Author: Bob McClain, Web Copywriting Expert

Every web copywriter should have a “toolkit.” By toolkit, I mean books that you read, reread, and read again. A collection of “cheat sheets” filled with “ticklers” of information you’ve gleaned over the years to remind you of tricks you can use to achieve yours or your client’s website goals. And a file of great website copywriting you’ve found on websites.

You can find plenty of mediocre websites filled with copy written either by someone’s receptionist or some marketing person who has little writing skill or by a business owner too cheap to hire a professional to write their copy. Ignore them.

However, anytime you read a website that you can’t seem to take your eyes away from, a website that is so well and persuasively written that your hand moves of its own accord to order their product or service, save that copy in a special folder. Either copy and paste it in a document or convert the page to a pdf or do a screen capture. Whatever you have to do to get a copy of that gold. And save it in a special file to review every time you’re going to write some new website copy.

So let’s talk about books…

In addition to your cheat sheet and your file of “borrowed” copy, you should have a small group of books that you read regularly, have heavily highlighted, marked, underlined and tabbed that you use for reference. I do.

Here are the books I have and why I consider them so important…

HOW TO PERSUADE PEOPLE WHO DON’T WANT TO BE PERSUADED

by Joel Bauer & Mark Levy

I love this book. The guy who wrote it, Joel Bauer, made his fame as a “hawker” or pitchman at trade shows. When a major company wanted to make sure they sold lots of products at a trade show, Joel was the guy they called.

As I’ve said before, if you want people to make a buy decision, you have to tap into their emotions. Joel does that by using fun and entertainment to get “past” their inhibitions, get them to let down their guard, and make them more receptive to his message.

He often comes up with some kind of whimsical trick that engages people and gets them to forget that they should “distrust” everyone. His methods can be translated into website copywriting and they will make your web copywriting much more successful.

GETTING EVERYTHING YOU CAN OUT OF ALL YOU’VE GOT

by Jay Abraham

If there’s a sharper guy in the sales business, I have no idea who it is. Jay is a hard-hitting, no-nonsense, winner take all kind of marketing person. The subtitle of the book says it all:

21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn Your Competition.

His premise is that most companies have huge opportunities staring them in the face to make much more money with the same products or services they have now. But because they either learned marketing from “someone else in the same business” or from doing what their competitors do, they have blinders on that prevent them from seeing new ways to market their business.

Jay rarely pays any attention to what competitors are doing when he consults. He looks at what other companies in totally different industries are doing and looks for ways to adapt their ideas to his client’s business. By doing so, he opens up vast new opportunities for his clients to make money in new and exciting ways.

What does that have to do with web copywriting? Everything. A web copywriter’s job isn’t to just write whatever the client tells them to. They must be willing to dig into the business, learn everything they can about the products or services; how they are currently marketed, who the “ideal” client or customer is, and find new ways to squeeze more profit out of the company.

WEB COPY THAT SELLS

by Maria Veloso

I’m sure by now you’ve noticed that I haven’t offered any books that are actually about writing website copy. In fact, none of them were even about copywriting, period. The reason is because I need to get you thinking “out of the box” if you’re going to be a successful web copywriter.

You need to be thinking strategically. You need to be thinking like a marketer and a sales person all the time; not just like a writer. A copywriter is all of these things and more.

However, here is a book specifically on website copywriting. While her book is almost exclusively about selling B2C (business to consumer), the tricks she offers in here for subliminal persuasion will look familiar to you because I teach the same ones here in this blog and in my web copywriting ecourse. This book is a must have to web copywriting.

Maria learned from one of the best. Mark Joyner, a former military intelligence officer who brought his “propaganda” techniques to Internet Marketing. And speaking of Mark Joyner…

THE IRRESISTIBLE OFFER

By Mark Joyner

Mark Joyner operates on the (correct) assumption that you have three seconds to get a website visitor to commit to your offer. How are you going to get them to do so?

By making what he calls, the “irresistible offer”. An offer so compelling, so obviously a win for you, that you’d be stupid not to take advantage of it.

Americans are the most heavily marketed to people in the world. It’s estimated that we get hit with over three thousands marketing messages per day. And it’s just getting worse. So how do you get noticed in such a cacophony of marketing noise?

By creating an offer people simply can not resist. Mark takes you on a journey spelling out exactly what an irresistible offer is, how to develop one, how to implement it, and how to test it to see if it’s truly working. And speaking of propaganda…

SUBLIMINAL PERSUASION

By Dave Lakhani

Here’s another book based on government propaganda secrets. You have to figure the best “marketers” in the world work for the government. How else could they get you to go fight a war where you are likely to die horribly?

They do it by tapping into your greatest fears and pushing your emotional hot buttons. They do it by spreading rumors and stories about all the terrible things “the enemy” is doing and are going to do here as soon as they get here…if we don’t stop them right now.

Here is a book that will introduce you to the masters of propaganda and the psychological tricks they use to manipulate the public and get them to do whatever the rich and powerful want them to do. Even when it’s against their own best interest. If for no other reason, you should read this book because it will open your eyes to a lot of dark secrets of how you are being manipulated by your government. You’ll be shocked…