Where to Start: From Blank Page
to Endless Ideas
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
How do we get started on a sales page? Well, I'll tell you, in the past we
used to open up a blank document and just sit there and stare at it and try
to write something. And you guys know what I'm talking about. This is what
we call Blank Page Syndrome. And it is horrible. Nobody wants to start
from a blank page.
So we realized that we had to develop an approach that would help us
write more efficiently and it would help us nail it every single time. So now
when our copywriters are ready to write a sales page, the first thing they're
going to do is they're going to pull up two documents that are already
ready to go. And those two documents are the positioning document and
the product content. These documents help them kick-start the sales page
process. So I want to walk you through them.
Let's start with the positioning document. This document is created by our
product development team during our initial research phase, and basically
it's a summary of the insights that we've gathered from customer research,
from one-on-one research calls, and from competitive research. Some of
the things that this document includes: Who's our customer? What are
their hopes, fears, dreams, pains? What problem are we solving with this
product? What they've already tried to do to solve this problem, and how
our product compares to the competition. The positioning document is put
together by reading customer emails, survey responses, and doing oneon-one calls with customers, which by the way should be done before you
make a product.
Now we go into much more detail on how to do this in the immersion phase
of our course Zero to Launch. Basically, any time we notice a pattern, we
include it in the positioning document, and what that does is it gives our
writers everything they need to do to sell the product to the right customer.
That's really important. They're not selling it to everybody, they're selling it
to the right customer.
So here's an excerpt of the positioning document for one of our courses,
Mental Mastery. Our copywriter’s going to go through this document and
highlight any nuggets that strike him as useful for our sales copy. Here's a
few key things that he's looking for: our customers’ hopes, fears, pains, and
dreams; the primary problem that our product is solving for them; again,
W H E R E TO S TA R T : F R O M B L A N K PAG E TO E N D L E S S I D E A S
1
Where to Start: From Blank Page
to Endless Ideas
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
what they've already tried to do to solve this problem; and how our product
compares to the competition. All of this material is going to be especially
helpful in the first half of the sales page, where our goal is to build desire
for the product.
We've included a full PDF of the positioning document below. Now I'm
going to challenge you to put on your copywriter hat. Go ahead. Pause this
video, download the positioning document, and note down what you would
pick out as interesting nuggets for the sales page. Then come back and I'll
show you what we noticed. Go ahead. Pause the video and do it right now.
OK, welcome back. If you take a look at this excerpt from the positioning
document, I see a lot of things that tell me about our customers’ hopes,
fears, pains, and dreams. Let's take a look. “It just never feels like the right
time.” He's starting to think about whether he should be trying to do
more. This person's starting to feel a little directionless, even a bit guilty
or lazy for not doing more than he feels capable of. What about this one:
sees people getting promotions, starting businesses, living the high life,
and wondering what they know that he doesn’t. Deep down, there's an
unspoken fear that he's wasting his potential. Wow. Very powerful, very
emotional. Or how about this one: afraid of living his life as average or
ordinary or forgettable. It sounds like this person's feeling stuck.
And by the way, look at those meaty quotes. We didn't just make this stuff
up. These are all direct quotes taken from our interviews and surveys with
our potential customers. And by the way, all this is going to be really helpful
in writing the sales page because now we know exactly who we're talking
to. The magic is in the quotes. I want to say it again, it's really important.
The magic is in the real quotes. This is why you want to do real customer
research and include as much detail as possible in your documents.
OK, our copywriter is going to grab these nuggets and he's going to pull
them into a blank document we call the scratch pad. This is basically just
a casual document to dump any standout points from the research. Why
do we do this? Because we like to keep our sales page drafts clean. So our
writers will pull whatever raw ideas they need into the scratch pad.
Now the next document that the copywriter goes through is what we call
W H E R E TO S TA R T : F R O M B L A N K PAG E TO E N D L E S S I D E A S
2
Where to Start: From Blank Page
to Endless Ideas
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
the product content document. At IWT and GrowthLab, we primarily create
video courses, so the actual content of the product boils down to the
transcripts of those videos. For Mental Mastery, for example, we created
four modules with five videos each, for a total of 20 videos. Now our
copywriter reads through all 20 videos and picks out interesting elements
that can be used to sell the product.
Here's a transcript for one of our videos on building confidence. Notice how
our copywriter Jackson has left comments throughout the script. What he's
doing here is he's picking out interesting ways to describe what's in the
product itself. It's almost like you have a product creator creating a coat,
right? They pick the best fabrics. They make it fit within the price point.
But then the marketer wants to come along, and they might talk about the
way that coat keeps you warm in the blistering cold, or how light it is. So
there's going to be a natural push and pull with the product creator and the
copywriter or marketer.
OK so what our copywriter is looking for here is he's looking for features,
like what comes with the product. He's looking for benefits. What are the
results that a customer can expect? He's looking for anything tangible, like
techniques, tools, frameworks, or mindsets. He's looking for great stories.
Great stories always help copy come to life. We're going to talk about that
a little bit later. Basically at this stage, we want to find anything that helps
us tell customers what they get in the product. And these are going to help
mostly when we're writing the second half of the sales page, where we talk
about the product itself. So our copywriter Jackson takes any ideas he finds
and he puts him into the scratch pad.
Let's take a look at that scratch pad now. What do you see? It's full of our
customers’ hopes, fears, dreams. It's also full of features, benefits, stories,
and real customer quotes. All of these things are sales elements that we can
plug into the sales page as we're writing it. What do you see here after just
a couple of hours of going through our research and our product content?
We now have pages and pages of juicy nuggets to help us get started.
Notice how much more efficient this is than just staring at a blank page
until you come up with an idea.
W H E R E TO S TA R T : F R O M B L A N K PAG E TO E N D L E S S I D E A S
3
Where to Start: From Blank Page
to Endless Ideas
www.getwsodo.com
www.getwsodo.com
Now remember, if you don't have a team that can help you do this, here's
how to apply this on your own. Pull up your research and your product
content. And if you haven't created a separate doc for that, now is a great
time to do that. Go through it with fresh eyes, pick out all the nuggets that
would stand out to you. If you are reading this for the first time, remember
nuggets are discrete juicy pieces of content that will solve people's
problems. And if you do have some help, this is a great project to delegate.
Then when you're ready to start writing, someone has already compiled all
the raw material for you.
Now that we have all of our nuggets, our copywriter is ready to start
drafting. I'll see you in the next video, where I'll show you how we put
together the first part of the sales page.
W H E R E TO S TA R T : F R O M B L A N K PAG E TO E N D L E S S I D E A S
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