 10 or 100 times the cash that you kept in
your pocket by doing the job yourself.
Consequently, he paid a highly respected online copywriter a reputed
$25,000 to write just one sales page – it could have been more or less,
but it was certainly a five figure sum for only one page of advertising
copy, a few thousand words at the outside.
And guess what happened? Due in no small part to the power and
effectiveness of the advertising copy, the product was the first digital
information product to gross over $1 million in sales in one day!
So, would you say that the initial five figure investment was worth it or
not?

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The question doesn’t really merit asking in truth. Of course it was worth
it because without that copy, superbly crafted advertising that sold the
product fantastically well, it is certainly possible that the gross income
on the first day would have been an awful lot lower.
If you were to compare this situation with the vast majority of Clickbank
marketers who do everything (including writing the sales copy)
themselves, you would undoubtedly see a very different picture
emerging.
As the majority of these people have no experience or background in
copywriting or advertising, they generally do a very poor job with their
sales copy. And the worst thing is, they don’t even recognize the
problem (or even that it exists) because they do not have any guidance
or copywriting advice available.
This prompts a question and highlights an opportunity.
To deal with the question first, how difficult is it to write good
advertising copy? The answer is, not all that difficult because the
resources you need to create highly effective ad copy are easily
available on the net (you have already been introduced to two such
resources in the previous chapter). It requires nothing more than
learning what works before applying it.
The opportunity is of course represented by the fact that whilst some
less business-minded online marketers attempt to create their own
sales copy, most of the smart guys (i.e. the people who have the
money to pay for it) are more than happy to pay high quality
copywriters thousands of dollars to create their sales page advertising
copy for them.
This is obviously your ‘curtain call’, so let’s begin by considering what
you need to do before getting started.

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Before you get started
Fame and fortune – one is far more important than the other…!
As perhaps suggested in the previous chapter, there are a handful of
online copywriters who are very well-known like the 5-figure copywriter
who was mentioned.
People like him can (and do) command massive fees and in contrast to
what is happening financially elsewhere in the ‘real world’, their fees
only ever go up as demand increases incessantly.
I will introduce you to a few of the acknowledged copywriting greats
later because they do have an integral part to play in this copywriting
plan.
However, the thing to understand is that for every well-known
copywriter, there are hundreds of unknowns. And whilst some of these
people are undoubtedly struggling, there are also a significant number
who are nevertheless making a very handsome living from their
copywriting activities, so joining this group should be your first target.
For example, I recently saw an ad from a copywriter who I did not know
who was offering to create a sales page for $7500, discounted from
their normal price of $10,000 per page. The ad itself was very
persuasive and there were plenty of testimonials on the page as
evidence that this individual was good at their job, so if I had been in
the market for a copywriter, this would have been a very interesting
offer.
But what you should take from this is that you do not need to be a
famous copywriter to make good money from this business. After all, if
you charged only $5000 for each page you write (which would definitely
be a bottom-end fee for an experienced writer),and you picked up one
commission every week, then you’re looking at a business that will pull
in just short of a quarter of a million dollars a year (working from
home)!
But I can’t write…!
I guess that if one thing should be clear from what you have read so
far, it is the fact that as the vast majority of sales pages are still heavily
text based (as opposed to sales pages where video is used to get the
sales message across), you need to be able to write if you are to create
sales pages like those that you should now be familiar with.
Now, I know from years of experience dealing with online marketers of
all levels of skill, ability and business backgrounds that some people

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appear to be great natural writers, whereas others seem far less
naturally inclined.
Seeing people to whom writing seems to come naturally can be
depressing, and I have seen many people entirely dispirited because of
it. For example, I have met or heard of many would-be online
entrepreneurs who never got out of the starting blocks because they
allowed the fact that they had never written anything more complicated
than e-mail to derail their business before it even got steady on the
tracks.
But here is a very important factor to take on board which might be the
key to whether you succeed or fail as a copywriter.
Very, very few people in online business or indeed in any other walk of
life are naturally talented writers.
As proof, many of the top copywriters in the business freely admit that
rather than being naturally skilled writers and ad men, what they were
and are ordinary people who were willing to learn their craft and then
practice so that they became just a little better with every passing day.
It is completely unnecessary to be naturally gifted if you want to
become a high-quality copywriter, because everything that you need
can be learned. Indeed, trying to do things in any other way would be
foolish and self-defeating because if others have already done all of the
hard work for you (and they have), why waste your time repeating
what has already been done, ‘re-inventing the wheel’ as this is
commonly described?
Maybe you can’t write advertising copy at this moment, but by the time
you have finished reading this book and have used the resources
provided here, you will have everything you need to start creating top
drawer online advertising materials at your fingertips.
Whether you think you can write or not is therefore entirely irrelevant
as far as copywriting is concerned because nothing is genuinely new in
the world, and when the old stuff works, you should use it.
As all successful businesses have done since commerce was first
invented, you need do nothing more than learn from others before
improving on what they are doing to land the success (and the fees)
that you are striving for.

