Within this article on copywriting tips and tricks, we will look at how you can take a sales letter and maximize its usage in eight different ways. This comes directly from a book written by Dan S. Kennedy, titled The Ultimate Sales Letter. This book comes highly recommended as he is one of the foremost experts on copywriting with in the world today.

Copywriters have a very interesting niche in that you can use your own writing to help you develop leads. If you find that you had many inconsistent advertising methods, think about developing a sales letter to help bring in qualified leads. If you develop a successful sales letter, you can send this out in quantities which you pre-determine. The beauty of this is that you can quantify the amount of work that you want to do in a given month and mail out that many sales letters. After having used a consistent sales letter for a certain period of time, you will know what the response rate is and this will allow you to know how much business you should potentially get from mailing a certain number of letters. This can make sure that you always have clients coming into the door when you want them to. It can also help you better pattern the business after your life and lifestyle so that you can pick up the pace when you have extra time and slow things down when other parts of your life become busier.

If you have quite a few clients who are telemarketers or you would like to start developing telemarketers as potential clients, you may want to look into developing a sales letter for one of these companies. Telemarketing has become much more expensive and more inconsistent these days due to new laws and it is an industry with very high turnover. Developing a sales letter to send to qualified prospects in the beginning can make telemarketing more effective for these companies and potentially reduce turnover. If you are able to quantify the savings in training employees as well as in better sales, you will find yourself called upon by many telemarketing companies because you will have put yourself in their shoes and can understand the business struggles that they go through.

The final way that we will use a sales letter and one way in which you could increase your business is to focus upon dentists and doctors office. Often these professionals are consistently looking for new clients and this could be a way to help them out. You could use a sales letter to help stimulate referrals.

These were just a few of the ideas that came from this great book. If you are looking at copywriting and have been in the field for awhile, this article can be very valuable because it can offer new places to look for business. Hopefully this article on copywriting tips and checks will benefit you with more dollars in your bank account.

If you want people to buy, you gotta ask for the sale.

Truly, it is that simple. Yet I can’t tell you how many ads, Web sites, brochures, sales letters, etc. are floating around out there that aren’t asking.

So, what is a call to action? It’s telling people what action you want them to take. Typical calls to action include:

Hurry in today.
Buy now.
Call now.
Visit now.
Click here now.

Nothing terribly sexy, I agree. However, if you want to see an increase in your customers, leads, income, etc., this is an essential component.

But, you might be thinking, isn’t it obvious? Why else would you be running an ad if you didn’t want people to buy what you’re selling?

Good question. And it’s true, people do know (if they stop to think about it) that you would probably like them to buy from you.

However, the unfortunate truth is your potential customers aren’t going to spend that much time thinking about it. People have too much going on in their lives to spend very much time and energy on your business. If they do read your ad or promotional material and it doesn’t contain a call to action, they’ll likely say, “Oh, that’s nice” and go on to the next thing.

And even if they were interested in purchasing your offerings, they may not know what their next step should be. Do they pick up the phone? Go to a specific Web page? Visit a store? And if they don’t know what they should be doing, chances are they won’t do anything at all.

So you need to tell your potential customers what you want them to do. (Remember, people are busy, and if you don’t make doing business with you easy, they probably won’t do business with you at all.)

So, back to the above call to actions. Did you notice they all had something in common? The word “now” (or, in the case of the first one, “today”).

If people think they can buy from you anytime, they’ll say “oh, I can do this later.” And later rarely comes. You need to give them a reason to buy from you right now, while they’re interested. Adding the “now” or some other urgency or scarcity technique (maybe a limited time offer or few copies left statement) is a great way to push people into doing what you want them to do right now and not later.

While we’re on the topic of calls to action, I want to talk about one other type of advertising campaign where you rarely see calls to action. These are called branding campaigns. Typically they’re shown on national television by big corporations (MacDonald’s, Nike, Starbucks, Target). In those instances, the businesses are building a brand that will cause you think of that business first when you’re interested in purchasing their products. For instance, when you’re hungry, you think MacDonald’s. You need new athletic shoes, you think Nike. You’re dying for that cup of joe, so you think Starbucks, etc.

