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To make money online you need to sell something: a digital product, a physical product, or a service. And to sell any of those things you’re going to need a sales letter that turns your visitors into buyers.

But sales letters are hard to write, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing.

That’s what this post is for: to make the hard task of writing a sales letter much easier.

Over the past 6 years, I’ve developed a system for writing sales letters. The system breaks an entire sales letter down into 6 small components, and you write one component at a time. At the end of the process, when you put the 6 components together, you have a finished sales letter.

As you read through this post, take action at the end of each section and write 1 component of your sales letter. By the time you get to the end of the post, you’ll have a finished sales letter ready to make you sales.

The first component is the sales letter’s headline, so let’s dive in and get started.

Component 1: The Headline

The easiest way I know to write good headlines is to use templates that are already proven.

I’ve got 2 headline templates for you below, and I’ve also broken them down into smaller pieces so you can see how they’re constructed.

Template #1: Goal-Based Question and Exciting Promise

This is a simple template that uses your visitors’ goals to write a compelling headline.

First, you need a goal-based question.

Let’s say you’ve got a dog training information product. Ask yourself what the goal is of someone who lands on your sales letter. It can be more than one goal, and you can combine them into an entire string of goals if you like.

When you have your goal (or goals), simply put them into the form of a “Would You Like?” question.

In my dog training example, that might be something like this:

“Would You Like Your Dog To Stop Barking, To Walk Calmly On A leash, And To Come To You Every Single Time You Call His Name?”

That’s the first half of this headline template – the goal-based question. Next, you need to add the promise of the results your product is going to produce.

To my dog training example headline, I might add something along the lines of this:

“That’s Exactly What You’re Gonna Learn To Do In The Next 17 Minutes.”

Combining my goal-based question with my exciting promise, I’d end up with this headline:

“Would You Like Your Dog To Stop Barking, To Walk Calmly On A leash, And To Come Every Single Time You Call His Name? Well That’s Exactly What You’re Gonna Learn To Do In The Next 17 Minutes.”

A pretty good headline, created by combining the goals of your visitor with the promise that your product will help deliver those goals.

Template #2: How-To and Mystery

We’ll start out with the how to, and this is easy. Ask yourself what the visitor to your website is hoping to learn or achieve by coming to you, and state that in the form of the “how-to.”

Let’s go with a golf example, where the “how-to” might be something like this:

“How To Drive The Ball 50 Yards Further And Take 5 Shots Off Your Handicap.”

Next, we need to add on the “mystery” element to the headline. To do that, just take a look at the product you’re trying to sell, and find something within it that can be spun into a mystery.

To create a good mystery that makes someone want to know more, all you have to do is reveal a tiny bit of information that makes someone desperate to know the rest.

If your market was golf, say that a housewife discovered a secret on her first lesson, or that a sneaky amateur player found a way to cheat that helps you add 50 yards to your game.

Find something to say that makes your visitor compelled to know more.

For my example, I’m gonna go with my housewife one, so adding that onto my “how to” I get this:

“How To Drive The Ball 50 Yards Further And Take 5 Shots Off Your Handicap Using A Sneaky Trick That A 106lb Housewife Discovered On Her 1st Lesson.”

Do you see how powerful headlines can be built by using a simple template?

Time to Write the Headline Component

Take a quick look at your product and spend a few minutes thinking about the kind of person who might have the problem that your product solves.

Now create a handful of headlines using the 2 templates above and go with the one that you feel is best.

Component 2: The Story

This second part of your sales letter is all about the story you’ve got to tell.

Your story is there to show your visitors that you understand their problem, that you understand the solutions, and that you have a product they need to get.

Your story will be made up of 4 sections:

• your problem
• your failures
• your breakthrough
• sharing your breakthrough

Let’s write these one at a time, then at the end you’ll have an entire story ready to slip into your sales letter.

Your Problem

In some form or another, your product will solve a problem, and this first part of your story is where you’re going to reveal your own experience with this problem.

Let’s say your product shows someone how to lose weight. In this first part of your story, you’d explain that you were once very overweight, and you’d tell your visitors what that was like and why it was so unpleasant.

