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great points verb thanks for your input, especially about the Portfolio work, I completely understand that.

woah!

I havent had any requests for that.
In fairness, do you think there are actually many people at all that are knowledgeable in this area?
I thought nanobots and similar where things from startrek, lol

Ok, I hear ya.

I think that when I say "cuss words" and "swear words" it probably conjours up hardcore offensive words that I wont mention.

However there are a lot of commonly used cusswords that people have even become accustomed to, you might think I'm cheating though using these to fight the "swearing is OK corner".

Often, when describing something that is poor in sales copy, the abbreviation of BS is used, which obviously is an abbreviation of a swearword. Even "crap" or "crappy" is a cussword.

Gary Halbert was famous for using the term "shit weasels" although to be fair, I havent found any sales copy of his using the term.

If you where marketing to certain dems, swearing and offensive language is the norm. For example marketing to the Hip Hop / Gansta Rap fans type market where offensive and derogatory words are a normal part of daily vocab, it would probably actually be hard to make any impact without dropping a few swear-bombs and cuss words on them. I think that a lot of markets made up of purely younger people can be impacted rather than offended by swearing and cusswords, although it maybe ethically challenging to do so, just think that nowadays and for many years infact the albums with "parental guidance" generally prove to be the successful ones.


And finally, to save myself at least some sort of grace (lol) I'm gonna have to duck under the "adult market", if you happened to be marketing Male Enhancement Products, or even dating sites that you where targetting to males rather than females, I think you would get away with using various swear words.

If we stick with the simple definition that link bait is a piece of material that is highly likely to get other people to link to it from their blogs/sites/profile pages etc etc, how does one go about making a truly successful piece of "link Bait"?

Being able to write good link bait is one of the best tools you can have as a Freelance writer, as modern SEO companies are always on the lookout for a writer who can come up with Thought provoking, link inducing articles and pieces.

I find reading through the daily sun newspaper in the UK gives me some good examples of link bait, and powerful Headlines to draw in the readers. Powerful headlines would also be an important part of linkbait then.

I've recently been finding that I get accused of spelling mistakes quite often when using british spelling for words.

Does australia/new zealand etc have there own spellings on certain words too?

You know, like Color and Colour to give an easy example

I tried to have a look to see if it was covered here already or not.

What do you think about using cusswords in your sales copy?

I think it's ok, but nt as a regular thing, most sales copy probably wouldnt be enhanced by cusswords, but to add emphasis to feeling swear words often do a better job than any other words.

What do you think?

yes and no,

What I do now is no different to what I did a year ago, except then it was a proper job, with a real nice wage.

Now I'm a little more than half way up to my previous wages, so its managable.

For a little while i was eating my savings but the last few weeks have been steadily getting more jobs and work, so I hope to be at the same wage I was working for before soon next year, and then its just up from there!

Usually I have to have music playing, but it really depends on what mood I'm in as to what I listen to, I have quite a diverse taste in music.

There really are some great threads going on round here.

I was just doing the rounds and I really enjoyed hearing what everyone has to say about things, there's a few really interesting things being discussed that I find myself picking up little tips all the time now!

Thanks everyone

I agree with short for web, although powerful copy can be long too, I think it is much more powerful broken up as much as still reads well, and being able to draw the reader in by instead of draggin out the pages long and long, break a long sales page up into even smaller single pages, that dont scroll down very far, and try and work in a little cliffhanger on the bottom of each page.

I'm sure John Reece has a sales letter like that, about 5 pages that you need to click through before the actual end.

But again it's all down to relevancy to the target market.

I have converted my spare room into an office, and I have a photographer friend who has kindly let me and my partners share his office space in the town center, so we all go there twice a week too, which is lucky because I know my spare room is just about big enough for me and my desk and stuff, so I wouldn't have any meetings in there very easily!

I like whats been said so far.

I have to agree that knowing the demographic to be sold to essential. Different dems can have totally different languages as far as what will appeal to their emotions. Tricks and persuasive tactics will only work if it's the principle being applied to the right language, if that makes any sense.
So making sure facts and testimonials are relative to who your marketing to.

I've recently been trying to learn a lot about this and read about a few things to consider when writing sales copy, however I havent had enough experience to give my own findings, but most of what you read and learn about involves simply doing the best job yu can of getting inside the readers head at the time of reading and figuring out the right buttons to push to get the buying state of mind.

Reason Why advertising has had books written about it, but it boils down to people are more inclined to believe anything you say if you give them a plausible reason why. The more solid the reason why, in theory, the more solid the trust factor. Thats why facts are important as they back up your reasons why.

Things I would really like to know more about myself are NLP and Cognitive Dissonance, challenging peoples presuppositions somehow and changing their mind.

I have to think though, no matter how much you put into your copy, a lot of people just arent susceptible to any kind of tricks etc.

great answers thanks guys.

I see you all have similar ambitions, and it's great to even be doing what you love in any capacity, even if it isn't the exact way you dreamed it yet. Some day, with enough work and belief if you want to be successful sharing your art it will happen.

Good points,

I think it's true, to write sales copy you wouldn't need any particular skills more than being a good writer, nothing that couldnt be picked up and learned from some or other expert in the field, as previously mentioned.

