For me, the most difficult part of writing ad copy has been to come up with great benefit statements. And benefit statements are critical to selling your readers to try your products, services, and ideas, second only to the headline.

All of the other parts of copywriting such as good headlines, price offers and stories were much easier for me than finding good benefit statements. But creating a benefits list drove me crazy; that is until I learned how to come up with one or more benefits every minute.

You might remember from any basic sales course that people do not care about features nearly as much as they want to know the benefits. Knowing the truth to that, I started to take a closer look at what benefits really are. I discovered they are really just action items in disguise, agreed? You “save” money or “stop” wasting time, for example. So, what do you think about starting out each benefit statement with a verb that takes action? The process goes like this:

1.  Alphabetize a long list of action verbs.

2.  Display the alphabetized list of action verbs on your desk or, even better, view them on your computer screen so that you can see the list in its entirety
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3.  Begin with the first verb in your list that begins with the letter A and read the verb out loud and make a sentence out of it that describes one benefit of your product.

For example, the first word in my list of verbs is “Accelerate”.

So, I might say that my product helps to “accelerate” fingernail growth.

4.  Write benefits until you can’t think of any more, and don’t think of quitting early! You’ll weed out the benefits later that don’t have as much punch as you thought. Don’t worry about duplicates right now either. Just let your brain consider your product and freely create the benefits as they come to you.

5.  Now is the time that you will prioritize your list from most important to least.

This process has worked for me not only to create great benefits lists, but also for writing articles for my website like “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.

Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. Most of the time, you won’t need more than a great list of 20 benefits.

Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years.  He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors.  Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.

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