Thinking up great benefit statements has always been the most challenging part of copywriting for the web. But, other than a good headline, to sell visitors to your service, product and ideas you need great benefit statements.
Coming up with headlines, stories, price offers and all the fancy Buy Now! buttons you’d need to fill a sales page was easy for me in comparison. But creating a benefits list drove me crazy; that is until I learned how to come up with one or more benefits every minute.
Any basic sales course will tell you that features don’t sell a product or service, benefits do. Knowing that, I started to try to get to the bottom of what benefits actually are. They’re action items, right? For example, you “lose” weight or “make” money. So, what do you think about starting out each benefit statement with a verb that takes action? The process goes like this:
1. Find a long list of action verbs and alphabetize them.
2. On your computer or desk, spread out the list so you can see the whole thing
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3. Beginning with the letter A, read each verb aloud and come up with a descriptive sentence about your product or service that includes the verb.
”Accelerate” is the first word on my list of verbs, for example.
So, I might say that my product helps to “accelerate” fingernail growth.
4. Write benefits until you can’t think of any more, and don’t think of quitting early! You can cut out those that don’t have as much impact later. Don’t worry about duplicates right now either. Just keep an open mind and write down any benefit statements that come to mind about your product or service.
5. Now you organize your benefit list in order of priority from most important benefit to last.
This process has worked for me not only to create great benefits lists, but also for writing articles for my website like “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.
Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. In most cases, a good list of 20 benefits is all you will need for your sales page.
Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years. He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors. Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.