Feel Like Critiquing My Copywriting?

Ok, I'll bite.

1. Targeting. Who is this aimed at? Small business owners is too broad. Do they have a website? How tech-savvy are they? How much have they already spent on their site? What emotions do they feel when they look at their website? Are they pleased with it, or embarrassed about it?

Do they even want more business from their site? Surprisingly, quite a few small business owners don't, really. The main purpose of their website is to impress their buddies at the country club. They'll spend on fancy design, but not on promotion. These people are not your customers.

What makes them angry? What have they tried before? What are their commonly held beliefs about your service? What did the last guy trying to sell them this stuff promise, but not deliver? Are they the sort of people who spend time to save money, or spend money to save time? How will a better website improve their life? (hint: “more money” is too generic )

If you don't know the above, don't waste your time sending this. Instead, use an amazing low-cost tool called the telephone to do some research. You may even pick up some customers whilst doing your research (I usually do).

2. Headline. Quit trying to be clever/cute. You're not a good enough writer to pull off "clever" headlines (very few people are, if it's any consolation). Given that your headline is the most important part of the copy, you've blown your chances at the start.

A few simple, but effective headline templates to consider:

-How to achieve <benefit> in <timescale> even if you <objection>
-<Guaranteed result> in <timescale> or your money back
-Why most <things you're selling e.g. websites> fail, and how to avoid it.

3. Shit-flinging I see you've chosen the “throwing as much shit at the wall as possible to see what sticks” strategy for your first two paragraphs. This approach is fine if the outcome you're hoping to achieve is a shit-covered wall. Otherwise, avoid it. Pick one or two pains that really REALLY bug your customer (less = better). Talk about those pains in the first paragraph. Just enough to make the knife break the first few inches of flesh. Then spend the rest of your letter twisting it, slowly.

I'm guessing here that a major pain would be the fact they've spent (often too much) money on a website, but it's nothing more than a fancy online business card that sits there doing nothing. Or they've bought SEO services from someone who promised them page 1 results, then used Google Adwords to get them there and sent them an enormous bill. Talk to your customer to find this out.


4. Story Next, give an example of how you have helped a local business just like theirs achieve an awesome result. Include names. If you don't HAVE any case studies, talk about the results you could achieve, and back it up with a strong as hell guarantee. Whatever it is, you must tell a story with it in one paragraph. The purpose of this para is a. to build credibility. and b. to build a bridge in the customer's mind from where they are now (pain) to where they want to be (anticipated pleasure)


5. Offer Once you've caused some pain, and painted a picture of how life could be better, it's time to go in for the kill. A subhead of “How I can help you” should do the job here, with 3-4 bullet points maximum. Each bullet needs to have a BENEFIT. All of your bullets are currently FEATURES (i.e. things that nobody but a web geek really gives a shit about).

What can you imagine your business owner telling his wife over dinner? “Honey, things went really at work today. I leveraged analytics and improved my ad campaigns.” Really?

Also: “I can help you use the Internet to make more money” sounds like a recruiting pitch for an MLM. Drop it.

6. Action Finally, a clear call to action is needed. You have five separate options. If they put you in charge of planning fire exits for public buildings, people would burn to death before they'd chosen a door.

Try:

“Call 0123456 now for your free 45-minute website review. I'll take your through my 10-point website profits checklist, and at end of the session you'll have a clear plan of what to do next to get more business from your website. “

Or something like that. If you want to really boost response, offer them $50 if they don't think it's the most valuable 45 minutes they've spent all year on their business.

7. PS I'm personally a fan of the PS, because people still read them. BUT just use one, and keep it short. Use it to restate the biggest benefit, offer the guarantee, or introduce scarcity (e.g. I'm only accepting 2 new clients this month)

While we're on the subject, you've made #1 salesperson error in the PS, which is not respecting your prospect's time. There IS a risk in getting a free consult from you – the risk they'll waste half a day with an idiot. Reassure them this won't happen. Imagine you were charging $500 for the consult. That's the sort of value you need to offer to ask for a couple of hours of their time.

Also, you have typo in absolutely. I probably have typos in this post too. Heh. Hope that helps.
 


