You know that for your marketing to work, it must tap into a powerful emotion the buyer is experiencing.

The emotions most commonly targeted in copy: greed, guilt, fear, and exclusivity.

Of course there are many others: love, hate, envy, joy, empathy, benevolence.

I’ve identified 4 other emotions that work for a wide variety of offers but especially for business opportunity and money-making offers.

They are desire, dissatisfaction, disappointment, and despair. I call them the “4 Ds”.

There are many similarities between the Ds, but subtle differences, too:

1 – Desire.

Prospects who respond to business opportunity and money-making offers want something.

Not just a little. They crave its possession.

For some prospects, the desire is for money or material objects—a boat, vacation home, luxury car—and they need money to own it.

For many, it’s the difference that money can make in their lives: the ability to run your own business, quit your 9-to-5 job, or get rid of money worries for good.

Others desire the security and peace of mind they think financial independence will bring.

Promising the fulfillment of the prospect’s prominent desire is a powerful way to entice him to pull the trigger and invest in your product.

2 – Dissatisfaction.

Countless individuals slog through life, unhappy and dissatisfied with their lot.

They want something better, but are often unclear on what that would be or how to achieve it.

In business opportunity marketing, our selling proposition is that we will help you make the money you need to live the life you want to live.

In self-help and spiritual marketing, the promise is often to show you how to be happy and fulfilled by who you are and what you have.

Dissatisfaction is a potent emotion to tap into. Dissatisfaction is emotional pain.

People act mainly for two reasons: to attain pleasure and avoid pain. Of these, the avoidance of pain can be stronger than the attainment of pleasure.

Another way to put it is that people act for only two reasons: to gain reward and avoid punishment.

3 – Disappointment.

What’s the difference between dissatisfaction and disappointment?

Dissatisfaction means the prospect has a problem he has not solved or a situation he cannot resolve – for example, he wants to own a BMW but can’t afford it.

Disappointment is more specific. It means the prospect has tried to solve the problem or resolve the situation—and it hasn’t worked out.

The disappointed prospect is wary of marketing claims. That makes him highly skeptical and difficult to sell.

It’s far easier to market to prospects who have had some degree of success solving their problem and want more help.

As a copywriter, for example, some potential clients tell me how they have hired an endless string of copywriters and all of them have failed.

When I hear that, I run for the hills. I’d rather have a client who hires and works well with her copywriters.

4 – Despair.

Despair means the prospect’s situation is so dire, it is emotionally painful.

The prospect feels no one can help him and there is no hope.

The best approach here is to prove that what you offer does in fact work and has worked for many of your customers.

Testimonials, case studies, and YouTube videos are three obvious marketing tactics for proving your claims. There are others; e.g., show images of checks you have received as a result of using your money-making system.

You may think the 4 Ds—desire, dissatisfaction, disappointment, and despair—are too negative.

But negative marketing can work. Fear is a powerful motivator. It’s not universally right for every marketing campaign. But next time you’re formulating your promotional strategy, see if you can build a message around one of the 4 Ds.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

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A low conversion rate is the end-result of a series of mistakes for most web businesses, There can be any number of issues at play with low conversions. But all is rarely lost, and practically any business can be turned around with the right information and focused action. Given below are 3 powerful tips to help you improve your conversion rates.

We begin with a simple and basic premise that the most effective approach to influence someone is through words. Words are powerful; witness a professionally designed and gorgeous website or blog but containing ill-suited and ineffectual sales copy will still not give a tantalizing impression of your offer, thereby shutting off a potential sale. The quality of sales copy you have and how effective it is plays a major role in how many sales you’re getting and how well you’re converting casual browsers into customers. If you’re not a copywriter but have lots of time on hand, do take the time to learn this important skill. You may want to think about outsourcing to a freelance copywriter if you have the money. Probably 90% of all marketers on the Net fail to test anything, and that is simply a huge mistake. How about realizing a 300 to 500% increase in conversion rates just from changing one or two words in a headline? It happens all the time. Work on your copy as much as you can and do A/B testing or get a fellow friend to proof-read it.

Whenever you’re dealing with copy and sales/marketing material, pay attention to the benefits of what you’re offering. They must be expressed properly to make the reader ‘feel’ for all the great things your product will provide for him/her. Just about everyone who has a little experience with IM has heard about benefit bullet points. The main reason for bullet points is that online readers always skim and scan, so it’s easier to the eye when information is encapsulated in quick, short and “to the point” sentences. You should draft a list of features and benefits and lay them out side-by-side so your prospects know quickly and clearly what’s in it for them.

As mentioned earlier, one of the most important and critical actions you could ever do is test your sales material/copy. Test everything you can: the copy content, graphics locations, actual graphics, price points, site colors, etc. There’s nothing wrong with continual testing, and you’ll find that you can always improve. All the great marketers stress that there is never a good enough reason to stop trying to improve conversion rates. Times keep changing and especially on the Internet, you need to keep your site updated to keep your conversions consistent. The tips that I discussed in this article are only a tip of the iceberg because there are many, many ways you can constantly increase your site’s conversion rate. So there it is, and always remember to keep taking action as much as possible.

