Doesn’t it suck when people don’t respect the price you charge? When they always want a special deal? Well guess what? It’s probably YOUR fault! When people ring around for quotes on price, and it happens a lot with Yellow Pages directory ads, they’ll ring 2-3 businesses usually. That’s what everyone has been ‘trained to do as consumers, and it’s the ads that force them to. How? All the ads look the same!

Just think about when you need a service, say your lawns mowed. So you open the yellow pages and look up lawn-mowing, and there are dozens of ads with people wanting to mow your lawn. So who do you choose?Whoever is cheapest, right? And why? Because all the ads look the same, so there isn’t anything that makes one business different from the next. And if that’s the case, the only difference comes down to the price!

Makes sense really, because if all the ads look the same then PRICE can be the only difference between them, right? So if the ads for each industry are virtually all saying the same thing, can you understand that you’re educating your market to base your value on price? Then what you need to do is create a unique selling proposition that will make you STAND OUT from your competition.

Now let me explain what a unique selling proposition is and how you can get one for your business. Every day we are subjected to about 4,000 to 5,000 advertising messages, so we all need to do work a bit harder to stand out from the crowd, and that’s what the USP will do for you. It’s that CORE reason that someone should buy from you. And here’s a great tool for finding your USP in half an hour.

Grab a piece of paper, and draw a straight line down the middle. On the top of the left-hand column I want you to write “You know how….” And here is where you write down all the things that your competitors do badly. Now we are just building a list, so don’t be critical of what you’re writing, or how you write it.

At the top of the right-hand column write “Well what we do is…” And here you write down all the things that you do that are great, basically laying out ALL your cards. Once you’ve done this, you should have a list of what your competitors do, and all the things you offer which are different from them, and this is what you base your Unique Selling Proposition around.

And if you haven’t come up with anything from this exercise, then you need to create something to be different! Once you have a USP, then turn it into a statement everywhere your advertising goes, as a reason why someone should do business with you over anyone else!

Another great way to make sure your customer is happy to pay extra for your business is what’s called ‘dollars for cents’ copy. We all love a bargain, right? What this means is to throw in so much value it’s not funny. Say for example you have a $99 product for sale, and you throw in $300 worth of free bonuses, you’ll make sure the customer comes out way in front in terms of value. So they are paying you just ‘cents’, but getting ‘dollars’ back in value.

The key with this method is to make sure the bonuses you throw in are low cost to you, but high perceived value to your customer. You could offer a free report, cd or dvd, any type of information products like this are quite inexpensive to produce, yet the information contained within could be very valuable to your customers. This makes the buying decision so much easier when your customer is getting much more value than what they are paying for. This is one technique you should always strive to use, and it can literally set your sales soaring!

Obviously, if you’re paying to advertise your business, you want people to read your whole ad, so they know what you’re offering and can make an informed decision about whether to do business with you, don’t you? Here’s a few ideas you can use in your advertising to keep your reader interested:- conversational short sentences, subheadings, break up long text into short paragraphs, using bullets to speed the reader through your copy, problem-solving copy the reader identifies with, talking in “What’s in it for me?” terms, educational copy, and not revealing price til the end.

Firstly, you need to be aware of the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) concept. What that means is you need to constantly tell your customer what’s in your ad for them, because if they’re reading your ad it’s only to find out something that they want to know about. YOUR ADS NEED TO BE THE ONES THAT REWARD THEM (while your competitors’ BORE them). This also means you should understand the difference between benefits and features.

Let’s say you sell a colour TV with a 90″ screen – that’s the feature. But the benefit of this is that the screen is so big that it makes your lounge room feel like a cinema! That’s the benefit, ok? Let me now introduce you to two powerful words which will automatically suck out the benefit of any feature;

“WHICH MEANS”

In the example above, in order to put it into WIIFM terms, you could put it together like this – “This sensational TV has a whopping 90″ screen, which means you can virtually turn your lounge room into a cinema!”.