Its to long, has no pictures and no story, you will be wasting your time distributing this as is all over the city. If you get 1 response I would be surprised. This isnt the time for a long drawn out piece. How are you distributing this? If you are physically putting this out in print at various places you should delete 3/4 of the words and add in some pix and you may hopefully get your 2% response rate

Edit IE.. You need to get to the point
get-to-the-point1.jpg
 
3 Ways To Get Qualified Leads Delivered To Your Email


How To Turn Your Business's Website Into An Asset — Not A Money Pit


I Can Generate Quality Leads For Your Business


5 Free Ideas To Help Your Business Generate Leads Online
 
I Can Generate Quality Leads For Your Business
5 Free Ideas To Help Your Business Generate Leads Online

Yep, you're getting the hang of it.

How about :

"How to generate leads from your website in 30 days or less, even if you hate technology"?



"
 
You're missing a critical ingredient. Scarcity. Make them act NOW. Put a deadline on the free consults, or offer it only to the first 20 callers. Also when throwing around "Free" people tend to place zero value on it. So justify the reason for the "Free" consult, normally $xxx an hour. Build value, make them act now.
 
Much better. You now have a really strong offer, so drop my other suggestion and use the offer in the headline:

Give Me 10 Minutes of Your Time, and I'll Give You 5 Free Ideas to Generate More Leads For Your Business... or $50 in Cash

You could even use that as a cold calling intro. It takes balls to make that sort of offer, and that stands out.

Minor points:

1. read up on apostrophes. They're easy to misuse, and certain people (like me) get really hung up on a piece if they're done wrong. I am eternally grateful to a chemistry teacher who used to circle all of my apostrophe related errors in BIG RED MARKER before handing my work back to me, though I hated him for it at the time.

2. Your bullets are still feature-heavy, they need to be a feature-> benefit combo. Here's a tip to get from F->B. Call up the most miserable, cynical friend you have, and tell them to pretend to be your customer and ask "so what?" every time you read a feature to them. You have to keep answering the "so whats" until you get to something your customer really care about. It normally takes 4 or 5 iterations for each feature, but can range anywhere from 2-20

3. Add a little benefit to your Call To Action. "to get your free lead-generation ideas now, call 32213"

you might want to consider adding some scarcity, like a deadline for the offer. Depending on how marketing-savvy your audience is, it can either work like crazy, or turn them off. You have legitimate reason for scarcity here, because your available time is limited anyway.

EDIT - yep agree with Scottspfd. Stick a value and a reason on it.
 
Watch out with how you ask all those questions. I never like to ask a direct question about the reader they can get subconsciously defensive about and say no to. Instead of questions starting with "Do you", change it to "If you've", or "Maybe you have", "If you're like most people who" etc.
 
Watch out with how you ask all those questions. I never like to ask a direct question about the reader they can get subconsciously defensive about and say no to. Instead of questions starting with "Do you", change it to "If you've", or "Maybe you have", "If you're like most people who" etc.

This is really good feedback here, I really wish I had more time to help. I love copywriting. Amaturesurgeon killed it though, good job. I could write for days on this subject, it's my favorite one. You should be also using more presuppositions and future pacing the reader a little more.
 
agree - really good feedback above, not too much more i can add that hasn't already been said -

this is a really great unique idea that I guarantee will bring you clients. I used to be surprised whenever my phone rang from a set of business cards I left at a restaurant, or a linkedn message I posed a few months ago.

If you are in Bucks County maybe make your way down to Philly hit up the subway system put it all over the blue/orange line stations. Hit up downtown during rush hour as well - Good luck!
 
Definitely going to be hitting up Philly as well. I'm not sure if I'll get a better response from suburbs or city, I'll find out.

I'm working now on revising the new letter that I linked to in my last post. The feedback in this thread has been insanely great, I'll be thinking of guerilla, amateursurgeon, JRose, skohh and everyone else when the new clients start coming in.
 
Definitely going to be hitting up Philly as well. I'm not sure if I'll get a better response from suburbs or city, I'll find out.

