Can you help me further my education?

I've got it and I'm working through it.

And there's a good example. He talks about 2-4% as a "decent" conversion rate for "fast food" copywriting. That's 20x higher than anything I've gotten from organic search visitors, so obviously there's a whole other section of stuff I've got to work on relating to targeting.

But I still have my original problem. I got burned, so I have a trust/belief issue. I'm not going to get past that issue until I believe I can communicate well enough to understand the copywriter and validate them against my requirements. This is how I'm trying to learn to do that communication.

Copywriting assistance - yes.
Sales copy assistance - not really.
This is an exercise. The objective of the exercise is for me to understand copywriters work better. I picked a sales letter for something I'm doing because it has the stringest overlap with my knowledge. I could have said widgets, but I don't make or sell widgets. The sales copy result itself doesn't matter very much. It's the dialogue arriving at the copy I want.

Consider these scenarios (and I'm going a parrot a bunch of phrases I THINK I know the meaning of).
1. I mention I'm thinking of getting some copy written to someone I've been dealing with. He recommends someone. I take their word that the guy knows their stuff, I pay, and send the guy the product, and I end up with a half written sales letter full of copy that puts me off. And the guy disappears.

That is where I got burned. Notice what I didn't do. I didn't check references, I paid up front, I didn't make sure the guy had written stuff in the right market, etc.
Notice what he didn't do. He didn't ask me pretty much anything. Not about target markets, not about desired writing style, pretty much nothing

Me now:
2. I mention I'm thinking of getting some copy written to someone I've been dealing with. He recommends someone. I still don't know if I can believe the recommendation. But I know more now. So I can talk to the guy, I can see what he asks me. I can ask for references, I can even talk about conversion ratios, visitor value and target market.

But I still can't honestly assess if that copywriter knows how to write for my target market. Or if they can write in a style I'm comfortable portraying myself in. Or a whole bunch of other stuff I can't even articulate.

Where I'd like to get to
3. I mention I'm thinking of getting some copy written to someone I've been dealing with. He recommends someone. I talk to them. I check their references. I can pick out that they have done work in the area before. I can discuss writing style. In short, I can figure out if they are a good fit without a mass of misunderstanding getting in the road.


Another aspect to it is time/cost/results.
Someone comes to me and says "I want a website to let customers track their freight around the world" (real example, the plan is an A3 blotter page of drawings). Cost: 40-80K PER MONTH for 4 years.

Someone comes to me and says "I want a website to let customers track their freight around the world" and "It needs to be hosted here. It needs to talk to 12 different database systems around the world, some of which are not ours. It needs to show results to customers as it finds them instead of waiting until the end as some results might be missing, or on slow connections." Cost: Would probably have been about 200K up front, and about 20K per month to hook additional systems, and make improvements.
That's a cost reduction of about 40%

If the client also said:
"I've investigated the options available, and we need an ASP.NET site. Communication needs to be via asynchronous web service connections, and here are the queries we need to be able to ask about. Oh, and we need to be able to filter results by customer ID in each system."
Just cut the cost by another 10%. Even though they increased the complexity.


And now I'm going to say thank you. You just triggered one of those moments I was after.


Software is about design. The end product is a representation of a thing. So is sales copy. There are dozens of ways of arriving at a design result which are equally effective.

And: Software design has an "architecture analysis" phase at the beginning (for larger projects). During which you you talk to people and collect what they want to achieve and why. Later on you translate that information into specific points we call a functional specification. And THAT maps to what you call features and benefits. Primarily benefits. and almost exclusively what I've seen Paul Myers call a "first level benefit". The obvious reason for doing something, but not the "systemic cause or desire".

Later you decide on the basic system, and you do a functional analysis, which translates functional points into a technical specification. The spec is things as detailed as "is colored green", "can accessed via a menu and a toolbar button". Those are purely features.

What I've been trying and failing on is primarily on representing and mapping features too and from benefits for the purpose of writing. And the causes are partly because I'm too constrained by how I use language, and partly because I've been trying to work from features back up to benefits because it's been so long since I started this project that the features are what I remember.