It is recognized in internet marketing circles, that the most valuable skill is the ability to write effective sales letters.  This sales letter writing is more commonly referred to as copywriting.  Copywriting can be a daunting task but there are ways to make it easier.

A great copywriter can make a fortune by creating powerful sales pages for his own product or writing sales copy for others.  Copywriting is such a valuable skill that the best copywriters can charge up to $20,000 to write one sales letter.

If you are selling a product online, you need some type of sales page.  Your sales page is your salesman.  Every time someone visits your website, your sales page immediately goes to work pitching your product, trying to convince your visitor why they need to buy. 

How do you write a good sales letter?  How can you produce a sales page that will convert your visitors into customers?  There is one principle that every great copywriter knows.  That is, don’t reinvent the wheel!  What has worked in the past as an effective sales letter will work in the future.  That is why every copywriter’s number one tool is a swipe file.

A swipe file is nothing more than a collection of sales pages.  When a copywriter sees an effective sales letter, he ads a copy of it to his swipe file.  You can do the same thing.  You can create your own swipe file. When you see an ad that makes you want to buy something, add that to your swipe file. In a short time you will have created a swipe file collection with examples of a good number of different sales pages.

Why is a swipe file important?  Remember what I said at the beginning of this article, don’t reinvent the wheel, an effective ad in the past will be an effective ad in the future.  You can use the sales examples in your swipe file to model your sales letters after.  Now notice I said model not copy.  You should never copy anyone else’s work directly.  That is against the law. It is perfectly legal though, to create a sales letter that uses the same structure and ideas as other sales letters.

A good example of this is the use of some common headlines that you will find in your swipe file examples.  I’m sure you have seen a variation of this headline: WHO ELSE WANTS TO LEARN TO WRITE MILLION DOLLAR SALES LETTERS, or WHO ELSE WANTS TO SAVE $500 DOLLARS TOMORROW, or WHO ELSE WANTS TO LOOSE 30 POUNDS IN 30 DAYS. 

In this case the same headline idea was used for three different products.  They were different yet they were the same.  This is how you can use your swipe files to get ideas that you can transform into your own ideas to sell your product.  The more you use your swipe files, the better your sales letters will be and the more product you will sell.