How to Repurpose Copywriting for Maximum Value

by admin on March 1, 2010

Increase Your Exposure and Results by Repurposing Your Purchased Sales Copy.

Sometimes it can be hard to swallow a five-figure price tag for high quality, unique and targeted content and sales materials. Yet some businesses do it all the time. They have no issue whatsoever with paying 10 or even 20 thousand dollars for a single sales letter. Why is that?

Do they have a super high-priced product that’s going to give them a huge return? Maybe.

Are they just so wealthy that they don’t care how much things cost?

Probably not.

Do they know a secret you don’t know?

Most likely, yes.

I share this secret with my clients all the time, and it totally changes how they value the writing they pay for. It doesn’t seem fair that some business owners know the secret, and some don’t. So, I’m going to share it with you.

The Secret to Maximizing the Value of Purchased Copywriting

The secret is simple: Rearrange and repurpose your content.

Once you’ve paid for a piece of copywriting, it’s yours to do with as you please. That means you can chop it up, release it in pieces, use bits and bobs for different things.

Things like:

  • Web Pages
  • Email Autoresponders
  • Whitepapers
  • Press Releases
  • Article Marketing
  • Newsletters
  • Blog Posts
  • Twitter Posts
  • Social Media Bookmarking
  • Special Reports
  • Direct Mail
  • Advertorials
  • Speeches
  • Print Ads

The list goes on and on.

It’s easy to get more than $30,000 of value from a $10,000 sales letter.  Here’s how:

Let’s say you paid $10,000 for a well-written, persuasive long-form sales letter. That’s a lot of dough, but not unreasonable when you have a solid product or service and a high-quality list of prospects to sell to. But a savvy business owner like you will work that copy for all it’s worth.

The first thing you do is put the entire sales letter on a web landing page. Easy peasy.

Now, every sales letter should have certain elements in it, each of which corresponds to a certain page on a more traditional style website. Here’s how it breaks down:

Sales Letter Component:                                                Web Page:

Credibility builder                                                          About/Bio

Objections                                                                        FAQ

Offer, Guarantee                                                            Products/Services

Testimonials                                                                   Clients/Case Studies/Testimonials

Order section                                                                  Contact

USP                                                                                   Our Philosophy

So, it’s a simple matter of breaking the sales letter apart and using the copy sections as the corresponding pages on a traditional site.  Essentially, you’re getting two websites for the price of one.  You can either use each one for a different audience, or split-test them against the same audience to see which one converts better. That’s at least $5,000 saved.

Next, you decide to take out the section of the sales letter that builds your credibility and use it as a press release—about $1,000 saved.

Then you take each one of the objections dealt with in the letter and reformat it as an article. You repurpose these for blog posts and email autoresponders. If you have, say, seven of them—you’ve saved about $1,750.

Now you’re on a roll. What else can you use the copy for?

Every well-written subhead makes a nice Twitter post—you’ve saved time, if not money.

Then you realize you can take each blog entry and post it to social bookmarking sites—gaining you lots of SEO value.

You combined the headline, a testimonial and the offer to make a print ad—Another $1,000 saved.

Someone on your staff says he needs a whitepaper to give away at a convention he’s speaking at. Why pay up to $10,000 for that? You’ve already got one. Just rearrange and print out a combination of your FAQ, case studies and weave in your offer and contact page.

Wait, your original sales letter doubles as a direct mail piece. All you need to do is take out a juicy testimonial and reformat that as a lift letter—Another $10,000 project you don’t have to pay for.

Do you see how a little creativity and a WELL WRITTEN sales letter can save you more than you invested in the first place?

And that’s before you start counting the orders that come in from all these marketing efforts.

The key, of course, is that you must be sure you’re getting the very best writing possible.  And that means investing in a bit more in a copywriter on the front end.  If you’re not comfortable doing the rearranging yourself, often your writer will work with you to repurpose the piece for nominal fee (or even free.)

So, before you decide to go with a cut-rate copywriter because they’re cheaper. Think about the long-term needs of your marketing plan. If you’re going to end up hiring out all the writing anyway, doesn’t it make more sense to invest in the best you can get and maximize the value of every word?