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Why effective research is the key
The importance of knowing your perfect prospect…
Earlier, you were introduced to a couple of old-style advertising
resources that highlighted both the theory and the practicalities of
advertising offline in the past.
What we are now going to do is move this on a stage by looking at
resources that are more focused on online advertising before
demonstrating how you use your research results to create highly
effective sales copy.
To do this, I’m going to imagine that as your first assignment or
commission, you’ve been asked to write a sales page for a digital
information product focused on the (presently booming) acai berry
weight loss market. This happens to be a product that someone else
has created in this hypothetical case but the principles of research and
writing would be exactly the same if it was your own product.
Having an example to use when demonstrating how to research your
market properly is extremely important because when you create sales
copy, you always do so with a very specific project and objective at the
forefront of your mind.
When you write sales copy, your sales page must be designed to appeal
or ‘talk’ to the kind of people who are most likely to buy the product for
which you are writing the copy.
To take this one stage further still, many professional copywriters
recommend that you should research your market until you have a very
clear idea of exactly who the person is that is most likely to buy the
product.
Once you have done so, you then produce your own ‘identikit’ picture of
the ideal individual customer for that product.
By having a clear picture of your ideal prospect, it becomes much easier
to write effective copy with this single individual firmly fixed in your
mind’s eye rather than trying to write in a way that appeals to the
faceless, amorphous mass that is ‘the market’.
Isolating one individual ‘perfect prospect’ usually works incredibly well
because as when you are speaking to another person face-to-face, it is
always easier to make what you’re saying a perfect match for the needs
of the individual than it is to say something that is 100% matched to
the requirements of a large group of individuals.
This is something that I always do and when I have my perfect prospect
in mind, I raise it another notch by searching for and printing out an

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image of someone who looks very close to being the ‘person’ I have
pictured in my mind. I then stick this as close to my monitor as possible
so that every time I sit down to work on the copy, I never forget this
person at whom every word I write will be aimed.
So, the first research step is to establish exactly what kind of person
makes up the target market for the product for which you are writing
the copy.
The exact information that you need to create your perfect identikit
picture will vary from case to case and situation to situation, but the
following are some of the more obvious factors that you should consider
when establishing who your individual perfect prospect is:
Age:
Gender:
Family situation:
Income:
Location:
And any other interests.
You also need to establish whether there is any money being spent in
the market that you are writing your copy for. Even though this is the
kind of research that the product creator should have done well before
deciding whether it was worth making the product or not, it helps you
to establish how hard your copy is going to have to ‘work’ to generate
sales.
Although in the early days it is unlikely that you are going to be in a
position to do this, after you have established yourself as a recognized
copywriting expert, there may be situations where you turn down a
commission because your research indicates that there is no market for
the product in question. You might do this based on research into
whether there is any money in the market.
In my experience, it is far more profitable in the long run to be selective
about the work you do than it is to accept everything that comes across
your table, especially if instead of accepting a flat fee for your work,
you are being paid based on results (which is something I will return to
later).
By the time you are in a position to be selective, you will also have a
reputation to protect, so sometimes accepting an assignment for a
product that is going to be very difficult to sell is not going to help your
business in the long term.

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Consequently, having the capacity to research whether there is money
being spent in the market is vitally important.
There is one other factor that you need to consider as well, an
‘intangible’ that nevertheless has the capacity to dictate whether your
sales copy is extremely successful or far less so.
This is the fact that no matter what market or niche you are working in,
the people who populate that market will have a common language, a
jargon or argot that is only known and used by ‘insiders’.
In my experience, less knowledgeable marketers who are attempting to
get into a new niche for the first time commonly make the mistake of
not understanding or appreciating that in every market sector or niche,
there is a specific form of language that differentiates those who are ‘in
the know’ from outsiders.
Because they do not understand this, they market using ‘outsider
language’ (in other words, ordinary everyday English), and their sales
results are poor or non-existent as a direct result.
Remember your ‘perfect prospect’?
Well, he or she is undoubtedly an insider who uses the special jargon
that only insiders know. It therefore follows that if you really want to
get your sales message through to this prospect in the most powerful
and effective way, you have to learn the insider way of speaking to do
so.
As a simple demonstration of how all-pervasive niche jargon is, you
would probably think that if you are going to buy seeds to plant in your
garden, understanding the information on the label would be child’s
play.
If so, this ‘seed packet jargon buster’ page will probably help change
your mind:

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This is just one niche market example but every niche or market sector
is the same. Hence, it is simple – you have to ‘learn the language’.
Your essential research portfolio
To start putting together your identikit perfect prospect, the first thing
you need to establish are factors like age, gender and so on.
The first step towards building up this picture is to find other websites in
the market in which you have been commissioned to write sales copy,
in my example, the ‘acai berry’ market.
To find these sites, run a standard Google search using your main
search term to locate other associated sites:

What you’re trying to do is build is a shortlist of half a dozen sites that

are specifically focused on the market for which you are thinking of
writing copy. Consequently, results that represent individual pages of a
site like Wikipedia or Amazon.com are no use to you. It is only the

