When you sell anything on the inter­net… whether you do it using e-​​mail mar­ke­ting, forum mar­ke­ting, blog pos­ting… if you sell e-​​books, phy­si­cal pro­ducts, e-​​classes, even a news­let­ter… the best way to sell anything is using direct res­ponse sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-​​class copyw­ri­ters like Michel For­tin. I con­si­der myself a pretty sloppy copyw­ri­ter, and althought I can whip up a head­line, quick story, bullet point list of bene­fits, test­mo­nials, fea­ture list, gua­ran­tee and a call-​​to-​​action… I will never be a great copyw­ri­ter.  Gary Hal­bert can’t hold my atten­tion for lon­ger than a few minu­tes, I’ve never read Scien­ti­fic Adver­ti­sing, so how do I scrape by wri­ting ave­rage sales copy?

The ans­wer is: prac­tice and resour­ces. I’ve writ­ten enough sales let­ters that I know what my audience wants and how I can pre­sent it to them to maxi­mize sales.  I rarely spend more than a cou­ple of hours wri­ting even 5 or 10 page sales let­ters, and some have con­ver­ted as high as 19 per­cent for me.

Even if you don’t have the skill or the prac­tice, you can still hit the follo­wing sites to pro­duce an ave­rage sales let­ter, enough for a copyw­ri­ter to rew­rite it or cri­ti­que it.

Site #1: Digg​.com
As far as I’m con­cer­ned, Digg is THE best place to find niche head­li­nes from popu­lar, spe­ci­fic and benefit-​​oriented, but funny news items.  Go to Digg​.com, type in your niche key­word and click Search.  Then refine the search to search by the title only (so your key­word is in the title), show all sto­ries (not just front page sto­ries), and sort by most diggs (so the news items “the peo­ple” like float right to the top).  Using the Digg tech­ni­que, I hel­ped a copyw­ri­ter come up with this head­line: “Man Wins Divorce Without a Law­yer In Sight!”  Makes you want to find out more, right?

Site #2: Hard​To​Fin​dAds​.com
Michael Senoff’s Hard to Find Ads is like an ins­tant swipe file.  He shows you ran­dom ads, most of them deca­des old, writ­ten by the most famous and best con­ver­ting copyw­ri­ters that ever lived.  You can take cle­ver head­li­nes, ideas and bullet points from these ads and rew­rite them as your own.

For exam­ple, the first ad I found reads like this: “Top Medi­cal Doc­tor Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Lose Up to 20 Pounds in Two Weeks the Easy Way.”  If you were wri­ting copy for gro­wing orga­nic toma­toes, you might say: “Top Orga­nic Gar­de­ner Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Grow 15 Pounds of Toma­toes in 8 Weeks the Easy Way.”  Obviously you’d change the num­bers to wha­te­ver you can prove, but that head­line is bet­ter than anything I could come up with from scratch.

Site #3: Ama​zon​.com
Amazon.com isn't just for buying books. You can use Ama­zon to find out seve­ral things: what KINDS of books in your niche are hot sellers right now.  You can also choose the top selling books and most of the time take a peek at the table of con­tents.  Bingo, ins­tant list of bullet points you can hit on with the sales let­ter.  Ama­zon also gives you a list of key­words rela­ted to that book, to give you even more ideas for bonus reports, videos, and emo­tio­nal hot but­tons.  If all that wasn’t enough, you can read through reviews of the book and make a note of the ter­mi­no­logy peo­ple in that niche tend to use.

Site #4: Archive​.org
Look at one of your com­pe­ti­tors’ sites in your niche.  Then look their site up on the Internet Wayback Machine to see how their page has chan­ged over time.  The other day I was watching the TV show “Mad Men” about adver­ti­sers in the 1960’s.  In one epi­sode, the men in the ad agency are tal­king about a maga­zine ad by Volks­wa­gen.  The ad was ugly, and the car was ugly, and the guys were baf­fled because Volks­wa­gen kept pla­cing the same ad… so it must be pulling in money!

This is the inter­net equi­va­lent of that.  If you know a site pulls in lots of sales, and it was writ­ten by a copyw­ri­ter who tests the head­line, phra­sing, bullet points, call-​​to-​​action, offer, and so on… you can open up the web page as it looks now, and the web page as it loo­ked 6 months or a year ago, and see what chan­ges have been made.  If a copyw­ri­ter kept twea­king the head­line over time but kept switching back to one in par­ti­cu­lar, you know it’s a money-​​maker and you can look at what makes it such a great headline.

