Whether you’re selling products or services

That’s what an Elevator Pitch is and I want to thank those who commented on Monday, and shared their business “description” with us. You might want to check out the responses left by Peter & Sarah. I honestly think they are great examples of effective elevator pitches; I’ll explain why with these 5 tips:

5 Tips For Crafting an Effective Elevator Pitch

People often hear the word pitch and they automatically think “selling” – while it is a form of selling if you’re speaking to a potential customer, it’s more like sorting. As business owners we need to “sort out” the people who need (or want) our products and services, from those who don’t.

Which brings me to the first tip:

1. Know Your Target

Getting your message just right first requires you to know who’s going to be receiving that message. Saying something like, “I Help Startups Get More Clicks & More Leads By Improving Their PPC Campaigns” is not going to resonate with your audience if they have NO MONEY and they want free traffic. Makes sense, right?

2. Fix Their Problem

You elevator pitch can’t just be, “my business does SEO”. It doesn’t say to who or what that means to the prospect. If your business does SEO for small business owners, they don’t want SEO services, they want higher rankings and ultimately more traffic from search engines from their major keywords. That is what they want to hear, so that’s what you tell them.

“I Help Small Business Owners Rank Higher & Get More Free Search Engine Traffic” – it’s not perfect, but you get the point.

3. Keep Your Eye On The Prize

This is why stating benefits and solving problems in your  pitch is so important; you want your prospect to say, “YES!! That’s what I want. Where have you been all my life?” or something along those lines. The prize is getting them interested in what you do and how you can help them.

4. Short & To The Point

Specificity is your best friend when crafting your pitch. The goal is to get prospects interested and wanting to know more, NOT to confuse the hell out of them. Sarah did this beautifully with her pitch; she wrote, “I help businesses define their content marketing strategy and develop original content to support it.”

I’m left with only one question in my mind, which is” How?” – from there Sarah would explain what she offers and how that helps her clients and then BAM!!! ..money starts rolling in… woohoo let’s go have margaritas and chill at the beach.

Uh No, this is when the real work starts. You actually have to deliver on your promises and make your client happy – but you knew that already. Moving on…

5. It’s Not About You

I briefly (very briefly) touched on this in Monday’s post, but here it goes again – your business is NOT about you or how smart you are, it’s about them and the results they’re looking for. Again, if your business does SEO, talking about backlinks, caffeine updates, meta tags and keyword research does not get you customers.

Showing them how you can help them rank higher gets you clients. So be creative and let them know as fast, simple and non confusing as possible.

I’m done!

On To You…

Share your thoughts below and let’s discuss – oh and don’t forget to use the Twitter & Facebook buttons to share this with your friends.. :0)

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Copywriting is a weird topic for me.

Still, I know it’s an important topic, especially when it comes to grabbing your readers attention… which brings be to A.I.D.A. I know the advanced readers know what I’m talking about, but for the “newbies”…

What The Heck Is A.I.D.A?

Let’s keep this short and simple (I don’t wanna bore anyone)

A is for Attention – You need to grab your readers attention first.

I is for Interest - Then you spark their interest to keep their attention.

D is for Desire - After interest is sparked, Desire for your product or service needs to be created.

A is for Action – Then the person takes Action on whatever it is you’re offering.

Now that we got that out of the way, how do we grab people’s attention to bring them into our blog?

Here Are My Top 3 Headline Writing Tips

Tip#1 – Create Curiosity – The key to creating curiosity is to just have fun with it. You can use movie phrases and substitute some words or play with some cliche phrases.

An exmaple would be “To Blog Or Not To Blog, That Is The Question” – This might sound cheesy but I can almost gurantee that it will outperform against a headline that reads – “Reasons Why You Should Blog”. Agreed? Great!

Tip#2 – Include a Benefit – This is a great strategy for writing effective headlines because everyone is cruising the web tuned into the W.I.I.F.M (what’s in it for me) radio station. So your headline needs to tell them What’s In It For Them.

I could’ve easily titled this post “How To Write Effective Headlines”, but that headline holds no benefit to my readers.

Tip#3 – Promise  a Solution – Everyone is always searching for the answer to their problems, so promising a solution will definitely get your readers attention.

For example: In yesterday’s post, I knew a pressing problem (objective/excuse) that most people have is that they can’t build a business because they’re on a budget. So I promised to solve that problem by titling my post “You CAN Build A Business With A $29.95 Budget!”

Do You Have Any Tips You’d Like To Share?

Remember that writing a great headline is one thing, and delivering on your promises is another. I hope I delivered on my promises, but we won’t know until you actually take these tips and apply them to your blog.

If you enjoyed this post – share it, retweet it, digg it, stumble it.. pass it on.

This is Hector.. signing off – Talk soon.

These are the things to always keep in mind when writing your copy so that our visitor, lead, or prospective customer actually take action! Preferably the action you want them to take

So here they are… 4 Quick Tips To Spice Up Your Web Copy

1. Use short, punchy words for greater impact

There’s a rhythm to great copy and it certainly is NOT in long, BOOOOORRRRRINNNGG sentences. You MUST keep your reader interested in what you got to get your point across. Would be kinda hard to do that if they stop reading.. right?

So leave the long, boooorrrriiinnggg sentences at the door.

2. Spell out the benefits to the reader

Don’t leave anything to chance. Nothing gets assumed by the reader so make sure you tell them everything you want them to know AND everything you want to assume about you or your product.

Writing the benefits in bullets pointswill increase readership, and show the true value of your product or solution.

3. The more magical it sounds, the more you will sell

One thing that goes without saying is that you gotta use these tips ethically and legally.

Example: “Watch Tv, Eat All Day, & Make Millions Doing Nothing!!” will PROBABLY not fly with the FTC, but you can find a healthy combination of both magical and realistic sales copy.

The unfortunate reality is, humans are lazy, when work is involved, you’ll get less sales. PERIOD.

4. Subsitute adjectives for verbs

Verbs are much more powerful words to use when describing what something does or the benefit it brings.

Adjectives are for book authors, verbs are for marketers (that’s us)

Got any more copy tips you’d like to share. Post ‘em below…

Hector The “MLM Master”

P.S. If you enjoyed this article and you already subscribe to this blog please share it with your friends on Twitter by clicking the little green “retweet” button on this post.

Similar Online Marketing Posts::

1. 5 Tips For Writing Great Headlines That Work
2. Quick SEO Tips To Getting Higher Search Engine Rankings
3. 5 Quick Tips For Crafting An Effective ‘Elevator Pitch’