In my years as a super affiliate I have seen some of the best and worst that copywriting has to offer and almost everything in between. Clickbank is awash with sales letters and copy for vendor products and it’s not always obvious which ones will convert to sales at first glance.

Even the ugliest of sites will convert browsers into paying customers if the copy is well written and does its job as it should – and if the copywriter understands how to sell to the niche in question. In this post I am going to highlight to you the copywriting elements that are vital to the success of any sales pages (no matter how good or bad the design and graphics). The end result should be that your customers feel they simply have to buy the product on offer without any delay.

The Key Element of Converting Browsers into Buyers

One of the most important elements to concentrate when promoting your own or someone else’s product is your sales copy. The more your copy converts the more products you will sell and the more you will attract affiliates to sell your product for you. It’s all a virtuous cycle – and arguably your sales copy is the most important factor in the entire mix, perhaps even more important than the product or affiliates who you recruit. If you can write a great sales letter, one that converts into sales then you will have other marketers ‘eating out of your hand’ in a bid to promote your ClickBank products. Get it wrong and you won’t get any traction on the marketplace, and your product will stagnate and die.

The starting point of writing killer sales copy is understanding your market. By that I don’t mean reading a few articles and assuming you know the market. You really have to do a bit of leg-work to understand who you are talking to, establish what they want, research what’s already out there and what isn’t. Find a gap in the market and fill it. Visit forums and find out what people are talking about, what their frustrations are and how likely are they to spend money to get a solution to their problem or need. Read your competitor’s sales letters, and sign up to their e-mail newsletter. And listen to the problems they talk about that the average customer has (eg. “aren’t you sick of diet pills that don’t work”), along with which benefits they push hardest (“lose weight without any hunger pangs” for example). This will highlight important clues as to what is on the mind of your target audience.

So do your research and work out what is going through their heads. In other words you really need to resonate with your potential buyer. If you can do this you can establish empathy with your potential buyer. And if you do this, you are on your way to a winning formula for your sales copy..

Getting Started

Now before you exclaim ‘but I can’t write copy’ know that it is actually easier than you think. In fact, the transition from never having written a word of copy before to being a ‘monster’ copywriter is perfectly achievable in literallly days – but only if you follow and implement some simple but extremely powerful copywriting rules.

The Short-Cut To Copywriting Success

One of the fastest ways to get yourself from 0 to 60 writing great sales copy is to leverage the years of experience of some of the great copywriters who have already tried, tested and proven the elements of copywriting. In short we are going to cheat a little by building up a big pile of other marketers’ copy and swipe it (aka “the cheat sheet”).

Note: before I proceed, I want to be very clear on something. I am not suggesting you break copyright rules by copying other peoples work – you simply cannot do that – it would be copyright infringement. But the good news is, we don’t need to. Instead we can examine and work out exactly what the successful elements, phrases, hooks and buzzwords that are being used and spin them to work into our own copywriting. In other words, we are going to extract the most important elements and rejig them into our own sales letters. This is not only lawful – but its common practice in successful copywriting circles. The trick is to go to other niches, and take elements from the most successful sales letters there for your own inspiration.

For example let’s say you want to write copy for a bodybuilding product. You might come across a Forex sales letter with a headline that reads:

“Just In: Renegade, Grass-Roots Trades Exposes Forex Loophole and Siphons Off $3,000 In 30 Days”…

You have a lot of words you can work with and use here i.e. renegade, grass-roots, exposes, loophole, siphons etc. So if your niche was bodybuilding you could work those words into your own headline:

“ Renegade Bodybuilder exposes muscle-building loophole and packs on 8 lbs of muscle in 3 weeks.”

The idea is to take the words and adapt and fit them to your own copy whilst keeping the same elements of newness (renegade), something uncovered (loophole, exposed) and importantly how quickly something can be achieved ( 6 days / 3 weeks).

This method is not only used for your headline but also for your sub headers and the body copy of your sales letter.

Benefits Are Vital

Why? Fact: Because people will buy something based on its benefits. A benefit is simply what the customer gets out of buying a product – in short, it’s the reason(s) that people decide to buy a certain product. For example, if you have a product on making money, people will buy because of the perceived benefits that making money will bring i.e. being able to pay off debts, improve their lifestyle and by doing so appearing more attractive to people around them. If it’s a more advanced guide, benefits might be very specific and purist – for example, if its a blogging guide, one benefit might be, “generate a flood of backlinks to your blog”.

