How To Write Sales Page Copy In 9 Simple Steps!

In this article, I'm going to reveal how to write sales page copy in 9 Steps that are designed to give you an exact process you can repeat and make it easy to write copy that converts into sales.

And perhaps best of all…

Having a process, you can use to write sales pages over and over again and by the end you should have the confidence to know each step required to write a high-converting sales page.

Overview Of The 9 Step Structure To Writing Seductive Sales Copy

Let’s take a quick look at each step broken down so you can get an overview of the process:

1. Building your Avatar.
2. Finding Competitors.
3. Discover The BIG Idea.
4. Create Your Offer.
5. Create your Headline.
6. Creating The Lead.
7. Overcome Objections.
8. Add all Elements – which is your first draft.
9. Edit and Complete

So Each step is designed in a way that puts together the correct order your copy should begin and end with.

What You Must Know And Do Before Writing Sales Page Copy

Writing a good sales page is a formula and requires you to write in a certain process.

Where people go wrong with writing copy, is that they do their copy in the wrong order with no structure.

And before you write a single word or even think about making the copy, you need to be asking yourself these questions…

• What’s the overall strategy?
• Are you selling to cold traffic or warm traffic?
• Will you be getting people to the sales page from your emails or on cold traffic ads?
• How aware are the prospects of your brand, service, or product?

All of this will give you a starting point to know where you should begin and this method works for any strategy you implement. 

Step 1 - Research Your Avatar

Before you start writing a single word, you need to understand the fundamentals and emotions behind your customer.

This is going to give you insights and an understanding of the person you’ll be writing to.

And what’s important here is that as you create your avatar and research them, you’ll be wanting to make a swipe file with all of the notes about them.

This swipe file is going to be something you should be returning to over and over again as you continue to fill it up.

Which should contain information about your avatar such as demographics, interests, and the usual things that should already be done for your business.

The importance of writing stories when making copy

Expanding on having a swipe file and general avatar research you also want to find and make stories.

Stories are what your prospects are talking about, go deep into finding what things they're saying such as what they’ve been through.

Find stories of people who are already where your avatar wants to be, and look at the transformation and how it changed their lives.

How to discover your prospect's pain points

• What did they go through, what obstacles did they face?
• Then look for the Desperate problems, what's the main problem your prospect is facing and want to overcome?
• What's that one thing that keeps them up at night, if only they could solve it how would everything be different?

Pain is the most powerful emotion that can drive people to buy because most people will buy to get out of a problem rather than buy for pleasure.

After finding their pain find what they want and what promise would you would be giving them.

Look for all the things that they wish they could have or want and what you can deliver to them that can transform their lives which is the big promise you’ll be making.

Knowing your customers level of awareness

Something that is so important to your copy that barely anyone talks about is knowing where your customer is at with their level of awareness.

What have they tried before?

Who have they got help from before and what’s already been around for the solution they’ve been looking for?

This is more of an advanced copywriting strategy something you can find in a book by Eugeneshwartz breakthrough advertising, and great leads by Michael Masterton.

However, if you're a beginner, I recommend you start reading breakthrough advertising and get some copy out first before you reading great leads.

Now, once you know the level of awareness, this will give you the perfect idea of where to begin your copy and at what point your product will be helping to solve their problems.

Discover what proof your prospects require

After discovering where your prospects are at you want to know what kinds of proof your prospects require or that is best suited for them for trusting you and your product/service.

There are many proofs to look for such as:

• Testimonials.
• Social proof.
• Demonstrations.
• Studies.
• Pictures.

Find out what convinces your audience and what is best suited for the kinds of proof you’ll be presenting.

A lot of people think they need testimonials as proof, this is not true, there are so many variations of what is considered proof.

Step 2 - Researching your Competitor

After you've researched your avatar and have all the info required for your customer, you want to find who is putting the solution in front of your prospect.

This is going to give you an idea of what’s working and what your prospect is buying and when you look at your competitors, you’ll still want to make sure you're filling out a swipe file.

A swipe file is something you will be something you’ll be returning to over and over again.

6 Essentials To Look For When Researching Your Competitors

1. Offers – What are they offering, look into how they're presenting it, and what’s in the products or services they're giving.
2. Hooks – What’s the angle or hook they're using, how are they hooking in their customers and what’s the angle there using to sell their offer.
3. Promise – What’s the big promise they're saying to their customers, And how are they saying it?
4. Mechanism – What’s the mechanism of the product or service. This is the deliverable of fulfilling the problem with their solution. The mechanism is basically the thing that solves the problem.
5. Stories – and again similar to the avatar what story angles are they using?
6. Proof – what kind of proof are they using, are they demonstrating, using testimonials, case studies, or even studies from credible sources.

