In this article I’m about to give you the 7 essentials of writing good marketing copy. Every page where you want to sell something or even offer a free gift will need these elements to encourage people to take advantage of your offer.

If you miss any one of these 7 essentials out from your copy you will seriously reduce the effectiveness of your copy.

1.    Title – this has to make a promise about what you’ll deliver and it must speak to your audience – so an audience we were speaking to on one of our web pages wanted more money and they wanted to make a difference in the world and they wanted to start doing that right now… and this is something we can deliver, so our title reflected all of those things.

2.    Sub-title – the subtitle builds on the title, it build the picture and gives just a little more of the critical information that might attract someone to read on.

3.    Rapport/Credibility piece –  I know the people I wanted to attract to a  programme I was launching wanted to attract clients rather than “win” clients. I know they are interested in “flow” rather than being “motivated” and I know they wanted me to show them the “how-to”. So I used their language to build instant rapport and credibility.

4.    We then need to get the benefits across quickly and we do this through a bullet point listed benefits. When your benefits create curiosity, they tend to work better, than when you just state something as a fact.

5.    Social proof – testimonials, show other people what they got from your offer. Use names where you can. Use pictures if you can get them. Use video whenever you can and the more specific you can be, the better.

6.    A call to action – this is about telling them what to do next. If you leave this out, it will seriously hurt your results.

7.    Contact details (either get theirs or give yours or both)

I want to mention that what I have covered here are just 7 essentials… These are just the basics.

Good wishes
Neil

p.s A great resource for something in more depth is my Insiders Secrets programme. Read about it here: http://www.communitysoulbusiness.com/insiderssecrets/

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What other essentials do you think are needed for great marketing copy?  Would love your thoughts on this blog. Leave a comment below.

All top copywriters agree on this point.

They probably wouldn’t even go to far into a writing project without spending time understanding this.

And if you miss this step in your marketing copy, you’ll be missing out on one of the most important ingredients in your copy, be that on your website, or in your brochures.

What I’m talking about here is understanding what stands between a client walking away from you without buying or buying.

We are talking about their objections.

In an event we once ran on networking skills, I knew we needed to overcome objections to have people attend. If we simply told them this was an event to  improve networking skills a number of people would have thumbed their noses at it and missed out on the content that would have helped even the most seasoned networker.

But that’s not all…

There are a group of people who are networking phobics, how do you include them and make it safe?

So I needed to engage both groups of people in the copy and then honestly and with integrity make them a promise we would deliver on.

As you think about your marketing copy, you might start to now see what objections people have when thinking about buying from you. Is it location? A fear? The price? Something else?

An objection one of my mentoring clients spoke about was that they felt scared because we made everything so easy and they felt they would get all the things they needed and wanted and that scared them.

In other words, if they decided to take out our service, they knew with 100% conviction that nothing would stand between them and where they wanted to get to.

By knowing what may hold a client back from taking on your life changing service, you can help them.

Best wishes
Neil

Do you agree with this? Would like to hear what you have to say, so feel free to leave a comment.

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Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

A friend of mine called Pete has made a fortune on-line.

While most people reading this article will probably be working from inspiration and passion, Pete is the opposite. He works from logic. The result is he gives people what they are looking for, rather than offering what he is passionate about offering. Following this method has made him a fortune.

I’m not saying Pete isn’t into what he does. He is. He likes following trends and patterns and plonking his products right where demand flows.

But who of you can combine your passion with logic? That then becomes so much more powerful… so this is what we’re going to look at.

Pete will tell you a passion won’t make you money unless there’s a market. He’ll tell you there is no point creating a product unless people are looking for it. And he’ll also tell you all he does is find where the money is flowing and he then puts his offer in front of that flow.

Put in economic speak, he follows demand, checks out the supply, and if competition is low, in he jumps.

Sir Richard Branson follows a similar philosophy with Virgin when looking at new markets to enter. Where there is demand and where the suppliers have been abusing the customers and giving poor service, Virgin will step in and offer something innovative and revolutionary to that industry.

