I first taught this tech­nique in 1998. While there have been tons of improve­ments since then, today I still see copy on so many web­sites, sales let­ters, or emails using a lan­guage that only the per­son who wrote them understands.

The bot­tom line is, most mar­keters and copy­writ­ers still seem to ignore the most impor­tant part of their sales copy…

… Their readers.

Abra­ham Maslow once com­mented, “If all you have is a ham­mer, every­thing looks like a nail.” Abra­ham Maslow may have been a psy­chol­o­gist, but he prob­a­bly knew more about copy­writ­ing and par­tic­u­larly sell­ing than what most peo­ple cared to admit.

Even now, most of the copy I cri­tique dis­obey this impor­tant rule the most. Their sales mes­sage doesn’t com­mu­ni­cate with their read­ers, par­tic­u­larly at their level. Now, I’m not talk­ing about a socioe­co­nomic or edu­ca­tional level. I’m talk­ing about the level at which they under­stand and, above all, make buy­ing decisions.

They fail to use what I call “upwords.” It’s an acronym that means…

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I recently merged my library with my blog. I had mul­ti­ple resources, books and tele­sem­i­nar record­ings on var­i­ous sites, but decided to con­sol­i­date them all and add them to my blog.

Rea­son? The fact that these resources are no longer as scat­tered makes them eas­ier to find and fol­low. If you want to book­mark these pages or even tell oth­ers about them, please do!

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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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A strat­egy in copy­writ­ing that’s immensely pow­er­ful is to use words and phrases that help to paint vivid pic­tures in the mind. When peo­ple can visu­al­ize the process of doing what you want them to do, includ­ing the enjoy­ment of the ben­e­fits of your offer, you also drive their actions.

I call them UPWORDS: “Uni­ver­sal Pic­ture Words and Relat­able, Descrip­tive Sen­tences.” In other words, words and phrases that describe ideas the mar­ket can uni­ver­sally appre­ci­ate and relate to.

That is, analo­gies, metaphors, action words, men­tal imagery, exam­ples, tes­ti­mo­ni­als, case stud­ies, com­par­isons, col­lo­qui­alisms, sto­ries, etc.

Why?

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