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subject specific sites as highlighted in the previous screenshot that you
can meaningfully research.
However, checking out some of the related searches at the bottom of
the page can sometimes help to find additional sites if you cannot locate
half a dozen suitable sites on the first couple of results pages.
What you do next is head over to Quantcast.com to study the
demographics of the audience who use each of these sites, investigating
at least a handful as the demographics for each individual site will be
slightly different. Thus, by investigating more than one site, you build
up a more accurate composite picture of the market for this type of
product than you will if you research just one site alone.
Quantcast is a site where there is a huge amount of information
available about the audience for millions of websites, although as not
every site on the net has been quantified, you will sometimes find that
the information is an estimate rather than an accurate quantified result.
Nevertheless, even these estimates have value as they help to compile
your composite market picture.
To continue with the previous example, we’ll start with
acaiberrysite.com. According to Quantcast, the site currently sees
approximately 27,000 visitors a month, down from a peak of nearly
47,000 in early March, 2009:

This declining traffic would suggest that this particular type of product
may be getting less popular than it once was. Although this is not
directly relevant to the job you are doing, it nevertheless helps you to
build up a more accurate picture of the market in which you are being
asked to work, so it does have value.

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Beneath the chart, there is a detailed breakdown of the demographics
of US site visitors for this particular acai berry site:

From this, you can clearly begin to see the value of using Quantcast in
your research.
For example, whilst you might imagine that the majority of potential
prospects for a product of this type would be female, the demographics
of this site suggest that there are slightly more male users than
females. You can see that nearly 70% of site visitors are aged between
18 and 49, and that almost the same percentage are childless.
But there is still more information to be found on the page, as on the
right-hand side, there is a list of other websites that people who visit
this one are likely to go to together with an ‘affinity’ rating which
indicates how much more likely they are to visit these sites than an
average net user:

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You can see that there are a few more acai berry sites that you can add
to your ‘direct’ research list (i.e. sites that are in exactly the same
market).
However, there are sites in the list that have nothing to do with acai
berries or dieting with several money and debt-related sites shown as
an example. This is incredibly powerful information because it enables
you to learn a great deal more about your targeted prospect, firstly
from this list itself and secondly by visiting the sites in question to learn
more.
For instance, the fact the people who use this particular weight loss site
also visit debt related resources suggest that they might have money
problems, a suggestion that is at least partially confirmed by the
earning figures shown in the demographic chart seen earlier.
If the sales copy you are writing is for a more expensive product, this
information would be extremely relevant as it gives you some indication
of how you need to target your copy if it is to be successful. For
example, for a significant proportion of your potential prospects, money
is likely to be an issue and therefore you will have to focus on value for
money (‘yes, it costs this much, but just look at how much you get for
the price’) when you write the sales page.
Now, go back to your original Google search. Copy the URL of another
site in this market and do the same again. This for example is what
Quantcast has for acaiberryreports.net:

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Now you can see that there are far more women using this site than the
previous one, which might suggest that their advertising is more
targeted for women or that the sales page is more female orientated.
Whatever the reason, the main point is that this adds a bit more detail
to the composite ‘perfect prospect’ picture that you are building up.
To find out where the target audience live, open Alexa.com, paste in the
site URL that you are investigating, click the ‘Go’ button and finally
scroll a little way down the page to find the geographical make-up of
the site audience:

The audience for acaiberrysite.net is overwhelmingly U.S.-based as

would be expected, with the next largest single country prospect base
being India.

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With lots of highly appropriate demographic information collected, the
next step is to establish whether there is any money being spent in this
market, because when money is being spent, there is also money to be
made.
This is a very simple step as all you need to do is go back to your
original Google search results page.
A quick look at the page indicates that there is the maximum allowable
number of three adverts at the top left hand corner of the results page,
with another (maximum) eight on the right-hand side:

This immediately indicates that this is a market where there is plenty

money being made and spent, but for further confirmation of this, scroll
to the bottom of the advertising skyscraper on the right-hand side of
the page to click ‘More sponsored links’:

Clicking this link pulls up a page that highlights how many advertisers
are trying to get their advertising materials on the first Google search
results page for the search term that you have used:

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There are 253 advertisers competing for the same search term. With
that number of competitors in the market, the cost per click is going to
be very high, proving that there is indeed plenty of money being spent
and therefore made in this market.
The final thing you need to do is research the market jargon, the insider
language the people in this niche use when they are communicating or
talking with other insiders.
To find where these people congregate and communicate, you should
search for niche appropriate forum sites because it is these sites that
people use when they are looking for other net users with similar
interests to theirs.
To continue with the same example, I would search Google for ‘acai
berry forum’ (or ‘forums’) because by default, Google will list the most
popular forum sites at the top of the results page:

