Thinking up great benefit statements has always been the most challenging part of copywriting for the web. But, other than a good headline, to sell visitors to your service, product and ideas you need great benefit statements.
Coming up with headlines, stories, price offers and all the fancy Buy Now! buttons you’d need to fill a sales page was easy for me in comparison. But creating a benefits list drove me crazy; that is until I learned how to come up with one or more benefits every minute.
Any basic sales course will tell you that features don’t sell a product or service, benefits do. Understanding that, I wanted to understand what exactly benefits really are. They are just things that help you take (or not take action), right? As an example, you “build” muscles or “create” more time. So, why not start out all benefit statements with action verbs? This is the process to take:
1. Find a long list of action verbs and alphabetize them.
2. On your computer or desk, spread out the list so you can see the whole thing
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3. Make up a sentence describing your product or service using each verb on the list.
”Accelerate” is the first word on my list of verbs, for example.
So, I might say to myself that my product helps people to “Accelerate your learning speed by getting true hands-on training with every command”.
4. Keep writing benefits as long as you are able and don’t quit! You’ll weed out the benefits later that don’t have as much punch as you thought. You don’t need to stop to think if you are writing duplicate phrases down either, now is not the time. Just keep an open mind and write down any benefit statements that come to mind about your product or service.
5. Prioritize your list with the most important benefit statements first and the least important last.
This process has worked for me to write great benefits statements, as well as when coming up with article ideas for my blog, such as “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.
Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. Usually, 20 benefits is more than enough to create great sales copy.
Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years. He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.
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