I'm sure you've been there. You're sitting down and staring at a blank screen or a blank piece of paper wonder how in the heck you're going to get started.

You've got a major case of writer's block.

I know I've been there. And, for me, creating an outline's the best way to do beat the blank page blues. It's really intimidating and daunting when you know that you have to write a fairly long sales copy for a product and you don't really know where to start.

But again, this is not an exercise in writing. It's an exercise in selling. So let's take a look at some steps you can take to develop your outline for your sales copy.

Step #1: Imagine you're in a room with your prospect and ask yourself, "How would I talk to him about this product? How would I begin the conversation? What would I say next? How would I present the product and the benefits and the offer? How would I do it if there was a live human being sitting there?"

That's a really good cue to how the copy should flow.

I begin by identifying every product benefit that I can think of. I look at the product. I look at what it does. I look at how it changes people's lives. I look at how it connects with things that are going on in the world right now or that are in the news right now.

Because if it's in the news, my prospect's thinking about it. And if he's thinking about it, he has feelings about it. So if my product addresses something he's thinking about, that's particularly important to me when writing the sales copy.

Step #2: Ask yourself, "How is my prospect likely to feel about each of these benefits that my product provides? How does he feel right now about not having those benefits in his life?"

See, what's happening here is you're building a matrix. You could even do it on an Excel spreadsheet. In the left column, you have the benefit the product delivers. In the right column, you have the resident emotion that connects with that benefit.

Step #3: You need to decide whether you're going to do a USP or an advertorial approach in your sales copy. A USP approach is one where you begin simply by stating the benefit that the product offers.

So if the benefit is that you can have a greener lawn in 30 days, that's your headline. You just go straight to the direct benefit. USP ads are great when you're limited in terms of the length of your copy.

Advertorials have much greater readership and generally produce much greater response, but they require longer copy. An advertorial promotion begins with editorial copy on a theme your prospect is thinking about, worried about, excited about, whatever.

You construct your promotion as if it were an editorial report or white paper on that topic. And in my areas, investment and health, there's a million ways to go with that because there's always news from one organization or another about the efficacy of some supplement ... or China just found out that its inflation rate is gonna almost double in 2007 ... or gold prices have taken off ... or the federal reserve didn't raise interest rates yesterday.

The USP lead for a financial newsletter promotion would probably begin by touting the most profitable investment advice in America, then present give the track record of the newsletter and say, "Buy this newsletter and you're gonna double your money in 2007."

But the advertorial approach says, "Look, here's something you're thinking about that you probably have been wondering where you could get more information about." And then it goes about establishing our expertise and the value of what we do by giving him practical advice and help that he can use even without buying the product in order to capitalize on this opportunity or solve this problem.

Once you know whether you're going with a USP or advertorial approach and once you have the outline complete, it's time to start hanging some meat on the bones. That means research. You'll identify facts you'll need to make each point credible - maybe a chart or a picture to drive your point home.

So your outline kind of becomes a research document. You simply drop in the facts or the support material or whatever you need after each sales point so it'll be there for you when you begin writing the sales copy.

Now, what you have is a very rough draft. You have a complete sales argument that starts at point A and ends at point B with most, if not all, of the facts that you'll need in order to complete your copy in the appropriate places.

Now, you don't have a blank page, do you? See? You've outsmarted that raging case of writer's block you had.

So it's simply a matter of going through and turning those notes into a conversation that you're having with your prospect and doing it in the order that you've laid out in your outline.

Having trouble coming up with a Headline?

If writer's block is preventing you from coming up with a killer headline, bookstores are fantastic place to get some external stimulation.

Just head right for the magazine racks. The companies that publish those magazines have spent a fortune and many, many years, in some cases decades, trying to find out what kinds of headlines on their magazine covers produce the greatest sales in the newsstand.

In know this for a fact. I've done a lot of work with Rodale Press. They do Men's Health and Prevention Magazine. And one day they told me that every month they do 10 to 12 cover panel tests on Prevention.

So if you go to a bookstore in Connecticut, you're likely to see a different cover on Prevention than you might see just down the street. And certainly you're likely to see a different cover if you go to Alabama.

They've been doing these tests for like 20 years. So when you stand there in front of a magazine rack and look at the fronts of all of those magazines, you're looking at millions of dollars of research on the hoof.

And so a trip to the bookstore can be very informative. I quite often will go and take both a little pocket recorder and a notepad, grab myself a latte, and just stand there and go over the magazine rack very carefully. Then after having done that, I go to the book section.

Now, I'm told that book publishers do much less of this kind of research. But looking, especially at the non-fiction books, and studying their headlines and opening the books and looking at their chapter titles, both of those exercises have yielded a lot of great headline ideas.

Or you can go to the tabloids - National Enquirer and Globe. Those guys are past masters at headline writing. Back in '91, I was asked to write a promotion for Health and Healing, and I did just that. I went to a bookstore after I'd written the copy, and I noticed that a couple of the tabloids used the word forbidden in the headlines on their covers.

And so I went straight home and just wrote "Forbidden Cures: The Cures Doctors, Drug Companies, and the U.S. Medical Industry Don't Want You To Know About." We mailed 30 million of those and sold a heck of a lot of subscriptions of Health and Healing.

It's great. Once you get into this, you'll always have your feelers out and you'll be hearing phrases and structures that you can adapt for pretty much any product. Television's another great place to go, but bookstores are probably the best.

So, next time you have a bit of writer's block, go on a road trip to your nearest bookstore, grab a latte, and enjoy those headlines.

I hope this helps!

About the Author

Clayton Makepeace is a working direct response marketing consultant and copywriter who has helped his clients attract more than 3 million new customers ... quadruple their profits ... and rake in more than $1 billion in direct mail and internet sales. His daily e-letter, The Total Package, shares his proven response-boosting techniques with younger writers, business owners, and marketing pros. Find out more at http://www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.