21
In this example, there appear to be no specific ‘acai berry forums’ but
there is plenty of information available in associated forums such as on
the weight-loss.fitness.com forum site and the others shown here. In
other markets or niches, you will however find lots of forum sites, so
start by researching the ones that are most popular and work down.
Remember that what you are attempting to do here is to infiltrate the
insider language that people in this niche use when they are
communicating with each other.
Consequently, this is not something you can do overnight as you need
to find an active forum or two where you can ‘lurk’ whilst building up
your knowledge of insider vocabulary and language use.
Once you have observed what is happening and what is being said for a
while, you should have a reasonable degree of understanding and
knowledge about what happens and the jargon being used.
After you have reached this stage of ‘reasonable knowledge’, it is time
to ‘test’ what you think you have learned by getting involved in the
forum yourself. In other words, you should start your own threads

22
where you attempt to use the jargon of the market in the appropriate
way.
When you sign up for membership of the forum, I would not necessarily
recommend that you use your proper name.
Although there will probably be no real problem if you do, remember
that you are using this as a test and that until you have tested what
you think you know, your reading of the situation may be completely
wrong. If so, then other members of the forum might be more than
willing to ‘out’ you as an unwelcome ‘alien’ or (even worse) some kind
of ‘scam artist’ which is a tag that you definitely do not need attaching
to your name.
So, using a pen name as a way of protecting yourself against false
accusations is generally a good idea.
When you start posting threads of your own, try to do so in a way that
is challenging, interesting, controversial or shocking, as this is the best
way of eliciting responses from other members.
It is these responses that will really indicate just how far you have come
because if you use the appropriate jargon in your original thread – but
don’t go over the top – and receive replies in a similar vein, you
immediately know that you’re on the right lines. If not, you may need
to do a little bit more research before trying again (with a different pen
name).
But once you learn the language that works in your niche, you have the
secret key to your ‘perfect prospects’ purse, something that very few
other copywriters will ever have.
How much research and what to do with it?
In the early days when you are first trying to find new clients for your
business, you are not going to be snowed under with too much work.
Consequently, when you’re just starting out, it will pay you to go over
the top in your research efforts, doing far more work than is justified by
the fee you are going to be paid as adopting this approach will
ultimately benefit your business.
In the first instance, the more research data you compile, the more
professional and effective the copy that you produce is going to be. A
high-quality professional sales page into which you have put a great
deal of research is far more likely to sell a large number of products
than a sales page that has been hurriedly thrown together with a
minimum amount of background work.
The more sales your copy generates, the quicker you are going to
establish your reputation as someone who can write copy that sells,

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which of course makes it far easier to attract new clients and additional
work.
Another benefit of putting in this extra research in the early days is that
you are still perfecting your craft and your ability to research properly.
As this research ability will be an asset in the future, this represents
another benefit that will ultimately put more money in your pocket.
What I would also recommend is that when you are perfecting your
research tactics, you write everything down, adding appropriate
screenshots and the like so that you have a detailed ‘how to’ research
guide of exactly the way you do things on your computer. As a
supplement or alternative to this written guide, you could create
screenshot videos to demonstrate exactly what you do when you are
researching.
You do this for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, as a natural part of your research activities, it is likely that every
so often, you will discover a new trick or ‘workaround’ that helps save
time or improves the quality of your research results. If you include this
in your plan, it ensures that you never forget these tricks which can be
important if they are things that you are likely to use only very
occasionally.
Secondly and far more importantly, this ‘how to’ manual is something
that you can give to someone else so that they can replicate exactly
what you do to research your market.
This is going to be invaluable once you start getting busy, because
when that happens, you are no longer going to have the time available
to personally undertake the depth of research you need to do.
You are therefore going to have to find other people to do the research
for you. Your guide enables them to do research in exactly the way that
you want it doing from day one, meaning that you can be absolutely
confident that the research results will always be exactly what you
need.
As an example, if you do get to the stage where you are asked to create
a new sales page for a different product every week, then you are
probably going to need four assistants to do the research for you.
Although finding research assistants is easy through sites like Elance or
Get A Freelancer, getting them to do the job exactly the way you want
is going to be a nightmare if you do not have a manual that goes into
every tiny detail of the job required.

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You would waste several weeks writing it from scratch when you get to
the stage where you need to outsource or you can create the guide as
you go along so that it is ready the instant it is needed.

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How to write highly effective copy
Different kinds of sales page
When you have done your research and are ready to start writing, the
first thing that you need to consider is the kind of sales page that you
are going to write. There are three common types of sales page used in
online marketing.
The first and probably most widely recognized sales page format is the
long copy sales page, a sales page where there are several thousand
words so that the prospect who is reading the page has to continually
scroll down in order to continue reading.
Next, there is the short copy page which is perhaps not surprisingly a
short version of the previous example, and finally, there is the
increasingly popular video sales pages where there are minimal words
on the page as the video does the selling.
Now, if you are creating copy on behalf of a client, they will have told
you exactly what kind of copy they want, almost certainly including
such information as the minimum number of words required, whether
bullet points and images are required (and if so, where they are to be
placed) and so on.
If however this is your own sales page, you will have to make the
decision, with the most widely accepted ‘rule of thumb’ being that the
more expensive your product is, the more information there needs to be
on the sales page to convince the prospect to buy.
For the purposes of this manual however, I am going to assume that
you are creating a more traditional long copy sales page because if you
can do this, then creating the short copy page is just a simpler version
of what you have already learned to do.
Using Clickbank to find effective copy…
Earlier in this manual, I suggested that when it comes to writing
effective advertising copy, there is no sense in redoing all of the work
that others have already done. Consequently, the first thing that you
should do is study other successful sales pages to allow you to analyze
what makes them successful before replicating those success secrets in
your own copy.
Let’s start with the best known resource by returning to Clickbank to
see what you can learn about successful sales pages.
When you open any Clickbank results page either by typing in a specific
search term or by category, what you are presented with is the ‘top 10’
digital information products called up by that term or category search.