In my weight loss example, I’d start out with something with this kind of tone:

“4 years ago, my life sucked. I was 132 pounds overweight and I couldn’t even walk around my apartment without getting out of breath.

 Yep, pretty embarrassing to be that fat when you’re only 23 years old.”

Very casual, very conversational, and all 5 parts of your story should be written in this same style.

For this first part of the story, I’d now continue by going into each of the problems that being fat had caused me. And I’d look for the most unpleasant ones, as you should whatever your product is, because it’ll have much more impact with your visitor.

So I’d talk about things like:

• not being able to get a girlfriend
• fearing that I was gonna have a heart attack all the time
• being ashamed of what I’d become
• losing friends because I couldn’t go out and do things with them

The person reading your sales letter is going through all those unpleasant problems right now, so when you talk to them about your own similar experiences, you can’t fail to connect to them on a very deep level.

Your Failures

In the second part of your story, you’re going to explain all the things you tried to solve your problem that failed. For my example, the obvious things people might have tried to lose weight include:

• dieting
• exercise
• diet pills
• books on weight loss
• going to the gym
• fitness equipment

When you have the list of things you tried to solve your problem, you need to write a quick paragraph on each of them, revealing what you tried and why it failed.

The first thing on my list above is “dieting,” and I’d write something like this:

“I tried every diet known to man. All-fruit diets, low-carb diets, high-protein diets. You name it, I tried it. And none of them did anything but make me miserable because I was always hungry.”

Now I’d now write a paragraph like that for each thing on my list: exercise, diet pills, books, and so on. And in each paragraph, I’d explain what I tried and how it failed to work.

That’s what you need to do next. Write 1 paragraph about each of the things you’ve tried to solve the problem that didn’t work.

Your Breakthrough

The third part of your story focuses on the breakthrough you finally made that got you the results you wanted.

This should follow on naturally from the second part of your story, so after you’ve explained everything you tried that failed to help, you’d move onto your breakthrough. Kind of like this:

“So when I said I tried everything to lose weight, you can see I meant it.

And I’d pretty much given up on ever finding a solution, and I’d just accepted that I was always meant to be fat.

But then one day, something totally weird and unexpected happened.”

And here you’d lead into your breakthrough, making it as mysterious and intriguing as possible, because everybody loves a good mystery.

So no matter how mundane your breakthrough was, find a way to make it exciting. There’s always a way, and getting this part of your story right can work wonders with your conversion rate.

• did you find a new approach in an old, unknown book that was left on an airport seat?
• did your grandmother reveal a secret to you that she’d learned 60 years ago from her mother?
• did you meet a stranger at a bus stop who told you she’d lost 230 pounds by using a radical new form of exercise?

Make it interesting, exciting, and mysterious. Find a way!

And reveal your breakthrough like a story. Tell it to entertain, not just to pass on the information.

Sharing Your Breakthrough

The next part of your story is where you reveal that you’ve shared your breakthrough with other people with this same problem, and that they too have had great results.

This part helps to make your visitor believe that your ideas (and ultimately your product) is capable of helping them with whatever problem it is they’re trying to solve.

This is a simple element of your story, and it requires very little work.

For my weight loss example, all I’d really need to say is something like this:

“So this little-known secret really did blow my mind when I started using it, and I’d never lost weight so quickly or so easily.

But that wasn’t the most amazing part.

What was most amazing was that everybody I showed this secret method to ALSO lost weight – fast and easily. My mother, my sister, and my best friend ALL lost huge amounts of weight easier than they’ve ever lost weight before.

So pretty soon I caught on and realized that this method that almost no one knows about works for EVERYONE, and that blew my mind.”

That’s pretty much it for this part of the story, and you could probably use my above example word for word in your own sales letter (apart from the weight loss references, of course).

Time to Write the Story Component

By breaking your story down into small sections like this you’ll find it’s really easy to write, and it shouldn’t take you long.

This is a vital part of any sales letter, and when you get your story right you conversion rates will skyrocket.

Write your story component now.

Component 3: The Product

The previous component will lead perfectly into this product component, where you’ll be introducing your visitors to the product that will teach them how to get the same great results as you.

