Jim Edwards
“If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein (Location 45)
Here are the ten reasons. We’ll talk about how you put them into practice quickly in your copy. People will buy because they want to: Make money Save money Save time Avoid effort Escape mental or physical pain Get more comfort Achieve greater cleanliness or hygiene to attain better health Gain praise Feel more loved Increase their popularity or social status (Location 304)
Questions you can ask about your product. You might think this sounds like work. However, putting in a little brain sweat now can translate into millions of dollars down the road. It’s a fun exercise to do. Here are the questions: What are five ways my product or service will help them make money? How can I or my product or service help them save money over the next week, month, or year? How much time can I save them and what else could they do with that time? What is something they don’t have to do anymore once they get my product or service? (This is how you figure out how it helps them avoid effort.) What physical pain do I eliminate for them and what does that mean for their life and business? How does my product or service eliminate mental pain or worry for them? What are three ways I or my product can help them feel more comfortable? How does my product or service make it easier for them to achieve greater cleanliness or hygiene? How does my product or service help them feel more healthy or more alive? What are three ways my product or service is going to help them be the envy of their friends and feel more loved by their family? How will buying my product make them feel more popular and increase their social status? (Location 313)
Now, here’s how to put this on steroids. Force yourself to come up with ten answers to each of those questions. Your brain immediately exploded at this thought, didn’t it? (Location 327)
Once you go beyond those two, three, four easy answers to each question, you start digging in and thinking about who your target audience is, what they want and where they are in their life. That’s where you’re going to come up with copy bullets that once you write them, you’re going to think, “Oh my gosh. That’s awesome. That’s going to make a huge difference.” (Location 333)
You can tie these reasons to your offers, to your headlines, to your stories, to your bullets, to your content topics, to your calls to action, to everything. (Location 338)
Here are a few examples. (Location 341)
Nobody Cares About You In Your Sales Copy (Location 379)
“People aren’t interested in you. They’re interested in themselves.” Dale Carnegie (Location 380)
Here’s a technique I’ve learned to help you make your copy all about them. It’s a shortcut, a hack. Look for these words in your copy: “I, me, my, we, ours.” Why do you want to look for those words? Those words show where you’re talking about yourself. These are the words your prospects don’t care to hear because when you use them you’re usually not telling them things that will benefit them. (Location 391)
Just go back through your copy, look for any time you’ve used the words “I, me, my, we, ours,” and change the perspective. Change the verbiage. (Location 396)
Example: “I want to tell you something here.” Changed perspective: “Here’s something you need to know,” or, “There’s something you need to know in this situation.” (Location 397)
They want to be the hero of your sales message. Not you. They want to picture themselves getting the results, not you. They want the whole transaction to be about them, not about you. And the way you do this is to convert your copy from talking about yourself to talking about them. How will they be enriched? How will they benefit? How will they receive what they want? (Location 399)
Summary: Make your sales copy all about them (your prospect). Go back through your copy and look for the words I, me, my, we, ours. When you find those words, change the perspective so it’s all about them—not about you. Remember: prospects don’t care about you. They care about having their needs met, their problems solved, their fears calmed, and their desires satisfied. (Location 409)
The Most Valuable Skill You’ll Ever Learn “Every product has a unique personality and it is your job to find it.” Joe Sugarman (Location 413)
I invite you to check out Funnel Scripts at funnelscripts.com. We have a really cool 60-minute training you can watch where we teach you 3 great secrets about copy. (Location 451)
I want you to pay attention to the copy that either makes you spend money now or in the past. Think about it. If the copy in someone else’s funnel, video sales letter, or Facebook video makes you spend money, you need to dissect that. You need to learn which sales messages work on you and why. Here’s the reality. We are members of our own target market 999 times out of 1,000. Either you are a member of the target market you are going after, or you were a member of the target market you are trying to help. If the copy makes you spend money, it’s good copy. You need to pay close attention to it. (Location 480)
