If you are like me, you have probably made the mistake of spending far too much time on product development and far too little time on marketing your product.  In fact, most businesses could use a little more time marketing than they on worrying about how the product will actually perform.  You see, even the best product in the world will simply not sell unless is it marketed well.  I cannot overemphasize the importance of good marketing in the success of a business - especially an online business. Copywriting goes hand in hand with good marketing.  Copywriting is such a huge component of marketing.  You must have great copy to be successful in an online venture.

So what is the big idea about all this talk of copywriting?  I would love to help you learn from my mistakes if you have not already make them yourself. When I first started my home internet business, I focused most of my attention on product creation.  I created products on a monthly basis, but although I spent so much time and energy on product creation, my profits were just not increasing.  I had yet to learn a way to market and sell the new products I was continually creating.  In fact, I needed a way to learn this vital skill fast!  Thus began my study or copywriting as it related to my business. 

Well known copywriter, Joe Sugarman, touts the goal of effective copywriting as causing  a person to voluntarily give his hard-earned money for a service or product. Through my search on effective copywriting, I have picked up a few tips and suggestions that I would like to share with you.  Here are the two concepts that have made the biggest impact on my business.

Solid and Thorough Research 

I cannot tell you how important this is if you are to have a great sales letter for your online business. The biggest question is then what you should research. The first thing you need to consider is your customer. It is vital to know who you are marketing to. You must know what they like and dislike, what makes them tick, what causes them to lose sleep at night, what gets him motivated, what things are a source of fear or frustration for her and so forth. I recommend listing these things out in as much detail as you can. After you have a list of this sort, you can begin to address the objections or concerns of your unique customer.

Think about your target consumer once again. Does she use specific language or does he have a certain bias in the way he makes decisions. A great example of this idea is an engineer. Not to be stereotypical, but most engineers tend to be fairly analytical when they make decisions. Give them a decision to make based on feelings or ideas and they generally just do not connect with that idea. However, when you approach them based on your factual and and specific statistics and there is an idea that they are more excited about getting behind. In essence, you have to learn to speak the "language" or your target audience. Know their keywords, the language they speak.

You want to do this so you can really get to know your potential clients and so that your sales letter is targeted to a person, not a group of people. You want to have a sales letter that is extremely personal.

In addition to getting to know your target consumer, it is also vital that you do the research to investigate your product. What are the benefits and features of your product? How do these features help and aid the life of your target customers? It is a great idea to keep these close by as you write your sales letter. Remember that the features tell what the product does while the benefits tell your customer what is in if for them. Each benefit should tell your customer what is so great about that benefit. This is what your customer is thinking as he or she is reading your sales letter, so you need to answer that question for them.

The second tip I have found to really improve my copywriting is to use index cards. 

I remember using these back in the day on research papers in high school.  Bring them back to the table.  Here is another use for those index cards.  As I mentioned above, you need to ask questions about your customer, about their needs and desires.  As you go through each question about your customer, go ahead and write the answer on a separate index card. At the end of the day, you will have a good amount of information on your target client.  

The next step is to put each benefit and feature on an individual card. On each card, write a few good sentences that you might be able to include on your sales letter.  Remember that you only want to address the point you are working on.  If you come up with another idea as you are working, put it on a new index card. Also, keep in mind that this does not have to be perfect.  this is your rough draft, so to speak. You can always change it later. Now you want to spread out your index cards and start writing.  This is a technique I learned from Dan Kennedy.

Use these strategies for creating a really effective sales letter and improving your marketing through better copy. Remember that skipping out the portion of research you need to do in order to have good copywriting will come back to haunt you in the end. Your sales letter will fail to address the concerns for your client and you simply will not make the sales you desire. Put the time in up front and reap the benefits in the long run!