Answers To Questions, As Promised

Some peo­ple have asked me quite a few ques­tions in the com­ments sec­tion of my last arti­cle, “How to Write Carrot-​​Wielding Copy.” And some of these ques­tions were immensely valuable.

I could have answered them within the com­ments sec­tion. But because I believe my answers might be help­ful to a lot of peo­ple, and that the com­ments may be over­looked by many, instead I decided to do in a sep­a­rate post.

Here it is:

1) Sher­rill asked:

I couldn’t fin­ish the arti­cle… it was way too long. We sell com­fort food online… cof­fee… our mes­sage is short & straight to the point… here’s your cof­fee choices… pick some cof­fee to have fresh roasted & deliv­ered to your doorstep… pay for your cof­fee… get on with what you’re doing…

K.I.S.S.

It works for us.

I think you need to read the entire arti­cle, because I make the case about long copy ver­sus long-​​winded copy. Long copy that needs to say as much as is needed to say to make the sale and not one word more — or less.

By the way, Sher­ill, your cof­fee website’s front page con­tains 1,605 words. And that doesn’t take into account the 9 other pages, which seem to con­tain any­where from 200 to 1,000 more words each. And you say you use short copy?

Bot­tom line …

If it only takes 2 para­graphs to make the sale, use 2 para­graphs. If it takes 20 pages, use 20 pages. And the more com­modi­tized the prod­uct is, and the more tar­geted and aware the mar­ket is, the less copy you will need. Let me quote myself from my article:

How­ever, in a hand­ful of cases shorter copy is war­ranted. (There is such a thing as “over­selling” in copy.) But the only real way to know for sure is to test, test and test. Claude Hop­kins, author of “Sci­en­tific Adver­tis­ing,” wrote an impor­tant axiom:

“Almost any ques­tion can be answered cheaply, quickly and finally, by a test cam­paign. This is the only way to answer them, not by argu­ments around a table. Go to the court of last resort… The buy­ers of your product.”

2) Michael Hardishake:

I’ve been read­ing Joe Sug­ar­man lately and he talks a lot about match­ing your mar­ket too. One of the things I find so tough is learn­ing (get­ting to know) your tar­geted mar­ket. I mean, how many things can you be inti­mately involved with?!?!?

The best copy­writ­ers in the world who have writ­ten multi-​​million dol­lar saleslet­ters and ads are usu­ally those who have spent a great many hours inter­view­ing clients, spend­ing time learn­ing about them (maybe even to be with them), putting on their “sales detec­tive hats” (as copy­writer John Carl­ton would say) and ask­ing a lot of ques­tions, and spend­ing a lot of time learn­ing about:

• geo­graph­ics (loca­tion, coun­try, city, etc)
• demo­graph­ics (income, career, sex, age, etc)
• psy­cho­graph­ics (hob­bies, buyer his­tory, cul­ture, etc)
• techno­graph­ics (owns a PC, surfs the web, buys online, etc)

Brian Keith Voiles, in an inter­view I gave him regard­ing the power of empa­thy in copy, said it best:

“The first thing I do is try to live a ‘day in the life’ of my prospect. What keeps him up at night? What are his biggest con­cerns or his biggest joys? What’s the first thing he does in the morn­ing as he wakes up? Does he read the paper? What kind of paper? What sec­tions? Does he hurt? Is he frus­trated? About what? In all, I try to put myself in my prospect’s shoes as much as pos­si­ble and really try to see what he sees, thinks what he thinks, feels what he feels. The more I do, the more empa­thetic I am in my copy … and the more I sell.”

3) Michael Vaughn:

Michael, I sell PC’s (desk­top and lap­tops) online. My tar­get mar­ket is peo­ple with bad or no credit and with an income of $28,000 or less. I use direct mail (post­cards) as my main source of con­tact. Infor­ma­tion on a post­card is lim­ited because of size. I am going to try a test of one thou­sand fly­ers with more info and let you know how it goes. Thanks for all of your help.

Try an over­sized post­card. Usu­ally 5 x 11 or 8.5 x 11 (or some­thing like that). Or bet­ter yet, write a saleslet­ter and use plain, #10 envelopes.

4) James Marks:

You have a LOT of arti­cles and the con­tent is great. I’d ven­ture to call it dan­ger­ously revealing.

#1 — Does all this come from your head?

#2 — How often do you find your­self repeat­ing the sub­ject in an arti­cle? (mean­ing the “point” of the content)

#3 — Do you have an arti­cle “swipe file” to write these? I mean, you write a lot of stuff day-​​by-​​day… Is it your expe­ri­ence that helps you write so much in a day, some kind of raw tal­ent that not every­one has? or do you have some kind of article-​​generating tool that we don’t know about?

In other words: What’s your secret?

#1 — Yes and no. (I’ll come back to this later.)

#2 — Yes, I do repeat myself, unfor­tu­nately. It’s one of my flaws. I write like I speak. And some­times, in my attempt to drive an impor­tant point home, I repeat myself a few times too many. That’s where edit­ing is needed to tighten up the copy — some­thing I need to do more often but fail to do.

As John Carl­ton coined, I need to “pithisize.”

Now, aside from my flaw, there’s a pos­i­tive les­son, here. As the adage goes, “Rep­e­ti­tion is the par­ent of learn­ing.” Rep­e­ti­tion aids com­pre­hen­sion espe­cially of com­plex, crit­i­cal or impor­tant ideas. How­ever, the key here is not to repeat the same words over and over but to use dif­fer­ent exam­ples to illus­trate your point.

To that end, sub­sti­tute cer­tain words with syn­onyms and add new pieces of infor­ma­tion each time the idea is repeated. For instance, in order to drive the mes­sage “pri­vacy poli­cies pro­mote pur­chases” home, it can be repeated with the following:

• “Pri­vacy state­ments increase sales,”
• “Con­fi­den­tial­ity is a key to online success,”
• And “respect­ing vis­i­tors’ pri­vacy is profitable”

#3– To answer that ques­tion, and partly your ques­tion #1, I refer you to an arti­cle I wrote on how I write arti­cles.

About the Author

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