Also, there’s a deeper pyschological aspect here. Whilst people think they just want to make more money, in truth the benefits they will gain from doing so are much deeper than it at first appears. So it’s not enough to just sell the ‘idea’ of making money – this is far too general and unfocussed. Rather you should sell the benefits that will have a knock-on effect as a result of making money. So the more you understand the deep reasons behind why people want something the more likely you are going to be able to tap into a person’s psyche when writing sales copy.

Check Out What’s Working

The best place to start when researching what is and isn’t working in a given niche is to check out the top performing products in that niche. This is easily achieved by heading over to the Clickbank Marketplace and doing a keyword search in a given niche. Alternatively, you can check out affiliate niches or the top ClickBank products on Affiliate X. For example, let’s look at dating. We know that internet dating is a huge market that continues to grow massively but what about digging deeper into the dating niche.

Doing a search in Clickbank on any aspect of dating will bring up the top performing products easily identified by their high gravity score. Take a look at the headlines of the top performers. The headline is the most important part of the sales copy. If you don’t grab the reader’s attention at this point you will have lost them forever. A headline should be compelling, intriguing and raise curiosity in order for the reader to want to read on. In the same way the sub header should pull the reader in with a taste of what’s to come. Generally a good formula for a headline is: “How [someone like the customer] [got the kind of benefit the customer wants] in [x days], eg. “how a 27 year old renegade forex trader made $1,000 with a breakthrough new robot in 10 days” or “how a 21 year old scrawny kid stacked on 13 lbs of chest muscle in 31 days”.

Remember again that “empathy” is a powerful copywriting tool. If you can identify with the reader and show that you understand their problem or need because you have been in ‘their shoes’ yourself helps to build trust. Explain your situation and how you worked to discover a solution and now you want to share it so that others don’t have to go through the same hurdles and problems that you did. Empathy in any situation is beneficial in copywriting it’s extremely powerful. For this very reason ‘your story’ i.e. how you arrived at this point should make up a major part of your copy.

It’s important not to underestimate the value of empathy within your copy – get it right and your copy will result in insane conversions.

Don’t Ignore The Competition

You may be tempted when writing copy to ignore the competition and hope that potential buyers will see your product for what it is and just buy it. Don’t make this mistake. Instead explain in your copy why your product is better because it covers an angle that isn’t covered in competing products. Try to think of a Unique Selling Point that makes your product different from the others out there. Maybe it’s price, easier to understand, quicker to implement or has better proof. Whatever the unique selling point is elaborate on it and make it standout. Just put yourself in a readers shoes – if you wanted to buy a product on dating women or learning to play the guitar – would you just check out one product? No, of course not, you would check out what’s available from a selection and then choose the best one.

Which brings us nicely onto…

The Power of Proof

The number one reason why people don’t buy a product is because they don’t believe its claims. How many times have you thought to yourself – ‘that sounds too easy’ or ‘that sounds too good to be true’. This is why it is so important to demonstrate empathy within your copy.

However, the second element that cannot be overlooked is proof that your products does what it says it does. If you can provide screenshots of profits you’ve attained using the products or a live working example or even testimonials from existing customers then you are on to a winner. Once you have the proof it will be easier for potential customers to identify themselves with the benefits your product will deliver and they will want it for themselves.

To Conclude

It’s important to understand that in order to write great copy that will convert into sales you DO NOT need to be an experienced copywriter. It’s as simple as breaking down the sales copy of highly converting web pages out there, and carefully working out why they are selling – and that’s just something that comes with a little digging and a bit of experiencey. It doesn’t matter what niche the sales copy is in. You can swipe the buzz words and curiosity elements within the headlines, sub headers and sales letter body and rework those to your suit your own niche. Well thought out copy and strong proof on your sales will almost guarantee your sales pitch will convert into sales. Once you have mastered these essential elements you will be able to create copy that converts in any niche you choose.

This article was written by Affiliate X and originally posted on ClickBank.com