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One of the great challenges for a copywriter is to catch the customers’ attention. You have to catch their attention despite the natural resistance many people have developed to noticing advertising. People always say they don’t like ads. They do like to be helped, however.
But if your message is lost among all the advertising messages, you may as well have not bothered to produce your ads. Poor quality advertising wastes your time.
There are some kinds of advertisements that are more likely to receive attention. These still have to be well done, but overall they’re good tactics.
The first is to use humor appropriately. The biggest mistake people make with using humor is making it the focus rather than the product or even the company name. All too often people will laugh about a funny ad but have no idea what the ad was actually for. Big waste of time and possibly not even good branding.
Well done humor, on the other hand, brings attention to the product and sticks in the mind. It’s very hard to find that balance, but worth mastering.
Free offers work well too, to an extent. The negative is that they catch the attention of freebie seekers, who have no interest in paying for your product.
A good freebie should be valuable and encourage purchases. You should have customers sign up on a mailing list to get the freebie, so that you can send other advertising to them. It can be a booklet on a common problem people solve using your product, a trial size of the product, etc.
Make a clear promise of a solution in your ad. You should know by now what the product does. Promise that it will solve that problem well. People won’t buy your product if they don’t know what it’s going to do.
Educate your customers. Tell them things they should look for when searching for products of the type you are selling. Obviously, your product should have what it takes to meet those guidelines.
Drama sells. Okay, actually dramatizations sell. This is why customer testimonials are so great. Real accounts of people getting benefits from your product gives your customers someone to identify with.
Make sure you are targeting people who really need your product. Sometimes you can make a need where none existed before, but it makes far more sense to find people who really do need your product. It’s a lot less work to sell to that group.
With such tactics in mind, you have a greater chance of breaking through all the other ads and getting attention to your products. The effort can be well worth it as sales improve.