How does this apply to you and your business? Do this... create a survey that asks what questions your prospect list will have. Find out exactly why your prospects do business with you. Ask why your prospects do business with you and not your competition. Ask what changes your prospects want from you. And find out what your prospects want you to emphasize in your products or services. You could go on and on for your particular situation. Once you have your survey created, contact your prospect list and give them an incentive for answering your survey. Something like a free ebook, a discount, a free report, or a free product. Use your imagination.

Keep in mind that as you create your survey you also want to discover what kind of lifestyle your prospects have. Such as what kind of books they read, what kind of car they drive, their philosophies on life, and so on. Now, don't make your survey intimidating. Make it a fast and enjoyable experience for greater results.

And once you do this... apply information you've gathered and reformat your sales letters, and appearance of your sales letters and websites, to mirror tastes of your prospects. Result? Your prospects will feel that you understand them. They'll feel much more inclined to trust you and believe what you tell them. And once you do that... you'll not only experience a windfall of money and profits, you'll also want to put your sales letter in a plaque and hang it up above your TV.

Bottom line: Build an almost intuitive link with your prospects by surveying them to discover what triggers them to buy from you. And discover what kind of people you're dealing with. Use that knowledge and infuse it into your sales letters. You'll make people feel like you know them, that you understand them. Now watch out! You'll be astonished at tremendous results! Even if your competition has a fantastic copywriter, you're sales letter has more statistical probability of eating your competition alive.

Why? Because, everything else... is just guessing!

2. Generate empathy--You want your reader to feel what protagonist is feeling. The information you convey must touch something in reader, making him/her think, "I know just how that feels."

The more your reader can relate to protagonist of story, more they will see their own lives paralleling that person's. For example, say you tell a story about trials a woman with weight problems went through, how she felt about being overweight, and then tell how she was able to change her life with your weight loss supplements. If story is told in a way that makes reader recognize feelings similar to those of overweight woman, they will be likely to buy product.

3. Generate sympathy--This is a different task than generating empathy. When you feel things empathetically, you are feeling what someone else is feeling. When you feel sympathy, you feel concern or sorrow for someone else.

The purpose of generating sympathy is to get reader more involved in story. We all love conflict and turmoil, so more there is, more interested we are. If you tell a story about a woman whose husband died, leaving her with debt and four kids to take care of, we feel a great deal of sympathy for her. And just as we all rubber-neck at scene of a horrible accident, we can't stop reading about someone one else's problems and trials.

4. Show how protagonist changed--If you read an entire novel in which main character never learned anything or changed in any way, you would shut book thinking, "What was point?"

If person you tell a story about doesn't change for better, story won't do you any good. When you are using a story to sell or build credibility, it must always have a happy ending. And that happy ending must come about because of your product, service, or business opportunity.

Don't be afraid to tell your story every chance you get. If you don't tell your story, other people will. And they often won't get details right.

I remember a woman who owned a big string of electronics stores in Southwest. Everyone in town knew story about her first arriving in area, with only $300 in her pocket to start her first store.

One day I had a chance to ask entrepreneur about this story. "Gosh no," she laughed. "I don't know where that story comes from. I started my business with a mountain of market research and plenty of investment money."

The moral of this story is, follow character development patterns used by popular novelists. Using these techniques, writers keep people involved in a story for hundreds of pages. You will certainly be able to draw readers in and keep their attention for a few paragraphs.