You’ve written an arm-grabbing headline making a big claim. You’ve qualified your claim in a sub-headline making it more specific and promising great benefits. Now you’ve got your reader’s attention and interest, the next job is to reinforce their interest, identify their need with your offer and keep them reading on until they grab for the solution and you make the sale. What you don’t want to do is try to make the sale right away because the buyer isn’t ready. So at this stage you don’t need the testimonials, guarantee and call to action. What you need is blind bullets.
A blind bullet looks like this: A proven strategy to double your sales in two months. Why you should never take stock tips from newspapers. (The formatting has been omitted). They’re called “blind” because they don’t go into specifics. They announce the secret you’re going to reveal, but they don’t tell what it is. That’s what you’re going to sell!
My expert analysis of the blind bullets we use in copywriting groups them in seven categories by function. 1. Blind bullets create curiosity. 2. They align the reader’s need with the results we promise. 3. They reassure the reader that our solution is easy to apply, oftentimes by following a structure. 4. They offer a How to solution. 5. They arouse fear by suggesting the risk of not buying our product. 6. They quantify the benefits our service provides. 7. Blind bullets give authoritative expert advice. You won’t maybe use all the types of blind bullets in one piece, but you must use several, especially the first two.
After the sub-headline the reader’s hoping that what you’ve got to sell really will meet their need, their specific, painful need, which is particular to people in their situation. They’re also wondering how you’re going to do it. After all, if their need was so easy to satisfy, their problem so easy to solve, they’d have fixed it themselves and wouldn’t be reading your copy. What you have to tune into and align with (to change the metaphor) is the pain, anxiety, fear, hope and desire your reader has. Forget about your own desire, the straightforward desire to sell your product or service. Focus on their desire. Align with them and they’ll align with you. In fact, I’ll go further. When you write a successful piece of copy, you don’t so much do the selling. The buyer does. The copywriter doesn’t so much sell to copy-readers. They sell to themselves.
Take another example of how people don’t so much sell things to us as we sell things to ourselves. When we buy clothes, an emotional as much as a practical decision, have you noticed when we try things on the sales assistant doesn’t say much? The assistant doesn’t gush with praise for our good taste, our good sense in finding a bargain, what our colleagues, 메이저놀이터 friends and family will say. Not at all. The good sales assistant keeps quiet. Meanwhile we fill the silence with our talk about the blouse, the scarf, the trousers. The assistant nods and smiles as we persuade ourselves to buy. Maybe the assistant briefly answers our questions about the material, other colors available, payment terms and so forth. In fact the assistant waits until we sell the clothes to ourselves. This can be observed even in cultures where it’s customary to haggle over the price. The haggling doesn’t begin until the seller thinks we’ve made the decision to buy.
Because buyers sell things to themselves more than we sell things to them, we need to lead them through the process of self-persuasion. We need to build up to the climax of the story. This comes when, after a largely internal struggle with doubt and indecision, the struggle is resolved in the mind of the buyer and the decision to buy is made.
What we need to do is to supply the buyer with talking points that they can use in their conversation with themselves. That’s when we reach the third stage in the structure of copy and use blind bullets. Blind bullets create more curiosity and lead on seamlessly to the next stage of our copy, the features of our product or service. We offer the benefits first so that the buyer can tell themselves that the features supply them. The blind bullets suggest to the buyer what they should be looking for. The better the knowledge of our market niche, the better-focused our blind bullets will be. They’ll truly reflect what the buyer wants. Once the logical connection is made in the buyer’s mind, the stage is set for beginning to move towards closing the sale.