While there’s nothing wrong with branding campaigns, they are tougher to track than campaigns with a specific call to action (Sale ends Saturday, call before Friday to receive your free gift, etc.) Those campaigns are also called direct response because you’re asking the customer to respond directly. Direct response campaigns can be tested, so you have a good idea what’s working and what’s not (and can tweak the campaign accordingly). And, if the campaign doesn’t require getting a salesperson involved (i.e. if the call to action is for the customer to whip out his wallet right there) the campaign will just run itself (and make money all by itself).

(One note: You do need to do more than add a call to action to have a strong direct response campaign, but that doesn’t negate the power a call to action can bring to your campaigns.)

Branding campaigns are nearly impossible to test, track and tweak. They either appear to work or don’t appear to work. And if they don’t appear to work, it’s very difficult to start tweaking to improve the response rate.

However, branding is still very, very important. As a business owner, you need a good brand and you need to communicate that brand effectively. And sometimes it makes sense to run a branding campaign.

However, my advice for most situations is to combine branding and direct response. Your brand is clearly communicated in your ads and promotional materials, but you also take advantage of some direct response techniques at the same time.

If nothing else, make sure you don’t forget the call to action.

Creativity Resources — Write Your Call to Action

Want to include a call to action in your promotional materials but don’t know where to start? Here’s an easy step-by-step formula:

1. Figure out your purpose for the ad or promotional material. Why are you running this ad, creating this Web site, printing this brochure? (And no, an acceptable answer is NOT because everyone else has one.) Is it to generate leads? Get your name out there? Get people to buy? Or what?

2. Now write it down.

3. That’s it. That’s your call to action. Whatever the end result you want for the campaign is what you should be asking people to do.

Copywriting is a field which you can learn through practice and education. If you find that you’re a good writer, the only nuance is that you must learn is how to write in a way that sells. Within this article today on copywriting tutorials and lessons, we will look at a couple of different books which you can look into it as well as tutorials and lessons on the Internet.

Copywriting will not be easy to learn and it is a lifelong subject which you will continue to improve at if you work at the subject. To paraphrase a quotation from Stephen King, he said that copywriting, really writing in general, is a subject that you continue to improve on. It would be similar to lifting weights for 10 years. You will develop muscles. If you write every day for a certain period of time, you will develop writing skills to the point where you become a very good writer. If you focus on copywriting and write everyday, you will become a very good copywriter.

The first book which would like to point you towards in copywriting tutorials and lessons would be the book The Copywriter’s Handbook. This is a great book for you to look at because it will give you an introduction into copywriting as well as learning what it will take to write the different types of advertisements. Copywriting is a very broad field in that what you write could be anything from direct mail to Web content to public relations materials.

Another book which you should look into is simply called Copywriting. This book is a little different in that it explains both what it takes to the copywriter as well as how you need to develop ideas and structure copy. This is a more fundamental book that focuses on what you need to do as opposed to explaining the different types of advertising like the first book did.

If you cannot find these books within your local library, take a look at the following websites which can provide copywriting tutorials and lessons. One website which we would like profile is: http://www.sherus.com/business/copywriting/. Another website which you can look for copywriting tutorials and lessons is: http://www.adcopywriting.com/Tutorials_List.htm. This is a website which has a great deal of information as well and has elicited positive testimonials from different people. If you look online, you can find a great deal of websites which will offer you free tutorials on how to write good copy. This is probably the most critical skill when you are looking to start a website because your written words are going to be the engine which drives your online sales. You can have all the flashy graphics and animation that you want, but if there’s no content, people will only spend a certain limited amount of time on your website. It is the people who write good content who have the greatest success.

Hopefully this article on copywriting tutorials and lessons is something which can help you. Come rating is a skill which takes persistence and a desire to continue learning due to the sheer volume of information on the subject. This can make it exciting because you can always learn something new that can help you improve your writing and make more money.