Clearly whereever there is a need and where the market recognises that need, demand for a service or product will be high. There may even be fierce competition, but if the competition is poor, unorganised, unprofessional, lacking a process or a system, then you could quite possibly be the one to turn that industry on its head.

Best wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

How will you know when you’ve learned what your market really, really wants?

You’ll know, because that’s when people buy more easily, because they just see what you offer them is a good fit.

It will be such a revelation to learn how easy selling your service or products can be when they’re what your market wants.

Once that happens, you’ll begin to hear from your clients how grateful they are for your products. Everything about how you do business will be transformed, because you’ve taken the time to learn what your market wants. You’ve made the effort to step into their shoes and understand what makes them tick. And that effort pays off in products that really meet the needs of your market.

So, if you’re still struggling to sell your products, or it feels as though you’re pushing people into buying what they don’t want, it’s time to take a time-out and really understand what it takes to attract or pull a client towards you, rather than push.

You are attracting (pulling ) clients towards you when you:
1. Understand what keeps them awake at night
2. Know what is most important to them
3. Know what end result they expect from working with you

To be clear, a push marketing strategy involves selling and promotional activity to create demand for a product, while a pull marketing strategy might involve advertising or web promotion to build demand and will typically have customers coming to you and asking all the right questions, as opposed to you creating a sales presentation opportunity where you show them what they don’t know they might need.

I come across more people today wanting to build pull marketing strategies and not getting the income they really want and a big reason why they have this problem is because they really don’t know their customers.

So if you prefer to attract customers to you, you really have to get to know who you serve.

Best Wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

When you know who your market is, you know what they need. When you know what they need, you know how to package it in a way they want that makes it easy for your client to buy from you.

This really is the holy grail of marketing and it’s what leads to more clients… more referrals… and more hits on your web pages…

Before creating any new product or service or before ramping up your marketing, take a step back and ask yourself, “Do I REALLY know who my market is?

Next you want to be asking, “What does my market really, really want?” Being able to answer that question is the key to growing your business. By focusing on what people want, rather than on what you want to sell them, you’ll begin to see the kind of results you really want.

If you think you’re wasting time by marketing something people don’t really want, here is something to ponder:
People buy when they feel understood. They buy what they want, not what you think they need, they like to feel good about their purchase.

Let’s break that down a little more…

No matter what logical explanation you give someone for buying a product, underneath it is the want to be understood. So when someone buys from you it’s because you showed them that you knew enough about who they are to make a product that fits them.

I call this an “appreciation of a client”.  In the same vein as “What you appreciate, appreciates”, when you appreciate who a client is and what their issues are and then package something for that need, you show your understanding.

If you offer what you think a client needs rather than what a client wants and you try to shoehorn clients into buying something they don’t want it, doesn’t matter how amazing you make the benefits, they just won’t respond to your efforts, if they don’t want the product. To continue doing so is a lot like speaking a different language and shouting to be understood.

If you’ve done a good job of pinpointing a target market, you should be able to learn these things easily. Until you do, you’re marketing will only limp along because you don’t yet know what products they’ll feel good about buying.

Find that appreciation for whoever you are serving and the numbers you serve will grow.

Best Wishes
Neil

www.communitysoul.co.uk

I want to give you an example of how, when you niche, you make it easy for people to find both you and what they need.

For a lot of people resistance to niching is what stands between you achieving what you want. Let’s look at it like this: if you don’t niche, you fail to stand out from the crowd and all the other white noise out there. What happens then is you go unnoticed.

When someone wants to increase their client base the first question out of my mouth will most likely be: ‘Who is this for?’ Often the answer I hear is words to the effect of: ‘Anyone who wants to buy my service.’

The problem with this answer is that while they ‘Could be anyone’… in ‘reality’, “they” are not ‘anyone’. “They” are “someone”.

The marketing message of  ‘Anyone can be my customer’ doesn’t speak to ‘anyone’. It doesn’t touch or move anyone. It’s plain and bland and as a result hardly anyone shows an interest and becomes a customer.

