Here’s a secret about long-form landing pages:
They’re not really that long on the scale of things.
Sure, occasionally you’ll be tasked with selling a product that’s so complicated it’ll require ten thousand words to explain it. Sometimes, you’ll have to write a video sales letter that goes on for an hour.
But for the most part, that sort of approach is massively overselling things. In many cases, it’ll dissuade as many people as it converts.
You don’t need 10,000 words to sell a $5 ebook. You don’t even need that many words for a $50 ebook.
All in all, most of my highest performing sales letters are about 1500 words.
That’s certainly long-form when compared to a Facebook ad, but it’s not long in the sense of writing a book.
Let’s assume you’re the same and you’re working in similar fields to me. 1500 words is our target.
Some copywriters take forever to write a sales letter.
This obviously has a negative effect on their business. They have longer wait times, their customers get grouchy and they can only take on so many clients.
(I mean, all of those things are good at a certain point, but not when you’re a beginner copywriter looking to get your foot on the ladder.)
There are a ton of different ways you can cope with this; charge more, outsource elements of your business or create complex research processes.
But the best method of getting over this, and probably the easiest one too, is to write copy faster.
How To Write Copy Fast: The Attitude
From my rare dealings with other copywriters, there are a few problems that come to mind immediately.
Firstly, if you’re hired as a copywriter – and I’m mostly talking about freelance, direct response copy here – you are not a creative genius for sale. Yes, there are creative elements to the work. Sure, you have to find angles and work with them. But if you spend most of your working day waiting for inspiration to strike you or whatever, then you’re doing something wrong.
You’re selling a product or a brand. The angle is creative, but the magic is in the method. And the method is “How do I get people to want to buy this?”
So from there, we can start to work. You’re essentially convincing someone in a short letter to buy a product. Hopefully there’s something unique about your letter, but plenty of copycats make a ton of money just rewriting swipe files.
Second point; it’s not an insurmountable task. Even at the beginning, you’re 1500 words away from the end. Bear in mind 100 words of that will be a guarantee and even the most boring products on Earth have something going for them, and you’re practically halfway there already.
Essentially, writing a sales page is not rocket science.
Let’s talk about research.
Research For Copywriters
People get hung up about research. In a way, that’s a good thing; research is important and you need to know your target market as well as possible.
That said, people take it to an extreme that I can only imagine is due to their will to avoid actually writing the damned sales page.
I took a course recently and for the research section you were supposed to do target market research. Great! You filled in an “ideal customer” questionnaire. That’s good. But it had weird questions on it. “What car does your target market drive?” “What’s their favourite pasta dish?”
Those things… they’re all a waste of time. Knowing your target market doesn’t mean knowing everything about your target market. I mean sure, if you’re selling a diet book to a housewife then you might want to know what she’s eating, but the idea of filling in an ideal customer questionnaire is to get a stereotypical person in your niche. It’s not an attempt to market to three people on the planet and exclude everyone else.
Concentrate on the issues the product solves, do a general questionnaire to make sure you’re not selling men’s aftershave to twelve year old girls and build your profile from there.
No sales letter ever needs to read, “Hey ladies… I know it’s your 45th birthday, and as you jump out of your red Mini Cooper and quickly microwave your Lasagne, you think, “Damn… my husband really needs a POWER SAW with 45 adjustable drill bits.”
Writing A Sales Letter… Quickly
Let’s assume you’ve got the right attitude and you’ve done your research.
There are two things that will help you write copy quickly and without sacrificing effectiveness. Those are:
- Structure
- Getting Over Perfectionism
I’ll talk about them in that sequence.
Structure
Most sales pages have a very similar structure… or should I say, they have the same universal elements.
There’ll be a little story about how we go from zero to hero. There’ll be the important call to action and the fact you’re only paying 1% of what the product is worth. Then there’s the guarantee so your reader isn’t risking anything.
You get the picture.
The best thing you can do as a copywriter is to first collect all of these elements up into a swipe file, and then by whatever means necessary, get them into your head. I can look at a sales page now and divide it up immediately into those elements, and a lot of the time I can determine where a sales page is losing people based on how well the element in question stacks up against others.
Here’s the important thing: with copywriting, the structure does the work for you. It’s been honed over years and years, and if you get the structure right and include all the necessary elements, your writing itself doesn’t have to be perfect. That brings me onto the next point.
Perfection
If you have the structure right, then the actual words don’t have to be perfect. That’s a great thing, because they can’t be perfect. With direct response, every funnel is a case of retaining as many eyeballs as possible. It’s a given that you’ll lose people along the way.
IF you lose all of your visitors, then your copy is defective in some way. But you’re going to lose some reads because of a word choice or because they purely don’t like the voice you’ve written in.
Those are all micro-issues frankly. My point is here that you can get away with a ton.
I was checking up on a copywriter I sort of follow because he charges a ton of money. Recently he let people have access to a bunch of his sales letters in exchange for email subscription.
Some of those sales letters cost clients tens of thousands of dollars.
They allegedly sold products hand over fist and the copywriter in question got glowing reviews from the clients, so we can assume that they must have made some money from them.
By that account, you can say they were great copy.
You can’t say that they’re good English… because they aren’t. There were grammar errors, spelling mistakes and all kinds of weird things like not finishing sentences and weird tense changes and stuff like that.
Obviously, you don’t have to worry about that to make money, and here’s why.
Why It Works
Most copywriting is giving people what they want. You don’t have to oversell a product that someone wants, because they already want it.
Think about if you’re starving to death and someone walks up to you and offers you a bucket of KFC or a Big Mac or something equally bad for you healthwise but honestly who cares?
You’re going to eat that bucket of chicken.
Now, at that point, you want the food and don’t care about the niceties. You might think twice if you’re offered something by a junkie with a literal needle sticking out of his arm and saliva hanging off the tip of his chin, but otherwise, you need the food you’re going to eat it.
With copywriting, grammar considerations are the equivalent; if you want something and it’s going to change your life, you won’t care if the guy writing about it confuses your with you’re.
If you’re reading a sales letter and you think, “I’m not going to buy this because the guy is mixing up his tenses” then you’re probably not quite the intended market.
If you say “Sorry man… I may be starving to death but Big Macs just have too many trans-fats in them so I think I’ll pass this one up” then you’re probably not starving to death at all.
Final Thoughts
This article is longer than most sales letters you’ll have to write. In it, I’ve dispelled most of the myths people have about copywriting and given you a simple flowchart to follow when it comes to writing sales letters fast.
The devil is always in the details, but you can’t eat an elephant whole.
By that, I mean write your sales pages first and then if you read them back and they’re rubbish – or if they don’t perform – then sweat the small stuff.
If you’re sitting wasting hours thinking, “I don’t know where to start with this sales page,” then read this article again and then you will do.
Get it done, worry later.