Sales Copywriting: Beating Writer’s Block

I’m sure you’ve been there. You’re sitting and staring at a blank screen or a blank sheet of paper and wondering how the heck you’re going to get started.

You have a major case of writer’s block.

I know I’ve been there. And for me, creating an outline is the best way to beat the blank page blues. It’s really intimidating and daunting when you know you have to write a pretty long sales copy for a product and you don’t really know where to start.

But again, this is not a writing exercise. It is a sales exercise. So let’s take a look at some steps you can take to develop your outline for your sales copy.

Step 1: Imagine you’re in a room with your potential customer and ask yourself, “How would I talk about this product? How would I start the conversation? What would I say next? How would I introduce the product, benefits, and offer?” “How would you do it if there was a living human being sitting there?”

That’s a very good hint of how the copy should flow.

I start by identifying all the benefits of the product that I can think of. I look at the product. I watch what he does. I watch how people’s lives change. I watch how it connects to things that are happening in the world right now or are in the news right now.

Because if it’s on the news, my prospect is thinking about it. And if you’re thinking about it, you have feelings about it. So if my product addresses something that he’s thinking about, that’s particularly important to me when writing the sales copy.

Step 2: Ask yourself, “How will my prospect feel about each of these benefits my product provides? How does he feel right now about not having those benefits in his life?”

Look, what’s happening here is you’re building an array. You could even do it in an Excel spreadsheet. In the left column, you have the benefit that the product offers. In the right column, you have the resident emotion that connects to that benefit.

Step 3: You have to decide if you are going to do a USP or an advertorial approach to your sales copy. A USP approach is one where you start by simply stating the benefit that the product offers.

So if the benefit is that you can have a greener lawn in 30 days, that’s your headline. Just go straight to the direct benefit. USP Ads are great when you are limited in terms of the length of your copy.

Advertorials have a much larger readership and generally produce a much larger response, but require a longer copy. An advertorial promotion starts with editorial copy on a topic your prospect is thinking about, worried about, excited about, whatever.

You build your promotion as if it were an editorial report or a white paper on that topic. And in my areas, investing and health, there are a million ways to do it because there is always news from one organization or another about the effectiveness of some supplement… or China just found out that its inflation rate will nearly double in 2007. …or gold prices have taken off…or the federal reserve didn’t raise interest rates yesterday.

The USP lead for financial newsletter promotion would probably start by promoting the most profitable investment advice in America, then present the newsletter’s history and say, “Buy this newsletter and you’ll double your money in 2007.”

But the advertorial approach says, “Look, here’s something you’re thinking about, and you’ve probably been wondering where you could get more information.” And then it’s about establishing our expertise and the value of what we do, giving you practical advice and help that you can use, even without buying the product, to capitalize on this opportunity or solve this problem.

Once you know if you’re going with a USP or an advertorial approach and once you’ve completed the outline, it’s time to start hanging some meat on the bones. That means research. You’ll identify the data you’ll need to make each point believable, perhaps a graph or image to drive your point home.

So your outline becomes a research paper. Just put in the facts or supporting material or whatever you need after each selling point so it’s there for you when you start writing the sales copy.

Now, what you have is a very rough eraser. You have a complete sales pitch starting at point A and ending at point B with most, if not all, of the data you’ll need to complete your copy in the appropriate places.

Now, you don’t have a blank page, do you? Watch? You made fun of that raging case of writer’s block you had.

So it’s simply a matter of going through and turning those notes into a conversation that you’re having with your prospect and doing it in the order that you’ve laid out in your outline.

Having trouble finding a title?

If writer’s block is keeping you from finding a punchy headline, bookstores are a great place to get some outside stimulation.

Just head right towards the magazine racks. The companies that publish these magazines have spent a fortune and many, many years, in some cases decades, trying to figure out what kinds of headlines on their magazine covers produce the most sales at the newsstand.

In knowing this for a fact. I’ve worked a lot with Rodale Press. They do men’s health Y Prevention Magazine. And one day they told me that every month they do 10-12 roof panel tests in Prevention.

So if you go to a bookstore in Connecticut, chances are you’ll see a different cover on Prevention than you might see at the end of the street. And you’re certainly likely to see a different cover if you go to Alabama.

They have been doing these tests for about 20 years. So when you stand in front of a magazine rack and look at the covers of all those magazines, you’re looking at millions of dollars worth of research going on.

And so, a trip to the bookstore can be very informative. Very often I go and grab a little pocket recorder and a notepad, have a latte, stand there and go through the magazine rack very carefully. Then after I’ve done that, I go to the book section.

Now, I’m told that book publishers do far less of this kind of research. But looking, especially nonfiction books, and studying their headlines and opening the books and looking at their chapter titles, both exercises have produced a lot of great headline ideas.

Or you can go to the tabloids – national investigator Y World. Those guys are masters at writing headlines. Back in ’91, they asked me to write a promo for Health and Healing, and I did exactly that. I went to a bookstore after writing the copy and noticed a couple of tabloids were using the word banned in their front page headlines.

So I went straight home and simply typed “Forbidden Cures: The Cures Doctors, Pharmaceutical Companies, and the US Medical Industry Don’t Want You to Know About.” We shipped 30 million of those and sold a ton of subscriptions to Health and Healing.

It’s great. Once you get into it, you’ll always be on the lookout for phrases and structures that you can adapt for virtually any product. Television is another great place to go, but bookstores are probably the best.

So next time you have a bit of writer’s block, take a road trip to the nearest bookstore, grab a latte, and enjoy those headlines.

I hope this helps!