Bat Boy Lives! Copywriting Techniques to Make Your Website Sell.

There are many intriguing questions that I like to ponder.

What is the meaning of life?

Could God make a microwave pizza so hot that he himself can’t eat it? 

How was the band Nickelback able to make so many albums even though their music sucks? 

But there are a few questions in particular that interest me the most. 

What is it that makes us say to ourselves, consciously or unconsciously: “That was a great ad and exactly what feels right to me, I’m going to buy that product!” 

Can mere words on a webpage truly sway us to act in one fashion or another? The answer absolutely is yes, but what formula or writing style is most conducive to an increased conversion rate? (i.e. more sales and subscriptions).

The answer is always multifaceted and dependent on context and all the variables surrounding your product or service and clientele, which is what makes it so interesting to think about.

But I think I’ve found a great strategy! 

We can’t always know the exact words or phrasing that will resonate best, but we can rely on simple ideas that have survived the test of time. And from these techniques we can form a template to use that will captivate an interested reader. 

In the legendary copywriting/advertising book “The Adweek Copywriting Handbook”, author Joseph Sugarman mentions an idea he calls the slippery slope. This consists of focusing all attention on writing in a fashion that will make the reader pay full attention to your advertisement, abandon everything else going on in their life at that moment and finish reading the whole ad. 

If we can utilize this sales writing structure correctly, we can entertain and captivate a reader one sentence at a time until they are falling down Sugarman’s slippery slope.

And the probability of a sales conversion in this scenario is much higher. 

And how can we structure our writing to make a reader fall down the slippery slope and buy our product?

Humor and relevant quality information. 

Be humorous or say something borderline ridiculous. This is what I call the Bat Boy Paradigm. 

How often while waiting in the checkout line at the local grocer do we turn to read the headline on the latest tabloid? It says something crazy or completely irrelevant to our lives and yet we read it anyway. We focus our attention on it even if we don’t want to.

It’s like we can’t help it. 

One of the greatest examples of this is the weekly world news. It was a publication featuring the famous character Bat Boy. A boy who was part bat and part human was allegedly alive and real.

I always wondered how such a ridiculous publication that tells fake news stories could stay in business for so long.

The answer, though, is obvious: the headlines grabbed our attention, made us wonder if it was real and chuckle at the notion. 

Another debatably less outrageous example of this is Sugarman’s advertisement example titled “British Men Have Underwear Problem.” He then continues to include wtf statements that entertain us and begin to inform us of a great new product (for Americans) to buy.

So why not use this strategy, with varying degrees of tastefulness, to grab your reader’s attention? It doesn’t have to be something as out there as Bat Boy, but it need not be boring and mundane either. 

Basically, make your advertising interesting and entertain the audience. Try to shock them a little with something random or outlandish if you can.

Just don’t overdo it like Quizno’s did when the restaurant tried to use their so-called “Spongmonkeys” to sell sandwiches. Believe it or not, it is possible to go too far. 

Seriously, go on YouTube and look up that infamous commercial if you don’t know what I’m talking about. That was an actual advertisement I saw on TV once and seeing those bizarre singing creatures still freaks me out to this day

In any case, once the reader is pulled in through humor we can begin to convey quality information regarding our product or service with varying levels of humor and fun. And from there our reader falls down Sugarman’s slippery slope until we have ourselves a fresh sales conversion. 

Follow this strategy and you’ll be well on your way to increased profits! 

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