Getting the person to take action.

So, what’s happened before that?

We’ve been building desire.

And the “desire” also includes such things as “value building”.

(Mr. consumer, we’re getting serious here.  We have something that can seriously make your life better…)

The value building includes such things as comparing the value of what you are providing to other things that may solve the same problem or that they might spend on other (and frivolous) things.

Action is where the rubber meets the road.

You can think of your salesletter made up of a thousand little micro-decisions (will I continue reading?) but now you’re asking the reader to make a bigger decision, make a bigger commitment.

Whether you are getting someone to sign up for something free or whether it’s something that will require money  — it’s the commitment decision.

You’ve got to pull out and remind the reader of all the wonderful things your product will do for them (and how miserable they’ll be without it!).  You have to make them feel comfortable to do business with you. Make them have confidence

That you’ll take good care of them, that you are trustworthy.

It’s a sacred trust.

At least, I’d like to think that most merchants view the transaction as a sacred trust.

Obviously, that isn’t always true — otherwise groups like the FTC wouldn’t have to exist.

When the reader has finally become confident that not only will your product enhance their lives, but that you will be someone who is trustworthy, will they take the risk in buying your product.

Hoping upon hope that all those wonderful dreams you spun will become possible with your product.

So, are we done?

Well, we’re done with the AIDA formula.

That makes the sale.

But beyond the sale there is making the sale “stick”.

And that’s what we’ll talk about tomorrow.

That’s why people have their guarantees.

But this isn’t about that.

AIDA is a well-worn and well-proven sales formula — not just for copywriters, but for salesfolk the world around.

It stands for

• A – Attention
• I – Interest
• D – Desire
• A – Action

While there are many other “formulas” out there — Michel Fortin has a few, most notably his “QUEST” formula — the AIDA formula forms the backbone of them all.

Let’s take them 1 by 1 and give you an introduction.

And that’s all it is, is an intro — because books can, and have, been written about each of these — even if not in so many words.

First, ATTENTION

If you’re on a car lot, it’s the car salesperson coming up to the person on the lot and asking them what they might be looking for today.

On a website, you’ve got to hit them much more strongly.

Why?

Well, it has to do with the investment in time it took them to get there.

At the car lot — they’ve gotten up, maybe on their day off, gotten dressed and driven to the car lot.  How many miles did they drive?

They have an investment of time and effort getting there, so they’ve already invested a fair amount of their own attention.

But when they come to your website, they haven’t invested much to get there.  So they don’t have much to lose by leaving.

And leave they will — quickly — if you don’t really pull them in.

On the web, it’s called “web surfing”.  So what you need to do is to stop them from their surfing, get them to stop.

You have to get them to change their behavior.

And you do that by grabbing their attention.

“Okay, okay”, I hear you say.  “Enough with the attention.  How do we get people’s attention?”

Well — it’s typically the headline of your copy that does the heavy lifting.

Copywriter John Caples describes the three basic winning headline types in his “Tested Advertising Methods.”  Caples is the copywriter who penned the stunning headline “They Laughed When I Sat Down At The Piano…But When I Started To Play…”).

Caples stated winning headlines should provide one or more of the following:

• Curiosity
• Benefit
• News

Gary Bencivenga, on his “Bencivenga Bullets“:site, indicates that I=B+C — or, put another way — (user) interest = benefit + curiosity.

So — you grab the reader’s attention by appealing to THEIR interest.

Not the wonders of your magic product … that (generally) comes later.

You see … the reader has a number of questions running around in their mind: concerns, worries, issues.  Things that they think about while driving, while they are standing in line at the grocery store, while filling the gas tank…stuff that fills their mind while it’s not focused on a specific problem.

And when they come to your webpage — there’s part of them that’s asking “Is this for me?”  And, more specifically, “Will this solve any of the problems that pre-occupy me?”

Understand — this isn’t a conscious thing.

But there’s a part of us that’s alert to anything that promises to solve the problems that pre-occupy us.

And when we find that, it focuses our attention like a laser beam onto the solution.

(otherwise known ase a “benefit.”)

Okay… so much for Attention.

Tomorrow we’ll talk about Interest.

Words, surely. And along with words, people use size, font “decorations”, font weight, font color and the like to change how things appear on the webpage. With cascading style sheets (css), webdesigners can make placements onto webpages down to the pixel. Line spacing, justification, first line indents — the choices go on and on.

Of course, that raises another issue: once a page is designed — pictures and font decisions, centering text or not — will it look the same on all web browsers? Wait! All web browsers might be a bit of an impossibility, at least within a reasonable time & cost constraint.

So let’s step back, before we go too, deeply, and start looking at this problem a bit more simply.

But not too simple.

After all, If I provide you a page of black text, with one font and only enough variety with capitalization to make your 8th grade grammarian teacher happy — you probably will not find the page as interesting as you would with more variety. It wouldn’t be as interesting as it might if I use such things as: bolding text; capitalizing some words; making some parts of the text centered, other parts left-justified; using different colors of text.

Within reason, of course. Too much variation, and visitors can get overwhelmed. Too busy, and visitors can not easily reach into your design and connect with your message. Too crowded, and the reader can feel suffocated.

What’s reasonable? How much is enough to make the text interesting, but not so much as to be, well, offensive. Off-putting.

While there are many aspects we could discuss, let’s just take two that reportedly make text more interesting. Granted, at least one of them I’m not doing in this blog at this time. And that is first line indents. I did change it on another blog I recently started. I think it makes things more pleasant to read — what about you?

The other is justification. It’s been reported that “ragged right” (aka “left justification”) helps to prevent “eye fatigue”. Anything that makes it easier for readers to view the page should be done. Who knows at what point just a subtle bit of eye fatigue distracts the visitor from your page — never to return again?

( John Ritskowitz’ Copywriter’s Toolkit )

If you need a headline — for an article, a salesletter, email subject lines — the online headline generator is superb. How superb? Well, I was hired to write some headlines for a client for a little over the price of the toolkit. I have more than a few headline writing resources. And, to tell you the truth, the headline generator in John’s toolkit wasn’t what I considered using first.

But after going thru a number of different tools, John’s headline generator gave me the greatest ease in fulfilling the client’s request.

How Does The Headline Generator Work?

The headline generator asks several questions that help to focus on what are elements of proven, successful headlines.

The headline generator harnesses the power of computers to do what computers do so well — create hundreds of combinations at the click of a button. And then you can select from all the combinations the ones you like and want to save — and even make changes and create some more!

So it turns headline writing inside out. Rather than taking the checklist and applying it to a headline, it takes the points of checklists, gathers the information, and generates a candy-store full of checklist-satisfying headlines.

To say that the headline generator can save a lot of time in what is often the copywriter’s most time-consuming task misses the point. It takes headline creation to a whole new level.

And the headline generator is only ONE tool in the copywriter’s toolkit.

I’ll be talking about more of the features of the Copywriter’s Toolkit soon … but if I’ve piqued your interest, and want to discover more about it sooner, why not just check it out here:

John Ritskowitz’ Copywriter’s Toolkit