How To Write Ads
January 30th, 2009 by John AnghelacheThe late, Gary C. Halbert, is my favorite copywriting mentor. Not only was he ultra-successful but he could teach the art and science of crafting ad copy like nobody’s business.
One of the things I learned from Gary is the importance of making things easy on yourself. For example, let’s say you want to write an ebook on losing weight.
What’s the best course of action?
Well, maybe you can study horse racing. Maybe you can spend years around the best horse trainers to find out what their secrets are. Maybe you can get in with the inner circle of horse racing. But is all of that time, work and stress necessary? Not at all. There is a much more hassle-free method to getting everything you need to know about horse racing.
Forget about all that work. It won’t pay off any more than taking the easy road. Gary’s advice would probably be to acquire all of the best books and report written about horse racing. The hot selling ones. Read them and note all of the exciting little secrets horse racing fans want to know.
Armed with this research you write your version of a health and fitness book. Only this book has all the great info from the other books you read. The exclusive details that bring value to your book. The end product is a book filled with the very best information on health and fitness.
Smart.
You can do the same thing when creating advertising. In fact, this works great if you have to craft a sales message on the fly for any kind of media.
The technical term for this copywriting technique is called… swiping. And boy does it ever work! Gary even held an entire seminar on copywriting. The bulk of that seminar focused on how to swipe blockbuster ads ethically and legally.
Forget about learning how to write like the best copywriters. That takes way too much time and is unnecessary. Once you learn how to swipe putting together promotions that bring in money is much easier.
When you do, here’s what’ll happen as a result…
** You’ll eliminate writer’s block forever. Because now youll access a starting point for your ads. You wont be guessing at what to write. The swipes reveal exactly what to write in your ads to make them effective and responsive.
** Ad writing will be much faster. All you do is model your ad after the swipe. Therefore, the guessing element is taken out of the equation. It’s like using a proven template to write your ads.
** The ads you write could be three times more responsive. Think about it. You are essentially modeling success. When you do that success is on your side.
So the idea is to build a swipe file and use it when creating ads.
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