This is a point I’ve debated with lots of people who were struggling to find new clients. Their worry is that if they narrowed down who the customer might be too much, there would be even less chance of someone buying. This isn’t the case. In fact the opposite is true. Let me explain…

If you want to speak to ‘anyone in London’, you might be speaking to five million faceless unknowns who are busy in the City with countless distractions like: the hum and the buzz and of the City, catching a tube home, the stress and long hours of working in the City; or it might be about “Will I make the next connection?” or “Am I going to make my appointment?”

People in the City come from lots of cultural backgrounds and many of them will have moved to the City for work and come from different parts of the world  such as Germany. They might be struggling with the culture and just wishing they could be at home, say in Germany, and speaking their own language for five minutes and have a joke about how Londoners are. And they’re sitting there on the tube rubbing their neck and shoulders and really feeling that tension and feeling a bit lost, maybe a bit frightened, maybe slightly fed up, but maybe also okay with life and slightly enjoying the adventure they’re on working in London.

So, how do you get their attention when you’re say, a masseur?

If your marketing says: ‘anyone who wants me’ it just melds into the wallpaper of the City. But what happens when you bring it to life by saying: ‘Hello I help people from Germany who are busy, stressed and missing home. Come and see me, chill out, relax and let me drizzle the most fragrant oils in town over your tight shoulders… until London fades into the distance and all you can imagine is being back at home.’

You don’t need everyone to be your clients or customers, you just need a few… “someone’s” who love you and become raving fans. 50 clients as a masseur is probably worth around £2500-£3000 a month if you see your clients monthly. If you see them fortnightly then it’s double that. And all you need to find is just 50 people, not hundreds.

All the best, Neil

http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

In writing any good marketing copy there are 7 essentials you have to take care of – without getting overly technical. I’m going to give them to you here, because I want people reading this newsletter to write copy that engages readers and finds them a stream of clients.

So, let me take you through the 7 essentials:

1. Title – this has to make a promise about what you’ll deliver and it must speak to your audience

2. Sub-title – the subtitle builds the picture up more – it expands on the title

3. Rapport/Credibility piece – Speak in the language of the people who will buy from you and let them know why they should listen to you.

4. Benefits – put these in a bullet point list… it makes it easy to read and suggests value, value, value

5. Social proof – testimonials, show other people what they got from you. Use names where you can. Use pictures if you can get them. And the more specific you can be the better.

6. A call to action – this is about telling them what to do next.

7. Contact details (either get theirs using a contact form on your website or give yours if you are using flyers or another advertising method.

For an example of a webpage using these all 7 steps visit: www.communitysoulbusiness.com

When I first wrote the copy in the link above, I had it critiqued by a group of people I mastermind with. Then I rewrote it. I invested around £3500 in hard cash in that copy and then a further £1000 in my own time writing it.

So you can see, it’s not something I just threw together in a few minutes. The title took several attempts and yet when I look at it now it looks really simple. And that’s the way you want it to read. Simple.

The copy was hacked and rewritten. But that page has resulted in around 2000 people signing up for the offer we make.

Just using the seven essentials will give you better results in from your marketing efforts, but that’s not the be-all-and-end-all in copywriting. There is a lot more for you to learn… and it never stops!

Best wishes
Neil

http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

What are the 3 MUST-KNOWS of writing Compelling Marketing Copy?

First, there’s a saying, that to become a good copywriter, you have to become a good copy reader… that means reading good marketing copy and learning.    This is one of my habits.

Because I have developed good copy habits and a process for writing, I never have to scratch my head and wonder where to start.

In fact in my newsletter to my Insiders Secrets group recently, I mentioned to them that I spent 15 minutes writing copy that sold 3 products in 90 minutes while I prepared a presentation and gave it.

The people on that call know something, though – my marketing copy is never just thrown together. I was able to create that copy so quickly because of the habits I have developed.

The second must know is: know your customer.

