Discover The Simple 7-Step Copywriting Formula That’s Generated $100,000,000 In Sales! | The Growth Booth #61

Welcome to episode number 61 of The Growth Booth. Today I want to start diving into Copywriting and the Psychology of Selling and share with you some ideas and techniques and formulas that I've used to sell over $100 million in different products online over the past couple of decades.

And the most important thing for you to know from the outset is these are strategies that can be applied to almost any kind of online business. It doesn't matter if you're selling eCommerce products. It doesn't matter if you're selling someone to opt-in to an email list. It doesn't matter if you're selling via email or video or audio. The same process can be used over and over and over again. The formula can be used over and over again.

So in this episode here today, episode number 61, I'll walk you through a simple seven-step formula that I learnt from copywriting legend Joe Sugarman, and then in the next episode, I'm going to talk to you about a series of the most common objections that you'll get from people who are considering investing in the product that you may be selling.

Copywriting is the craft of creating content that will sell whatever it is that you're trying to sell. The sale may not always be something transactional. It may not always be someone actually taking out their credit card and paying for something, although that's what hopefully it is in most cases. That's what it tends to be. But it could be opting into an email sequence as an example. That's a non-transactional sale right there.

And the formula, the framework that I tend to use, which I've sort of got built into me at this point from having done it for so many years, really boils down to seven core steps. I'm going to walk you through them. As I mentioned earlier, these are things that I learned from Joe Sugarman. He's got a book on Amazon, which you can probably pick up for about $10. I believe it's called an “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook”. This guy is a legend of copywriting. I've met him in person, and I've learnt a huge amount about copywriting from him and his framework. 

His seven-step framework basically starts out with creating excitement and intrigue and interest upfront. I think the easiest way to think about copywriting is to imagine a sales letter. So, a written out letter where someone has written a page of content. Maybe it's a flyer that you find in a newspaper or a page in a magazine, or maybe it's a web page where someone is selling something to you, and at the very top, you'll normally have a headline. And the bigger the headline, the more powerful the headline. I don't mean big in terms of size, I mean big in terms of the claims that are being made, the more readership you're going to get.

So I think getting people excited, interested, and intrigued is something that you need to absolutely nail, because if you don't manage to do that, then no one's going to go on to the next piece of the sales leader or listen to the next piece of the video or audio. They'll just tune out. They'll go away and do something else.

There are a few different things you can do. One is to make a very big claim. Secondly, something you can do in addition to doing that is to specifically talk to the people that you want to be selling to. So, for example, you could say “Attention! To all woodworking enthusiasts..” or “Attention to all e-commerce sellers! If you've got a shopping cart platform to sell…” like we do, with Cartzy as an example, then you can start building drama and intrigue around what's to come. You may do this in another paragraph. So I put all of that into the first section of this framework, which I sort of call ‘interest and excitement’.

The second section that we get into, which should flow on from the first, is about how whatever the product is, is different. You really need to differentiate yourself these days. You're never going to be able to do a better job of being Apple than Apple computers can do. So it's good to differentiate. And that's the second part of the sales sequence, is that differentiation and talking about how your product does things differently that perhaps no one else can do or no one else does.

The third part that leads to that is getting into more of how it works. But in this section, you don't want to get people lost in the weeds. Like if you're selling a drill, you don't want to tell them how the motor works. You don't want to tell them how it's all put together. You want to keep things at a very high level and keep laser focusing on the fact that the drill is designed to drill a hole and the person that is buying the drill wants to get a hole drill. They don't necessarily want to know all the intricate details of how the drill is put together, how it works, and so on and so forth. But you can still give a high-level overview of how the drill work. “Well, you plug it in, you press that button, and hey, presto! You've got the hole that you're looking for. If you want to make a bigger hole, you can do this. And if you want to make a smaller hole, you can do this.” So that's what I mean. That's about the level of detail that you get into and how it works section, which is the third section. 

So far, we started off with section number one, which was about interest and excitement. Section number two was about how the product is different. Number three, how it works. The fourth section is where you get into the unique features of the product and some of the aspects that exist about the product that actually makes it different. I want to differentiate the features here from the benefits. The benefits are the things that the product is going to allow the customer to do, and when you're writing sales copy, a really good way of making sure that you're including benefits is by adding “so that…” at the end of a sentence.

So for example, if you're selling a drill, you could say “A drill with multiple drill bits so that you can drill holes of different sizes.” The benefit there is the ability to drill holes of different sizes. The feature though might be having this set of different drill bits at your disposal. Hopefully, that makes sense. That would be the fourth sequence. The fourth part of the framework, I should say. 

