How to Steal Killer Sales Copy Straight from Your Prospects' Mouths

What’s in these 2 warehouses? Pure copywriting gold.
… Also known as “customer reviews”.

Warehouse #1: Amazon Reviews

Most services are tied, in some way, to products. So if you offer a service, read the related product reviews, and steal from there. For example:

  • If you offer a project management service, mine reviews for books about how to manage projects
  • If you offer a directory of professionals – like AnyFu or Sortfolio – pull from reviews of biographies of the legends in those professions
  • If you have a deal-of-the-day site, spend a little time on Amazon reviews for every product you host every day
  • If you’re an unknown fashion designer on Etsy, pull from clothing reviews that highlight the things people want when they don’t care about big brands and labels
  • If you’re a freelance graphic designer, find new ways to express your value by reading the reviews for Adobe Photoshop and for books on DIY design

Warehouse #2: AppStore Reviews

If you’re in the mobile app, digital product or game business, the AppStore is loaded with customer reviews that will help you write sick copy that resonates with prospects.

What to Look for When You’re in a Warehouse

You’re trying to find natural phrases and analogies that you will be able to use to write actual marketing and sales copy.

(…)

With your selected warehouse open on one monitor, open a Word doc or Excel worksheet on another monitor (…) and create a table with 3 columns. Give the columns these names:

  • Repeated and memorable phrases
  • What people want (or things i need to give them)
  • What people are mad about or in pain over (or things i’ll eliminate for them)

Now what?

Now you go through the reviews, one by one, and look for phrases that tell you what reviewers were struggling with before buying the product and what they wanted (and, in some cases, got) from the product being reviewed.

(…)

Here are the top 6 things to consider before copying and pasting phrases:

  1. The more reviewers say X, the more you should consider using X in your copy
  2. The more people find a review helpful, the more attention you should pay to the words in that review
  3. Phrases that stand out – whether they’re strange, idiotic or funny – are worth noting
  4. Don’t try to revise, rephrase, summarize or water-down what people say – just type it out and figure out if/how to use it later
  5. Don’t fixate on 1 complaint or 1 praise-phrase
  6. Take in a balanced number of favorable and critical reviews

Steer Clear of Expert Reviews and Review Sites

Experts tend to write in cleaned-up, professional-sounding ways. That’s not what you’re going for.

You want real reviews from real people who’ve really used the product they’re reviewing. (…) people who have:

  • Experienced a pain to such a degree that they sought out a cure
  • Been convinced enough to pull out their wallets (this is a major moment)
  • Spent their hard-earned money on the so-called cure