Each weekday during the Red Hot Copywriting Bootcamp, attendees (or recruits) get a daily drill designed to reinforce the training I give on the weekly phone calls. The drills are illuminating and fun. Plus these drills build your copy from the ground up. By the end of Bootcamp, you actually have a sales letter that would have cost you anywhere from $3,000 to $15,000 to have written professionally.

So how do you get going? Grab a kitchen timer or stopwatch, a piece of paper and a pen. Your bite-sized drill today is to separate out the features from the benefits. So let’s do an exercise.
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“Shallow men believe in luck. Strong men believe in cause and effect.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

What is the “unique selling position” in your market? Luck will not propel you to success. Understand the “cause” of your market’s problem by knowing your target. Solving their problem is the “effect” they are looking for. Corporations have entire departments dedicated to finding out who buys from them so they can hone in on that market segment. They do that by profiling not only who buys from them, but who is their competition. Successful marketing campaigns listen to their market. It’s about connecting a hidden desire or an expressed desire in a market, a target market. Your job is to identify where those minds are, find them and then connect with them. You don’t have to be a corporation. It’s your job to do your own research and it’s available to you through your competition.
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“People seem not to see that their opinion of the world is also a confession of their character.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

So you just dropped a tidy sum to attend the Big Seminar (or some other three-day event). Now it’s over and you’re exhausted. Your client work is backed up. You have a fistful of business cards to connect with. And your family would like some face time. Time to get back into the swing of life, right? Wrong.

I go to A LOT of seminars. Rubbing shoulders with my colleagues, talking over dinner and debating our hottest industry issues at a live event is honestly one of my secret weapons to success.
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Copywriting Checklist

Okay, you know you have your product (or service) in front of you. Now it’s time to get the word out with an attention-grabbing sales letter. But where do you begin? Whether you hire someone to write your copy, pass it off to a staff member or learn to write it yourself, you need this checklist.

The Critical Steps to Take Before Writing Your Sales Letter

One of the biggest misconceptions new clients have when they come to me is I can whip out a sales letter in a few days. Wrong, wrong and wrong. A lot of preparation goes into writing copy. I spend on average 50% - 70% of my time PREPARING to write copy. If you don’t do your homework, the chances go up exponentially that your copy will fall flat on its face. Use this simple checklist to get you prepared for writing your own sales copy.
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Copy is salesmanship in print, but does it have to be a greasy used-car salesman? The answer is, “No!” Follow these 5 tips and watch your prospects’ trust level rise.

1. Make it believable. Face it – we are just smarter nowadays than we were several decades ago. In fact, we’re jaded. We’ve seen it all. Bought the miracle pills (and felt stupid for believing the charlatans). We all know it’s impossible to lose 25 pounds over night. So why even go there? Once you lose credibility, you’ve lost your prospect’s attention too. Respect your prospect with honesty and you have a much better chance of doing business together. (Psst. A great way to build trust is to actually reveal a flaw in your product. We all know nothing is perfect – so show us where it’s not and we believe in you.)
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All successful marketers know the sale comes from the words or the copy. While the traditional definition of copy is “salesmanship in print” I actually take a broader approach. Copy is used in ALL your promotional sales and marketing material. That means any place there are words about your business there is copy. So it’s EVERYWHERE. Some people will drop loads of cash on website design or graphics, but balk at learning the one skill that’s a veritable silver bullet when it comes to boosting income fast – tweaking the copy. Don’t make that mistake. Your business is too important.

Here are 5 targeted hot spots any entrepreneur can tweak copy to start raking in the green.
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Think you have what it takes to be an consultant or a coach? I wasn’t so sure I knew when I first started in 1999. All I knew was I desperately wanted to work from home to raise my two sons after my divorce. It took a lot of trial and error to get to the stabile and profitable business I am running now in 2006. There are some things I learned along the way I wish I knew much earlier in the game.

One thing I learned is that writing is a very small part of being a successful entrepreneur. Don’t get me wrong. You DO need to know how to write. But your success depends largely on your savvy as a businessperson. How do I know? Because I’ve played it from both sides of the street. And I didn’t begin to enjoy success until I started doing some very distinct things in my business.
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