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It is often suggested that these 10 products are the most popular but
whilst there is an inkling of truth in this, what this search really
demonstrates is far more interesting from a copywriting point of view as
I will explain.
This is the top of the of the ‘Money & Employment’ search page on
which the ‘top 10’ products are shown:

Under each individual product, there is a line of statistical information

which is data that a Clickbank affiliate uses in their research into
whether an individual product is worth promoting or not.
To the far right on every highlighted line, there is a figure for ‘grav’.
This is a short version of gravity, which is often said to be a measure of
the popularity of the product concerned. Any number above 100 points
indicates that a product is very popular, so all of the products in the
previous screenshot would appear to fall into this category.
But, here’s the thing to bear in mind.
Until a prospect finally decides to get their credit card out to buy an
individual product, they have absolutely no idea whether it is worth
spending money on or not. The product itself is not therefore popular
with that individual prospect at the point when they buy.
In effect therefore, Clickbank’s statistics do not indicate product
popularity because when the customer pays, they do not know whether
they like it or not.
What a high gravity figure is therefore demonstrating in reality is that
the sales page for the product is extremely effective because it is really

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telling you that the product is selling well because the sales page copy
is extremely effective.
From a copywriting point of view, this means that Clickbank are
presenting you with a detailed list of the sales pages that are
generating the most sales. Hence it follows that they are the pages with
the most powerful and effective advertising copy.
Okay, as you are looking for ideas for a long copy sales page, the next
step is to check out the sales pages for products in the top 10 to find
those that use the long copy format that have a ‘grav’ figure in excess
of 100 points. This is a very popular product at the moment that
matches both of these criteria:

Open the sales page up and start to read.

Read through every section of the page and as you do so, jot down your
reactions and thoughts to these various different sections as you go
along. If you do not do this, as one thought naturally follows another as
you read, you will forget how you reacted on a section by section basis
meaning that you lose important information.
Also, write down the phrases and terms that make the biggest
impression on you as you go along because if some phrases really ring
a bell with you, it is likely that they will do the same for other prospects
viewing this sales page. All this information will eventually help you to
start compiling ‘swipe files’, individual files where you collect together
terms, phrases or ideas from sales pages that work for you. You can
then reuse these in the future in your own advertising materials.
Start from the very top of the page with the banner or headline, decide
whether it works for you or not and then try to analyze why you have
arrived at your decision:

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In addition to the words on the page, consider the various page
elements included such as the video at the top beneath the main
banner headline:

Scroll down the page and look at the other features on the page.
There is for example a bullet point list which highlights many of the
major benefits of the product, something that every top copywriter will
tell you should be included on a long copy sales page:

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There are lots of testimonials – social proof is absolutely essential on a
sales page if it is to be effective – and many of these testimonials are
given face-to-face on video which is becoming an increasingly popular
and powerful strategy.
There is an unconditional 60 day money back guarantee which is
absolutely essential nowadays if you are to have any chance of selling
together with several links and buttons on the page where anyone who
has already made their decision to buy can do so without continuing to
the bottom.
So, the make-up of the page is highly professional and follows a format
that you could definitely follow yourself when you create your own sales
pages.
But there has to be more to it than that, right?
Do you know why it works?
When you’re looking at a number of long copy sales pages, you will find
some work for you and some don’t. On a sales page that works, there
may be some particular aspects or feature on that page that
immediately spring out at you as making it effective, but sometimes
what makes it work is far harder to discern.
There may be words and phrases on the page which you add to your
‘swipe file’ for use in your own copywriting efforts in the future, and if

