You might be writing sales copy for an online product or service. Or ads for magazines. Or radio copywriting for a series of radio commercials in a radio advertising campaign. Regardless of the medium, here is the big secret to successful copywriting:

 

Offer people solutions they already want to problems they already have.

 

If you’ve done any market research, you already know what your prospect wants.

 

You can drive people to a survey site and find out what their most common and powerful desires are.

 

If you have a mailing list and want to work within the same market consistently, you can probably get the information even more quickly: Send them an email and ASK!

 

If you don’t have a list of subscribers, there’s a simpler system yet. It takes a bit more time and patience, but it works. Surf the web-based discussion boards and look for the questions and topics discussed most. Takes notes, lots of them..

 

Here’s a key point to making the most of your feedback, however you get it: Don’t just listen for the most common responses. Listen for the response that reflect the most human anguish and desperation!

 

The most common are your bread and butter benefits. They’ll sell your products for you in enough quantities to make them profitable.

 

The most desperate ones, the ones that talk about real pain, are the ones that will turn a profitable promotion into a monster. Those are the ones that can skyrocket your conversion rate. Those are the selling points that can be worth, literally, millions of dollars. They’re also the things you should focus on for your higher-priced back-end products and services.

 

I’ve been called all sorts of unpleasant names, including ghoul, predatory creep and leech for telling people to focus on the pain. That’s fine with me. The people slinging those names are just missing the point:

 

People WANT to get rid of pain, and they’ll pay for the relief. Who does the world a greater service: the guy who provides an evening’s entertainment or satisfies an idle curiosity, or the person who helps people feel good and achieve the things that are important to them?

 

Remember: You’re not creating the pain. You are eradicating the pain. The more pain you remove, the more money you’ll make. And the happier you will make your customers.

 

Your homework today is to sit down and think of all the things that create pain for your customers. And then consider exactly how your service or your product alleviates that pain.

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