Bullets With Bite: Learn to Create Mouthwatering Word Nuggets by Marcia Yudkin

Author:Marcia Yudkin [Yudkin, Marcia]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Creative Ways Publishing
Published: 2012-05-31T14:00:00+00:00

A Content Checklist

Creating bullets is not merely a verbal exercise, of course, so it’s important to set up checks and balances to catch instances where you allowed your ideas to go overboard.

Set your freshly written copy aside for at least a day and then coldly apply these criteria as if someone else had penned your effort. Remember your overall goal – to persuade and bring about leads, sales, donations, memberships and such, without prompting any sort of backlash.

1. Have you promised anything you can’t deliver?

Be mindful that all marketing copy functions as a sort of promise. Through lack of communication among your team, because of last-minute changes or by making inaccurate assumptions, it’s possible to describe something that is no longer or not usually part of the product.

Keep in mind that someone may buy because of one or two bullet points that caught their eye. I once highlighted a couple of points in a seminar description and then asked for (and received) my money back because those items turned out not to be on the agenda after all. From this point of view, underpromising is best.

2. Are all the facts in your copy accurate?

The first draft of this chapter included a made-up example referring to “Rapid City, Iowa.” When I reread what I’d written, a little voice in the back of my head whispered, “Is it really in Iowa?” From decades of demanding journalistic work, I’ve learned to be over-cautious about facts and check everything that I could conceivably get wrong. In this case, I looked it up and learned that Rapid City is not in Iowa but in South Dakota.

Check the spelling of proper names like psychologist Abraham Maslow (not Mazlo), Martha’s Vineyard (not Marthas Vinyard) and Paris’ Champs Elyseés, rather than some fractured version of that famous boulevard.

If you refer to a warehouse that is five miles from downtown on Route 135, are you certain it’s five miles and not on a side street off of 135? Think of how silly you’ll look to your target market if you wrote “Sony” when you meant “Nintendo” or vice versa (I saw this happen once), or if you mentioned Nazis in connection with World War I rather than World War II.

3. Is your copy consistent?

If at the top of the page you refer to the “three biggest mistakes” used car buyers make and at the bottom of the page promise to explain the “four biggest mistakes” of used car buyers, something jangles in the reader’s head. (Even worse – and pretty common – is to announce the “three biggest mistakes” and then actually list four!)

Likewise, you may tell people on page 2 to avoid buying Camaros, the greatest losers in resale value, and on page 3 ascribe that status to Volkswagens. You lose credibility when you say things that don’t line up with one another.

4. Have you repeated yourself?

The longer your marketing piece, the greater the odds that unintentionally, you’ve made the same point twice. Sometimes repetition drives home a point.

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