In today’s nanosecond world, you’ve gotta be able to grab every ounce of drive-by attention that sees your ad, landing page, video sales letter, or emails.
The best way to do it?
Bullets, bullets, and more bullets.
Because being able to write hot bullets is truly a PhD-level skill.
Anybody can crank out tepid, boring, forgettable bullets—few can glue eyeballs to the page.
But what if you’re not going to be writing bullets yourself and you don’t want to learn how?
Not an option.
Even if you’re farming out the work and hiring copywriters, you STILL need to be able to evaluate what you’re paying for.
That’s why everyone needs to be able to write… or at least weigh the effectiveness of… not just bullets, but all aspects of copywriting.
And since we haven’t discussed bullets for a year or so, we’re going to hit it again today from a couple different angles.
So hang onto your hat.
What’s the Big Deal About Bullets?
The big deal is that writing powerful bullets is the 2nd most important copywriting/persuasion skill, next to writing headlines.
Because bullets keep readers engaged, keep pulling them back into the copy, break up long blocks of text, force you to focus and be concise, make you dig deep for your most powerful benefits, and they create a snowball of curiosity that builds… and builds… and builds.
Plus, the better you get at creating fascinating bullets (thus the alternative name, “fascinations”), the better you’ll be at headlines, product names, chapter titles, captions on images, and subject lines.
And… you get fabulous practice at being “pithy.”
So let’s take a look at several different styles and strategies, because bullets can be used in a wide variety of ways.
For instance, this, and every other Cosmopolitan cover, contains an image with a pile of bullets.
It’s been working for decades.
That’s why you should be studying these bullets whenever you’re in line at the grocery store.
Here are a few:
A Doctor’s Antidotes for Those Worry and Anxiety Feelings
Wives Run Away, Too—A Startling Report
101 Ways a Man Can Please You—If You Would Only Tell Him
Start Telling the Truth No Matter How Gruesome the Hurt or the Deceit
Now, in more of a sales letter format, a solid strategy is to start off your bullets with the standard 5W1H formula… Who, When, Why, What, Where, and of course, H, for How.
Here are a few examples from the great Gary Bencivenga, written to pitch a marketing seminar:
- How to uncover large new “starving crowds” of prospects who spend like sailors on leave.
- Why the two most powerful words in advertising are no longer NEW and FREE. You’ll be shocked at what they are. Understand the secret behind these two simple words, and you will have cracked a whole new code, tapped into an atomic power for exploding response higher.
- How to use the laws of psychology to increase your response. There’s a vast universe of scientific research in psychology that direct marketers have blithely ignored.
- Which ads pulled best? Results of numerous split run tests of headlines, designs, formats, offers, premiums, guarantees, etc. Many surprises here, and all of them can lift your response from 20% to 150% or more.
- What two-way mirror studies have proven about how people open and read their mail, and how to use these findings to boost your response dramatically.
Like everything else, the 5W1H can become predictable, which then becomes the number one marketing sin, being boring.
And as Bencivenga also says…
“There are no boring products, only boring writers.”
So mix it up with this list of “bullet starters:”
The little-known remedy for…
Why only one in ten…
The old-school system for…
Advice for…
The sneaky way to…
HINT: This is the only way to…
The no-brainer trick that…
3 Little Words that…
The secret way to…
How to legally and ethically…
The single most important strategy for…
An ingenious system that…
The number-one tactic for…
Why an unorthodox, 2-minute …
The real reason…
A simple 3-step formula for…
The absolute worst…
5 Rules for…
The absolute best…
Where to find one of the…
The _________ formula for getting…
A special way you can…
How to _______ without ________…
New ways to…
Simple—sometimes even illogical—strategies for…
The 3-best low cost ways to…
How to double or triple your…
The smartest way to…
Use the above, and the ones below, to create your own swipe file of great bullets that you should be adding to consistently.
Read This or Die!!
Another way to mix up the look is to vary your formatting, length, and content.
So here’s a short list of bullets from the famous Jim Rutz magalog, “Read This or Die.”
They’re used to break up the text AND hammer home the point that your skepticism might be a mistake and you SHOULD grab this health newsletter:
- They ostracized William Harvey for saying that blood circulates.
- They ridiculed Louis Pasteur for announcing that germs cause disease.
- They ran Ignaz Semmelweis out of town for asking surgeons to wash their hands before operating.
- And in our day, they hooted en masse at two-time Nobel prize winner Linus Pauling for showing that vitamin C Helps with colds.
Here’s more…
These are a couple bullets from a template we customized for one of our new members, where we’re alternating the bolding and the length of each bullet:
- Remember the great bear market of 2000-2000 and the 2008 recession? You ain’t seen nothing yet (just ONE simple secret will protect your nest egg… guaranteed… and even make it grow)…
- How you can get personalized guidance without paying for your advisor’s lake home…
- Why the diversification in your IRA and 401k won’t protect you, in fact, your investments are even more vulnerable than they’ve ever been…
OK finally, a few from the bullet master himself, Mel Martin.
Martin was the secret weapon of Boardroom Reports, and was instrumental in helping them become a $100 million per year company… mostly on the strength of his bullets.
If you can squint and see this example, you’ll notice it’s basically a mass of bullets.
Here are a few of them:
- What never to eat on an airplane
- How to outwit a mugger in a self-service elevator
- Legal way to take tax deduction for cost of commuting
- How thieves deactivate burglar alarms. Easy changes to make in yours
- What never to keep in your safe deposit boxes… never
- How to detect marked cards and loaded dice
So that’s it, except for this piece of advice.
Make sure you have a bullet file to COLLECT the bullets that really grab you.
And jump on the mailing lists of successful marketers and grab the great bullets they use to sell to you.
Better yet, apply for our FREE business analysis and we’ll show you how to have most of the bullet writing DONE-4-YOU… while you concentrate on growing or reinventing your business.
In the meantime, happy selling!
source http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DanielLevis/~3/22S5UnlA4ZI/
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