5 Magic Language Tricks that Make People Buy
Before we get started, I’ve got to make two things crystal clear. It is chock full of headline formulas to help you with your sales copy. So without further ado, let’s get to those copywriting tricks.
1: The first rule that your copy has got to be “you-focused. No, I’m not talking about you as in the person listening. Remember in high school when you were taught to never use the word “you” in your academic writing? Well, I’ve got a little secret for you. The exact opposite is true in copywriting. When you’re writing sales copy, you’ve got to always be talking to one person. This is going to create an authentic connection between you and your reader, the person you’re talking to.
2: The second rule that you’ve got to follow if you want to get more people to buy from you from your writing is to add humor. Humor snaps people out of their thought patterns and gets them to pay attention. For me personally, humor is just a part of my personality and my brand. You might not find me funny, but it’s still important to me to be able to be myself in my writing. So how can you turn a stale, a mundane part of your copy into something entertaining? The key is to do it naturally. It’s not about making inappropriate jokes or adding a bunch of exclamation points. Frankly, it’s just about being yourself.
3: The third rule I recommend following is what I like to call extreme honesty. This is what is truly going to push people over the fence from not sure if they want to buy from you to absolutely saying yes. One way of using extreme honesty is just by being clear on who is and is not a good fit for your offer. Another trick I love is to use extreme honesty to talk about the downside of your offer. Yes, there’s always a downside. For example, the downside of using the sales page kit, one of my products to rate your sales page, is that you have to do all the work. It’s going to be a lot less expensive than hiring a copywriter and you’re going to gain some great skills from it, but you do have to put in the work to write the page yourself.
4: This brings me to rule number four, which I like to call “super specificity.” Hands down, the biggest mistake I see people making in their copy is trying to be way too general in an effort to resonate with more people. But can I tell you the truth real quick? When you try to resonate with everybody, you wind up resonating with no one. So when I write sales copy, I always try to think of three people who are target clients of mine who I’ve worked within the past or I would love to work with in the future and I think of them specifically when I’m writing the copy, I make a list of all of their qualities and frustrations and desires so that I can mention those specific things in the sales copy. My favorite way of summing this up is with a James Joyce quote, “In the particular lies the universal.”
5: The fifth and final rule for writing great copy is what I like to call the “three-layered cake.” The three-layered cake is a metaphor I use to explain that you need to get at different levels of logic and reasoning and emotional connection in order to truly get someone to want to buy from you. Imagine a three-tiered cake and each tier of that cake represents an answer to the question, “Why should anyone care about that?” So you start off by asking yourself at the top tier, why should anybody care about purchasing my offer? What’s in it for them? Once you have an answer to that, ask yourself the question again, “Why should anyone care about that?” And then, you got it, you’re going to want to do it a third and final time to get your three-layered cake. Ultimately, you’re going to use all three layers of this cake in your sales copy.
