The 7 Rules of Copywriting for Beginners
Everything you need to know about copywriting for beginners.
Well, almost everything.
We’re told on the internet content is king.
To put it another way, copy (aka content) is king.
The legendary copywriter John Carlton once said,
Nothing happens in business until the sales copy is written.
And “Nothing happens online until the sales copy is written.”
If you think about that for just a minute, you’ll realize how profound that is.
This is the most important part of copywriting for beginners….
If you stripped out all the copy from your online business, what would you have left?
Nothing!
Now if you were to layer it all back in, but this time making it twice or three times more persuasive…what would you have?
Instant wealth.
Why?
Because of the multiplying effect.
The multiplying effect happens when ALL your sales messages combine into an “orchestra of persuasion.”
With every instrument playing in perfect pitch.
Whether it’s emails, videos, sales letters, landing pages, blog posts, articles, etc.
All of it will be music to your prospect’s ears.
If I had in my hands what you’re about to discover, I could have cut my learning time down to under a year.
And that’s what I want for you.
A fast, effortless way to write better copy without the pain I had.
Yes, I know that’s a bold promise to make if you’re looking for a copywriting for beginners course.
But I intend to deliver.
You’re about to discover how you can soon become far more persuasive and create money just with your words.
You’ll join an elite group of persuasive men and women who are making the big money online.
You’re going to learn about the new breakthroughs in psychology and how you can apply them immediately to your business.
Breakthroughs like:
- The quickest, easiest way to bypass resistance so you can get more opt-ins.
- How to double the number of prospects coming onto your email list every day.
- The simple secret that’s guaranteed to increase the number of people who buy from you week after week.
- You’re going to learn a proven system that allows you to break down the wall your prospects put up to resist you.
- You’re going to learn that on one side of this wall is total indifference to you and yet on the other side is intense interest.
- You’re also going to learn what really drives people to act. What the four human motivations are for doing anything?
No, this is not about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
It’s not about psychological tricks or manipulation.
It is about the underlying needs that compel people to act.
It’s a new way of looking at how to persuade people unconsciously so they can’t resist buying from you.
You’re going to learn a simple system that will put an end to your struggle to get your conversions high enough to make a decent living online.
Even if you’re a beginner copywriter.
This means you’ll have a system that will wipe away the frustrations of making more money and give you a simple understanding of how to bypass resistance from almost anyone.
What’s more, you’re going to discover breakthroughs in technology as they apply to online copywriting.
The Copywriting For Beginners Crash Course.
By Clive Cable
Want to know what really motivates people?
There are four core drives we all have.
Three of these drives are positive and one is negative.
The negative one is what causes all your problems when going after new customers.
That’s why it needs to be studied in great depth if you’re going to eliminate resistance to your sales message.
In 2010 a groundbreaking book titled ‘Emotionomics’ was published that showed for the first time the role emotions play in business.
The author Dan Hill shows why people don’t buy from you.
In a moment I’m going to show you what that is and why you’ll always struggle online if you don’t know what you’re up against.
But first, let’s begin with copywriting for beginners basics.
I’m going over these because I can’t be one hundred percent certain where you’re at right now in terms of what you know about persuasion.
So, if you’ve heard some of this before, please bear with me because in just a few minutes we’ll get back to that negative emotion that’s standing between you and success online today.
To say that in any type of business “persuasion is power” puts the focus where it should be if you want success.
Persuasion is the number one skill in business because making sales creates profits and pleasure of all kinds.
Whenever there’s a problem in business with not having enough money it’s because someone somewhere doesn’t know how to persuade others or they are useless at convincing others.
In some cases, I’ve found business owners don’t like to sell or won’t sell.
I find that weird because persuasion brings in the money in business. Let’s look at what persuasion isn’t.
Copywriting for beginners rule number one.
Persuasion is NOT manipulation.
Far from it.
Persuasion done right – the way you’ll discover here – will have people believing and feeling that they’ve won by being persuaded by you.
Your job is to have them believe you’ve done them a huge favor.
