Ben Settle

If you are a freelance copywriter who gets paid on commission — instead of or in addition to taking an up-front fee — then please read the following very carefully.

Doing so can save you a ton of time… and maybe even make you a bundle of money.

Back when I was just starting out as a copywriter, to get some “real world” experience, I did copywriting jobs on just pure commission.

The idea was to get some good experience and make some decent money… all while removing the risk from the client.

And it worked great… on paper.

Unfortunately, in reality, it didn’t work well at all (as far as making a lot of money).

Why?

Because while the ads I wrote were pretty good, and did well when they ran, many of my clients were not motivated to do what was necessary to monetize the copy to the fullest extent.

Why weren’t they motivated?

I don’t know.

But the fact they didn’t pay me any money up front probably had something to do with it. After all, people rarely give value to things they get free.

Now, “flash forward” a couple years when I ran into a marketer who explained how to make absolutely sure you never waste time on a “do nothing” client:

“Don’t work with anyone who is not as excited about the project making money as you are.”

Boom.

That one sentence hit me like a ton of bricks — and all that flakey client behavior actually made sense.

You see, while it’s true a lot of people want good copy, few of them are willing to exploit that copy and nab every dollar they can from it. Even if it will make them a lot of money, and even if they think your copy is the next best thing since sliced bread.

I know that sounds strange but it’s true.

Some people are just like that.

Now, if you’re writing on a straight fee — and no commission — then this is no big deal. I mean, if you already got paid, who cares?

But if you are ever in a position where you’re offered a chance to write an ad where you get paid based on sales — then I highly suggest not working with that client unless they can prove they’re as motivated to make money as you are.

Otherwise, just walk away from it.

Seriously.

Because all you’re going to do is bust your chops on an ad that will never be exploited properly…or may not even run at all.

And unless you take an upfront fee, that means you’re out all that time, energy and effort.

If you’d like to know a secret way of making your copywriting more enjoyable, your business more profitable and your promotions more sustainable, then get a load of this:

Recently, I heard an interview of a guy who writes and self publishes “special effects” cookbooks and other information products.

And during this interview he spilled his guts about the way he markets, how he writes ads, and what his influences are.

But what really stuck out was how he uses his imagination when creating sales promotions.

You see, the more outrageous his headlines and ideas… the more sales he makes from his newspaper ads and press releases.

For example, one of his headlines (for a report on how to get cheap dental care) is: “Dentists Scream Bloody Murder!”

Another headline he uses in his press releases (for his cookbooks) is: “Kids Eat Their Own Faces, Mothers Laugh Their Heads Off!”

Anyway, after reading several of his headlines and ideas it was obvious why his ads and press releases are so successful:

1.) He pushes things as far as he can in terms of being outrageous and getting attention.

2.) He has a tremendous amount of fun doing it.

Actually, that second one is a guess on my part, I don’t really know the guy.

But come on.

How can you not have fun writing headlines like that?

I bet when he writes his headlines he holds nothing back. Just lets his mind create whatever it wants without restraint or hesitation.

Do you do that when you write your ads?

Do you let your mind go wild and free?

Do you write down all the goofy, silly, controversial and downright ridiculous ideas that come to you?

If you don’t do this and if you instead snuff out your more “over the top” thoughts and ideas before getting them down, then not only are you hurting your bottom line, but you’re missing one of the biggest joys of marketing and copywriting.

Why?

Because letting your mind go crazy and come up with ideas, themes, offers and snatches of copy is outright fun.

And not only is it fun, but writer’s block vanishes, the time flies by and, before you know it, you’ve logged in three or four hours of work without even so much as looking at the clock.

The key is to be totally uninhibited.

Stephen King (in his book, “On Writing”) calls this mindset “writing with the door closed.”

Because it’s just you and your copy alone in the locked room of your imagination. Nobody can overhear your internal conversations. Nobody can see your work. You can be outrageous, offensive, silly or “politically incorrect” and nobody will give you a hard time.

And if you just go with whatever your subconscious gives you — expand upon it, add to it, and enlarge it — you’ll be amazed at what pops out on the other end.

Try it yourself and see.

Next time you sit down to write an ad (or any kind of writing) don’t hold back on the first draft.

Let anything and everything pour onto the page.

Don’t worry about what anyone else will say, feel or think about you.

Nobody is going to see it.

In the end, not only will you make your copy better, but the actual writing part will be a whole lot more fun.

A couple weeks ago I got together with some local business owners to discuss the many “ins and outs” of marketing.

Eventually, they started asking me about copywriting, and wanted to know what the biggest “secret” of copywriting was.

