Bullets With Bite: Learn to Create Mouthwatering Word Nuggets

By Marcia Yudkin

Turn Words into Money with Juicy, Flavorful Copy

Get a delicious return on investment from your marketing pieces after you apply the tips in this concentrated guide to writing captivating bullet points.

Most world-class copywriters have mastered the art of listing irresistible little tempters that arouse curiosity and desire. But rarely has that art been analyzed into useful guidelines and suggestions.

Bullets With Bite, by copywriting gourmet Marcia Yudkin, helps you craft appetizing bullets for any kind of sales piece - brochures, print ads, web copy, direct mail, catalogs, etc.

Learn how to:
* Turn raw ideas into delectable, bite-sized morsels
* Inject vivid personality into factual data
* Add intrigue, punch and oomph
* Create aching suspense and desire
* Dramatize anything straightforward
* Make reading an activity to savor
* Use 76 compositional techniques that make readers hungry to buy
* Select 14 ingredients that produce a high-class or low-class, formal or informal flavor
* Avoid poisonous content pitfalls
* Understand effective formatting options
* Edit for a consistent and appropriate tone
* Trigger excitement, involvement and orders

Along with every technique are one, two or three scrumptious examples.

Reading this ebook is like visiting a dim sum establishment where more and more luscious looking treats keep wheeling by. You'll gorge yourself and emerge a far more capable writer.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Marcia Yudkin
• Release date: Sep 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476084268

Marcia Yudkin

Creative marketing expert Marcia Yudkin has an unparalleled ability to find the right words for a message, an unusual angle to get folks to pay attention, and the promotional strategy that pays off handsomely for her clients.Her 16 books include 6 Steps to Free Publicity, Persuading on Paper, Web Site Marketing Makeover, Meatier Marketing Copy and Freelance Writing for Magazines & Newspapers, a Book of the Month Club selection.Marcia’s articles have appeared in hundreds of magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, TWA Ambassador, USAir Magazine and Business 2.0. For eight years running, she served as an official site reviewer for the Webby Awards and has helped judge the Inc. Magazine Small Business Web Awards.She has been featured in Success Magazine, Entrepreneur, Home Office Computing, Working Woman, Women in Business, dozens of newspapers throughout the world and four times in the Sunday Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio.Her clients range from grizzled entrepreneurs to nervous newly self-employed professionals, from software publishers and ecommerce startups to media companies, associations and independent educational programs.Marcia Yudkin holds three Ivy League degrees, including a Ph.D. in the humanities.

Book preview

Bullets With Bite: Learn to Create Mouthwatering Word Nuggets

by Marcia Yudkin

Author, 6 Steps to Free Publicity and 15 other books

Creative Ways

P.O. Box 305

Goshen MA 01032

http://www.yudkin.com

[phone]

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Marcia Yudkin

All rights reserved. Please obtain written permission before reprinting, duplicating or distributing this ebook, in whole or in part.

Contents

Introduction

Seven Steps to Powerful Bullets

76 Ways to Add Oomph

A Content Checklist

Your All-Important Tone

Formatting Options

About the Author

Introduction

Whether you're preparing a sales letter, a space ad or a web page, if you're hoping to incite the passion to buy, you’ll want to spend ample time crafting energetic bullet points. These usually appear in the heart of your marketing piece, and they can have such power that if just one hits a bull's-eye with a particular reader, the sale occurs.

Bullets are the second most powerful copywriting element, after headlines.

* Set apart on the page, like this, they attract the eye of the reader.

* They’re easily scanned.

* They save space by using a telegraphic style.

* Words or phrases within short bullets are likely to catch the reader’s attention.

This ebook offers a step-by-step guide to triggering excitement, involvement and purchases with these verbal nuggets.

Seven Steps to Powerful Bullets

Step 1. Reread what you already have hanging around about the product, service or business.

When a professional copywriter goes to work on the words that will sell, let’s say a book, he or she reads with highlighter in hand, yellow pad at the ready. What gets covered with color or written down on the pad are not necessarily the most important points. Often they’re the bizarre-but-true facts, little details that might surprise an outsider, eye-opening examples or contrary-to-expectations arguments. Sometimes they’re completely ordinary observations that can be made to sound startling with a little verbal cunning.

For example, legendary marketer Gary Halbert quotes a passage from a book on selling a house that recommends, as a way of dealing with the question, How long has the house been on the market? taking the house off the market for a while so that you can honestly give the answer the questioner wants to hear. Halbert’s bullet from this passage:

* How to sell your home faster by taking it off the market!

This is a different kind of reading than you normally do. To experience it, read the following paragraphs from Patricia Smith’s book, Each of Us, and see if you can isolate at least three points that could be turned into bullets marketing the book. Don’t worry about wording the points in a catchy way, just try to identify the bullet-worthy material here.

Higher education is a top priority for so many women, and yet the great majority of us remain in low-paying careers. What’s going on?

The world of business is filled with individuals with every level of education, working side by side. People with high school diplomas often fill the same positions as people