I remember going to a workshop in 2003.
The price of the workshop was $8000. Plus there was overseas travel involved. And yes, the usual accommodation and food expenses.
In all it was going to cost me almost $12,000 to get to this one workshop.
And I made the decision on the basis of a single bullet.
No, it wasn’t the kind of bullet you see in the image of this post. What kind of bullet am I talking about?
These are the fascinating bullet points that you see on effective sales pages. Or in highly readable blog content. You’ll also see bullets on the cover of magazines and newspapers, even if they don’t use an actual bullet symbol.
If you want to sell more effectively, here’s how bullets can help you.
When you’re writing copy — or creating a speech, rehearsing a presentation, or writing an article for that matter — don’t sit down and start with your text or sales copy.
Start with bullets instead
Once you have your headline, but before you start drafting the full text, bullets help you clear your mind. They focus your marketing message.
Let me give you an example of bullets in marketing material.
- The Spider’s Secret. How to get customers to call you instead of you chasing them.
- How to get your fee paid 100% in advance every time.
- How to create a huge demand for your product or service. This secret is over 10,000 years old and works every single time. And most business doesn’t use it.
- Why your website, business card and your advertising can turn out to be a total waste of resources and effort. How the eye sees things and what causes customers to buy.
- The secrets of being able to sell the same product or service at up to 400% higher prices.
- How to create a sequential system that will bring business even if you don’t have a single new customer.
- The Three Prong system. This tool will change the way you look at your business forever. Ignore at your risk.
- How we got over US$40,000 worth of products complimentary this year alone … and how you can do it too.
- Piggybacking: You’ll laugh and cry when you see how simple it is to piggyback on the success of others. The more the others succeed, the more you succeed. And all at zero cost to you.
- The Secrets of Conversion. How to engage and make your customer never want to leave you, and instead, continuously buy from you.
What you see are just some of the bullets that we used when we sold one of our courses. At that point, the course wasn’t ready. Just the bullets were.
Bullets are your foundational material. Bullets free you to run wild with your thoughts and create the outline for your sales copy and syllabus. They’re usually tightly focused on benefits, so they’re appealing to customers. And they help the customer make a decision.
Often, the customer may be too busy to read every word of your copy. So they’ll skim until they reach the bullets. Then they hit the brakes.
What made me hit the brakes back in 2003
One bullet caused me to stop and decide to spend all that money on that single workshop.
That one bullet was my starting point. From then on, everything I read on that sales page was just an added bonus. The more I read, the more I felt that it was exactly what I was looking for.
But let’s get one thing straight:
One bullet alone can’t take the entire load. The rest of the sales page needs to do the job as well.
We know this to be true, because if we turned things around and put just one bullet on the page — and no other sales copy — I would most certainly not have bought the workshop.
But the one bullet acted as a brake. It stopped me, and then got me to re-evaluate everything else. And that’s why bullets are so darned important.
No matter how good your marketing material, your customer will usually buy for just one reason.
They’ll pick one bullet out of the whole lot and say, ‘Yeah, that’s what I really, really want!’ And they’ll buy. So before you go into that long-winded presentation; before you write copy; before you do anything:
Write bullets.
They’re the key to getting customers to stop, read, and then buy.
About the Author: Sean D’Souza offers a great free report on ‘Why Headlines Fail’ when you subscribe to his Psychotactics Newsletter. Be sure to check out his blog, too.
P.S.
Looking for help creating powerful bullets — and the rest of the sales copy that needs to go with them?
Take a look at Premise. It will help you quickly build a great-looking sales page, craft copy that converts (including those fascinating bullets), and optimize your page until it’s working exactly the way you want it.
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