Your product component can be created pretty quickly. There are 3 small sections, and each one will generally write itself.

The sections are:

• product introduction
• product overview
• promise of results

Product Introduction

This is where your sales letter shifts from storytelling and conversation to selling.

Your story component ended with you explaining how the breakthrough you discovered worked for everyone you showed it to. You now need to transition from that into your product introduction.

The best way of showing you how to do that is to give you an example, so here goes:

“So pretty much everyone I know who had a weight problem lost all the weight they wanted to using the ideas I shared with them.

And that’s great – if you’re someone who knows me and I can be there to talk you through everything every step of the way.

But there are a lot of people who don’t know me who also want to lose weight. And I started to wonder how I could help them too.

Well, the answer is…I wrote an eBook!

So I put everything I learned, everything I discovered, and the exact same plan that helped me lose over 170lbs, into an eBook, and I called it “Full Throttle Fat Loss.”

And that’s it for the product introduction.

The great thing about this section is that you can almost copy my example word-for-word. All you need to do is change the parts about weight loss for your own market, and this intro will work every time.

Product Overview

Here you want to lightly touch on what your product contains – the sections, the modules, the chapters etc, depending on how your product is organized.

Continuing on with my weight loss example, my overview might be something like this:

“The core of the program is made up of the Full Throttle Fat Loss Handbook and audio sessions. Inside the handbook and the audio sessions you’ll find 3 main parts to the program…”

And this would be followed with a brief paragraph on what each section of the program would achieve and how.

Promise of Results

The third and final section of your product component is the promise of the results your product could deliver for your visitor.

This is ultra-easy to write, and would go something like this:

“The 3 sections of the Full Throttle Fat Loss program, when used together and exactly as described in the “how to” section, combine to deliver extraordinary results.

You will never have lost weight as easily or as quickly as you will with this program guiding you…”

And that’s it!

Time to Write the Product Component

This component pretty much writes itself, and you’ll find that you can borrow almost everything from my examples and not have to write much yourself at all.

Component 4: The Bullets

If you’ve read even a few sales letters then I’m sure you know all about bullets, and that’s because any good sales letter will have tons of them.

Bullets, just in case you don’t know, are individual benefits and features of your product written in a brief style and put into lists.

And they’re important to a sales letter for 2 reasons:

• they reveal things about your product that might make someone want to buy
• they’re easy to read and will keep people moving down your sales letter

Each bullet has the power to get a person to buy your product, so the more you have the greater the chance you’ll make a sale to each person who visits your site.

Since you’ll need a lot of bullets, you’ll need a fast way to create them, so I’ll share my “Bullet Formula” with you.

This formula will make it as easy as possible to create bullets, and that’s a good thing since you’ll need at least 25 of them.

Here’s my formula for creating powerful bullets:

• benefit + feature = result

The benefit is what it does, the feature is the part of your product that gets it done, and the result is what the ultimate reward is.

Let me give you an example and it’ll all become clearer.

Let’s use the weight loss example, and let’s say that one of the very basic pieces of advice my product teaches is to eat breakfast every morning to speed up your metabolism.

So this bullet will be about eating breakfast every morning as a way to help weight loss.

To turn that into a bullet, I’d first look at the benefit this part of my product offers, and in this case that would be an increased metabolism.

• benefit = increased metabolism

Next, I need to find the feature that gives this benefit to the visitor. In this case, the feature is a piece of information, as it will almost always be in an information product.

And the piece of information is eating breakfast every single morning.

• feature = eating breakfast every morning

Next, I need to look for the result, the thing that gets achieved by using this part of the product.

And the ultimate result someone will get from using this part of the course is faster weight loss due to the increased metabolism.

• result = faster weight loss

That’s it, I have my 3 parts of the formula completed, and I can now take the final step of piecing them together into the final bullet.

There’s only 1 tricky part here, and that’s disguising the “feature.” The feature is typically information from the product that only customers get to see.

In my example, it was the information that eating breakfast every day speeds up the metabolism and produces faster weight loss.

But I can’t reveal that in the bullet or there’s no need for the visitor to buy my product.

