Some time back in the 2000s, Internet marketer Ken McCarthy put on a 3-day seminar titled, Advanced Copywriting for Serious Info Marketers.
This seminar has a kind of cult following in the marketing world today. Some of the most successful copywriters out there — people like Dan Ferrari and Ben Settle — say this is one of the best resources for really understanding what copywriting is all about.
Anyways, during this seminar, Ken asked the participants about the most important “do or die” copywriting skill.
“It’s a mechanical skill,” Ken explained. In other words, he wasn’t talking about secret ways of conducting research… or building desire… or even closing the sale.
All those are important. But there’s a single, mechanical skill that all good-to-great copywriters must master.
If I remember correctly, Ken teased this for over 10 minutes. I won’t do the same, because I feel I’ve teased you enough already. So let me just tell you:
This “do or die” skill is writing bullets.
Bullets? Yes, bullets.
Many sales letters are all bullets. But good bullet-writing skill will also mean you can write great headlines (what is a headline but your best bullet?) and subheads.
On an deeper level, being able to write good bullets means you can evoke curiosity in your reader, and focus his attention where you want it to go. That’s something you can use in your body copy too, or even in the structure of your sales letter.
But let’s assume Ken is right, and bullets are where it’s at.
So how do you get great at writing bullets?
Copywriter Gary Halbert had a solution for you:
Find a successful sales letter chock full o’ bullets… then get the book or newsletter or course they were selling… then reverse engineer how the copywriter “twisted” the original content to create the sexy bullet.
Thing is, the golden age of bullet-heavy magalogs has passed. And maybe you’re not keen on going on eBay and hunting for 90’s sales letters and the books they sold.
Fear not.
You can get access to some of the best bullets running today, along with the content that spawned them, for free, and in a pretty entertaining package. I’ll tell you all about it in my email tomorrow.
What, you don’t get my daily emails? Well, if you want ’em, you can sign up here.