The Writers Roadmap to Making Money Online

“The secret of all effective advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.” —Leo Burnett

Last week, we talked about structuring a logical sales argument throughout the body copy of your promotion that will keep the prospect engaged in the copy, amplify his dominant buying emotion, and convince him that the product is the single best way to satisfy his desires and emotions.

This week, we’re going to take your logically-organized argument and start filling in the supporting and connecting copy. With the skeleton of your promotion in place, you’re mostly going to be elaborating on each sales point … explaining what it means … in some cases, showing how it benefits the prospect … proving it’s true … and then transitioning to the next point.

Again, like last week, let’s take a look at an example provided by copywriting legend, Clayton Makepeace. Let’s say you’re writing a promotion for a financial product and you want to make the point (i.e., “the Big Idea”) that “Wall Street’s ratings are deliberately designed to mislead the prospect.” Well, you would certainly need to explain and support that claim, wouldn’t you?

So, you perform your research and come up with the following facts:

• Wall Street’s credit ratings are bought and paid for.
• The main rating agencies like Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s, Duff & Phelps, Fitch, and A.M. Best charge the companies $30,000, $40,000, and even up to $50,000 for each yearly rating.
• Often, when a company doesn’t like its rating, it ceases publishing it.
• When stocks are dropping, brokers often just drop their coverage without explanation, causing an investor thousands of dollars before he even knows what’s happening.

Given these facts, here is what the body copy might Read more »