1) Limit 80% of the words to 5 characters or less.

2) Make sentences 1.5 lines or shorter.

3) Keep the first paragraph to 3 lines or fewer.

Source: Target Marketing, 3/12, p. 14.

Copywriter Ryan Healy offers these tips on how to get readers to believe your copy:

* Don’t use hype to sell your product.
* Make every effort to be accurate.
* Do not distort the facts.
* Don’t be hypocritical.

Many consumers are turned off by and distrust long-copy landing pages, which they find too salesy or even sleazy. Here are some elements you can add to your landing page to eliminate this turnoff and add credibility:

>> Industry or media awards (editor’s choice, fastest growing company).

>> Media coverage (mentions in mainstream press or blogs).

>> Endorsements from individuals, analysts, associations.

>> Partnerships (e.g., authorized reseller) with well-respected companies.

>> Client lists and logos.

>> User testimonials and third-party review.

>> Studies and surveys (e.g. ranked #1 in customer satisfaction).

Source: Target Marketing Group, “3 Landing Page Mistakes to Avoid.”

We copywriters are taught to write conversational copy. Many marketers erroneously think “conversational copy” means “write like you talk”. But what it really means is “write the way your prospects talk”.

A public radio station in my area, featuring eclectic rock and pop, sent me a fundraising letter. It began: “Dear Neighbor: I know you are a savvy media consumer.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but if you ask me why I listen to the radio, I would not say because I am a savvy media consumer; I’d say, “I like music.”

Here’s my rewrite for the fundraising letter lead: “Dear Fellow Music Lover: Do you ever wish, when you turn on the radio, that they’d play OUR music?”

While my rewrite hasn’t been tested against the original, I believe it’s an improvement, for two reasons.

First, it talks about something the reader cares about: hearing music I like when I turn on the radio.

Second, it establishes an empathy-based bond through a common interest between the reader and the writer: that we share similar musical tastes—which is why I said “our” music instead of “your” music.

“In most cases, you should write in a conversational, intimate voice,” says copywriter Susanna K. Hutcheson. “You should talk as if you’re having coffee with the reader and use her language. Many copywriters, and just about all people who write their own copy, don’t understand the concept of writing in the language of the reader. It’s truly an art.”

Is there any situation where you should use language other than conversational copy? What about writing to sophisticated audiences? Don’t specialists prefer jargon when discussing their industry or trade?

Some argue that jargon is appropriate because it’s language used by specialists in your target audience. But I think they confuse jargon with technical terms.

Technical terms are words or phrases that communicate a concept or idea more precisely and concisely than ordinary terms. Example: “operating system” to describe the software that controls the basic operations of a computer.

Jargon, on the other hand, is language more complex than the ideas it serves to communicate.

Example: I worked for a company that made industrial equipment. In one of our products, a door opened at the bottom of a silo, allowing powder to fall into a dump truck underneath. Our chief engineer insisted that in our copy we replace “dumped” with “gravimetrically conveyed”.

For a client, I wrote that the dental brace they manufactured helped keep loose teeth in place. The product manager rewrote “keep loose teeth in place” to “stabilize mobile dentition”. To me, this is like calling the sea shore an “ocean-land interface”.

Mark Twain said “I never write metropolis when I get paid the same amount of money to write the word city.” But is there an exception to the rule of writing the way people talk? A situation where you would deliberately use language more complex than the idea it serves to communicate?

Yes. The one case in which you might consider replacing ordinary language with more sophisticated phraseology is when you want to set your product above the ordinary.

Take a look at a Mont Blanc catalog. They don’t describe their products as pens; they sell “writing instruments”. Why? Because Mont Blanc pens start at about $100…and, while that’s too much to pay for a pen, it’s not too much to pay for a “writing instrument”.

The goal of direct response copywriting is not to produce perfect prose or great writing. It is to persuade the consumer to buy your product. And the bottom line is: the copywriter should do whatever it takes to achieve that goal, whether or not writing purists approve.

For instance, grammarians dislike the phrase “free gift”, complaining that “free” is inherent in the definition of gift: what gift isn’t free? But in a recent lecture, my colleague Herschell Gordon Lewis defended “free gift” because it works, explaining that “each word reinforces the other”.

I remember years ago hearing about a mailer who actually split test “free gift” vs. “gift”. Not only did “free gift” win handily, but a number of recipients of the “gift” letter responded by inquiring whether the gift was indeed free.

Which reminds me of what Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: “It is not enough to write so you can be understood; you must write so clearly that you cannot be misunderstood.”

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

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A “swipe” file is a collection of promotions you have collected from other marketers.

“A good swipe file is better than a college education,” says my old direct marketing professor, master copywriter Milt Piece.

The swipe file provides inspiration and ideas from successful marketing campaigns you may be able to use in your promotion.

By doing so, it can help overcome writer’s block. With ideas from a swipe file, you can write copy better and faster.

Lots of copywriters today keep swipe files of promotions in their industry, particularly health and financial writers.

Milt, however, preferred to get his inspiration and ideas from promotions for products different than the one he was writing about.

