Module 6: Next Steps

Learning Objective

Consolidate and implement your learning and plan future action steps so you can achieve the goals you set for this course.

You’ve made it to the end of the course, so now it’s time to reflect on what you’ve learned and plan what’s next.

Lesson: Review and Improve (Frequently)

Once your copy is written and out there, that doesn’t mean you’re done.

You need to keep the copy’s performance under review to ensure it’s delivering the conversion rate you want.

Plan a review after three months to see what results you’re getting. Look at your metrics, but also identify exactly what in the copy itself is working. Keep an account of this to try it out for future sales copy. You might want to split-test another aspect that you believe is holding back sales.

Skills Improvement

You don’t need a degree to be a good copywriter, but you do have to learn and practice the craft, and that takes time. You can set yourself practice exercises weekly to get used to the process even if you don’t have copy to write just now.

Invest in your level of skill further by taking more training in copywriting, reading books on copywriting, and perhaps even finding a copywriting mentor.

From time to time, reflect on your progress and congratulate yourself when your sales copy produces results.

What You Learned

This is a course you can refer back to time and time again, helping you whenever you want to refine your sales copywriting skills. It’s important to reflect on what you’ve learned, so answer these questions:

Questions to Answer

• What have you learned about how to craft sales copy that converts?
• What difficulties have you encountered?
• How do you plan to address any issues?
• What further steps can you take to become totally comfortable with the process?

Action Steps

Plan a three-month review of a new piece of copy to analyze results.

Review the course thoroughly and answer the questions in your Action Guide.

Use the action plan in the Action Guide to record your goals and what needs to happen next.

The Hidden "Buy Now" Button

Wouldn't it be wonderful if your prospect had a hidden Buy Now button and you knew exactly how to activate it?

Well, here's the good news.

We all have them and finding them is a technique that can be learned.

In fact, it was all revealed way back in 1931, long before email and the internet.

Heck, long before computers.

Back when direct mail meant snail mail and was the only alternative to face-to-face selling.

By a man named Robert Collier.

Who became a millionaire by applying the principles he discovered.

Back when "millionaire" meant a lot more than it does today.

The Letter Book

Here is a quote from Robert Collier's The Letter Book:

“The reader wants certain things. The desire for them is, consciously or unconsciously, the dominant idea in his mind all the time.

You want him to do a certain definite thing for you. How can you tie this up to the thing he wants, in such a way that the doing of it will bring him a step nearer to his
goal?

Getting your reader's attention is your first job.

That done, your next problem is to put your idea across, to make him see it as you see it - in short, to visualize it so clearly that he can build it piece by piece in his own mind as a child builds a house of blocks, or puts together the pieces of a picture puzzle.

The mind thinks in pictures, you know. One good illustration is worth a thousand words. But one clear picture built up in the reader's mind by your words is worth a
thousand drawings, for the reader colors that picture with his own imagination, which is more potent than all the brushes of all the world's artists.

And the secret of painting such a picture in the reader's mind is to take some familiar figure his mind can readily grasp, add one point of interest here, another there, and so on until you have built a complete word picture of what you have to offer.

It is like building a house.

You put up your framework.

You add a roof, doors, sides, windows, doors, stairs, until you have your structure complete.

You would not start with one side, or the roof.

You get a solid foundation first; then you add to it logically, piece by piece, until you have your finished building.”

Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Words?

We've all heard the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words".

But Robert Collier turns that on its head.

"But one clear picture built up in the reader's mind by your words is worth a thousand drawings, for the reader colors that picture with his own imagination, which is more potent than all the brushes of all the world's artists."

Your Most Important Takeaway

This training course has covered many aspects of better copywriting.

But the most important principal is this:

Every piece of copy you write, from sales letter to short email, has one primary purpose. And that's to create a picture in your correspondent's mind that will move them towards the desired action.

Keep that in mind at all times and success will follow inevitably.