So you’ve got to make the “feature” of your bullet mysterious.

That means in my example, I need to make eating breakfast every morning mysterious (and even if I don’t achieve “mystery,” I’ll need to disguise it).

Here are ways I might reword this piece of information to be mysterious:

• one simple change to your diet
• something you can do every morning when you get out of bed
• an early morning kitchen trick

All those statements, when in my bullet, would be referring to eating breakfast. But in this form, no one knows what this “feature” is.

And that’s why good bullets are compelling, because you reveal the benefit and the result to your visitor, but you deny them the “how to.”

That’s why bullets turn visitors into buyers.

So let me piece together my bullet based on the 3 parts of the formula that I’ve completed. Here the final bullet:

• find out how to quadruple the speed of your metabolism by using a little-known early morning kitchen trick – get this right and you’ll double your rate of weight loss

I reworded things a bit, and I used a dash towards the end of the bullet to break it up a little.

But essentially, that bullet is simply benefit, feature, result.

• benefit – find out how to quadruple the speed of your metabolism
• feature – by using a little-known early morning kitchen trick
• result – get this right and you’ll double your rate of weight loss

I hope you’re seeing the power of well-written bullets, and how easy they can be to create when you have a system to help you.

Let me give you a few more examples, because seeing these in action is the best way to learn how to create your own.

Here’s an example for a product that helps people with anxiety disorders:

• how to quickly regain control of your anxious thoughts when they spiral out of control by using something you keep in your refrigerator, stopping your panic attacks before they ever happen

Benefit, feature, result. A totally different bullet in a totally different market, but created using the exact same system.

Here’s an example from the Internet marketing niche:

• discover how to get an extra 242 unique visitors to your website every single day using a sneaky little WordPress Plugin – this could mean up to 3 extra sales a day

Benefit, feature, result. That simple.

Time to Write the Bullet Component

Go through your product and make a note of everything in it that could potentially become a bullet.

Then, one at a time, turn each item on your list into a bullet using the simple formula I showed you. You’ll want at least 25 bullets, preferably 50.

Component 5: The Guarantee

The guarantee you offer your customers is vital. The stronger your guarantee, the higher your conversion rate.

For that reason, I’m going to suggest you offer an extreme guarantee. What do I mean by extreme?

That anyone who buys your info product and is unhappy with it in any way is allowed to have an immediate refund and gets to keep the entire product for free.

Yes, that kind of guarantee will increase your refund rate. But it will increase your conversion rate even more, and the end result will be much more profit.

You can make this kind of guarantee with an information product because you have no physical goods to lose should someone take you up on your guarantee.

I’m going to give you a guarantee here that you can pretty much copy and paste, and it’ll work great.

If you want to, you can edit it slightly so that it includes references to your product and market, but apart from that, this guarantee is ready for you to use:

“Because you’re here I know you’re looking for the same answers I was looking for a few years ago. And I know you’ve tried lots of other things that didn’t help you.

This WILL work for you. And because it’s VERY important to me that you get this program and allow it to change your life for the better like I know it will, I want to remove any reasons you have that might STOP you from getting it.

That’s why I’ve put together a guarantee that some people have told me is totally nuts.

If at any time in the 8 weeks after you order this program you don’t think it’s the best investment you’ve EVER made in yourself, just send me an email and I’ll give you a complete refund.

And…I’ll let you keep the program anyway, for free.

Yes, you read that right. And I can only make that kind of guarantee to you because I have such belief in my program. I KNOW what this is going to do for you. I know the massive positive changes it’s going to make to your life.

And THAT’S why I can make the kind of guarantee that no one else with a similar program will EVER make.”

Time to Write the Guarantee Component

If you want to get this part done fast, just copy and paste my example and you’re done.

Or you can spend a few minutes rewording my example so that it’s tailored for your product and your market.

Component 6: The Close

This is the final component of your sales letter, and it’s massively important because it’s where you ask your visitor to buy your product.

The Close component is made up of 4 parts:

• the price
• the offer
• the call to action
• the P.S.

Let’s tackle these one at a time.