When a client who is selling insurance asked Milt to create a direct mail package, he would avoid looking in his insurance swipe file. Instead, he looked in his swipe files for totally unrelated products. Why? The reason is simple. “If you create an insurance package that looks like every other insurance package, you’re just being a copycat,” said Milt. “However, if you check through other types of packages, you’re more likely to come up with an original approach to the insurance package.”

A good example is a recent print ad I saw for the Stauer Titanium watch.

The ad shows a large photo of the watch.

The headline above it reads: “We Apologize that It Loses 1 Second Every 20 Million Years.”

The style and approach seem, to me anyway, to be inspired by the classic David Ogilvy Rolls Royce ad.

The headline for Ogilvy’s ad for Rolls Royce was: “At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”

If Stauer’s ad was for a car, it would seem derivative of the Ogilvy ad—not very original.

But Stauer has created a compelling ad by adapting Ogilvy’s straightforward, fact-based copy approach to a watch.

It’s an approach not typically used in this category…so it supports Milt’s claim that applying ideas used in one industry to another can result in an interesting and effective promotion.

The best results I’ve seen from using swipe files have come not from creatively plagiarizing promotions within the same industry.

They’ve come from cross-pollination of ideas between different industries.

For instance, I was looking at my swipe file for options trading promotions to come up with ideas for a DM package to sell trading software.

Nothing. So I flipped through my other swipe files. In my health swipe file, I came across a promotion for a vision supplement. The headline: “Why bilberry and luetine don’t work.”

I knocked off the headline in my trading software promotion—and tripled the control.

My headline: “Why most trading software doesn’t work…and never will.”

In a breakthrough fundraising direct mail package, the non-profit sent a free paperback book to potential donors.

The slim “book” was actually a promotion written to solicit donations, and the package did gangbusters.

A major financial publisher copied the format—now known as a “bookalog”—to promote an investment newsletter.

The book they wrote and sent prospects, titled “The Plague of the Black Debt”, was one of their most successful promotions of all time.

One interesting footnote to the Stauer watch swipe from the Rolls Royce ad…

David Ogilvy has been accused of stealing the headline for his most famous ad from another copywriter.

It was always believed that Ogilvy came up with this brilliant way of communicating Rolls Royce quality on his own—perhaps by driving his own Rolls.

I have also heard that he found the fact about the Rolls Royce clock in an article published in an automotive trade journal.

But now others are saying he took it from another car ad, for Pierce-Arrows.

And their headline, which was published years before Ogilvy’s Rolls ad, indeed is remarkably similar: “The only sound one can hear in the new Pierce-Arrows is the ticking of the electric clock.”

I don’t know whether Ogilvy had a swipe file and deliberately swiped the idea from Pierce-Arrows.

Today their ad is forgotten but his is one of the classic ads of all time.

Why?

I think the addition of “at 60 mph” makes the Rolls ad much stronger.

Back then, big cars were noisier than they are today, and a car that quiet at high-speed was a much more credible demonstration of quality than a car going 20 mph.

When you swipe from another industry instead of your own, you steer clear of copycatting and plagiarism charges—and are credited as brilliantly original when your swiped ad works.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

Professional copywriters can often make it seem easy to write good copy. It’s easy to read good copywriting and think that it’s something you could easily do yourself if you only put your mind to it. Then, when you decided to sit down and write your own sales page you found that it was a lot harder than you thought it would be. Anybody can learn the basics of copywriting. As an Internet marketer, you really need to have some knowledge of basic copywriting skills. Copywriting is essential for almost all aspects of online marketing, so you need this ability if you want to make sales!

Most of the time copy should be less than obvious. We’ve all seen examples of horrible copy that violates that principle. This kind of copy falls on its face. Your sales copy needs to do its job while making people thank you for selling them something. You have to consider that your income and livelihood depend on your sales copy, so it has to be written well enough to do that.

Copywriters like to use stories in a sales letters because they’re a subtle but powerful part of bring the reader into the message. You never want to shout or advertise that it’s a sales message, even though most people know it is. Those are a huge turn off!

Depending on the circumstances, you can use humor but not in excess. Having some humor and fun has worked in some letters. One thing you can use humor for is to break the ice a little and that will help people to let down their guard. Also, just getting a chuckle from readers will sometimes be enough to make them relax enough to stay on your page. But you know, there’s always a fine line between just right and overdoing it. Always avoid coming across like you’re trying real, real hard to be a quick wit.

You can break some rules, but you need to know exactly what you’re doing. If you learn copywriting, you’ll see that a lot of grammar rules are blatantly ignored but not spelling rules. The best course of action is to always get the facts, and it won’t hurt you to educate yourself a little bit on this matter. Just remember: there is a fine line between breaking a few rules and sounding like a total amateur. Don’t underestimate how difficult copywriting is. It’s the mark of a professional copywriter that he makes it appear effortless. As hard as it can be, copywriting is something you have to be able to do if you are an Internet marketer. By becoming even a moderately good copywriter, you can greatly improve your business. Copywriting is what sells your products. You really cannot expect to sell your products if you don’t know how to persuade people to buy them.