The fifth part of the framework is to justify the purchase. You can do this in a number of different ways: by showcasing the kind of value that it can deliver, by comparing the cost with other similar solutions, or maybe they're not even similar, but other options. So for example, if I'm selling a product that teaches people how to build an online business, and I'm showing them how they can go from zero to $1,000 in their first 30 days, unless I'm selling that for $1,000, I could compare that to the cost of buying into a franchise or something else, any other business opportunity. Basically, I could compare and contrast to put value in their eyes or to showcase the value of what I'm able to deliver in my product.

In addition to this, you also want to make sure that the prospect, the person who's considering investing, can see that it's a good value purchase not just in the short term but in the long term as well. You're not selling something that's just going to gather dust, you're not selling something that's going to end up stashed away in the garage and never ever use. If someone does want to stash it away, they can pull it out in five years' time, and it's going to be just as valuable as what it is now. That's almost presenting the opportunity in an evergreen light, meaning that there's the value today, the immediate value that you can get, but there's also value down the line. This is never going to go out of fashion or stop working.

The 6th part of this framework that I like to use is about servicing the product, and this is really another way of saying support. What happens if it doesn't work? What happens if something goes wrong? Where can you go to get support? This is where you can showcase all of your support avenues, but it's also where you can talk about guarantees that you may have in place, like a money-back guarantee as well. “If it doesn't work for you, don't worry, we've got you backed up with a money-back guarantee of some kind.” Then you're removing risk, essentially, in this section.

Finally, the 7th section of the sales letter or the ad or whatever it is that you're putting together would be asking for the order. A lot of people don't do this part, but this is where you have to specifically ask the person to take their credit card out and make the investment, if that's what needs to be done, or if it's not a transaction, then you ask them to take action, like, “Add your email address to the opt-in form right now.”

It's really important to actually reiterate this. You might ask someone for the order, then explain to them again what's going to happen if they don't take the order, if they don't make the investment and do whatever it is you ask them to do, explain what could potentially happen, what that would mean, and then ask them for the order again. 

So this is typically how we tend to do it. Like I said, it doesn't matter if this is a written sales letter, if it's an ad for something like the radio, if it's a YouTube video, it doesn't matter, or a webinar, it could be anything. This tends to be the framework at a very high level. Obviously, you can drill down into these sections more and more and more and get more into the details there. But at a very high level, if you want a framework to use, these are seven steps that you can go through.

I think the thing that should give you comfort here is selling is a science. It's not an art form. And it's almost a case of filling in the blanks, filling in the spaces. Right now, I've just given you a seven-step framework. If you got a pen and paper or a piece of page, you could write a heading for each one of these and then simply fill in the gaps. 

1. Interest and excitement
2. How the product is different
3. How it works
4. Unique features
5. Justifying the purchase
6. Service and eliminating risk
7. Asking for the order

When you piece all of those together, you've got to start to finish a flow that you can use.

Now, Joe Sugarman talks about a sales letter being like a slippery slide. Someone comes in at the top, and they slide all the way down to the bottom. When you're writing or crafting these, you want to make sure that each line leads on to the next, and that people want to find out more, and that's what true genius copywriters are able to achieve. Again, it doesn't matter if it's written, doesn't matter if it's video, doesn't matter if it's audio, but that's what they're able to achieve. They're getting people hooked and going all the way through the copy.

You can get so much more information about this by investing in books from some of these classic copywriters or doing Google searches. And if you're someone who thinks you're not good at putting words together, then there are so many tools out there that can help you with this today as well. I mean, look at all the buzz around AI and the likes of ChatGPT. You could load that up, and you could say, “Give me ten headlines that highlight the advantages of..” whatever it might be, and you'd get them spat out to you, and then you could sort of mix and match and merge them together until you've got something that actually works.

I think copywriting today is probably easier than it's ever been, but I think it's hard to put a price tag on the ability to do this for yourself because I don't think a machine will ever be able to come up with something as unique as you could potentially come up with, especially if you know the product inside and out. You can certainly feed ideas into the machine and get a better result of what you could do on your own, but having an idea of the structure at least will give you a framework to use and make creating a sales leader that much easier.

This is the seven-step sales copy formula that we use, and it's been incredibly, incredibly effective and valuable in our business over the years. I wanted to film this episode specifically about copywriting here today because I think this is something that could help you in all kinds of different areas of your business. Copywriting is one of the most high-value skills out there that you can master. If you want to learn something new, then diving into copywriting is something that will pay you off over and over and over again.

What I'm going to do in the next episode is dive a little bit deeper into this again and give you more ideas about how you can handle objections, which is one of the things that you can focus on to get even more bang for your buck when it comes to crafting a sales leader and putting a sales message together. That's a wrap for this episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of The Growth Booth. Thanks for listening.