Site #5: Goo­gle Ans­wers, Goo­gle Alerts, and (Your Niche) Forums
These sites “should” be a no-​​brainer for any copyw­ri­ter, but so few peo­ple pay atten­tion to them and as a result write very “flat” copy.  When you’re selling something, you’re selling a solu­tion, which means you’ve fixing a pro­blem.  Peo­ple are in pain whether that pain means not having enough money, gro­wing tiny toma­toes or not being able to play the piano.  Look at what ques­tions peo­ple are asking in question-​​and-​​answer sites like Google Answers and in the forums in your niche by searching for your niche key­word plus the word “forum.”

Site #6: Goo­gle Insights, Goo­gle AdWords, Yahoo! Search Mar­ke­ting, Quantcast

Can you tell I’m a fan of Goo­gle?  The fact is, simply searching for your key­word in a search engine and seeing what ads appear on the right side is the per­fect way to see what head­li­nes pull the best.  That’s the most logi­cal place to go and works won­ders com­pa­red to pulling out a head­line or a hook from thin air.

With those six free resour­ces at your dis­po­sal, you have finally run out of excu­ses.  You can write half­way decent copy for your next promo e-​​mail, blog post, or sales let­ter just by seeing what great copy is out there, and “cop­ying” it!

When you use screen cap­ture soft­ware for rapid video creation and record Cam­ta­sia videos with Power­Points or Mind­Maps, the pre­sen­ta­tion pro­cess beco­mes super simple.

A video pre­sen­ta­tion redu­ces the rea­ding time of a blog post from 5 to 10 minu­tes, to three minu­tes or less. That means you get a wider audience, more com­ments and more exposure.

To get more mileage out of an article, con­vert into a video using this very easy method that requi­res less than one minute of pre­pa­ra­tion per article. It relies on PowerPoint’s abi­lity to import text files.

In just a few seconds, you can take your article, apply a cou­ple of sim­ple search-​​and-​​replace actions, import the indi­vi­dual sen­ten­ces as indi­vi­dual sli­des, record, and dic­tate. Here’s the exact procedure:

Step 1: Copy and paste your article (INCLUDING the title on the first line) into a text edi­tor like EditPlus that allows for a multi-​​line search and replace.

Also copy your article title as the LAST line of the article so peo­ple will remem­ber what you just told them.

Step 2: Search and replace the end of each sen­tence to force a new line so that every sen­tence appears on its own line. Replace “.” (a period) with a period, and a newline.

In Edit­Plus, go to Search -> Replace, then click the “More” but­ton to show the multi-​​line search and replace boxes. In the “search” box, type that period. In the “replace” box at the bot­tom, you can simply type a period, hit Enter, and it will add the new­line for you.

Now you should have an article where every sen­tence is on its own line.

Step 3: Save this list of sen­ten­ces as a text file. Then open Power­Point and choose File -> Open. You won’t see the file you need at first.

Go to the drop­down that says “All Power­Point Pre­sen­ta­tions” and change it to “All Out­li­nes.” Browse to the fol­der con­tai­ning the text file you saved, and dou­ble click it. This will set each sen­tence as one slide.

Step 4: Select all sli­des by hit­ting Ctrl+A, right click and change the slide layout to “Title Slide.”

Want to change the layout of the sli­des easily? Go to View -> Slide Mas­ter to change the appea­rance of all the sli­des in that pre­sen­ta­tion. Then click “Close Mas­ter View” to switch back to the presentation.

If you want to knock out a bunch of article videos at a time, simply place seven of your artic­les (with each article title at the begin­ning and end) in one big text file.

Start the Power­Point pre­sen­ta­tion, record your pre­sen­ta­tion in Cam­ta­sia. Stop, save, and start a new pre­sen­ta­tion once you’ve reached the end of the article.

Don’t have the article writ­ten? That’s no pro­blem, just use my mindmap technique to create the pre­sen­ta­tion. But if you only want to con­vert a text article into a Cam­ta­sia video, this is the fas­test way to do it.

Wel­come to Mar­ke­ters Board. Recently, a mem­ber of one of our coaching groups asked this very inte­res­ting question:

Q: “Have you seen Google’s new Search Wiki? Are you aware of this? Using this? Pro­mo­ting this?”

A: Google’s new Search Wiki allows you to con­tri­bute your input and review based on search engine results. But this is something that’s rela­ti­vely new. We do not pur­port to be SEO spe­cia­lists, but with a little com­mon sense this is huge!

So we deci­ded that the best way to ans­wer this ques­tion is to record a brief video and show you how it works — and how you can use it to your advantage.

What do you think? Do you think it’s going to even­tually affect search engine results? Goo­gle has neither con­fir­med nor denied it, but why wait? This could become an area that may poten­tially affect our search engine rankings.