When you've done this take everything you have and create a giant list of bullets these bullets are what you’ll be adding into your copy.

At this point, you should have a big swipe file of everything you now need for the next step which is…

Step 3 - Find The Big Idea

When finding the big idea you want to allow your subconscious mind to combine everything that you have learned so ideas will pop.

The secret here isn’t to find the big idea through consciously thinking up the idea, but instead, the best ideas come from the subconscious mind.

When you try to consciously focus on a genius idea, it’s a very small part of the human mind.

The subconscious when left alone absorbs and filters everything you’ve taken from your research, it then starts working on putting it all together.

Just like how the best ideas come out of nowhere, have you ever taken a shower, and something sparked in your mind?

This is the subconscious popping to the surface.

5 Elements of a big idea

The big idea is a mixture of multiple things that combines…

1. Your story.
2. Your proof.
3. Your promise.
4. The problems.
5. Your mechanism.

These are all combined in a unique way that grabs attention and serves an urgent emotional need of your prospect.

And when you combine all this…

You want to make sure to push only one core theme through your copy with this big idea.

However, avoid trying to get this perfect, you might find a better idea later when writing your copy because the idea can change over time, and it's not something you have to get right the first time.

Just run with a basic idea, and as you write your sales page you change it if needs to be.

Step 4 – Crafting Your Offer

When you have a big idea in mind it’s then time to come up with your offer.

Your offer is not the same as the product, your product is what delivers the result and your offer is what creates the perception that enhances the product.

The product/service = something you sell.

It’s where you go through all the features and benefits…

It’s a commodity people can buy.

The Offer = Product + Perceived Value.

The Perceived Value is anything that makes the purchase or justification of the purchase easier.

And it’s where you can make your Offer more irresistible and a no-brainer, adding a higher perceived value such as giving extras and bonuses.

Now I say “perceived” because it’s about how you create the perception around the value of what you are selling.

The truth is…
It’s NOT about having the best product in the world it’s about how good the perception around the product is that gets high-value prices.

Have you ever said, “wow what a deal!”

This again is because you got an offer, not a product, you bought it because the perceived value outweighed the price.

How Can You Make An Offer That’s Perceived As Irresistible

To make an irresistible offer, everything you're selling and perceiving must have a focus on the result you're giving the customer.

Here’s an example:
If you were selling a dinner plate set, you would add a bonus as cutlery and glasses to compliment the product.

If you're selling a weight loss program, you could include bonuses such as weekly smoothie recipes for fat burning with some resistance bands to speed up the program.

Notice how each example compliments the solution you're trying to provide focusing on achieving the result or goal.

So, irresistible offers, are offers that focus on singular, focused goals or outcomes.

Creating An Offer Example

Say for the weight loss example you sell an online course to help women over 30 loose weight through exercise in 16 weeks at $297.

Is this an offer? Yes.

But is it irresistible? No!

Now let’s add a weekly accountability Zoom call to keep them motivated and on track, Let’s add again a 16 WEEK fat-burning Recipe book.

Now Add again an EXCLUSIVE circle of private members to hold your hand every step of the way.

Is this irresistible? Yes!

But notice how the price stayed the same without discounting and each thing compliments the outcome of the promise.

Step 5 - Write Your Headline

After you've created the offer it’s time to start with the headline, most people writing copy would think you would start with the headline first, which isn’t the case at all.

Because doing it this way gives you so much knowledge about your product, offer, and everything you’ve done so far to get here.

That you can now translate all of this into making a powerful headline much easier.

The purpose of the headline is to grab attention and hook the reader in, and bridge the big idea to start reading the rest of your copy which ill go into in just a moment.

But the headline needs to be strong because if the reader doesn’t read the headline they're unlikely to read anything.
Now, there’s a brilliant book I recommend you read for headlines called:

How To Write Good A Good Advertisement by Victor Schwab.

He goes into more detail about writing good headlines and has many examples in the book.

But overall you want your headline to grab attention with your promise and get them to keep reading.

Step 6 - The Lead

For creating the lead, this is a strategy by Michael Masterton in a book I mentioned earlier called great leads.

The purpose of the lead is to get your reader to read the rest of your promotion.

The lead is the text right after the headline and can be from half a page to 5 pages long and is the expression of the big idea, which is made up of several elements that should be within your lead:

The Rule Of One

Keep everything to one theme only, with simple language.

You want to stick to one idea and don’t move around with different things within your copy.

The last thing you want to do is make it complicated with too many things that divert your reader's attention or overwhelm them with things that put them off.

People struggle to keep their attention on more than one big idea at a time.

The Greased Slide

This is where you want to make your copy easy for people to read all the way down the copy without getting bored.