“It all comes down to your keyboard,” I said. “There’s a special key on your keyboard that, if you learn to use it, will let you create great copy almost on demand. Can you guess what it is?” I asked.

One of them said it was the exclamation mark.

Another said it was the period.

A couple people said the letter “f” (presumably for the word “free”).

A few others said it was the space bar or “return” key.

“You’re all wrong.” I said. “The most important key on your keyboard for copywriting is the ‘delete’ key.”

It’s true.

I bet more million dollar ads are “written” with the plain old delete key than any combination of letters or words combined.

In fact, one of the best pieces of advice I ever got when I was starting out was, “uh, Ben, this is great copy — but it’s way too ‘wordy.'”

And he was right.

It was too wordy. And we cut that 30-page monstrosity down to less than 20 pages…simply by deleting all the “fat” that really didn’t belong.

Since then, I’ve been relentless with the delete key.

You should, too.

Even if it means cutting out your favorite parts and even if it kind of hurts a little to do so.

This has always been one of the great “secrets” of copywriting.

And yet, it’s really no secret at all.

It’s just common sense.

If you cut all the “fat” from your ads they’ll read a thousand times faster, smoother and easier — and skyrocket your response every single time.

So suck out those excess words and adjectives.

Cut those long-winded sentences in half.

Condense those 15 sentence paragraphs into one or two sentences that make the point.

In other words…

Delete, delete, delete — until you’re left with only the words and ideas you need to make the sale. With no meaningless tangents, irrelevant stories or bloated sentences in sight.

And then… when you’re absolutely certain you got it “right”… put it away for a week or two (or longer, if you can).

Then come back and cut it down even more.

After getting away from it, I guarantee you’ll see even more fat to cut out.

Anyway, to make sure you never forget this important lesson, always remember this:

When in doubt… delete it out.

One of the most-quoted copywriting phrases in the world is, “sometimes people will buy your products because of just one bullet.”

And that’s true.

People really will read an ad that’s 5, 10, 15 pages or more… but whip out their wallet simply because of a bullet point buried somewhere on page 8.

However, there is also another side of the bullets story where bullet points can actually hurt your sales.

Let me give you a “real life” example.

A few years back I wrote an ad that was long (one of my copywriter friends even said, “What is this the Declaration of Independence!”), copy intensive and had something like 60 or 70 bullet points.

I was dang proud of that ad.

And when I finished it, I sat back, laced my fingers behind my head and congratulated myself on a job well done.

Until that same copywriter friend of mine above gave me his feedback.

“Ummm Ben…” he said.

“Pretty awesome, isn’t it?” I boasted.

“Yeah, this is great except… with this market… nobody’s going to care about any of the stuff in your 14 pages of bullets.”

I was floored.

Here was a guy who gets paid something like $25,000 to write a single sales letter — making his opinion worth its weight in gold — telling me all those wonderful bullets I’d written were worthless.

And as much as I hated to admit it… he was right.

You see, this was an ad showing people how to buy large, multi-million dollar businesses, without needing any money, credit, banks or prior experience.

And while the benefit of this is universally desired… the details of how this is done is foreign to most people.

Especially the people we were targeting.

To see what I’m talking about, here are a few of the bullets:

• Why sellers will (rightfully) not let you look at their supplier list before you make an offer and the one “almost magic” way to get them to show it to you almost 100% of the time!

• The ONLY thing your business should technically “own”!

• The chilling financial and physical consequences of buying businesses with union employees! (Hint: my car was smashed up with me in it… after a union negotiation that went bad.)

• How to make sure you don’t get stuck paying all the landlord’s taxes, maintenance and insurance costs when buying a business on land you don’t own!

Now, these kinds of bullets are fine if written to people already familiar with buying businesses.

But to the “kitchen table” entrepreneurs on our list — people who know nothing about buying million dollar businesses now, but would love to do it — these bullets would either:

1.) Mean nothing to them

2.) Confuse them

3.) Make things sound complicated

All three of which will destroy the sale.

Anyway, I hope the message is clear.

Yes, bullets are awesome. And just one or two bullets really can make the sale for you.

But, at the same time, you have to be constantly asking yourself, “Does my reader know what this means or care?”

If the answer’s “no”, scrap the bullet.

Because no matter how powerfully written those bullets are, they will most likely bore, scare of confuse the reader — and kill the sale.

If you write ads for products and services in overcrowded and “over-hyped” markets… and stick out head and shoulders from your competition… then listen to this.

The whole secret of sticking out in a saturated market is to use good, old fashioned persuasion.

What do I mean by that?

Well, pretend you’re writing an ad to people who want to eliminate stubborn belly fat and have “rock-hard abs.” (A very hot and crowded market right now.)