Now, if you still think that persuasion involves underhanded deceit then consider this.
Harville Hendrix Ph.D. said:
There’s a part of your brain – the limbic system – that can’t tell the difference between itself and others and has no concept of past, present, or future. That timeless, objectless part of your brain receives what it’s giving because it doesn’t know whether it’s going out or coming in.
If you care for and give to another person, their brain can’t tell whether it’s you’re doing it to them or if they’re doing it to themselves. The brain always receives what it gives.
What Harville is saying here is, that you get what you give in life.
If you trick people, you’ll be tricked.
If you give your best to people, you’ll get the best.
In the film ‘The Secret’ we’re told we create our own reality by what we think.
It’s the same with persuasion.
We create our world by persuading people to buy what’s good for them.
Copywriting for beginners rule number two.
Align your copy with the four drives that motivate people.
The defend drive.
You start with lowering your prospect’s defenses, so they don’t reject you. Once you get past your prospect’s defenses then you begin to bond with them by revealing interesting facts about yourself.
The bond drive.
When you’re in the bonding phase of your sales message you’ll be telling your story. Here you’ll want to connect with your prospects.
However, when you connect in a structured way, it compels your prospects to engage with you.
You’re going to reveal certain intimate details that bond you to your prospects. In effect, you’re being ‘private in public.’
You show how you struggled and were once where they are now.
The learn drive.
This is the third part of your sales sequence and the place where you inject your ideas, benefits, and logical arguments for buying your product.
These frameworks are designed to make your prospect go from what he thinks is possible, to what he believes can be probable for him.
Your prospect knows that certain things are possible in life, like winning the lottery. But he also knows the chances of winning are improbable.
Yes, he sees in the paper that people win every week… it’s just that he doesn’t believe he will, so he WON’T buy a ticket.
And it’s the same with your prospects. If you don’t show them how they can go from what’s possible to what’s probable in their model of the world, they won’t buy your ‘ticket’ either.
This vital part of your persuasion process must be in every message you send out.
You’re going to want to know about these frameworks and how to structure them for maximum believability.
Some concepts are difficult to grasp at first so that’s why I’ve created a way to install these ideas into your mind in a way that takes no effort on your part.
If you haven’t yet heard about the science of light and sound learning you’re in for a real treat.
But I’m getting ahead of myself here.
You’ve got to get past people’s “defend drive” and move smoothly into their bonding drive to advance the sale.
Once there, you move them into the learning drive and then you set them up for the last phase.
The acquire drive.
You want your prospect to take some sort of action. Here’s where you close the sale. You want them to accept your offer.
Before you move into the actual ‘asking for the order’ part, you MUST strengthen their desire.
There are thirteen ways to intensify people’s desires.
When you know all thirteen ways of intensification and how to use them, your response rates will amaze you.
Very few people know about these thirteen ways to fan the flame of desire.
All master copywriters know them and as soon as you’re exposed to them your business will take off so quick, that you’ll be in for a white-knuckle ride as you see your income increasing fast.
Copywriting for beginners rule number three.
Know how to tap into your reader’s secret desires.
Let me explain a bit about desire before I go on, and how it fits with all four drives.
I’m going to get a little technical here, but you’ll soon see why.
There’s no such thing as an isolated emotion.
Emotions happen because of the reactions we have to a certain stimulus in our environment.
And these stimulants may vary but the emotional reactions to them don’t. For example, if we are attacked, we will want to defend ourselves or get away from the attacker.
People take actions based on one of these four core motivations. And these motivations are turned on by triggers within us, or within our environment.
We seek to defend those we’ve bonded with, our ideas, our long-held beliefs, our opinions, and so on.
Now let’s look closer at the need to Bond.
The book “How to win friends and influence people” says it is all about bonding. We love to be liked. We love to join groups and be a member of some organization or another.
Most of us have a need for romance, to have someone to care for and who cares for us.
Another way our need to bond with others can be fulfilled is through friendships and communities like families.
The word family comes from the word “familiar.”
