"The seven simple secrets which will make your writing bloody irresistible – guaranteed"

Here's a five minute flipchart exercise I sometimes show clients. A simple demonstration of just how easy it can be to make everything you write more pleasing, potent and persuasive.

On a flipchart I write the headline:
A few techniques to minimise the shortcomings in writing designed to persuade.

Then I say, tip one: make your writing active and personal. By saying things like ‘your writing’, for example. Write as one individual talking to another individual.

So, I make a change to the headline on the flipchart. It now reads:

A few techniques to minimise the shortcomings in your writing designed to persuade. 

Second tip: use ‘hardwired words’. There are words that just seem to grab people’s attention, almost as if they’re hardwired in our brains. One example is the word ‘guaranteed’. Another is ‘secrets’. So the headline now becomes:

A few secrets to minimise the shortcomings in your writing designed to persuade – guaranteed. 

Third tip: be specific not generic. People like precision, facts, numbers, statistics. And the more tangible those are, the better. So instead of ‘Save up to 40%’, it’s more effective to say ‘Save as much as £65’. The headline gets another tweak:

Seven secrets to minimise the shortcomings in your writing designed to persuade – guaranteed. 

Fourth tip: talk about solutions, not problems. People buy solutions, they don’t like hearing about problems. So, in an anti-dandruff shampoo ad where they have one big picture, it’ll never be a picture of the problem. It’ll be a picture of someone with dazzling, flake-free hair.

So the headline gets another couple of tweaks:

Seven secrets which can make your writing irresistible – guaranteed. 

Fifth tip: features tell, benefits sell. So, when you get a credit card, ‘Fraud protection’ is a feature, ‘You can feel safe when you shop online’ is the benefit.

The changes we’ve made to our headline have already made it more benefit driven, but we can enhance it further. Firstly, by putting the definite article at the beginning. And secondly by being bolder and saying the benefits ‘will’ rather than ‘can’. We’ll also add an important, new benefit: that these secrets are ‘easy’. So now we have:

The seven easy secrets which will make your writing irresistible – guaranteed. 

Sixth and penultimate tip: make your writing lyrical and lively. Use slightly unusual language, a little alliteration, a metaphor, onomatopoeia or a play on words to make it stand out.

We can make the headline more alliterative by changing ‘easy’ to ‘simple’. And we can make it more distinctive by adding a punchy adjective:

The seven simple secrets which will make your writing bloody irresistible – guaranteed.

Seventh, final tip: ooze credibility. There are lots of ways of sounding more credible – such as quoting someone. Interestingly, it works even if your audience doesn’t know the person you’re quoting. In fact, it works even your quote doesn’t say who it’s from, but just looks like a quote. So, let’s add speech marks:

”The seven simple secrets which will make your writing bloody irresistible – guaranteed.” 

And there it is.

From A few techniques to minimise the shortcomings in writing designed to persuade to ”The seven simple secrets which will make your writing bloody irresistible – guaranteed”.

Seven simple copywriting parlour tricks. Which have made the line about 10 times better. Without being a single word longer. 

(Those seven are taken from the 25 tips explained in the 'Quick Wins' chapter of Copy. Righter.)