At some point near the beginning I’ll look around for a sales letter I’d like to emulate.

Then I list out everything I can think to say about the product. I take the list of benefits and make bullets out of them. By then I’ve decided on the type of lead to use. Then I get a stack of note cards and put each idea I wanted to include on them. I also make an outline of sorts that includes things like nested loops to open and close, objections to reframe, what to pace and lead, etc. It’s really something between a mind map and a to do list.

I lay the note cards out and build the letter in the order it makes most sense to me. I usually don’t use all the cards as I’m wanting to be as concise as possible. See Bob Bly’s methodology above [edit: from www.bly.com] for the structure of a sales letter.

Then I start writing and layering in NLP and other persuasive devices as I go. Sometimes it’s helpful and fun to go into a sort of hypnotic trance as I do it. I think Joe Vitale and Matt Furey talk about doing that kind of thing. You’ll need to watch the time if you do that though because you’ll blink and an hour will have passed.

I let it sit a day or so and then start editing. First I read it out loud and smooth out any grammatical issues. I’ll fine tune any persuasive devices I’m looking for and make sure the deeper meta message (ie NLP) builds progressively and elegantly. I’ll go back through that and tweak it with Glyphius. I think I finish by making sure I’m happy with the formatting. Once I feel like it’s where I like it, I’d make a list of things to multivariate test.

I may be leaving something out. Hmm.