Leveraging Bullets

Anyone who’s attempted a long form sales letter knows the difficulty of the challenge.  It can be excruciating.  In the last several posts, we’ve looked at a quick and dirty rewrite of a letter to get an idea of the difference between writing and copywriting.  We’ve talked about storyboarding as a strategy to organize information.  And the last post proposed the notion of having a ‘big idea’ to guide you through the process.  All due diligence.

As a side note, I got an excellent comment from Aaron about going digital with the notecards.  The question was whether there was software to facilitate this.  An alternative strategy would be to type the ideas, etc. into a Word document, for example, then print out and cut up and rearrange.  No retyping.  Or just cut and paste in the program.  But I do find it helpful, especially when starting out or facing a new market, to handle the information physically.

Ok, on to the subject.  Your bullets form the meat of your add.  A bullet may become a subhead or even your headline.

Here’s how to make it work for you:

Look at your notecards.  Turn every relevant thing, based on your big idea, into a bullet.  Start with features.  If you're selling a book, add a page reference.  Or the CD number.  List all you can think of.  Next, turn all features into benefits.  Benefits refers to what the feature actually does for the customers. Quick example: if you were selling a life empowerment service, a feature might be ‘focused, personal sessions with mentor trained in the law of attraction’.  Of course an obvious benefit would be ‘have more money than you know how to spend’.  You will need to edit that, but I prefer to wait until I have several times more bullets than I will need.  Think of it as a structured brainstorm.  Go for the emotional in the benefits.  In the final draft, you will have a chance to make sure your under-promise/over-deliver filter is working.  And legal.

If you have several hundred bullets, odds are good you will be able to write a very strong letter.  You may need far fewer for the task at hand, but when starting out, go big, go deep.  You don’t know what you’ll find that way; it’s the kind of work that will pay dividends.

To leverage all that work?  You will keep bullets you don’t use to develop new products.  You will be able to use many for subheads throughout the copy.  A couple will provide the germ for your headline.  Which brings us to the topic of the next post, the most important so far.

Keep up the work on the bullets, your stock in trade as copywriters.

To your Copywriting Mastery,

Sheridan

www.recession-proofmarketing.com

PS. I've gotten a few requests for a pic.  I'll get one up in the next several days.