Think In Lines
Do you ever get overwhelmed when faced with a copywriting project?
I certainly do.
This is another post on how to break down a project and get yourself out of a rut.
This time, we’re going to talk about a technique I call “thinking in lines.”
If you’re thinking, “Woah, that sounds abstract!” you’re completely wrong.
Video Sales Letters – An Easy Skill To Learn
Yesterday, I posted that I was breaking into a new copywriting niche. Now, the niche relies quite heavily on video sales letters. I haven’t really written many scripts. I’ve done a handful but not too many. What better way to spend my time than learn how to write VSL’s and write in a new niche as a two-for-one?
In reality, VSL’s are just sales letters with a voiceover and a PowerPoint presentation. Sometimes you’ll have a guy on the screen instead, but the script is basically the same as any long-form presentation from Gary Halbert onwards.
So that part of the learning curve went easier than anticipated. The second part- the technical part – well, that’s not so tough either. You literally get a screen recorder software and read out the script. Or, more likely, you wait until the client pays you and get someone with a nice voice to do it from Upwork for $500.
Seeing as the premium price people pay for VSL’s is much higher than the cost of producing them, it’s a skill worth learning.
But what’s that got to do with breaking through a creative block and thinking in lines?
What Is “Thinking In Lines?”
There’s another key difference with VSL’s as opposed to regular sales letters.
You have to write them one line at a time.
There’s no way you can have a PowerPoint slide with three paragraphs on it. You’ll lose the reader/listener. That’s why all of those video sales letters you see go at a painfully-slow one line pace and take 45 minutes to get through what you could read in five minutes.
It’s painful, but so is digging for gold. That’s what we’ve got here.
Now, I’m trying to break into this new market. Every niche has its own terminology, style and unique selling points.
This is quite frustrating, especially when you know little about the niche and you’re trying to come up with 45 minutes’ worth of content – or ten thousand words or so – to sell a product.
I wasn’t getting anywhere with this niche. Now, you might think, “But Jamie… maybe you should stick to what you’re good at.” I could do that, but then I’d be leaving gold coins in someone else’s treasure chest. Here’s what I did instead:
I opened up a good sales letter from my swipe file.
Then I went to the “Word count” tool in Microsoft Word. Here’s what I saw:
9756 words is a lot of words to write – even if you’re emulating a sales letter in its completion. (Don’t do that.)
Instead, I thought about one of the other stats: there are 846 lines.
Now, that’s a lot of sentences, but it’s not as many as 10,000.
If you’ve done your research and gotten bullets, features and benefits, then you can probably write 50-100 of those out of the gate.
Then what you need to do is go back to your source sales letter and work out how many lines were dedicated to each section.
For instance, the one I was working from had:
- 75 lines dedicated to the “guarantee”
- 63 lines in an FAQ section
- 40 sub headings
- 163 lines of “what you get in this course”
So on and so forth… you can break this down into whatever sections you’re comfortable with or “borrow” the structure from your swipe file template. The important thing is that while 10,000 words is a massive chunk, 100 lines aren’t.
It might take you a day or two to write 10,000 words. But it takes you twenty seconds or less to write a line.
Especially when you know exactly what you’re achieving with those particular lines. For instance, in your FAQ section you could have:
Q: “What happens if I want to cancel my order?”
A: “You’ll get your money back if you decide to cancel at any time within the first sixty days.
Not only that, but we’ll let you keep the course anyway. Don’t even bother sending them back.
Oh, and you can have my puppy too… I don’t really like the stupid mutt anyway.”
That’s a few lines that take no effort, even when you’re being serious.
Final Thoughts
One of the biggest strengths of copywriting as an art form is that it’s formulaic. Yet it’s easy to get distracted by all the bells and whistles, and there are some monumental tasks; like writing a 50n page sales letter.
Ultimately though, you can break any big project down into smaller chunks, and any sales letter into smaller sections. That’s why we do the handcopying and keep a swipe file; so we don’t have to think about any of this.
So when you’re stuck, just think; you might be stumped on writing a sales letter.
But you can write one line right now, can’t you?