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so, this is a perfectly acceptable and permissible tactic that is used by
even the best known copywriters in the business.
But what happens where a sales page works and you can’t figure out
why?
Frustratingly, there will be times when you study a sales page that
‘flicks the switch’ for you but you won’t be able to understand exactly
why no matter how long you study it to get to the core of why it works.
Perhaps even more frustratingly, this is most likely to happen in the
early days when you’re just trying to launch your copywriting career
which is of course the time when you need the most help.
Well, there is something that you can do to get around this difficulty, a
technique that I learned from one of the top copywriters in the
business, John Carlton (but he freely admitted that he learned it from
someone else, so it is not copyrighted knowledge!).
What John did in the early days to hone his copy-analysis skills is
something that I (and I guess hundreds of others) have done
subsequently and from experience, I can tell you that it works like a
charm!
What you do is, write it down.
That’s it, you write it down, no more or less than that.
Or, more accurately, you copy the sales page that you are trying to
analyze word for word with an old-fashioned paper and pen. You do not
do so on a computer keyboard because when you use the keyboard,
your fingers are disconnected from your brain and it becomes far too
easy to ‘copy in a coma’ if you use a computer.
If however you write every single word from the sales page absolutely
verbatim on a sheet of paper, then you will think about what you’re
writing. When you first try this out, it is unlikely that your epiphany will
hit you at the first time of asking, so you might need to do it two, three
or even ten times before you really understand what it is that makes
that particular piece of advertising copy so effective.
In other words, there could be some hard work involved here but it is
hard work that is more than justified in the long run. This strategy is
just about the best way I know of developing your analytical skills to a
point where you can skim through a sales page and pick up all the most
important points in the space of a minute or two.
Unfortunately however, you cannot reach this ‘running’ stage until you
have gone through the phase where you have to put in the time and
effort to learn to ‘walk’.

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But of course, this analytical strategy does not only work with Clickbank
sales pages. It doesn’t matter what kind of advertising copy you are
trying to find the key for, if the copy works for you, you must write it
down on paper, word after word, until you understand exactly why it
works so well.
For instance, go back to ‘old time’ ads at AdClassix to discover what
makes them so effective, what makes them ‘tick’. I wouldn’t mind
betting that if you read a couple of the ads earlier, you probably had no
idea why they were so successful back in the day, so now is the time to
find out.
Analyze them by writing them down whilst thinking about what the ad
creator is trying to do with every word that they use. As you do so, you
will gradually learn how to recognize the strategy behind the
advertising, the ‘power’ words and phrases that drive that strategy and
so on.
Once you can do this, you are in a position to deconstruct any
advertising or promotional copy before ‘leeching’ every effective
element of that copy for your own swipe files. Consequently, you will
quickly build up a swipe file (or several because you should have a
‘headline’ swipe file, a ‘bullet point’ swipe file and so on). These files will
quickly become invaluable resources from which you can create
effective ad copy within a few hours after you have collected together
the relevant information through your initial research activities.
Indeed, until you are in a position where you can confidently say that
you really understand without any doubt exactly why one page works
whereas another doesn’t, you should be prepared to don your
‘analytical hat’ to do the work that will reveal the secret to you.
Now, I am not going to attempt to kid you that this does not take work.
But here’s the thing to understand, the factor that justifies putting the
work in and especially in the early days.
The top level five-figure copywriters did not get where they are today,
in a position to command huge fees for one sales copy page by ‘winging
it’ and being lazy. They put the necessary work in and did whatever it
took to succeed. John Carlton is just one example, but you will meet
many more in a moment that learned their trade in exactly the same
hard way. However, as a consequence, they are now reaping the
rewards of the efforts they made.
In comparison, there are hundreds or perhaps even thousands of
would-be copywriters who never got past square one because they were
not willing to do the work. They wanted everything spoon feeding to

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them, but unfortunately in the copywriting world, this is not how it
works.
What you ultimately get out of copywriting is in direct proportion to
what you’re willing to put in, and there is never a better time to put the
work in than at the very beginning because this approach naturally sets
you up for maximum long-term success (the sooner you can do a great
job, the sooner the money starts pouring in).
Success means five (or maybe even six) figure paydays whereas
anyone who ‘wings it’ is going to be looking for something else to try in
three months time when they decide that copywriting is not all that it is
cracked up to be.
Every time you see ad copy that works, you must be able to say exactly
why it is effective as a second nature reflex reaction. Once you reach
that level of competence, you truly are set to be a top-class
professional copywriter if you have not reached that exalted position
already.
Other top copywriters to follow and mimic
In marketing, whether it is in business on the net or in the real ‘bricks
and mortar’ commercial world, there is an oft repeated and widely
accepted adage that suggests that if you’re going to learn from or copy
anybody, you should always pick a top expert as the person who you
are guided by or copy from.
I have already mentioned John Carlton and there are several more
similarly stellar copywriting authority figures listed below whose sites I
would very definitely recommend you should add to your ‘Bookmarks’
folder.
All of these guys are (or were because unfortunately, Gary Halbert is no
longer with us) top rated copywriters, many of whom acquired vast
experience of marketing and advertising in the real world well before
the advent of the net as an advertising medium.
And here is the thing about every one of these sites.
Every copywriter listed here got to the top of the tree because they are
an expert in creating incredibly effective advertising copy, a lot of which
can be accessed through their sites and blogs. Consequently, with your
newly acquired analytical skills, you can ‘steal’ super effective
advertising ideas and copy from some of the top people in the business
for your ever expanding swipe files.
The more copy, ideas and information you have in your files, the easier
it becomes to create top-quality, super effective advertising copy at the
drop of a hat as you eventually reach a point where writing sales copy

