Hot Buttons for Selling

One of my earliest mentors, Yanik Silver, once gave me a list of his 11 Hot Buttons For Selling.

It’s one of the daily documents that I review everyday.

Yanik’s tips will help you write better copy and email messages…in fact, I study one of these tips every morning and apply it to my copywriting tasks that day.

1. Stories

Almost everything I write is now based on stories. My emails, special reports, and even my products are now story-based. As Chip and Dan Heath said in “Made to Stick”, stories help people learn faster and remember longer.

Stories simply make things more interesting to read, and people are drawn to them. Yanik suggests using “damaging admissions” (i.e. where you admit one of your own mistakes, such as in an, “oops, I goofed” sale).

2. Reason Why

“Whenever you make a claim or special offer in your advertising, come up with an honest reason why, and then state it sincerely. You’ll sell many more products this way.” – Maxwell Sackheim

I once had a sale where I released the product before it was completely done. In my copy, my “reason why” for doing the early launch was that I needed to get the product into my reader’s hands as fast as possible, because summer had already arrived. It also allowed me to use a discounted price in the sale, plus it lit a fire under my butt to get the full product completed.

3. Specificity

Yanik suggests avoiding round numbers in your headlines and copy.

For example, he has a product called 33 Days to Online Profits, and he believes it would not have been as successful had it been named, 30 Days to Online Profits.

So if you focus on 20 minute workouts, change it to 19 minutes. Or if you promise 10 pounds of fat loss in a month, try 11 pounds instead.

4. #Truth

Readers are extremely skeptical these days, so bring up the hard truth about your products whenever necessary. When dealing with Turbulence Training skeptics, I tell them, “These workouts are not easy, but to get results you have to put in hard work.” People appreciate it when you are up front with them.

5. Curiosity

This is one of my favorites, and I’ve been a sucker for this stuff since the first time I read an ad that said, “Want to find out the one food that cures disease? See page 9 in our special report.” That type of curiosity bullet in the copy always gets me.

Put more mystery into your copy to engage the reader and make them badly want what you have to offer.

That’s it for today…I’ll be back tomorrow with the final hot buttons for making more sales.

Selling skills = financial independence,

Craig Ballantyne

“If people are truly free, they should be free to become as wealthy as their talent, creativity, and hard work can take them, so long as they do not use force or fraud against anyone else.  The American Dream is about opportunity, not guarantees.” – Robert Ringer