My most challenging part of copywriting to sell something online has always been the task of writing benefit statements. And benefit statements are critical to selling your readers to try your products, services, and ideas, second only to the headline.
Coming up with headlines, stories, price offers and all the fancy Buy Now! buttons you’d need to fill a sales page was easy for me in comparison. The benefits list always drove me crazy; until I discovered the secret to creating one benefit or more per 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 that, I started to try to get to the bottom of what benefits actually are. They’re action items, right? For example, you “lose” weight or “make” money. So, what do you think about starting out each benefit statement with a verb that takes action? This is the process to take:
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
.
3. Make up a sentence describing your product or service using each verb on the list.
For example, the first word in my list of verbs is “Accelerate”.
So, I might say that my product helps to “accelerate” fingernail growth.
4. Write as many benefits as you can and don’t stop! You will be able to pare down your list to only those that give the best punch later. You don’t need to stop to think if you are writing duplicate phrases down either, now is not the time. Just keep an open mind and write down any benefit statements that come to mind about your product or service.
5. Now is the time that you will prioritize your list from most important to least.
This process has worked for me not only to create great benefits lists, but also for writing articles for my website like “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. Most of the time, you won’t need more than a great list of 20 benefits.
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.
