How to Write Sales Copy in less than 30 Minutes

When I first learned about the information marketing business, I bought every product I could find on the subject, attended all the seminars I could afford and spent a LOT of money (FIVE figures!). Of course I could see the huge potential of it, and obviously there are many people making a good living from it. Those who jump from one “latest must-have product” to the next generally have a few reasons why they aren’t yet successful – the missing pieces of the jigsaw. They understand some aspects of information marketing but not others. For me there were 2 major stumbling blocks

• Where to find quality products with a resell rights license
• How to do the copywriting

I solved the first by creating my own web site (Bestmultimediaguides) and the second I figured out a system that I haven’t seen anyone else using……one day when I get around to it I’ll write a full ebook and record videos for this system as well as charging a lot of money for it, but until I get the time to do this….here it is for free

I attended a one day seminar here in the UK about 3 years ago – the cost was £5,000! A big part of that cost was the resale rights products included. At the time I had no idea where to buy them and this seemed to solve my problem. We were given a bit of very basic training on product creation, i.e. you have a 10 part video series on let’s say creating mini-sites. So your front end product is 1 of the videos with another 2 thrown in as bonuses; the back end product is the other 7.

Fair enough.

Except despite having run my own sales and marketing business and done face to face selling for nearly 25 years, I didn’t have a clue how to write sales copy. Sure I read all the books, I knew about the structure but the problem is when you are suddenly faced with an empty Microsoft Word document writing sales copy seems a very daunting task. So I did nothing with what I had learned on my £5,000 one day seminar – shame on me. I did actually ask the “guru” what to do about the copywriting – “Do it yourself, you’ll find it comes naturally”. Hmm, great advice for £5,000. Not.

It was only when I started selling ebooks on eBay that I finally figured out how to do copywriting – and quite by accident. Of course to sell on eBay you need to include some kind of sales copy in your listing or no-one’s going to buy from you! All of the 50 ebooks I initially listed came complete with sales copy so my plan was to simply “copy and paste” that into my listing.  But then I realised I wanted a “uniform” look for all my listings – i.e. same font size and colour for the header, same font throughout the main body of the sales letter, change US English spelling to UK English spelling, correct spelling and grammatical mistakes and so on. (On a side note you would be surprised just how many errors there are, some serious, in the sales copy supplied with well-known Resell Rights products.)

To do all of that, obviously I had to READ the sales copy, rather than simply copying and pasting. After about 6 or 7 of these listings I found myself almost subconsciously changing a few words here, a few words there, improving on the headline etc etc. Because I was reading the sales copy looking for mistakes I suddenly “got” how the sales copy is structured – I didn’t study it, I didn’t try to memorise anything, it just sank in at a subconscious level.

To test out this theory I took an ebook I hadn’t planned to list because it came without sales copy. Less than 30 minutes later there it was, I had written a passable sales letter complete with headline. OK this was for a $5 recipe ebook and if I was writing copy for a $5,000 seminar it would have needed something more but, we all have to start somewhere right?

So here is my 9 step system for writing basic sales copy in less than 30 minutes. First make a folder of at least 20 resale rights products that you already have that come with sales pages (if you don’t have any then contact me). It doesn’t matter what subject they are about. Your aim is to create a uniform look, with the same fonts, styles, sizes and colours used throughout. You will be making some small change to EVERY part of the sales letter.

1. Change the Header font – type, size and colour
2. Ditto Sub Header – if there isn’t one there then create one, doesn’t matter what it is, use one from another sales letter
3. Change the font for ALL of the body, if it is Times New Roman change it to to Tahoma or whatever. Do this paragraph by paragraph
4. Change the salutation from “Dear Frustrated Internet Marketer” to “Dear Friend” or whatever
5. If the bullet points are in itallics, change them to bold.
6. Highlight and/or underline a few key words
7. Change the font in the bonuses and the testimonials
8. Proof read the whole document – correct spelling and grammatical mistakes, I guarantee you’ll find them
9. Rinse and repeat 20 times in a row

When you’ve done that, take a Resell Rights products WITHOUT a sales page and see what you can write. As they say in the soap powder ads “Try it, the results will amaze you”. 🙂

But seriously, writing copy is one of the most valuable skills you can acquire. Take the time to try out this simple system – no it won’t turn you into Ted Nicholas but it WILL give you workable sales copy. More importantly it will give you the confidence to go ahead and write more copy, and practise makes perfect!