Target market

Know your target market. Who would benefit from your product, is it a business professional? If so write your letter in a more formal way, just as your prospect would expect to see it.

No matter what your target market is it will more often than not be in keeping with your personality or experience.

For instance if you address a business person then you will have experience in that field and know how to address your targets so that you don’t offend them.

If you really aren’t sure what your personality type is you could always take an online personality test to find out. It will be worth your time.

Write casually

You may be in business but the key here is to write an informal letter. Address your prospects with “Dear Friend” or “Dear Budding Millionaire” and not “Dear Sir”.

Think about how you can relate to your prospects.

If you are a break dance enthusiast, you can relate to your prospects by telling them how for the first six months of learning to break dance you broke every bone in your body before getting the power moves down – they’re sure to have had similar experiences and feel an empathy towards you:

“Hey this guy really knows what he’s talking about… I felt exactly the same way when I started… I’ve got to listen to this…”

You must write with the knowledge and understanding of the problems and frustrations your prospects are experiencing. Tell them you were just as frustrated until you found the solution to the problems. Tell them how you’ve learnt from this experience and are now going to help them by teaching them how to break dance. Step by Step, with simple easy to follow ‘How To Videos’

Sometimes you need to show your excitement in your sales copy, (I sometimes get so excited when writing that my fingers can’t keep up with the speed of my thoughts – damn annoying having to keep correcting all my spelling mistakes! – I really must learn to type with more than one finger) other times you need to calm down a little and talk in a more relaxed manner.

Control your delivery

Learn to control your pitch and delivery just as a good public speaker does. As I mentioned before the best way to learn is to read and study good sales letters. Then copy them out longhand so that the secrets jump off the page, flow up your arm and into your brain. There is no substitute to doing this.

Warning and tip:

Don’t fall into the trap of writing from the perspective of a group of people or company especially if you are a one-man band:

“…We know that you will be totally satisfied with our product, but if for any reason it doesn’t meet your needs please contact us and we will issue a full refund… Stuart Elliott CEO, HowToWriteKickButtCopy.com”

Who’s writing the above note? Is it the website domainname? No it’s not, it’s me – so get rid of the ‘we’ and the ‘us’ change them to ‘I’ and ‘me’ – everybody knows you are the author so don’t be pretentious and pretend you are a company, it’s so false and puts your prospects off.

Remember you are writing a personal letter to a friend, you want to connect to your prospect and speak to him one on one – how can a domain name do that?

If you write from this perspective i.e. ‘I’ instead of ‘we’ you will build trust with your prospects and this is what you want to do isn’t it?

Be Careful Here Though…

Your copy should focus on your readers problems and the solutions you can can offer him/her, if you only write about ‘you’ then you will turn your prospect away. There are times when you need to write about ‘you’ but you should try to keep an approximately 7 – 1 ratio in favour of ‘you’, ‘yours’ to ‘we’, ‘I’

Photo

Another way of generating trust is to include a photo of yourself on your sales page, either at the top or at the bottom with your signature.

NB. Do make sure it is a good-looking one. Some of the photos I’ve seen on web pages look like the person has just escaped from San Quentin – Not the sort of person I’d like to bump into on a dark night – would that make me trust him? Very, very unlikely.

This is an extremely powerful way to start off your sales letter.

Look out for more tips tomorrow

To your success, always.

Stuart