Questions Are The Answer

If you want to write sales letters and ads that create an intense desire in the mind of your prospects to own your product, you absolutely MUST do some research. You need to understand your target market, your product, and how your product solves your prospect’s biggest pain or fulfills their biggest dreams.

It really doesn’t matter how clever your letters are or how successful the phrases and formats have been with other targets and other products. Your letter has to hit on what is important to THIS target with THIS product. You determine that with research.

Learn all you can about your audience. Understand why this audience will be interested in what you have to offer.

Empathize with your target market. Begin from the mindset of a typical prospect. Get inside his or her mind. Communicate from a solid understanding of your prospect’s thoughts and feelings of the moment. Empathy removes the barriers and shortens the distance between you and your prospect. Empathy builds rapport. Your ability to come from an understanding of your reader’s point of view, gives you an advantage and makes you a likely candidate for the prospect’s attention, interest, and business.

Investigate all aspects of the product or service thoroughly. Look at it in different ways and from unique perspectives.

Learn what you can about your competitors, their products, their offers, their strengths, their weaknesses.

Consider any and every likely obstacle that might keep your prospect from parting with his money. Think of possible ways around those obstacles.

Envision your typical prospect as you write your headline. Create an image of the type of individual you want to address and keep this image in the back of your mind. This strategy will help you develop a sales letter that forces your prospect to imagine himself enjoying the benefits you offer.

At this stage, all you’re focusing on is questions, not answers. What do you need to know before you can persuade your ideal prospects to buy from you? Without worrying about how or if you can find the answers, list every question you can think of that would help your message be more compelling and motivating.

Questions like:

• Who is my ideal prospect?

• What is his biggest pain? Her deepest desire? Biggest frustration?
• Who are my strongest competitors?
• How are they better? How are we better?
• What are the major objections – reasons a qualified prospect might not buy?

Possibly dozens more.

Take time to dream. If you had access to unlimited knowledge; if you could read minds – what information would help you sell as much of your product or service to as many qualified people as possible? Write them down as questions.

Maybe you’ll find the answers and maybe you won’t. But, you have a much better chance of finding the answers once you are AWARE of the questions. That’s what this step is all about.

Please understand this key point…

What makes a sales letter irresistible is NOT the wording, not the format, not the clever way to get attention – it is the connection, the TRANSFER of ideas, of emotion, of passion from you to your reader. And you create this connection by truly understanding your reader – her needs, her pain, her dreams.

When you know – really KNOW – what your reader thinks, how she feels, what motivates her — and you write your letter directly to her, addressing her needs, solving her pain, delivering her dreams – you WILL connect with her. She will have to own your product.