The Price

In all the cases where I’ve tested what works best as far as revealing price, the winner has always been stating the price quickly, without drama, and not lingering on it.

So in this first part of the price component, all you’re gonna do is openly reveal the price, and the way I always do it is like this:

“Like I said, it’s very important to me that you get my program today so that you can start using it right away to stop suffering the way you are right now.

So let’s cut through everything here and just lay it all on the line.

When you order my program today it’s going to cost $67. You need to ask yourself if the results it’s going to give you are worth that TINY investment in yourself.”

That’s as fancy as you need to get in revealing the price. If you’ve done your job in all the components leading up to this revelation, this simple statement will work great.

The Offer

This part of the close component is largely just restating information that you’ve shared with your visitor earlier in the sales letter. Start this section with a simple headline along these lines:

“So, Here’s What You’re Going To Get…”

Then go right into describing everything that comes with your product if your visitor orders today.

When you’re telling your visitor what they’re going to get, it’s a great opportunity to use images of your product.

So insert an image of your product, then follow that with some text describing what it is, what it does, and what it will do for your visitor.

Don’t waste a chance to make your product look like a lot of stuff.

The Call To Action

This is what all your previous work has been for. You’re about to ask your visitors to buy your product, and it’s vital that you’re not afraid to ask for the sale.

So many sales letters, especially those written by people new to Internet marketing, have a timid close. People are scared to ask their visitors to buy.

Don’t fall into this trap. The more firmly you ask for the sale, the more of your visitors will buy.

This is an important part of your sales letter to get right, so I’m gonna paste an almost-complete call to action for you to use as a template.

You’ll need to rewrite it slightly to fit with your product and offer, but the basics are all there for you:

“It’s time to take action.

If you do nothing today then nothing is going to change.

You already know that.

The action you need to take right now is to click on the Add To Cart button down below, and to place your order. That’s it. The rest will be automatic.

As soon as you’ve ordered you’ll get instant access to the exclusive members’ area, the handbook, and the audio sessions, plus all the other bonuses I’ve already told you about.

Take action. Click on the Add To Cart button now and enter your information on the form on the next page.”

Follow this with an Add To Cart button.

The P.S.

The P.S. is important because your visitors will often skip down to the bottom of your sales letter to check out your price.

And you don’t want to lose a chance to sell your visitor on your product.

So while they’re down there checking out the price, why not summarize everything about your product in a compelling P.S. message?

A powerful P.S. will contain a reminder of your visitor’s problems, your product, the results your product will deliver, your guarantee, and another call to action.

Here’s a sample P.S. for a weight loss product, and you can use this to help you create your own:

“P.S. This program will quickly help you to lose 30 pounds in just 30 days, and it’ll show you how to keep the weight off for good so that you’ll never be fat again. You’ll be amazed at how quickly you’ll start shedding pounds.

Remember, you’ll get INSTANT access to the entire program once you place your order, plus all the limited bonuses. Please don’t hesitate while you’re so close to changing your life for the better. If my program doesn’t work for you, you can get a full refund any time in the next 60 days, so you have absolutely nothing to lose.”

Follow this with another “Add To Cart” button.

Time to Write the Close Component

The close component is where you’ll either make the sale or lose the sale, so it’s hugely important.

For that reason, I’ve given you templates and examples that you can pretty much copy and paste.

When you’ve finished your close component, your sales letter is done. All you need to do now is piece together the 6 components and you’ll have a high-quality, finished sales letter that’s ready to start making you sales.

The Takeaway

Sales letters are the keys to making money online. No matter how good your product or service is, you won’t make a penny if no one is compelled to place an order for it.

The trouble has always been that sales letters written by professional copywriters cost thousands of dollars. So most people have to write their own, and so they end up with weak sales letters that don’t convert.

Because of this, there are people out there with great products who aren’t making any money at all. Their sales letters just aren’t good enough to get them orders.

But this doesn’t have to be the case. Not anymore.

Now that I’ve shared my system for writing sales letters with you, there’s no reason that you can’t write a sales letter that converts.

If you follow the steps in this post, you will produce a sales letter that gets you sales. I guarantee it.