However I think that being skilled in particular fields like psychology for example would give you an edge with your sales copy. (i am not btw)

Also the reason I ask about NLP is because I used to think it was just some mumbo jumbo, but recently I've been looking into it and it seems to make a lot of sense, and from what I've read would make for some powerful and persuasive copy.

I know it's not the be all and end all, however if you work for a big client who can get a lot of exposure to your advert/sales page then if 1 sentence can make the difference between 5% and 10% conversion rate its worth trying as much as possible to find what works, any tricks at all to help boost that conversion up.

I agree there's too much to distract you on the web, my main distractions are reading up on forums, and reading up on blogs. I like keeping uptodate on a whole load of different topics and those two seem to keep me busy.

Nowadays I try and set aside a little bit of time each day to just do that, usually an hour or two before I finish for the day.

Yes, In short whoever wants you to do it would perhaps need to elaborate on what they need, it could be a sales page, or some topical articles, or short adwords adverts, ezine newsletters, absolutely anything.

Find out what they need, and if they dont know at least get them to try and explain what they are hoping to achieve in the long run and see if you can advise them on what they would need.

I currently work like this. I have two partners, between us, we have a lot of bases covered and can handle a bit more volume of work from clients.

I have found no difficulty so far, although we have worked together for a while we have only recently started working for ourselves as it where, so only time can tell of any tribulations ahead.

Said and done though, if you can trust the person often a partner is helpful in a lot of different ways.

well I suppose for ghostwriting if you were good enough you could demand a royalty on sales of whatever you wrote, if it where a work to be sold.

If it where sales copy for a webpage and you could split test and prove your copy outsold the previous by whatever percent, then I'm sure that would be worth some fair cut of the extra profits your copy produced.

I'm not sure if putting articles on AC and getting the bonus I've heard of would count as this sort of thing would it? I suppose it would really I guess.

From the sounds of it this isnt what you wanted to hear, but I have to say the same thing too, I spend a little time browsing some forums and a couple of similar sites, but recently thats purely been in between doing more jobs for the first few clients I picked up hitting those sites.

I'm begining to see now more often than not that if someone is willing to pay for writing to be done, and you can satisfy them, a lot of people just plain need more doing, and if you did it right for them first time round you'll probably get the job.

Thats some great advice there.
I've not really been a freelancer long enough to give any real advice, all I can say is that if you treat your clients right you'll find a good amount of return business from some of them, I think it's good to build on that.

Have any of you thought about writing sales copy for clients and in return taking a percentage of sales instead of an upfront fee?

I have even read of some top copywriters demanding a percentage on top of an upfront fee, what do you think about that?

I have been wondering, what would be the list of essential skills that you would need to be a good persuasive copy-writer, which different areas would you need to be knowledgable in.

I will start off with probably a more advanced skill, one I know nothing about really right now but feel if I did know I would be a great writer, Neuro Linguistic Programming,

Having this skill I believe I would know more psychological triggers and make more sub-conciously persuasive text.

Exactly.

Or something a client got me to do for them before, was talk about how to fix something, go into details about how to fix this something without leaving anything out, because in order to fix this something with the instructions outlined their going to need to buy this little something else, which happens to be a product that you/your client sells too.

Marketing isnt unethical. Marketing is essential.
There are however some rather unscrupulous marketers who will happily partake in unethical practices,

Free trials with auto renewal - IMO rather an unethical marketing tactic, not always but often enough the marketer wont really outline to clearly the fact that after xyz days the trial ends and the CC is rebilled for full months membership. Some of these trials may only be 1 day long!

Virii Infectii!! - Some unscrupulous marketers deiberately have yur machine infected with spyware, to sell you their spyware removal software!

Affiliate theft - another unscrupulous and downright unethical trick is using various methods to strip out affiliate cookies from surfers and replace them with the marketers own affiliate cookies. Some marketers will do this secretly in the background on their high traffic pages, but the worst case I have seen of this was an actual affiliate sponsor company setup to pay per install of a toolbar, and the toolbar stripped out and replaced cookies for most of the major affiliate networks, dispiccable!!

As a freelance writer, whatever type of writing you do, what do you see your future holding?

For example, do you see yourself forever freelancing, becoming well respected and sought after as a freelancer to the point of being able to pick and choose jobs from clients at whatever rates you feel, and enjoying the independance and freedom that could come with that.

Or do you see yourself perhaps developing another business some day, and perhaps have to hire your own freelance writers?

Or teaching/consultancy?

Myself, I've already began to plan my growth. I work with 2 other people most of the time right now, and between us we have built up a small network of friends with different skills. What I plan now is to build a strng reputation as a freelancer, then build on that reputation by bringing other writers/freelancers under my wing (already got some potentially good people for this lined up) and give my guarantee to clients that even if it's not me personally doing the work, it will be of the same or better quality always, which will enable me to charge a good rate, enough to pay my new writer and keep a percent for myself.
Basically I plan on building an outsource agency able to handle a large volume of work, built strongly on reputation. (if that was a bit long, thanks for listening )