There are basically two ways you can approach this.

You can do what everyone else in that market is doing and use “ballistics” — where you crash right out the gate with huge promises and claims about giving people “washboard” abs in 30 days or whatever.

Or…

You can go around all that noise, and “seduce” the reader into your ad.

For example:

I recently saw a post on an Internet marketing forum where someone was selling a product on building rock-hard abs and was looking for feedback on his ad, which was basically identical — as far as the claims, promises and structure — to most of the other ads selling similar products.

Except for one thing.

In the “P.S.” of his letter, he mentions how you can use his secret while sitting in your chair.

I remember thinking how much more powerful his ad might be if — instead of leading with outrageous claims that sound like everyone else — he said something like:

And instead of starting off with the usual claims of “blow torching off fat” and “chiseling your abs into a washboard” (and basically saying, “this is an ad!”)…he could start with something more seductive and “non-advertising” sounding like:

“If you want to know a secret way to flatten your stomach and build six-pack abs while driving to work every day, then here’s how I did it. And why you can do the same thing with the information I’ll give you in this letter.”

Then from there string the reader along into a compelling story someone who wants rock-hard abs would not be able to resist reading.

For instance, he could tell the story of how he was sitting in traffic on the way to work and some health guru came on the radio saying how simply breathing a certain way can eliminate belly fat. So he decided to try it, and immediately noticed a change in his energy levels and a tightness in his abs. Then he did it again the next day, and the next day…and in a week he saw a difference in the mirror. Within a month he lost more belly fat driving to work than he did at the gym. And he was so excited he started studying other books and tactics on getting rock-hard abs — and decided to combine all the best methods that worked into a simple system anyone can use…

And so on and so forth.

Anyway, the idea is not to be afraid to do the opposite of everyone else. To seduce readers into your ad one step at a time with an interesting story…instead of trying to overpower them with claims and promises right out the gate.

Try it yourself and see.

I think you’ll find using seduction like this goes a long way towards increasing readership and sales. Especially if you’re in an overcrowded and over-hyped market, and especially if your sales are lagging and you’re not sure why.

Would you like to increase the profits of every ad you write… without making any extra sales and without adding even one penny to the price of what you’re selling?

Then consider this:

A couple years ago one of my joint venture partners and I were selling a product that, while extremely high quality, was getting a ton of refunds.

One of the reasons for this was because we were letting people buy it on approval (i.e. we’d send them the product for 30 days before charging their credit card) and we were using PayPal. And the only way to do this with PayPal was to set up a “subscription” that lasted 30 days.

Only problem is, PayPal sends you an email reminding you at the end of those 30 days about your purchase and gives you a nice, convenient link you can use to cancel the order (you just click on a link).

Long story short, we ended up with a whopping 37% refund rate.

Ouch.

And it didn’t take long to realize we shouldn’t be using PayPal for this particular deal, and used a regular merchant account. As soon as we did that, the refund rate plummeted from 37% to 10%.

Now, here’s the thing:

We were making about $450 per sale. Which means we were grossing $45,000 every hundred sales. But at a 37% refund rate, we were only netting $28,350 of that money.

After changing the merchant account and cutting down the refund rate to 10%, we were netting $40,500 every 100 sales.

In other words, we added $12,150 to our profits…without adding a single sale or increasing the price. All we did was cut the number of refunds.

And ever since then, with every project I’ve worked on, one of the first things I try to strategize is how to write my copy and structure my offers in a way that minimizes refunds. Especially when doing “try-it-before-you-buy-it” offers — which tend to increase both sales and refunds.

Anyway, here’s the bottom line:

Depending on the price and quantity of what you’re selling, reducing your refund rates by just 5% or 10% can put a significant amount of money in your pocket without doing any extra work whatsoever.

If you want to know a quick and easy way to inject passion and excitement into your ads without using even a speck of “hype”, then here’s how one of the world’s greatest living copywriters does it.

And why you can do it, too.

Anyway, here’s the “secret” in a nutshell:

Get rid of all the exclamation marks… or use them sparingly.

Not only will doing this make your claims seem less hypey… but you’ll also stick out like a soar thumb from your competition at the same time.

Now, you may be thinking, “But all the copywriting ‘gurus’ use tons of exclamation points. Why shouldn’t I?”

Answer:

Not all the gurus do use an endless amount of exclamation points.

In fact, some of the highest paid copywriters in the world hardly use them at all.

For example:

Do you know who Gary Bencivenga is?

He’s considered one of the greatest living copywriters in the world, with the track record to prove it.

And guess what?

If you read his ads you’ll notice many of them contain few (if any) exclamation marks.

Why?

I can’t speak for the man, but one reason that seems obvious (to me, at least) is he doesn’t need them.

You see, the content of his ads is inherently exciting — without needing any exclamation marks, empty adjectives or fluff.

Think about it this way:

If someone has a disease that’s killing them, and you have the cure, then you don’t have to put an exclamation point anywhere in that ad if what you’re saying is interesting, exciting and can be backed up.

In other words, you won’t have to try and “create” excitement… it’ll be exciting on its own — whether you use five exclamation marks after your headline or not.

Now, am I saying ads with exclamation marks are bad?

No.

Many of the best ads ever written — that pull millions and millions of dollars per year — are packed with them.

What I am saying is they’re not always necessary.

For some markets they work like gangbusters. But in a growing number of markets — where people are getting sick and tired of reading one hyped-up ad after another — they can actually hurt sales.

But as with anything, test this yourself and see.

Take one of your ads with a lot of exclamation points, strip them out, and then test what happens.

Depending on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to, you may just find your response, sales and profits go up dramatically.

When I was a kid I loved collecting comic books.

I enjoyed them so much, I even wanted to be a comic book writer or artist, and spent a lot of time reading interviews with people who actually did create comic books.

And although I didn’t realize it at the time, reading these interviews taught me one of the biggest “copywriting” secrets I ever learned.

A secret so unbelievably effective it can instantly multiply your response.

Yet so childishly simple it can be used by anyone — no matter how good or bad a “writer” you are now.

What was this secret?

Well, whenever these comic book pros were asked why they got into the business or what made them start reading comics, many of them would say that yes, they loved the action and adventure and artwork, etc.

But even more than that… they wanted to see what was going on in Spiderman’s love life.

Or what Batman did when he wasn’t kicking arse on the streets at night.

Or if Clark Kent was ever gonna finally get it on with Lois.

Anyway here’s my point:

It became obvious to me people don’t just buy comic books for the usual reasons of action, adventure, great stories and riveting art.

They’re also buying a personality.

They’re buying someone they can identify with each month — with the same hopes, dreams, problems, fears and insecurities as everyone else.

In fact, Stan Lee (the co-creator of Spiderman) said his biggest challenge writing Spiderman was not coming up with dialogue or new villains for him to fight.

No, his biggest challenge was actually creating more problems to throw at Spiderman when he wasn’t in his spidey suit and was just Peter Parker.

You see, he wanted to make sure people would identify with Spiderman not just as a “super hero”… but also as a regular person.

The result?

Spiderman is a world famous icon worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Marvel Comics today.

That’s what the power of a simple, ordinary personality can do.

And guess what?

You can easily harness this “power” (no pun intended) yourself for your ads.

Just let your hair down and be yourself.

Write like you talk (or write like the person whose “voice” your copy is in).

Use your own figures of speech, attitude and colloquialisms.

You know, in a lot of ways, using your personality makes writing copy easier anyway. You don’t get hung up on a bunch of copywriting and grammatical “rules” and “formulas.”

You may even butcher a few major copywriting “rules” every now and then.

But who cares?

At least you’re being “real.”

And your readers will feel like you’re talking to them… and not at them.

And you when start doing that, the difference in response is night and day.

How would you like to quickly and cheaply build a thick, beefy swipe file full of proven and successful direct response ads?

A swipe file that contains not only long copy ads… but also proven classified and space ads that can be adapted and modified for pay-per-click ads and ezine ads?

And how would you like to be able to build this swipe file of hundreds of ads for about $50 or less?

Then all you need do is head over to the nearest comic book convention.

This is no joke.

If you want to see some of the best copy ever written then spend a few hours pouring over direct response ads found in comic books and a whole new world will open up for you.

The psychology the copywriters used in those old direct response comic book ads is sheer brilliance.

They knew exactly how to get “inside” your head and persuade you to buy things you never in a million years would have considered buying before. Plus, they were usually able to do it with just two or three sentences.

And as I said, they’re cheap.

Believe it or not, the comic books with the best direct response ads are almost always less than a dollar a piece.

The key is to buy the older comics from before 1990. For some reason after 1990 comic book ads started shifting into image ads and away from direct response.

But the older ones are all direct response ads.

And unlike baseball cards, comic books tend to go down in value instead of up.

And the really old ones — especially titles that didn’t sell well — can many times be bought for next to nothing.

In fact, if you go to a comic book convention you can sometimes buy entire boxes of old comics — containing thousands of ads — for less than $50.

Whatever the case, if you want a huge swipe file packed with powerful direct response ads, buy old comic books.

They’re dirt cheap… and they contain some of the best examples of selling, persuasion and copy you’ll ever see.