For me, the most difficult part of writing ad copy has been to come up with great benefit statements. And, second to the headline, the benefits are what sell people on your product, service, idea or even political opinion.

In comparison, the other parts of copywriting that people might find challenging, such as stories, headlines, and great price offers were easy. What drove me nuts was coming up with a benefits list; that is until I discovered how to develop more than one benefit a minute.

Any basic sales course will tell you that features don’t sell a product or service, benefits do. Understanding that, I wanted to understand what exactly benefits really are. I discovered they are really just action items in disguise, agreed? You “save” money or “stop” wasting time, for example. So, why not start out all benefit statements with action verbs? This is the process to take:

1.  Find a long list of action verbs and alphabetize them.

2.  Display the alphabetized list of action verbs on your desk or, even better, view them on your computer screen so that you can see the list in its entirety
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3.  Make up a sentence describing your product or service using each verb on the list.

For example, the first word in my list of verbs is “Accelerate”.

So, I might say to myself that my product helps people to “Accelerate your learning speed by     getting true hands-on training with every command”.

4.  Keep writing benefits as long as you are able and don’t quit! You can cut out those that don’t have as much impact later. You don’t need to stop to think if you are writing duplicate phrases down either, now is not the time. Just keep an open mind and write down any benefit statements that come to mind about your product or service.

5.  Now you organize your benefit list in order of priority from most important benefit to last.

I’ve used this process not only for creating benefits lists, but also for writing articles, such as “35 Reasons Why a Blog is Better than a Traditional Web Site for Your Business,” or “50 Ways to Kill a Perfectly Good Seminar”.

Use my list of verbs or create your own and start creating your killer benefit statements in just 20 minutes. Most of the time, you won’t need more than a great list of 20 benefits.

Marty Dickinson is an entrepreneur and the founder of HereNextYear, Inc., a full service Internet marketing company in business for 15 years.  He specializes in Internet marketing solutions for the small business owner, speakers and authors.  Visit to see what HereNextYear has to offer and to learn more about their innovative new website packages fully integrated for ease with social networking and other Internet marketing strategies.