Another powerful tool you can use in your copy is bullets. Why? Because you can package up your most exciting and riveting benefits into short little bursts. In fact, the effect of bullet after bullet of really amazing benefits can actually cause nervous tension in your reader. They can get so excited that they literally can’t read any more and go straight to the ordering details. That’s how powerful they are!

Here are some examples of how intriguing bullets can be in your advertising (then you can just adapt them to your own business)

* Why the advertising you’re probably running right now is wasting you thousands of dollars, and what you need to do to turn that loss into cash

* How to get movie and TV stars to help you sell your product or service

* How to get hundreds of prospects to seek YOU out

* The one mistake 99% of businesses make which loses them tons of credibility… and thousands of dollars in sales

* The secret about human nature which expert salespeople use to make their fortune

* 11 simple ways to make your business the “king” of your industry

In fact, each bullet point you write in your advertising should be just like mini headlines that promise something of value to the reader. You might have 25 or 50 bullet points in a long sales letter, if each of them are like a mini headline, then you may only need one to stand out to your reader and make them say “Yes, I need to know more about this!”

And this is also where educational copy comes in. You can’t assume that people know as much about your business as you do. You work in it every day, and possibly been doing it for years, and often you can get frustrated because you don’t think your customers respect your value. But the reality is, THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND YOUR VALUE.

So you need to educate them about the value you offer. If you tell them something about your company, then your job is to explain why that’s important for them. Let’s say you sell an expensive mountain bike, for example. In order to get people to buy the bike you’ve got to justify why they should spend $2000 on your bike. You’ve got to tell them the reasons why, which is what educational copy is all about.

Like that the bike has better suspension to handle rough terrain, a comfy seat that you could ride the bike for hours without getting sore, and maybe it has 50 gears for easy riding, and a GPS so you never get lost. These are all just examples of course, but notice how it’s talking mainly in benefits to the reader, how it will help them!

Copywriting can be a very lucrative field and is for many writers out there today. Within this article today, we’ll focus on how you can make copywriting a strong field for you so that you have million-dollar copywriting.

The first key and developing million-dollar copywriting is to make sure that you have the right skills for the job. Many people will focus on copywriting as a potentially lucrative field but do not have the necessary experience or expertise for this area. When you are looking to make a great deal of money in copywriting, make sure that you have a solid base of copywriting experience before you start to sell your services. If you have a solid base of copywriting experience along with testimonials and references from past work, you will have a better chance at being able to set your own rate.

To ensure that you are doing a great deal of copywriting, you will want to make sure that you are consistently prospecting for new business. As you are working on your current business and making your high rates, you’ll always want to make sure that you have worked in the pipeline. This will ensure that you are able to consistently bring in high revenues while not having to have as much slow time at some other freelancers have.

To effectively develop and prospect for new business, you must make sure to have your own website and have proven marketing techniques so that you can develop your million-dollar copywriting skills. You may be the best copywriter in the world but without a demand, you will not have a chance to prove your skills or bring in the paychecks that you want and deserve. There are many copywriters today who still do not have a website but this is just another way for you to set yourself apart from the competition. Another way you can set yourself apart from the competition is to develop a niche. This could mean that you do a great deal of copywriting within the healthcare industry because you worked with in it for several years.

Hopefully this article on million-dollar copywriting will have a strong effect on you. Demand on copywriting comes down to the same fundamentals that all new businesses have: an ability to prospect and sell your company to others while building and maintaining a strong client base. You will develop a strong client base by providing great work so that clients will come back to you for repeat business. This will limit the amount of time that you potentially have to prospect for business because you will have clients who will have consistent demand for it. For a company to survive, they must market and marketing requires copywriting. Marketing and copywriting are as essential to a company as oxygen is to human beings. By developing a particular niche within a field, you will set yourself apart from others who are trying to do it all.