For me, the most difficult part of writing ad copy has been to come up with great benefit statements. And, second to the headline, the benefits are what sell people on your product, service, idea or even political opinion.
In comparison, the other parts of copywriting that people might find challenging, such as stories, headlines, and great price offers were easy. What drove me nuts was coming up with a benefits list; that is until I discovered how to develop more than one benefit a minute.
You might remember from any basic sales course that people do not care about features nearly as much as they want to know the benefits. Knowing the truth to that, I started to take a closer look at what benefits really are. I discovered they are really just action items in disguise, agreed? You “save” money or “stop” wasting time, for example. So, why not start out all benefit statements with action verbs? The process goes like this:
1. Get a long list of alphabetized action verbs.
2. Put the list on your desk or computer screen where you can see the entire list
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3. Beginning with the letter A, read each verb aloud and come up with a descriptive sentence about your product or service that includes the verb.
As an example, “Accelerate” is the first verb on my list.
Then, my descriptive sentence might be that my service helps “accelerate” the time it takes to learn to read Spanish.
4. Write as many benefits as you can and don’t stop! You’ll weed out the benefits later that don’t have as much punch as you thought. Now is not the time either to worry if you are writing duplicative statements down. Just open your mind to think about your product or service and brainstorm benefit ideas as they come.
5. Now you organize your benefit list in order of priority from most important benefit to last.
I’ve used this process not only for creating benefits lists, but also for writing articles, such as “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.
Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. Usually, 20 benefits is more than enough to create great sales copy.
Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years. He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.