I found some great tips from Jason Fladlien about quickly writing sales letters. I’m passing it along for your enjoyment and education. Here’s Part 1 “The Intro, The Offer and The Benefits”
Intro
Most people make writing sales letters way too complicated. And for good reason – that’s how they’re taught. You probably got your instruction from someone who lives, eats, sleeps and breathes copywriting. So naturally, they’re going to share with you every trick, tactic and method for enhancing your copywriting skills.
Most of those tricks work. But the problem is: if you have a thousand tricks you “know about”,which ones do you use for each sales letter?
If you have too many options, it’s too easy to not want to write the letter at all… or to take forever writing it… or the sales letter sucks because you tried to do too much with it. In most cases, a simple straight to the point sales letter – especially for something you’re selling for $47 or less – will be the best case. And it’s also brain dead easy to write these. Here’s how to do it.
Start With the Offer
The biggest reason most people write copy that doesn’t convert is their readers leave the page before they even know what the offer is. That sucks! So how do you remedy this? You open your sales letter right up with the fact you’re selling them something, and why you think it’s in their best interest to take a look at what you’re offering, and consider purchasing it.
Let’s do an example to illustrate this.
“If you’re looking for an easy way to grow upside down tomatoes, then what I have to offer you today just might do the trick. I’ve painstakingly put together a guide that shows all the great tips on how to grow upside down tomatoes, and for a limited time I’m making it available to you for only $17
I believe you’ll find this to be worth much more than the tiny $17 you’ll have to invest to get your hands on it. Why? Well here’s what you’ll discover when you sign up to get your report on how to grow upside down tomatoes…”
And then you simply describe every benefit they’ll be privy to if they do decide to purchase your product.
There’s nothing magical about that, is there? It is straight forward. You have something you think is a great deal. You let them know that. Then you show them why it is a great deal. No big story. No “problem, agitate, solve” methods. No fancy tricks to “hook the reader” in. Just a straight forward message that says – I have a great offer for you and here’s why you should purchase it.
Communicating Your Benefits
So you opened your copy up with the straight forward approach we talked about above. Now it’s time to describe your benefits. The best way to do this is with bullet points. And the easiest way to write bullet points is to collect good bullet points, then model your own bullet points after them.
What that means is spending an hour or so looking at sales letters that have really good bullet points, and then saving the best bullet points into a text file, so you can consult it any time you need ideas.
For example, in our bullet point swipe file we might see this:
•What niches will almost never work for recruiting joint venture partners – and what to do instead…
So for our example we could create a bullet point that says…
•What methods almost never work for growing big upside down tomatoes…and what to do instead to grow plump, delicious tomatoes almost every time…
Again not rocket science. Just 15 to 20 bullet points about what you have.
Or, you could write a few paragraphs that explain the things they’ll discover once they get their
hands on your product. That’s it.
Here are some great resources 7 Minute Articles , 4 Minute Sites and Instant Sales Letters and Stopwatch Copywriting E-Class