And I know that you know this, but I’m mentioning it here, because even though I know that you know, that you need to know your customer, so many people forget this or resist clearly defining who the customer is.

And if you never define who your customer really is how will you ever know the third must know of good copywriting…

The third must know of good copywriting is to be clear on what your customer REALLY wants – which isn’t always what you offer, or at least not the way people often offer it.

And unless you have these 3 Must-Knows clearly in your cells, you shouldn’t even start a website or a brochure, because you don’t know who you are offering to, or why or how to write the copy.

Interestingly enough, I was talking to Alan Forrest Smith a few weeks ago, and Alan is one of the world’s most sought after copywriters, charging thousands to write your marketing campaigns and the the first thing he asked me was “Who is your customer?”

Now if that’s one of the world leaders in marketing and copywriting asking that question, we all need to pay attention.

Best wishes
Neil

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Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website and register for his free newsletter at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

I recognise a number of people reading this article are just not getting the results that you want from your brochures, flyers and websites.

These brochures, flyers and websites are marketing that never sleeps and it’s your marketing copy that for many people determines if you have people queueing up at your door or not.

To attract business we have to represent ourselves well on page because it’s our written material that sells us. And the more you automate your marketing through websites, auto-responders and emails, the more important your copy becomes.

You may also want your marketing copy to compete with the best in the field. To do that there are some essentials, and if you include them, that can set you apart from so much of the competition and have you recognised right up there with the leaders in your field.

There are also things that set ordinary marketing copy apart from great copy which sells quickly and easily.

Creating great marketing copy is something I’ve invested in. I write much of my own copy, but I will always run it by either a mastermind group who understand marketing copywriting, or I’ll talk it through with a mentor or an expert.

Doing these things has raised the bar, with many of our pages now getting results of 38%-84%.

In the last year we’ve invested thousands into this area of development, but I have to be honest and admit I made a big mistake…

When I first looked at at how much copywriting cost, I decided it was too expensive. In making that choice I failed to look at what it would cost me if I didn’t invest.

Looking back this is something I would have invested in much sooner.

Have you invested in copywriting? Or is that another area of your business where you are saying you can’t afford to invest? What is failing to invest costing you longer term?

Best wishes
Neil

When I first became self-employed I needed new clients and repeat business. What I was offering was a service to householders.

In order to have them buy from me I had to knock at their door and ask – cold calling and door knocking… something most people might like to run away from…

And it gets worse…

Each month I was knocking on a thousand doors and what that meant is that pretty soon I ran out of doors to knock on… and you know what that means…

Yes. I had to start again and re-knock on the doors who said no to me the first time round. But there was something surprising about this…

You’d be amazed to know that the second time around I got more yeses than the first, and the third time was about as good as the second. By then I was calling on every 2nd or 3rd house in some streets and that’s when something magical started to happen.

What happened was – word began to get around, and that meant referrals began coming to me. And this is what we call client attraction.

Attraction is simply when you pull customers to you, rather than push. Advertising is a form of push marketing, recommendation and referral is a type of “pull” marketing.

Attraction happens where you’re not projecting your business out there, yet you’re drawing business to you. And there’s something else you should know…

Before I enjoyed people coming and asking if they could be my customers, I had to undergo something.

Before attraction happened, I first had to go through rejection. Had I given up after my seventh straight no, I’d have never got to number eight and had them be my first customer.

If I’d given up too soon, I’d never have built that company. I set a goal, I found a strategy that worked and I kept working it.

Sometimes I fell behind my goals. But did I give up? No. And that’s the spirit people who succeed carry – on-going… never giving up…

Something all of us Conscious entrepreneurs have to keep in mind is that our source of wealth is created where our customers needs meet our ability to serve. When we have a great service and are 100% in our conviction about that service, customers can’t wait to get that service. When we can’t wait to give and we ask for opportunities to give, customers can’t wait to receive. What goes on on the outside of your business will be a perfect reflection of what’s going on on the inside.

Best wishes

Neil

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Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. To find out more, visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk