Put This Web Page STRAIGHT Into Your Swipe File
Hey guys,
This’ll be a short article today.
My part of England got hit with its yearly snowfall today, and because I’m an intrepid adventurer I decided to spend some time out in it, and the rest of the day watching the snow fall.
Take that, super-productivity online bros.
Crazy thing about snow… it’s amazing how a small change can affect everything massively.
Another thing I learned today… snow makes for a great exercise session. I went for my daily walk of a few miles, and that turned into an exercise routine. I felt like I’d been on an incline step machine. Then I got back and started shovelling snow, which after a short while felt like I’d been deadlifting.
All in all, I got a couple of free workouts, went outside and it was pretty awesome because everywhere was empty save for a few people walking their dogs.
This all brings me to my point as far as copywriting and other stuff you guys actually care about.
People are terrible at finding new ways to do things and new uses for things they already have.
If you want to gain a huge competitive advantage, then get better at finding new ways of doing things.
The above sentence is worth its weight in gold. It’s possibly worth its weight in Bitcoin as well, but seeing as nobody can decide what that’s worth, I can’t guarantee it.
Anyway, if the above sounds a bit vague, then let me segue into what I mean with an example.
Here’s How To Soft Sell
When I finally stopped watching the snow, I logged online to check out a few things.
It turns out that Thrive Themes have released a new product. It’s a plugin called Thrive Comments.
Now, I can’t vouch for the quality of the plugin yet, but their other plugins are great.
Here’s what I can vouch for: The blog post where I learned about it is a brilliant example of how the power of showing people new ways to do stuff is awesome.
It’s a fantastic blog post that is an awesome example of a soft-sell landing page.
Read it here, and then put it straight in your Swipe File.
This page is awesome because it has everything you could imagine a soft-sell sales page would need:
- Informative video
- 12 easy to follow bullet points (but a lot of content)
- Actionable advice
- Novel solutions to a problem that a lot of people won’t know they had
- Pictures, video, text to appeal to all learner types
- Nobody would look at the page and say “Oh my god stop selling to me!”
I haven’t tried the plugin, so I can’t comment on whether you could do all of those things as easily as clicking the buttons. But that tutorial sure does make it look like I could have those things up and running in a few minutes.
Also, 99% of people are never going to think about their website comment section in the ways that they’re suggesting.
Even if you don’t get Thrive Comments, you could implement these tips with some other solution.
All this will lead people to think, “This is helpful and not about selling you!”
We all know it’s always about selling.
Alright Jamie, But I Don’t CARE About Website Comments
So, you’ve looked at the page I linked to, but you think, “Yeah… but I write about fitness products, why would I put this in my swipe file?”
The structure of the page is excellent. Here’s how you as a copywriter, marketer and entrepreneur should see it:
- VIDEO Explainer broken into intro/12 steps/outro
- Headline that reads as informative (but simple list article format)
- Intro that explains major benefits
- Repeated title in different way
- 12 “how-tos” that have a couple of images and then a couple of hundred words (EASY to write)
- – each of those is about a different way to use the product/indirect benefit of the product
- If possible, link out to other products (this counterintuitively makes the page seem less salesy)
- Conclusion with a bent on a couple of goals – buy the product and let us know more stuff
Add in stuff like a contents section and some infographics, and that’s a powerful, powerful structure that you can use for any product, project or topic.
In fact, a lot of those points need a full explanation – but that’s how I go about putting something into Swipe file format. Do that, look at how your source material is broken down in terms of the goal, and you have a skeleton left over that’s fit for a lot of different things.
Final Thoughts
Like I said, it’s a short article this time. But the above framework is pretty powerful, and no doubt you guys can make it better. Obviously you’ll drop a comment below about how you’re going to do that.
Swipe files are awesome because it’s like someone has started the hard work for you. You just have to key in the data you’ve collected and bingo, you’ve got something powerful, effective and easy to create as well.
We’ll come back to some of the finer details in other articles, but for now, go and check out the linked article, break it down and then apply it to some material for your own project.