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becomes similar to putting together a jigsaw or completing a join the
dots puzzle.
You will get to a stage where creating a sales page necessitates nothing
more than pulling together a dozen or two dozen ideas or ‘chunks’ of
copy from your swipe file. You then add suitable transitional content to
join together the disparate individual ‘bits’ from your files.
Next, you rewrite any sections of copy that you have directly lifted from
other people so that you do not publish duplicate content or plagiarize
the work of others (which is illegal) and there you have it, your sales
page completed in an hour or two.
These are the sites that I would definitely advise you to visit. Where
there is a mailing list available, join it as doing so means that you get a
ton of high quality copywriting information sent to your mailbox several
times a week:
Dan Kennedy (& Bill Glazer);
Gary Bencivenga;
Jay Abraham;
Michel Fortin;
Gary Halbert;
Joe Polish;
Tina Lorenz.
Make it flow…
I once read a comment from Michel Fortin that suggested that when
you are writing a sales page, the objective of each individual section of
that page should be limited to convincing your visitor to continue to the
next section.
In other words, the headline of your page need do nothing more than
convince the visitor to read the sub-headline which should in turn make
the reader curious enough to go to the first paragraph, which in turn
forces them to read the second and so on.
In other words, the whole sales page is a step-by-step process that
almost leads the reader by the hand from the top of the sales letter to
the bottom where they hopefully hit the ‘Buy Now’ button.
Now, from my own research, I would suggest that there is both a flaw
and a strength in this approach and that ultimately, the latter wins out
over the former.

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The flaw in this idea is that most site visitors who are presented with a
long copy sales page will not read from the top to bottom in a logical
manner. Instead, they are far more likely to read the headline, perhaps
the sub-headline and the first paragraph and then they skip straight to
the bottom of the page to see what the price is so they can decide
whether it is within their budget or not.
So, the idea that you can force the reader to follow the pattern that you
want them to follow will not always match reality.
However, the strength is that knowing this, you can tie it in with the
original concept by adding a caveat to it. Knowing that the site visitor is
likely to read at least the headline if nothing else (which almost always
happens), that headline should be written with a dual objective in mind.
Not only should it be written to encourage the visitor to read this
headline, it should also be powerful enough to raise enough curiosity to
bring them back to the top of the page if they check out the price at the
bottom to see that they can either afford it or that they would at least
like to know more.
So, this is another thing to remember when creating your sales copy.
Your headline must be the ultimate ‘smack between the eyes’,
something that will pull anyone who decides to skip to the bottom of the
page straight back as long as the product price is in their personal
ballpark.

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Finding customers
Once you have acquired the knowledge that you need by applying what
you have learned so far and have accumulated swipe files that are
brimming with information, ideas and copy that you can use, you’re
ready to launch your business.
To do this, you obviously need to find clients or customers, which is the
next step. Fortunately however, this is a relatively straightforward step
as there are lots of places where you can offer your services and you
can do so relatively cheaply or at no cost as well.
In order to be able to sell your services, the first thing you need to do is
establish credibility by proving that you can do what you claim.
To do this, what I would do is join the #1 online marketing forum which
is the Warrior Forum. I would then post what is known as a Warrior
Special Offer (WSO). This is an offer that is exclusive to other members
of the forum which it costs $20 to post.
As this is the most popular online marketing site, there are always
hundreds of members looking for a quality offer at a ‘bargain price’
through the WSO section of the site:

There were 538 members viewing this particular section of the site at
the time of this screenshot, and here is the time it was captured:

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Offer to create five short copy sales pages for the first five Warrior
members who send you a request by private forum mail in return for a
testimonial (a video testimonial would be even better).
Also as part of the offer, you should tell members who take up the offer
that whilst the sales copy that you create for them will not be available
to anyone else, you will be using it in your portfolio for promotional
purposes. You can also ask them for any results that your copy
generates as a successful track record of sales will certainly help
acquire new clients in the future.
If all goes well – and it almost invariably does when you use the Warrior
Forum – you will have five great testimonials and a portfolio that you
can use to show prospective clients that you know what you’re doing in
the future.
It also means that the next time you create a WSO, you can charge
50% or 75% of what you have established should be your standard
charge to start bringing some money in whilst still offering a great deal
to forum members.
Search out the top people in the industry and offer your services to
them for free for a limited period of time in return for a testimonial and
the opportunity of working with them on a longer-term basis.
If they agree to your proposal, you have the chance to impress them
with your skills so that once the limited ‘work for free’ offer expires,
they will hopefully continue to employ your services (and pay you for
them) in the future.
Once you have a few testimonials under your belt, a portfolio of work
that you can use to show that you know what you’re doing (including
results) and perhaps even a few clients, you can approach online
advertising agencies to offer your services as a freelancer.
Similarly, you can offer your services to established copywriting
businesses as well, as many of them are looking for up-and-coming

37
freelance copywriters who can provide evidence that they know what
they are doing.
You can even advertise your services directly through sites like
Craigslist and US Free Ads.
My own experience of advertising using these sites is that whilst you
won’t get many enquiries and some of the ones that you do get will be
a waste of time, the clients that you pick up using these two resources
tend to be folks who stick with you just as long as you keep doing the
job properly, so it is worth doing.

