How to write effective ads

Copywriting is a skill that will pay you more than anything else in marketing, and even though I'll provide you with tons of ads you can start using today, I encourage you to learn how to become an independent marketer and start writing your own ads. I'll share some things that can help you do that.

Learn The Art and Science Of Writing Persuasive Ad Copy and Use
Some of the OVER 65 Sample Ads In This Powerful Course To Generate
More Leads and Sales For Your Business:

http://www.WriteSmokinAds.com

And even more marketing training here:

http://www.SimpleCashflowSystems.com

Here's an incredible site that will help you with writing headlines and subject lines for ads and emails: www.aminstitute.com/headline

It'll rate your headline to let you know if you have a good one. If you can get a score of 50% or above, then you have a headline that people will click on. 100%… you'll definitely have a winner. 

When writing ads, I want you to do your best to incorporate at least two of the following in every ad you write... 

• Benefit 
• Pain avoidance 
• Are they missing out if they don't respond? 
• Curiosity 

Ok, let's dig right into a quick lesson...below is a poorly written ad:

Headline/Subject Line: Make money online 
Description: Don't get scammed. Download a Free eBook and learn how to start an 
online business. 

Benefit: "Make money" and "start an online business" 
These benefits are way too vague and generic. For benefits to really "talk" to the viewer they need to be specific. 

Pain avoidance: "Don't get scammed." 
Not bad, except again there's no specificity. 

Are they missing out if they don't respond?: A tiny touch of that with the pain avoidance above, but ask yourself ... do you feel like you're missing out on anything if you skip this ad? (I don't either.) 

Curiosity: None. 

You'll see amateurs running ads online using EXTREME hype. Here are some of the worst examples of what NOT to say in an ad if you want to attract quality prospects, not just broke tire-kickers...

* Make $150K (that's $150,000) a MONTH Instantly!!! 

* We do all of the work for you 

* Quick and Easy Money 

* Quit your job tomorrow 

* Use our system to get RICH

You'll see these types of ads above publicly promoted on CraigsList, MySpace, eBay, Google, etc. 

Desperate and untrained individuals (in the hopes of making a few referrals) will use HYPE. Mostly because they're lacking basic marketing and lead generation skills.

Bottom line: There are a hundred trillion ads like this on the internet. What makes these ads 
stand out over them? (Nothing.) It's way too vague, generic and hypey to be able to speak 
directly to an individual viewer. 

From the ads I've seen, this is perhaps the biggest flaw in ads being placed. Ads are too 
generic and way too hypey and are trying to appeal to the masses instead of addressing a specific person. 

Without knowing the real benefits attached to it, here's a suggested rewrite that adds some specificity to the ad to speak to a specific person:

Headline/Subject Line: Looking to make your 1st online dollar? 
Description: I was scammed out of thousands before I came across a program that worked for me. You can do this. I'll show you how. 

Listen very carefully to what I'm about to tell you. Write this down on a piece of paper and put it on your desk. Read it before, during, and after you write your next ad. 
"If you try to sell to everyone, you end up selling to NO ONE." 

For your ad to be effective you have to CONNECT with a person. Not try to get the masses interested ... but to make a connection with one specific person. Or rather, one specific type of person.

Tell your reader exactly what you have and exactly how you can help them. Because I'm telling you ... if you write an ad for everyone, you write the ad for no one. Don't fall into that trap. You'll never connect to people individually by being vague and generic. It doesn't 
work.

Next... 

Headline: Secret Of Network Marketing Success...
Description: How to literally recruit prospects at the push of a button. How to generate 
an endless stream of FREE leads. 

"Simple and easy" are great selling points. But getting that point across is incredibly more powerful if you can express it without actually saying the words "simple and easy". This ad pulls it off. 

The phrase "at the push of a button" says simple and easy loud and clear. Nicely done. The one big ingredient missing with this ad is one of the two most powerful words you can use in an ad. ("Free" is the other one.) 

Do you know what other word I'm referring to? 

The word is "you". 

The exact same ad can easily be rewritten to better connect to each individual person 
reading it by simply saying: "How you can literally recruit prospects at the push of a button. You'll generate an endless stream of FREE leads." 

It may read the same to you. You may be thinking, "There's no difference. That won't help my ad."... and you'd be wrong. That's the beauty of how easy this is. But it works both ways. It's easy to mess up, but it's also easy to fix. As long as you know how. 

One more thing... once you have a successful ad working for you, don't get lazy and use the same ad over and over again forever. Why does Geico offer a variety of Caveman commercials as well as a variety of commercials with the cute little gecko? They could just pick their "best ad" and keep displaying it over and over, but they still give us a variety, don't they? 

You should do the same. Sometimes saying the same thing in just a slightly different way can produce results you never expected.

There's a famous example of this in the advertising community where an advertiser 
communicated the exact same offer in two different ways with two very different results. 

An advertisement offering a product for "33% Off" was met with a decent response. The advertiser then decided to shake it up a little and presented the offer as "Buy Two - Get One Free". 

Anyone who passed junior high math can tell at a glance it's the exact same offer. But the re-wording to "Buy Two - Get One Free" pulled an amazingly higher number of conversions. I think it was actually a SEVEN TIMES higher response. Exact same offer. Slightly different wording. SEVEN times the response. 

Put these tips into practice and test new ads!