I once took a media com­mu­ni­ca­tions course in which I dis­cov­ered an inter­est­ing exam­ple of the way the mind works. I soon real­ized how this applies to copy­writ­ing as well.

As part of a given les­son, they showed a video­tape of a tele­vised news­cast dur­ing which a jour­nal­ist was about to give a live report on a for­est fire dev­as­tat­ing the mid-​​west.

The news anchor said: “We now take you to Sally Smith, report­ing live from above the scene of the fire…”

He then turned around to face the back­ground screen, which gave a live bird’s-eye view of the rag­ing fire, and asked: “Sally, tell us, how big is the fire?” In a voice par­tially drowned by the whizzing sound of heli­copter blades, Sally reported:

“John, it’s so big, it’s cov­er­ing well over 140 acres of land… that’s about 200 foot­ball fields back-​​to-​​back for you and me.”

What is this telling you? A lot more than you think…

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Not a copy­writer or just start­ing out? Can’t afford a high-​​priced copy­writer? Need copy real fast to start sell­ing or to pro­mote affil­i­ate prod­ucts right away?

Here’s some­thing that might inter­est you…

Com­puter pro­gram­mer Robert Plank shares his quick and easy for­mula for writ­ing com­pelling sales let­ters fast.

Sure, noth­ing beats know­ing how to write great copy. But…

This pain­less for­mula will have your prod­ucts launched and your web­sites up and run­ning in less than an hour! (If you hate writ­ing copy or don’t have time, or you sim­ply need copy really fast, you’re going to love this.)

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Through­out my research, I’m always sur­prised when I stum­ble onto web­sites that are pro­fes­sion­ally designed and seem to offer great prod­ucts and ser­vices, but lack or fail in cer­tain impor­tant elements.

Ele­ments that, with just a few short changes, can help mul­ti­ply the results almost instan­ta­neously.

Gen­er­ally, I have found that there are seven com­mon mis­takes. I call them the “Seven Deadly Sins.” Is your web­site com­mit­ting any one of these?

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A lot of peo­ple ask me how I write copy. I don’t mean the content-​​writing process (such as how I come up with head­lines, bul­lets, offers, etc), but how I tackle the actual task of com­pos­ing a new saleslet­ter from scratch.

Every­one is dif­fer­ent. My writ­ing process is one devel­oped over many years, and many peo­ple may adopt or dis­like the same tech­niques. But in the hope that know­ing my process may be help­ful to some writ­ers, I’d like to share it with you.

Of course, if I were to describe all of the steps, there would be way too much infor­ma­tion to squeeze into one arti­cle. But for now, I can offer you a basic look at my method­ol­ogy by giv­ing you a short list of the seven steps I take.

Here they are.

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I’m up for a challenge.

Just recently, my friend and SEO blog­ging expert Andy Beard posted an arti­cle about an inter­est­ing case study.

After sim­ply reword­ing the head­line of a blog post, John Wes­ley lit­er­ally mul­ti­plied his traf­fic to one of his blog posts by 10 times.

With the same post!

In other words, noth­ing was changed except for the head­line. The arti­cle was exactly the same, word for word. But by chang­ing the head­line slightly, the blog post drew a ton of traf­fic, par­tic­u­larly from social net­work­ing sites.

Well, now’s your chance to have me do the same thing for you — and learn a thing or two, too. Here’s how. Let me rewire one of your own head­lines for max­i­mum sell­ing power. But there’s a catch…

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This arti­cle was writ­ten by one of my junior copy­writ­ers, Joe Valente, as an intro­duc­tion to one of my arti­cles — which I will be pub­lish­ing on this blog later this week. But Joe’s arti­cle is so good, I decided to reprint it here. Take it away, Joe!

There’s an old say­ing: “Depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances, any tool that comes to hand becomes a hammer.”

Now, let’s start with a basic premise: When you write copy, you build knowl­edge, trust, and sales, and lan­guage is your ham­mer. Some might take that a step fur­ther and say that the point of your writ­ing is to “nail” your prospects, but I don’t think I want to go down that road today.

Instead, I want to talk a bit about your main tool of the trade, your prover­bial hammer…

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