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How to charge your customers
As someone who has just become a copywriter, one mistake that you’re
quite likely to make is that of underestimating the value of what you
can provide to an online marketing business that needs an effective
sales page.
Whilst it is pretty obvious that in the early days, you are not going to be
able to quote premium prices to your clients, it is also important to
appreciate that as you develop your copywriting skills, your prices must
always reflect the value that you bring to your clients business.
For instance, to return to the example I used earlier in this report, if
you write a sales page that generates $1 million in one day (with
several more millions added subsequently), I would suggest that your
services are worth more than $25,000.
Of course, when you are creating a sales page, you have no way of
knowing exactly how much sales revenue it is going to generate for
your client which is why you need to be a little creative when it comes
to how you charge for your time and services.
In the early days, what I would recommend is that you work for clients
on a ‘back-end fee’ basis. As you are relatively unknown, you do not
ask them for money up front, but instead, you have an agreement in
place where they pay you a sum that is mutually agreed in advance on
successful completion of the job. For example, you agree that the fee is
$1000 at the beginning but they don’t pay that until you deliver to their
satisfaction.
However, you do not work on this basis indefinitely simply because
although this is a reasonably effective ‘foot in the door’ tactic, it is not
one that you can survive on in the long term.
Consequently, what you should agree with your client is that if after this
first commission they want to continue working with you, you will do so
on a stage payment basis. As an example, you might agree with your
client that 33% is paid in advance, another 33% tranche is to be paid at
a pre-agreed point in the sales page creation process with the final 34%
paid on satisfactory delivery of the required copy.
Okay, returning once again to the case of our million dollar sales page
copywriting friend, if you get to the stage where you are working with
‘big dog’ marketers who have the ability to create products that
generate millions of dollars, agreeing a flat rate fee upfront is really not
a great idea.

39
It would be far better to reduce the initial fee and include a percentage
for every sale made rather than going for a larger lump sum upfront
with nothing to come subsequently, simply because in this way, you are
getting paid for doing the job properly.
Think of it this way.
Even if the sales page is for a digital information product that is going
to be sold through Clickbank with 75% of the commission going to
affiliates, every penny the marketer behind the product receives after
they have covered the costs of creating it is pure profit.
Consequently, asking them for a 5% split of total sales revenue will still
leave them with a very handsome profit in their and and because you
have agreed to a lower upfront fee, their initial setup costs have been
reduced in any case.
Of course, this strategy is only going to work once you have acquired a
reputation in the market for generating sales and a track record to
prove that you can do so. As however a top name marketer is unlikely
to work with you if you have not already reached this level, this should
not be a major problem.
The final option is one that only really becomes appropriate if or when
you become a famous copywriter yourself, someone who has reached
the happy position where you can say no to any project that you really
don’t fancy because you already have enough top-quality clients to
provide you with more high paying work than you can reasonably
handle.
Now, instead of asking for a percentage cut of sales revenues, you are
only willing to work with new clients in return for an equity share in the
business for which you are providing the advertising copy.
If for example someone approaches you with a new project or product
which through research you can see is something with great potential,
you lay down the rules because your position entitles you to do so.
If the marketer who brings this idea to you is planning it as a spin-off
from their existing business, you should insist that they establish a
completely separate legal entity (e.g. an LLC) to handle it.
You can then agree to create the sales copy for the new product at no
cost in return for a 50% stake in the company so that your reward for
creating the sales page (which will only take a couple of hours because
of your swipe file collection, remember) is a half share of a business
that could make millions of dollars.
As you can see from this quick run through of the various charging
options available to you as a professional copywriter, it is a question of

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starting small and humble, developing your skills as you go along whilst
always remember going to charge appropriately as your business and
reputation quickly develops.

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Conclusion
As I hope you can see by now, although becoming someone who can
create superbly effective advertising copy at the drop of a hat and get
paid extremely well for doing so might have seemed like a crazy
pipedream when you first started reading, there is in reality absolutely
no reason why this should be the case.
On the contrary, if you apply what you have learned from reading this
manual and put in the work that is undoubtedly necessary to develop
your copywriting skills, then there really is no limit on how much money
you can earn as a copywriter.
Moreover, because as I suggested in the beginning, the number of
copywriters who can genuinely do a great job quickly is pretty limited,
you are not operating in a market where there are thousands upon
thousands of competitors.
Instead, you are working in a market where it is consistent quality and
your ability to deliver on time that counts above all else.
Consequently, once you have put in the time and effort to learn the
copywriting craft and have gone through the ‘apprentice’ period when
you develop your skills working with your first clients, it is consistent
quality and an unswerving dedication to meet deadlines on every
occasion which must be your primary focus.
It is these two factors that will initially establish and subsequently build
your reputation and with a blossoming reputation as one of the top up-
and-coming copywriters in the business, it is natural that your bank
balance will also enjoy a degree of ‘blossoming’ at the same time!
So, now you know that there is great money to be made as a
copywriter and you have all of the essential information you need to get
started.
All that is now needed is action, which is why you are the most
important person in this project from this point on…

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