I used to teach mar­ket­ing and sell­ing part-​​time at a local col­lege. One day, one of my stu­dents made me real­ize some­thing important.

Dur­ing my lec­ture, he offered an exam­ple to illus­trate his under­stand­ing of a con­cept I was teach­ing. While it was gen­eral in nature, I real­ized how beau­ti­fully his exam­ple applied to copy. Par­tic­u­larly web copy.

In fact, his point was so well made because he drove it home using the very idea he was illustrating.

But before I explain it to you, let me put the story in con­text so you can understand.

In my Per­sonal Sell­ing class, we were dis­cussing the nat­ural human incli­na­tion to illog­i­cally and uncon­sciously assume that there is a par­al­lel between a part and its whole — even when the two are totally unre­lated or irrel­e­vant to each other.

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I used to teach mar­ket­ing and sell­ing at a local col­lege here in Ottawa. And one of the things I used to help teach with — I also use them all the time when I want to learn and remem­ber new things, too — was mnemonics.

Mnemon­ics are tools or devices that aid retention.

Do you remem­ber the lit­tle ditty to remem­ber all the plan­ets’ names, taught mostly in kinder­garten? It goes, “My very eager mother just served us nine piz­zas,” where the first let­ter of each word rep­re­sents the name of each planet in our solar sys­tem (i.e., Mer­cury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Sat­urn, Uranus, Nep­tune, and Pluto).

Songs, rhymes, for­mu­las, pic­tures, allit­er­a­tion, etc are often used as mnemonic devices. But my favorite form of mnemonic are acronyms. You’ve prob­a­bly seen a few of them on this blog. That’s because I often use acronyms to teach about copywriting.

I do this to help you remem­ber, appre­ci­ate, and under­stand the process I go through when I write copy. Here they are, with their mean­ing (plus, each mnemonic is linked to its respec­tive arti­cle on this blog, cov­er­ing the for­mula in more detail):

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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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A sig­nif­i­cant rea­son behind most floun­der­ing web­sites is the lack of a response-​​driven mes­sage — an effec­tive one that gets peo­ple to do some­thing, even if it’s to keep reading.

A direct response mes­sage is not just about response. It’s com­prised of three ele­ments: it must be 1) cap­ti­vat­ing (it cap­tures the reader’s atten­tion), 2) riv­et­ing (it pulls her into read­ing fur­ther) and 3) engag­ing (it calls her to act).

(These are the “three steps” I talk about in my course.)

How can you incor­po­rate those three vital elements?

If I were to answer that ques­tion ade­quately it would likely take me an entire book the size of an ency­clo­pe­dia! But for now, let me give you a suc­cinct explanation…

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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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