You do this by being unexpected, different, and interesting making sure you keep leaving information gaps without revealing anything that would end the copy.

The 4 U’s

You want to be Unique, Urgent, Useful, and Ultra Specific.

And the more you add these in each sentence, the more powerful your copy will be.

Being unique is new and different such as The NEW Proven way to lose weight then Be Specific, such as you’ll lose 1.5lb in less than 72 hours.

Urgency is when you have limited time or there are only 100 copies left and finally useful is something that helps them.

Keeping these elements in as much as possible will make your copy compelling.

The 4 P’s

Promise, Push, Proof, and Picture.

You need a big promise of what they will get out of it, try to get this at the beginning of your copy.

You need to push them to keep reading the copy, add the proof to prove what you’re saying, give them certainty and paint the picture for them, the WIIF what’s in it for them.

Indirect Vs Direct

This is the level of awareness of where you’re meeting your customer and a strategy to use when positioning your lead.

Now, many factors affect this, from the media, competitors, trends, social media.

They all influence the scale of where your prospect is with their awareness of your product and depending on how much your prospect knows about your product and the solution you’ll use different approaches.

Such as…
If they know nothing about you or the solution then be indirect and the more they know you and your solution be more direct.

So Altogether from indirect to direct there are...

6 Different Lead Types

1. Story Leads – this is the toughest one but has the best rewards, it opens up the biggest audiences.
2. Proclamation Leads.
3. Problem-solution Leads – start the lead with a problem to show the solution.
4. Promise Leads – goes directly into your big promise.
5. Offer Leads – goes straight into the offer, they're aware of the problem and want the solution.
6. Direct – Most Aware.

So with your research, you need to know where your prospect is at and which type of lead you need to be starting with.

But again if all this sounds confusing, then I highly suggest you get more of an in-depth read of it with the book, great leads.

Step 7 – Handle Any Objections

During this step, with handling objections you’ll be at the middle part of the sales copy.

You may notice on sales pages and video sales letters that there’s always a long part of the text with page after page.

This is something where now you're going to take your prospect's objections turn them into sub-headlines and handle any objection that might be in your prospect's mind.

O.C.P.B Framework

And you'll do this by using the O.C.P.B framework which stands for:
Objection, Claim, proof, and Benefit.

So For example…
Let's start with the objection that your prospect is skeptical about if it work work for them.

You can turn this objection into a headline such as:

Now you might be thinking does this work for me…

Then make a claim…

Well, it works for anyone who is willing to put even the smallest effort in…

Then give proof to back up this claim such as…

Just like it worked for John who was as dumb as they come (You can use testimonials or other types of proof)…

Then end the objection handle with a benefit…

And that’s why you’ll get everything you need to transform your life for good.

You can do this sequence over and over until you’ve handled every objection you think your prospect might have.

Step 8 - Put Everything Together In A Draft

If you have reached this step and didn't just skip to here, congratulations you’ve done the hard parts all you do now is put everything together.

Put your headline, lead, objections and offer together and now you can add your guarantees.

Adding a guarantee builds certainty for your reader which is where you also add the call to action.

And you should have a good draft built in front of you because most of the copy is done.

But what I like to do, is to write an entire draft again from everything I created.

You don’t have to if you already have something ready to be polished up.

Step 9 - Edit And Polish

This is the final step, it times to edit it all down and polish your copy and turn it into your sales page.

You see before you edit it down, your sales copy will look a bit messy or have words that don’t need to be there.

Editing is what’s going to turn the copy into a high-converting sales machine.

What To Focus On When Editing Sales Copy

• Read it out loud and take out words you stumble on, you want it to be easy to read.
• Use short sentences and paragraphs, you can take parts of your copy and use the Hemmingway app which will help you understand how easy it is to read. You literally want it to be readable at a 5th-grade level.
• Add powerful emotional words and remove adverbs – look up synonyms and change the words.
• Don’t worry about grammar it has to read the way you talk and correcting or aiming for perfect grammar can hinder this.
• Remove “I” statements as much as possible and flip them to “you” statements, try to make the copy all about the reader and not about you.

After you’ve done all this well done, you have officially written your first sales page!
It’s a big achievement and you should appreciate what you’ve done.

What to do after completing your sales page copy

Now here’s a final thought, once you’ve done all of this you want to get it out asap, the only true way to know if it works is to find out how the market responds.

And depending on how they respond, you need to keep tweaking your headline and offer until you get the result you need.

But again the most important thing about writing your copy is knowing who you're writing to.

Take Your Sales Page To Next Level

Copywriting is a skill that can be improved with practice and copywriting exercises which I recommend practicing regularly.

When creating a sales page it's also important to know how it fits into the bigger picture of the sales funnel.