First Step: Become great at creating headlines. (Location 491)
Second Step: Become good at writing bullets. (Location 496)
Bullets that describe benefits or arouse curiosity create pressure in people to get them to take the action you desire. (Location 499)
Summary: Develop the copywriting mindset in all you do. Master your headlines first because they will make the biggest impact on your sales copy the fastest. Pay attention to sales copy that gets you to spend your own money. That’s good copy! Never stop learning. Never stop observing. Never stop testing your sales copy. (Location 507)
The number one copywriting skill everybody needs is to write great headlines. (Location 516)
The purpose of a headline is simple: to get people to stop what they’re doing and to start reading (or watching) whatever it is you put in front of them. (Location 522)
The secret of a great headline is one that connects emotionally with the person who represents your perfect prospect. A well-written headline targets people emotionally, usually around either a fear or a desire. You headline targets either something they’re scared of or something they really want . . . and it does so on an emotional level. (Location 526)
That’s the number one thing. Most people forget or neglect the headline. Even if it’s not a formal headline like you would have on a sales letter, you need to think about the titles of your videos, blog posts, etc., the same way you would think about a headline. They are that important. Same thing goes for the simplest Facebook post. Anything you’re doing, you’ve got to have that mechanism to grab people’s attention, stop them in their tracks, and make them pay attention. The headline is how you do it. (Location 562)
Know.” I took that and turned it into “The Ebook Marketing Secrets You’re Not Supposed To Know.” I used that headline, along with a $49 product, to create a six-figure business. (Location 571)
Here are some headline templates you can use immediately. The first group is “how to” headlines, so it’s how to get results. Remember, people are avoiding pain; they’re seeking pleasure. (Location 575)
Recognize that headline templates are all around you. Pay attention to them. Develop your swipe file. You’ll start getting ideas, especially for everything from articles and blog posts to email teasers, by paying attention to which headlines catch your eye. That’s a shortcut, by the way: develop your swipe file and pay attention to formulas that help you to create headlines fast. The most significant piece of advice I have for you when it comes to headlines, besides acknowledging the fact that you need to use them, is to consciously spend time on your headline and not treat it as an afterthought like many people do. (Location 642)
Summary: Spend a lot of time working on your headlines, especially for sales copy and ads. It’s the #1 factor that determines success or failure. Never post anything online without a headline or compelling first statement. If in doubt, use curiosity to pull people in (Example: The #1 Headline Mistake People Make That Bleeds Them Dry). Once you have a headline that works, TEST new headlines against that one to see if you can improve results. I’ve seen as much as a 500% improvement in sales just by changing a single headline. (Location 650)
“If your prospect is aware of your product and has realized that it can satisfy this desire, your headline starts with the product. If he is not aware of your product but only has the desire itself, your headline starts with the desire. If he is not yet aware of what he really seeks but is concerned with the general problem, your headline starts with the problem and crystallizes it into a specific need.” (Location 664)
In our online world, there are hot, warm, and cold traffic sources. Somebody who is on your email list or follows you on social media and knows your name is a hot source. Someone who is looking for a solution to a problem, but they don’t know about you yet is a warm source. Someone who doesn’t even realize there’s a solution out there but knows they have a problem is a cold source. Each group needs to receive a different message from you. Therefore, it’s not one-size-fits-all. (Location 668)
However, most people’s sales copy reads, “We help people pass their PT test!” What’s wrong with this sales copy? People who already know you don’t need that information. They need specifics about how you can help them now. (Location 691)
Shortcut: The fastest way to figure this out is to think through the conversations you could have with hot, warm, and cold people about your product or service. What would be the conversation with someone who knows who we are and what we do? What would the conversation be like with someone who is aware they have a problem, but they’re not aware of us? What would the conversation be like with people who know they have a problem, but they have no clue a solution even exists? (Location 733)
