Why You Should Write Your Own Sales Letters
I’m assuming you’re going to write your own copy. You’re not going to outsource it – you’re going to write it yourself
There are a couple of deep thoughts, big thought that I have on that particular concept: if when we’re copy writing, and remember copywriting can be:
- When we’re writing sales copy
- When we’re writing content pieces
- When we’re writing emails
- When we’re scripting a video
- When we’re communicating
It’s when you and I are just communicating – it’s really about human communication. It’s one man to another, one woman to another, one man to a woman, one woman to a man. It is real live communication.
The art of writing a sales letter, or copy writing in that sales letter arena, is simply the written form of that human communication. One thing that tends to happen in the copy writing arena, and I believe that this can seriously sabotage a lot of entrepreneurs, is this idea that we can hire one voice to write a sales letter, another voice to write our emails, another voice to write our articles, and expect it to all fit together.
In my personal opinion if you’re talking a copy writer, you might hear something totally separate. Someone may say, “Boy, I’m a sales copy writer, and I’m going to write you the best copy that will really convert.”
But in my business, and for my clients, I’m less concerned about a single page converting than I am on building a long term relationship with the other human. This is true even if I know I’ll never speak with them personally, even if the only way they get to know me is from hearing an audio recording from me. Or, whether it’s through reading my book, or whether it’s through reading some of my articles. Whether it’s through reading a sales letter.
What I believe is critical is: when someone is communicating, all of the communication they do is in the same voice.
It’s kind of like if I were to meet you at a coffee shop and we were to have a conversation for an hour. And we were to agree on some things, and I said, “Hey, I’ll meet you back here in a week, and we’ll continue our conversation.” But next week, when you met at the coffee shop, there was someone that looked like me, but it wasn’t me, and you just tried to carry on the same conversation. Even if he was clear that he was my representative there, it would be difficult for you to get right into the flow of things with that person, exactly where we left off, simply because their voice and thought process is a little bit different from mine. It would be sort of like you’re having to build that relationship all over again.
There’s one person stretching across the entirety of you product line, your copy, everything that you do.
I think that there is a place for expert copy writing, especially when you’re getting into really big business, and you’re launching a new product every single week, or if you’re the type of person who really wants to be the person that’s overseeing a business and not so much the personal brand centered business.
But, when you have a business like mine, that is, it’s really centered on my personal brand and my expertise. Obviously, what I teach is the topic of what I teach, so my business is centered on that topic, but it’s centered on my expertise on that topic.
If I had a business that had, say, 10 different voices, then maybe we released a new product every month, and then one voice was from Carl, next month it was from Julie, next month it was from Tamarin, next month it was from Jonny. Well, it would be different, and then maybe what we could say, “Boy let’s go hire a professional copy writer to write all of this.”
Another case is if somebody’s just starting out in the business. Let’s say they’re starting out in the business and their expertise is creating a certain type of training, but they don’t communicate well. They don’t write well, they can’t. They just don’t write well, they don’t even talk well and they don’t communicate well with other people. But they have a genuine skill, which is whatever the training is. They’re teaching or training a specific thing. Then, for that individual, I would say, absolutely.
Because you don’t have a skill at communication, hey, maybe your best bet is to outsource that particular skill. Just like you might outsource articles, or you might outsource your audio uploading. Maybe, you’re a good teacher, but you don’t know how to turn on a video recorder. So, you outsource the video recording part of that. Then in that case you’re probably outsourcing the emails, you’re probably outsourcing the article. And, then in that environment, I believe we say great, we want the sales person, the sales letter writer, we want the email writer, we want the article writer to be able to communicate with each other. So that we get as close to possible the same voice.
But, if you’re talking about someone like me, like you, like hundreds of others in the world today… You and I are entrepreneurs that have a business that is centered around the personal brand. I believe you can do the writing, and I believe you can do it without any fancy copy writing technique, any fancy copy writing training, anything like that.
It might take some practice, but it’s not as hard as it seems. And what you write will be genuine.
At first I really hesitated to teach anything about writing copy because I’m not a copywriter. I’m an ordinary person. But when I thought about it, I have covered this. It’s something I’ve taught my clients for years, but generally, I haven’t taught them necessarily under the umbrella of copy writing. I think I normally teach it under the umbrella of communication.
I believe that if someone can communicate in a way that gets the point across – just like I’m sharing with you right now. I’m sharing my thoughts on this. Just discussing this is the exact same communication that could be set down on the sales page itself. It’s conversational – and you can learn to write copy the same way you share content about your niche.