My most challenging part of copywriting to sell something online has always been the task of writing benefit statements. And, second to the headline, the benefits are what sell people on your product, service, idea or even political opinion.
In comparison, the other parts of copywriting that people might find challenging, such as stories, headlines, and great price offers were easy. The benefits list always drove me crazy; until I discovered the secret to creating one benefit or more per minute.
You might remember from any basic sales course that people do not care about features nearly as much as they want to know the benefits. Knowing the truth to that, I started to take a closer look at what benefits really are. I discovered they are really just action items in disguise, agreed? You “save” money or “stop” wasting time, for example. So, why not start out all benefit statements with action verbs? Here’s the process:
1. Get a long list of alphabetized action verbs.
2. Display the alphabetized list of action verbs on your desk or, even better, view them on your computer screen so that you can see the list in its entirety
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3. Begin with the first verb in your list that begins with the letter A and read the verb out loud and make a sentence out of it that describes one benefit of your product.
For example, the first word in my list of verbs is “Accelerate”.
Then, my descriptive sentence might be that my service helps “accelerate” the time it takes to learn to read Spanish.
4. Keep writing benefits as long as you are able and don’t quit! You will be able to pare down your list to only those that give the best punch later. Now is not the time either to worry if you are writing duplicative statements down. Just let your brain consider your product and freely create the benefits as they come to you.
5. Prioritize your list with the most important benefit statements first and the least important last.
I’ve used this process not only for creating benefits lists, but also for writing articles, such as “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.
Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. Usually, 20 benefits is more than enough to create great sales copy.
Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years. He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.
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