20 Minutes Is All You Need to Create 20 Killer Benefit Statements in Copywriting For the Web
Thursday, April 29th, 2010Thinking up great benefit statements has always been the most challenging part of copywriting for the web. And benefit statements are critical to selling your readers to try your products, services, and ideas, second only to the headline.
In comparison, the other parts of copywriting that people might find challenging, such as stories, headlines, and great price offers were easy. What drove me nuts was coming up with a benefits list; that is until I discovered how to develop more than one benefit a minute.
You may recall from Sales 101 that benefits are what sells your product or service, not features. Knowing the truth to that, I started to take a closer look at what benefits really are. I discovered they are really just action items in disguise, agreed? As an example, you “build” muscles or “create” more time. So, why not start out all benefit statements with action verbs? The process goes like this:
1. Get a long list of alphabetized action verbs.
2. Put the list on your desk or computer screen where you can see the entire list
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3. Make up a sentence describing your product or service using each verb on the list.
”Accelerate” is the first word on my list of verbs, for example.
So, I might say to myself that my product helps people to “Accelerate your learning speed by getting true hands-on training with every command”.
4. Write as many benefits as you can and don’t stop! You will be able to pare down your list to only those that give the best punch 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 is the time that you will prioritize your list from most important to least.
This process has worked for me to write great benefits statements, as well as when coming up with article ideas for my blog, such as “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. Usually, 20 benefits is more than enough to create great sales copy.
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.
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