From where/whom are you getting inspiration when you are writing a sales letter ?

I've been through a ton of modern copywriting books and they all suck in my opinion. Books by the likes of Dan Kenedy, Clayton Makepeace, and even John Carlton (supposedly trained and highly recommended by Gary Halbert) have done little more than use up my time and money.

I'm going back now to reading more by Gary Halbert (nothing has been more useful to me than the Gary Halbert Letter - google it if you haven't already) and following up on his recommendations, the Robert Collier Letterbook being one.

I only just started on Michael Masterton's AWAI Copywriting Course, which seems to be quite good, as it's VERY practical and gets you learning through a sort of forced osmosis from the the outset (reading winning salesletters multiple times, studying them and writing them out by hand, which I think really helps in improving your own writing).

Thank you for the feed back Snow

Hey look above the main internet marketing discussion forum and you will all in-on-thread, click on it and scrow down on next page to find the all in one copywriting thread. There you will find ton of harvestable info that you can you for this need.

Hope it helps.
Jideofor

Increasingly it seems I'm contrarian.

The only inspiration I have needed comes from the product itself, more specifically the benefits, the results, the solutions, the relief it provides.

No one knows my list better than I. The same goes with my info-products since I created them myself. So writing the sales letter and the entire campaign is merely an extension to the product creation process AFAIC. The only things I didn't write are the boilerplate legal notices, etc. (WordPress for the online stuff, and my attorney for the offline stuff).

Frankly, my niches aren't "ready" for the late Billy Mays' or the Sham-Wow dude! If I tried to force that hype and hysteria on them, I'm deadly certain they would unsubscribe en masse.

So far it has worked fine - if you agree that going from zero to mid-5-figure net in less than a year qualifies as "fine."

In future that may change since I'll going into complete different niches
and using different business plans and models, etc.

As always, your actual mileage may vary. I strongly encourage you read the classics from Kennedy and Joyner as an absolute minimum, and continue to increase your knowledge in all areas pertinent to your niche(s) and Internet marketing - whether you do these tasks yourself or outsource them. (Obviously, the better you understand what is entailed, the better you can get what you need - find the right person, detail what you want them to do, and assess their progress before it go terribly wrong and minor disputes escalate into all-out thermonuclear jihad - online and in the courts.)

Inspiration for writing a sales letter? Interesting. Inspiration for writing poetry or fiction, maybe. But copy? I don't think so. Maybe a better question would be where does the driving force behind the pitch or theme in sales copy come from?

That would be a number of things. First, the audience. You need to know your audience before sitting down to write. How old are they? What do they like and dislike? What's their average educational level? Stuff like that.

Before you can write sales copy you need to understand who buys the stuff you're trying to sell. Smart marketers will use some some sort of emotional trigger or appeal to get their customers in the mood to pull out a credit card. That might be guilt or envy or pride or fear or vanity or any number of other emotions.

Then you need to know the product. But this is far easier than knowing the market. You can find out a lot about the product by looking at a smart competitor and mirroring what they're doing. You can also find out a lot about your buyers this way.

The customer or potential customer.

But don't listen to me -- I cheat.

Howdy,

Are you looking for knowledge or inspiration? I think the two are very different....

If you're looking for knowledge, READ, Read as many books as you can on copywriting and I would like to respectfully disagree with people who believe modern copywriting books dont help...they've done wonders for me and I am sure they will for you too.... the key is not just skimming through them, but actually applying and testing what they tell you to do. Read John Carlton's books, Read Dan Kennedy and Read Gary Halbert...

Apart from that, two books that will do wonders for your copywriting and are NOT on the topic are:

How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

and

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

As far as inspiration is concerned.....

Inspiration in general: Read sales letters written by the top copywriters...they'll definitely take your copy to the next level..study the sales letters, de-construct them and build a library of sales letters (a swipe file)..

As far as inspiration for a particular sales letter is concerned: Understand the product, build an avatar and then go for a walk, a shower, a drive, a motorbike ride...whatever suits you and gets your creative juices flowing, all 4 work for me and I am sure at least one of them will for you...

I hope that helps..

Stay Frosty