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The Truth About Before & After in Web Copywriting

by admin on December 7, 2009

How many marketing and advertising campaigns offer before and after comparison? A product makes big bold claims and proceeds to “prove” it with a photo or a testimonial (or even both, in a shrewd campaign.)

Do you believe the claim? Possibly.

Do you buy the product? Maybe.

But what happens then? You take the product home and that’s it. The end of the sales cycle. At least, that’s how many advertisers think. The goal is to get the consumer to buy, right?

Wrong!

The ultimate goal is to get the consumer to use the product, get great results, tell all her friends and then become a lifetime customer.

The magic is in the “during” — the use, the consumption. (Why else would they be called consumers?) If you truly care about your customer achieving the promised results, and not just selling product, then you must encourage her to use what she bought. When you do this, two powerful things happen:

1) Your customer becomes a walking, talking marketing machine.

2) Your product claims become much more believable, resulting in higher sales.

People buy things because they hope your product will change them in some way for the better. It will make them slimmer, happier, smarter, more secure, more attractive. Even something as mundane as buying a gallon of milk makes a consumer think “this brand will make me healthier” or “that brand recycles their waste, which helps the environment, which makes me a better person for buying it.”

Let’s take a weight loss product for example. Say I’m reading a natural health magazine (which makes me feel smart, hip and environmentally responsible already) and I come across an ad for an herbal supplement guaranteed to “melt fat away while you sleep.”

Uh-huh. Okay. Sure.

Then I look at the before and after pictures provided. The model shows definite improvement in the photos, but my sales resistance is automatically raised to “red alert!” Did they manipulate the photos? Did they make up the testimonial? Was there some other factor that contributed to the weight loss? No little pill could possibly do that all by itself, it must be bogus.

Yet some people will still buy the product because the sales copy emphasizes how bad it feels to be overweight, it hits all your emotional hot buttons about how embarrassing it is when you don’t fit in a seat at the movies, and how awful you feel when your son’s friends make jokes about you, and how tragic it would be if you died early from being “morbidly obese.” The ad shames some people into buying the product because they desperately want to change. They want to be that “after” photo.

Great. So you’ve sold a few products. But if that consumer doesn’t follow the program properly and experiences disappointing results, what happens? They don’t buy more (lost sales for you) and they persuade others that your product doesn’t work (more lost sales.)

So, what do you do when you have a truly valuable product and you want to erase initial sales resistance and ensure repeat customers will spread your message?

You make consumption easy, rewarding, and you show the “in-between” stuff.

You talk about the “during.”

This isn’t the sexy part. It probably isn’t very dramatic. But it encourages people to believe your claims and shows them that they really can have the results if they use the product as recommended.

Many people simply don’t believe the “after” photo. The desired result can seem so impossible to attain, that they discount it as false. A headline that reads “lose 127 pounds” makes you say “yeah, sure” and flip the page or click the back button.

But an ad that explains how the product is used, how long it takes to see results, what happens in the meantime (especially if it’s a negative), and promises to help you every step of the way with true customer support is immediately placed head and shoulders above the competition on the believability scale. Add a testimonial walking you through the “during” and you’re home free.

“I lost 127 pounds. It was slow going at first, and I wanted to give up, but the people at Acme Weight Loss really cared about my success and didn’t let me quit. Their daily inspirational emails kept me going through the inevitable plateaus and tough times. And I knew I could call their hotline when I felt like giving up. If you’ve tried everything to lose weight, give this one more try. I made it, and you can, too!”

Pushing emotional hot buttons using before and after comparisons can persuade a few people into buying. But simply adding the in-between stuff and using encouraging sales copy will inspire the desired action (a purchase) and make repeat buying and word-of-mouth a regular occurrence.

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Don’t Make This Common Mistake When Hiring a Direct Marketing Copywriter

November 30, 2009

Hiring a copywriter makes good sense. After all, your time is better spent doing what you do best, running your business. Over the past decade or so, I’ve seen people make the same mistakes over and over when they hire people in my profession. Whenever I take on a client, they come under my care, [...]

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