That’s the main reason online communities are powerful, like Facebook.
In the offline world, we love being with our friends and taking time for small talk. We love sharing our tastes in music, dancing, fishing, and golfing. You name it we do it.
The opposite of bonding is isolation. That’s why solitary confinement is seen as one of the ultimate forms of punishment.
Okay now, let’s focus on the need to Learn.
There’s a trend online for ‘how to’ eBooks.
What does that tell you?
It shows that people love to learn.
For over 30 years there have been books and courses sold on memory training, speed reading, and mind maps.
I should know, I’ve bought most of them!
These are all powerful indicators of the drive to learn.
The multi-trillion-dollar personal development industry thrives on this core motivation.
Learning is something we automatically do. And today more people than ever want to learn so they can improve their life.
The opposite of learning is ignorance, and no one likes to think of themselves as ignorant.
That’s why the drive to learn comes into play.
The ‘learn’ drive fits neatly into the other three. We learn to defend ourselves against those who would do us harm.
We learn to bond with people who can help us or are good for us. And, if we’re smart, we learn to make those relationships better as time goes on.
Especially our romantic relationships.
And we learn to be better at our work and our hobbies.
I hope you’re seeing how these drive every decision YOU make.
Socrates said, “know thyself.”
When you know yourself well enough and you are your own best prospect for what you sell, you’ll be so far ahead of your competition they’ll need a telescope to see you!
If you sell an information product then you have a story to tell.
The story you’ll tell gives you an ‘unfair advantage’ over practically everyone else in your market.
Okay, one of the keys to understanding these four core drives is that your prospects can only experience ONE of these drives at a time.
Okay let’s look at the drive to Acquire
This motive at its basic level is selfish in nature.
It’s like the Joan Armatrading song, ‘me, myself I.’
We are all addicted to acquiring. That’s one reason why men have more shirts than they need, and women have more shoes than they could ever wear!!!
By acquiring what we call “essentials” we feel more secure.
This is going beyond mere survival to being very comfortable or fulfilled.
The need to acquire can also be seen as status-seeking. Here we acquire symbols like a BMW, a big house, a yacht, a high income, and so on.
Behind the need to acquire is the fear of public humiliation from not being a success in business or in relationships.
Are you beginning to see how you can use these breakthroughs in psychology?
This new psychology can be used in online copywriting, email writing, blogging, social media, etc.
With all the skepticism online right now, you need a method of standing out from the crowd in a way that excites your prospects to want to connect with you.
I’m going to show you exactly how this resource can be applied to beginning copywriting.
Copywriting for beginners rule number four.
Understanding brain science for better conversions.
These four core motivations fit in with the three parts of the human brain.
For example, the reptilian brain is concerned mainly with defending itself and the need for survival.
The limbic system is interested in acquiring new things to make our survival more comfortable. It’s also focused on bonding so that we can have pleasure and security
The neo-cortex is the newest part of the brain. This is the part where we learn to become more sophisticated human beings
Okay, now we’re going to look at WHY these four drives are essential to your online success.
You will take them through a sequence. You start out with getting past their defenses.
Then you begin the process of bonding with them.
After that, they’ll want to learn about what you have. Then they’ll want to acquire your product.
I’ll show you later how to get put all of this together to make your promotions compelling.
Now I want to switch gears a little here and tell you about another significant piece of the persuasion puzzle.
There’s a question that you must ask yourself before you write another word of persuasive copy.
This question is vitally important to the success of your promotion.
In fact, get this wrong and you’ll just end up frustrated.
But get this right and you’ll make even more money.
Copywriting for beginners rule number five.
You must answer the question, “how open are your prospects to your message?”
Some prospects have been approached so many times with a product like yours that their defenses will go up if they see a similar product. (think life insurance!)
It’s a natural knee-jerk reaction.
If you’re trying to persuade someone who has seen products like yours… tried them but didn’t get the results they were promised… then what?
Well, then you’ll have a fight on your hands.
That fight is their defense drive kicking in.