To put this into action on a website quickly, make three different copies of the webpage to create three different landing pages. Then, change the headline of each page to match the traffic temperature based on the traffic source (hot, warm, cold). Then look at the sales copy from your audience’s standpoint and adjust the existing text to fit. (Location 737)
For example, if you have an email list, focus all your marketing on this hot traffic source first! Do the same thing with your followers on Facebook and other social media. After that, target the warm market, and then finally write copy for the cold market. By the way, the cold market is usually the largest. If you can connect with them, that’s how you break into the world of big sales! (Location 742)
Summary: Acknowledge the different audiences who can use your product or service. Identify those audiences and commit to putting the right messages in front of them. Don’t be lazy and fall into the trap of one-size-fits-all with your sales messages. (Location 745)
You need to know what’s going on in Fred’s mind better than he does. You need to know how to enter the conversation going on inside his head. If you aren’t talking about what he wants to talk about, if you don’t show him what he wants to see, if you don’t tell him what he wants to hear, he will ignore everything you have to say. (Location 763)
I prefer using psychographics. Psychographics refers to what’s going on inside of a person’s head. What are they thinking? What’s motivating them? What are their attitudes or aspirations? I use psychographics first, and then I refine my niche with demographics. (Location 780)
You need to define who your target audience is and you need a specific way to do that. That’s exactly what I’m going to help you with right now. There are really three levels of definition. The first is the idea of a niche. A niche is very broad. An example is real estate. Real estate is too general to be able to run ads and write meaningful sales copy. Secondly, we need to move into what I like to call a sub-niche. This is a narrower part of the bigger niche. In our example, a sub-niche would be a real estate investor. Within this sub-niche there are different types of real estate investors. I personally have been in several different niches. I’ve been a flipper. I’ve been a buy and hold. I’ve been a hard-money lender. Finally, we need to drill down even more to find our Fred. Now we look at a micro-niche where we get laser-focused. (Location 789)
How are we going to define our avatar? I like to call my avatar Fred. Fred started as an acronym for Fears, Results, Expectations, and Desires (F.R.E.D.). (Location 811)
I figured out a better way to explain or to codify what an avatar is. (Location 813)
Tags: orange
Another thing you can do, and I have done this, is search Google for the name. See what pictures come up under Google images. Then, pick one and print it out. When you’re preparing your sales copy, you visualize talking to or writing to that specific person. It makes a huge difference in your ability to create quality copy. (Location 820)
People buy what they want. Pointblank. End of story. All that matters is people buy what they want, NOT what they need. You need to sell people what they want. You need to want to sell people what they want, not what they need. (Location 825)
Don’t talk about what people need. Talk about what people want. Include what they need in whatever you sell them or whatever service you offer them. But, when you write copy, you only talk, speak, show, and include what they want. (Location 831)
PQR2 is the secret code to your audience’s brain. What does PQR2 stand for? Problems Questions Roadblocks Results (Location 835)
The question for you, then, is how do you know what’s going on inside Fred’s head? Where and how do you find out the problems, the questions, the roadblocks and the results for your target avatar? How do you discover Fred’s PQR2? (Location 864)
Let me show you some headlines you can base on Fred’s PQR2. (Location 936)
Let’s do some email subject lines based on Fred’s PQR2s. (Location 943)
How about copy that uses curiosity-inducing bullets from Fred’s PQR2s? (Location 948)
Summary: Know your audience better than they know themselves. Pay as much or more attention to psychographics as you do demographics. Know Fred’s PQR2. If you want a shortcut (or hack) use FunnelScripts.com to help automatically put all of this research and knowledge about Fred into your sales copy faster than any other method. (Location 960)
Bullets: Build curiosity so you can create pressure inside people to get them to buy faster. Grab people’s attention so you can address their specific wants (and needs) to make more sales. Convey important information quickly so you can get your message across fast to maximize every advertising dollar you spend. The interesting thing is that when most people create bullets, they only include features. For example, if it’s a drill, they’ll say, “Hey, it’s 18-volts, and it’ll take up to an inch bit.” Like that means something to somebody! Features are what we would put under “technical specifications.” The problem is people don’t buy because of features. Features are how they compare things. People buy the benefits. (Location 973)