For me, the most difficult part of writing ad copy has been to come up with great benefit statements. But, other than a good headline, to sell visitors to your service, product and ideas you need great benefit statements.
All of the other parts of copywriting such as good headlines, price offers and stories were much easier for me than finding good benefit statements. 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 may recall from Sales 101 that benefits are what sells your product or service, not features. Understanding that, I wanted to understand what exactly benefits really are. I discovered they are really just action items in disguise, agreed? You “save” money or “stop” wasting time, for example. So, what do you think about starting out each benefit statement with a verb that takes action? The process goes like this:
1. Alphabetize a long list of action verbs.
2. Display the alphabetized list of action verbs on your desk or, even better, view them on your computer screen so that you can see the list in its entirety
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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.
For example, the first word in my list of verbs is “Accelerate”.
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. You don’t need to stop to think if you are writing duplicate phrases down either, now is not the time. 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.
This process has worked for me to write great benefits statements, as well as when coming up with article ideas for my blog, 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.