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4 Tips for Writing Successful Swipe Copy
© 2005 by Bruce Carlson
Master copywriter and marketer Dan Kennedy, in his highly
popular and successful copywriting seminars, likes to tell
his students that "sometimes good enough is good enough"
when it comes to a piece of sales copy.
What does Dan mean by this?
Simply put, you don't need to reinvent the wheel in order
to write successful copy. What has worked in the past can
and will work again.
Learning to effectively "swipe" from winning sales letters
is one of the most important skills you can develop as
a copywriter. And, contrary to what you may sometimes hear,
there is nothing "unethical" or "sleezy" about it. Every
great copywriter employs swipe techniques to some extent.
The key to writing good swipe copy is awareness. By keeping
focused on a few key areas you'll quickly develop a sense
of what can work for you and your market.
Here are a few tips for writing swipe copy that works.
1. Be on the lookout for parallel markets
Parallel markets to your own niche offer great opportunities
to borrow elements for your own purposes.
For example, let's say you're writing a piece for a website
that sells dog toys.
Your first possibility for a parallel market would be any
website that sells pet toys (other than dog toys). You'd also
want to look at sites that sell children's toys (although I
certainly don't want to imply that dogs and children have a lot
in common!) :-)
After this you could stray further afield and look at sites that
sell other pet accessories. Keep in mind that you are looking for
successful sales elements that might work for you. Anything and
everything that looks like it could work for your own campaign
needs to be taken into consideration, as long as it's been
proven successful. Parallel niches offer a golden opportunity
because of their similarities to your own niche.
How do you determine if a parallel niche site is successful?
Use Alexa to see what kind of traffic they get. Search around
the Web a bit and see how often their name pops up. More than
anything though, just use your marketing instincts to sniff out
the quality of what they're doing in terms of direct response.
If you think they may be doing OK then sign up for their
newsletter or f.ree report or autoresponder series. Study their
marketing diligently.
If you get even one idea for your copy from a parallel marketer
then you've done well.
Occasionally marketers hit the jackpot and find a full letter
that fits their market's purposes to the tee (with a few
alterations needed here and there). But more often it's an
approach or an element of the sales letter that proves useful.
2. Know your target market's level of awareness
As you know, you need to be on a very intimate level with your
market. You need to know their wants and needs inside out.
For freelance copywriters this can be a particularly troublesome
area, because freelancers often have difficulty just jumping
into the prospects' shoes at the drop of a hat. Thus many
freelancers choose to specialize in a few select niches whose
target markets they do have a good understanding of and/or can
learn about without an inordinate amount of work.
But beyond a good working knowledge of your market's wants and
needs there's also a knowledge of its level of awareness or
sophistication.
You'll want to determine how much knowledge your prospects have
of techniques used standardly in sales copy which targets them.
With our dog toys example, the online market's level of
awareness would be fairly low. New ads for this market could be
brought in from other parallel areas without much fuss.
But with a market like online marketers, for instance, the level
of awareness would be quite a bit higher. Copy aimed at this
audience needs to take that higher level into consideration and
not make the mistake of using worn-out copy from the past that
every marketer has seen a million times.
Over time the market's level of awareness will increase (and
with the Internet we find that online shoppers' levels of
awareness in general are increasing, thus making some of the
techniques seen even a few years ago less effective). And so you
need to stay in tune with what's going on in the whole marketing
arena for your product or service.
After all is said and done, testing and tracking will show
what's working however. And in some cases marketers are genuinely
surprised at how much higher their market's level of awareness
is than they had
imagined.
Or lower...
3. Build a swipe database
All good copywriters keep a swipe file. Some have entire rooms
full of old ads, mail packages, and sales letters that worked in
the past. And once in awhile they package them up and sell them
for a nice profit...
With the Internet it's easy to just save good copy to your hard
drive or a folder in your email program. When you run across
something that catches your eye save it immediately before you
do anything else. Otherwise you might suddenly find yourself
immersed in other matters and forget about the sales letter you
just read.
As so often happens in cyberland...
I kick myself sometimes because I forget to save a hot letter.
And later on. when I go back to try to find it, it turns out
they've already taken it down because the product sold out.
You also need to get on the email lists of people doing
marketing in your niche(s)so you can get their mailings. Some
very good sales copy is written specifically for email.
The more material you have to work with the better. There just
might be one little idea in that ocean of material that makes
the difference in whether your copy succeeds or fails...that
makes the difference between small profits and large profits.
So start a virtual swipe database. If you run out of room on
your hard drive burn it onto CD's. It'll take a while to fill a
room with CD's full of swipe material!
By the way, nowadays on the Internet there are several "swipe
file" products available for purchase, but you need to be
careful. These collections of "winning" sales letters are
often of very poor quality. So do your due diligence before you
buy them.
In the direct mail industry the quality control is much more
stringent. There are several excellent collections published in
book form and most good copywriters, online or off, keep a
couple of them on their shelves.
Some examples of these great works are Hodgson's "The Greatest
Direct Mail Sales Letters of All Time", Denny Hatch's "Million
Dollar Mailings", and Herschel Lewis and Carol Nelson's "World's
Greatest Direct Mail Sales Letters". Hodgson's book is available
in PDF form from www.twipress.com , a great website for
marketing books in general.
Oh, and don't forget that your own past successful efforts are
also good candidates for a swipe or two...
4. Integrate Smoothly
It goes without saying that you should smoothly blend the
material you swipe into your own copy so that it looks like it
belongs there. But it's amazing how often people fail to do this.
Make sure to put the copy you borrow into your own voice so it
reads as if it were something you wrote. Novice marketing is
often easy to spot because of the discrepancy between the
less-than-experienced voice of the marketer and the confident
voice of the good copywriter or copywriters he or she has
borrowed elements from.
When you've got conflicting voices within a sales letter people
pick up on it.
While most buyers don't care about good grammar, they will
notice, even if it's on a sub-conscious level, when your copy is
out of balance. They'll know that something "just isn't right".
And that's all it takes for them to click out.
So make sure you put what you borrow into your own words.
Authenticity is a genuine key to direct marketing. Customers
identify with a perceived personality behind the words, not with
the letters on the page.
You can borrow headlines, sub-headlines, bullets, stories,
offers... Even ideas. The list goes on. But make them a part of
you! Not just a cut-and-paste job that stands out like a sore
thumb.
As long as you retain your own USP (Unique Selling Proposition)
throughout your copy, you will maintain your offer's
consistency. And within that context you can then borrow copy
ideas to your heart's content. But blend the borrowed copy in
smoothly. Spend a good amount of time with this. It's definitely
worth it.
Swiping is a part of everyday life in the copywriting world. And
once you get the hang of it, only hard-core copywriting students
will pick up on what you've done.
Which is perfectly alright. You may even get a congratulatory
note from them.
So go forth and boldly swipe. Because sometimes good enough is
indeed **good enough**!
Veteran educator and freelance
writer Bruce Carlson would like
to help you improve your online
copywriting. Sign up for his
Dynamic Copywriter newsletter at
http://www.dynamic-copywriting.com
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