I'm working now on revising the new letter that I linked to in my last post. The feedback in this thread has been insanely great, I'll be thinking of guerilla, amateursurgeon, JRose, skohh and everyone else when the new clients start coming in.

Awesome. Keep testing, just like any offer online or offline track everything. A simple change of a word from "I" to "You" Could send your response through the roof, this is why you always need to be testing and tracking. Hit me up on skype dude, I am always on.
 
Heh, what brought you to bump this thread?

Fueled by the encouragement and help from WF, I hit the pavement with my letter. I'm not really interested in dealing with a bunch of clients with different needs, but I wanted to make some cash while working on creating a service that I could offer and automate. Well, going door to door helped me land a customer for the kind of service I was interested in getting started, so I ran with that and decided to just follow leads online for freelance programming and writing work.

The major lesson I learned is that magic does indeed have magic in it. Just doing anything will get you much further than studying and contemplating doing something.

If you want to keep up on what the help I received here has lead to, check out this thread: http://www.wickedfire.com/education-center/159915-1000-emails-ten-weeks.html
 
There's a lot of good advice in this thread that I think would help. There's no time here for a detailed critique, but for the most part I think you did a very good job. I'd like to comment about this part which stuck out for me as in need of improvement:

"Between organic search, email marketing, social media, and dozens of paid advertising platforms, how are you supposed to know WHERE your business should be? And with the broad range of complex technology needed to make it all work, HOW are you supposed to get there?"

The above description is very clear to us, and every word you said is loaded with meaning for WF members who are exposed to this every day. But forget about what you know, and think about what they know. People running dry cleaning services and pizzerias won't understand most of it.

I'd flesh this out a bit more and give specifics on how "organic search, email marketing, social media, and dozens of paid advertising platforms" help customers connect with business. Give us a sense of how consumer-to-client discovery works via these platforms, and also I'd stress that companies have the potential to establish a long-term relationship with customers when marketing to them online.

The paragraph in general is also not very clear or focused because it talks in vague generalities about "getting there." Where is "there"?

GLB
 
Roll with this as is. It's too short notice to give it a thorough facelift.

In the future, bullet point what you can do for them. Make use of formatting to keep it from being a wall of text.

A better title would be


It's a better title, because when your audience is probably intimidated and unfamiliar with what you do, cute humor doesn't help. You need to be very clear and easy to understand.

Then tell a short narrative of how you help small businesses. Include detail (numbers, facts) of what they get, and why. Try to keep it to less than 5 major points. 3 is probably ideal.

Then tell them to contact you if they want your help. Emphasize the ph# over the email address.

Don't ask 25 questions. You don't want them to sit there and think about the answers.

I'd find a way to either remove those many questions, or reformat them into statements. This isn't the Spanish inquisition, it is a sales pitch.

hth

I'd go something more impactful than:

How I Help Local Businesses Make More Money

You see quite a bit of headlines like that, and it doesn't really get you excited. "Help" implies that you're not solely responsible - you want to take more credit than that. "More Money" is pretty boring too.

I'd run with something like: "Explode Revenues" then a sub-heading of:
"How I Made A Local Business Grow 147% in 6 Months" or
"How A Local Business' Sales Snowballed In Weeks"

etc.

You then need to get people agreeing with you, and saying yes from the beginning. Your opening statement is weak. You're asking lots of potentially tough questions which will just bore them and cause them to turn away. You want each sentence to get them to read the next one.

Open with something like "Business is hard for local businesses. Margins are squeezed every year. The economy is dragging. Consumers have no money to spend." and so on. Statements that they'll agree with, that push on pain points these local businesses will agree with. It's a shitty time to be running a small local company at the moment, it's hard. I'm sure you can think of tons of reasons why.

There's tons you can improve with the letter, I'd re-write it. You've got tons of tips in this thread already.

You also talk far too much about the details of products, and use jargon like "organic search" that the average business owner will not understand.

The business wants new sales. You're not selling them a service or a product that lets them do X, Y or Z. You're selling them a service that gets them new business. Focus on that.

Where are the stats about 97% of people searching for local businesses online?

etc etc...