...eed tomake it 100% clear, to yourself, what you are trying toachieve. The most effective copy points and gently guides thereader towards one specific action. Anything that does notcontribute to this action must then hinder it, and is removed.The number one step then, is to understand your MDA or MostDesired Action, and stick to it. If it doesn't further your MDA,drop it.EXPLODE- You must grab attention. This is particularlyimportant for your headline, but must be maintained t...

...hroughoutyour copy, or its click and goodbye. It has been proven time andtime again that the right headline with the same sales letterwill produce fluctuations of up to 1000%. Test, test and testagain. The right headline will go a long way for you. In this case, as I am writing for a blog, my headline has to bea mix of generic and smack in the face. You shouldn't use a pure«smack you in the face» headline for this purpose because youwant your article to be listed relevantly and you want searchengine customers to come across it in their research, soplugging keywords is important.When you are writing a sales letter or ad that people will haveno choice but to come across, you can be purely imaginative andpay less attention to your keywords, just make sure you getrelevant fast.What are the guidelines to writing a great headline? Be as briefas you can, while still getting your point across. Use colorfulactive verbs and tenses, and look for «selling» words that fitwell with your subject. For instance, when I wrote the title forthis article, I could have been lazy, or do what the uninformeddo and write a generic title. A generic title would have beensomething along the lines of «Writing Great Sales Copy». Since Iknow better, I changed the verb tense to present and replaced«writing» with «how to write». I did this also because I knowthat «how to» is a selling word, meaning that for some reason,it pushes the right buttons. Finally, I changed «great», a nicebut generic word, to «killer», a visual, emotionally chargedadjective.Let's get some technical aspects out of the way fast: fontmatters, font size matters, color matters, width of textmatters, readability matters, length matters, as well as correctspelling, short sentences, long copy and much more. It would betoo much to cover all of those fields in a short article likethis one, so I will skip ahead to one of the most importantaspects: personality.You see, I'd much rather give it to you straight up with an «ifyou don't like it, too bad for you attitude». Why? Becausethat's how I am. Or because it works. Personality isinjected into my texts as much as possible. I am not a page inthe Encyclopedia Britannica, so I don't need to use perfectgrammar (as long as people can tell that it's personality, notpoor language skills). If it push comes to shove, I'd ratheroffend you slightly than leave you indifferent.Humans are emotional animals. We like to think that we're alllogical and higher brain function, but the truth is much morebase. We are impulsive, irrational beings that act on emotionsmost of the time. The same will hold true for acting upon yourMDA. If your copy is generic and bland and expresses as muchpersonality as an Al Gore puppet, your «readers» will run awayby the second sentence as fast as their little cyber legs cancarry them.One of the reasons they are reading is for stimulation. Give itto them, and more emotionally than not. Get your prospects tolove you or hate you; don't give them the middle ground of«yawn, yeah I guess it was ok».One of the best ways to channel imagination and stimulate yourreaders while selling them is negatives. Let's go back to thetitle of this article. If it was going to be a sales letter orad for a copywriting product rather than a blog article, I wouldhave chosen something along the lines of «Bored to Tears - howyour sales copy just isn't cutting it» or maybe « 99% ofcopywriting products are Scams, protect yourself! » or «ThisTitle Sucks and yours do too» and finally, «Stop Writing like aSleeping Pill». I would likely assort these titles to a subtitlethat sells the main benefit of my product, something along thelines of «Copy Writing Secrets to Explode your Online Sales» or«What the Marketing gurus don't want you to know». Formore examples, check out the sample Adwords I wrote forthefreejerk.com, here (they are towards the bottom, in thearticle). They're particularly harsh though, and not adapted toall businesses, tread with care.Dare to be different. Tell it like it is. Stick to your guns.Shoot to score. Didn't like my article? Thought my sample adsused misleading or unethical tactics? Oh well, please accept mymost heartfelt «I couldn't care less! ». B'bye now.