If you’re a small business owner, you must write sales copy that’ll get your target market emotionally charged, hooked, and motivated to respond to your sales offers.

The problem is many small business owners’ sales copy is lifeless, and falls flat. The sales copy doesn’t address results, potential objections, or contain emotional hooks. The result is your prospects keep moving on to other offers until they find one that compels them to make a purchase.

Writing strong and compelling copy, which has lots of personality and emotion, makes your readers feel they know you better, and helps to build trust. This in turn helps them to choose to buy your products and services.

Learning to write better sales letters takes some practice and study. However, you can write more powerful, emotional, and compelling copy immediately by applying these five quick and easy tips:

1. Be clear about results people get by working with you.

Your clients must clearly know the results they’ll achieve by working with you. The easiest way to do this is brainstorm and list thirty results. Listing thirty results really makes you think deeper about how you help, and you’ll surely come up with ways you wouldn’t have thought about, if you had stopped listing when you wrote down only five or ten results!

Another way to approach this exercise is to write down what you see, hear, or feel people want to get, as a result of using your products or services. Listen…what are your clients saying they want? This is a subtle, but powerful shift in how to complete this exercise.

Examples of what results your clients want may include:

- a step-by-step plan- what to do first, second, third, etc.
- fast results
- easy to do, not hard
- no technical jargon
- a “recipe” for success
- to make more money
- to increase sales
- to have you do most of the work

Once you write your list of thirty results, you can use this information in your:
- marketing brochures and flyers
- Web sales pages, as a bulleted list
- blog, FaceBook or Twitter posts
- articles or lists and weave them throughout

People want you to solve their problems. You can do this by focusing and addressing results in your sales copy.

2. Brainstorm a list of objections.

Everyone reading your sales copy will experience objections. It’s a good idea to determine what potential objections are, so you can address them in your sales copy before your prospect leaves your Web page, or doesn’t finish reading your offer.

You can do this by brainstorming a list of potential objections and writing them down. You can also ask someone you know, who is familiar with your products and services, what objections they might have if they were someone considering buying your product or services.

Then, when you then write your sales copy, you’ll address each objection before your potential buyer does. This builds trust and confidence in your offerings, because you’ve eased their fears about a potential purchase.

Examples of common objections are:

- costs too much money
- too hard to do
- it won’t work for me
- how is this program different from other programs out there
- who is she/he
- why this program, and not another program
- I’m not sure if purchasing online is safe

A good formula to use when writing and addressing objections is the “I give, you get, so that” formula.

“I give you 150 pages of templates and step-by-step instructions, so you can implement the program super-fast, and with ease.”

In this sentence, the objection of “too hard to do” is addressed.

You can also address objections in the form of questions, as they might be posed by a potential buyer, and then answer them in your sales copy, promotional emails, or mailings.

3. Be a champion for your prospects.

How do you really feel about what is at stake for your prospects? For example, if they don’t implement a successful marketing system, what is going to happen to them? How do you feel about this? When writing, be a champion for your prospects and let them know you are standing up for them. Here’s an example of writing championing copy:

“I know you want a system that gives you everything you need to know to create a marketing plan that’ll work. You’re tired of getting all this marketing information thrown at you. Even though you apply it as instructed, it still never seems to work for you. I am tired of you wasting your time, and not making the amount of money you deserve. I want you to be successful, and I’m going to help you finally implement a complete marketing system that’ll work.”

Be a champion for “something”. Be the hero, and get rid of the “bad guy” for your prospects in your sales copy.

4. Have a conversation with your client in your head.

When writing sales copy, it’s extremely helpful to picture a person, your potential client, in your head. What works well is if this person is a real person you know. Then, as you write your sales copy, have a conversation with this person. Doing so helps you to write in a more conversational, engaging tone. You also relate better to a client or potential buyer, because they feel you are talking ‘with them’, and not selling ‘at them’.

5. Create an emotional marketing hook.

To emotionally hook your audience, routinely weave two to five different values into your writing that have strong emotional impact. By doing this you’re injecting emotion into your sales copy and supporting your brand values.

Examples of values with strong emotional impact are elegance, beauty, ease, truth, trust, honesty, authenticity, freedom, wealth, love and integrity. Be sure to tie the values you use in your copy with:

1. Your brand personality
2. Importance to your potential client

There are many ‘value’ words you can use as emotional hooks. Tying them into your brand values will not only build a strong brand perception; it will help you write compelling copy that’ll increase your sales and income.

Copyright 2009, Bonita Richter