They’ll use that drive because they don’t believe that what you have will work for them.
They have low self-esteem and no confidence.
That means they’ll hide behind their ‘wall of indifference’ until you create desire.
You can only do this by showing them they can go from a possibility to probability.
Copywriting for beginners rule number six.
Understand the frameworks of strong sales copy.
These frameworks set the stage for persuasion. They do it subconsciously.
No, not by manipulation, but by intensifying an existing desire.
When you or I are interested in something and we have a passion for it, virtually anything we see on that subject automatically gets our interest.
Normally this happens below our conscious awareness.
And we secretly crave it.
When you can do this for your prospects you’ll jump over their wall of indifference into the lush garden of intense desire.
Because in that garden your prospect wants what your product promises.
They will be surrounded by the ‘air of believability.’
They will trust the architecture of your garden design to bring them into a place of hope and probability.
With the Internet the way it is today most people have seen most products.
And if your product falls into this category then you will have to take a new and fresh approach, otherwise, your prospect will not be ready to accept your sales message.
And even if you have a new and innovative product, your approach must still be in alignment with their readiness to accept your sales message.
Otherwise, your message will be about as welcoming as an incontinent frog in a punchbowl.
Here’s something worth knowing.
After 20 years of research, the world’s most successful online information publishing company, Agora, has found some of the best ways to reduce resistance online.
They’ve come up with six proven ways to approach a prospect based on their willingness and readiness to accept their sales message.
These six methods are so successful they have built an online business that exceeds two billion a year.
They are the true pioneers on the online world.
Here’s one of the things they found in their research and years of extensive testing online:
If you are too direct with people who don’t know about you or your product then you will invariably meet with resistance.
Over the years they became masters of ‘indirectness.’
Copywriting for beginners rule number seven.
Never EVER present your offer until the prospect wants to and is ready to buy your product or service.
This is CRITICAL to your success online today and the main reason why Agora makes so much money.
So that brings us back to the subject of emotions.
The four core drives we looked at earlier revolve around emotions and so does the initial approach you take with your prospects.
Remember people are not rational beings…
They will look to defend themselves before they do anything else if they don’t know you.
If you can’t get past their defenses then you can’t persuade them.
And that’s why you need to know about these six approaches that Agora found.
These six approaches will not only help you get past their defenses, but they will also help you to bond with your prospects so that you can begin the real persuasion process.
It’s been said enough times now that people buy from people they know like and trust.
That’s the bonding process.
Once you get past this, you enter the phase where your prospects need to learn.
But, it all begins with your prospects’ readiness to accept your message.
With each step forward, you must have them ready to accept the next stage.
In other words, you get past their defenses by using one of the six approaches, and then they are ready to accept you and willing to bond with you.
Once that happens, they are willing and ready to accept you and learn from you.
That’s when you tell the story of who you are and why you do what you do.
To do this right you’ll use one of the frameworks I mentioned earlier.
After that, they are willing and ready to buy from you, and that’s when you bring in the right combination of the desired strengtheners.
So, your initial approach revolves around these six categories Agora discovered.
And these same approaches must be used across all your marketing media.
You’ll use them in your e-mails, video sales letters, landing pages, Facebook adverts, PPC campaigns, and any other way you choose to generate leads.
When you begin with one of these six approaches your response rates will increase dramatically.
And any resistance will melt away.
Let’s go over that again but in a different way.
This will help you use this material in your next promotion.
Before you begin writing, you’ll choose one of the six approaches Agora uses to eliminate resistance.
Then you’ll use one of the frameworks to talk about yourself.
These demonstrate why doing business with you is your prospect’s best and only choice.
Then you’ll use the thirteen ways to strengthen desire.
This may seem a little daunting at first glance but putting it all into practice is simple.
Once you have a step-by-step method for putting this all together, you’ll be amazed at how easy it really is.
To know more about copywriting for beginners contact Clive Cable
Clive will show you
- the eight frameworks of copywriting.
- the six ways to start every promotion.
- and the thirteen ways to amplify desire.
