Foundations

The Rule of One – Conversion Copywriting Fundamental

O. Sentrec

• 1 min read

The Rule of One is about focus. Focus on one thing – one goal, one reader, one offer, one value proposition, one call to action.The moment you put too many ideas in your copy, the strength of your message dilutes, clarity gets lost, and your reader stops reading. Before writing any piece of copy, identify these three things:

  • Your One Reader. The person you are talking to in the copy you are writing. It’s your ideal prospect. It can be a group of people from different demographics or market segments as long as they share the same anxieties, desires, and qualities.
  • Your One Offer. An offer that is irresistible to your One Reader.
  • Your One Value Proposition. It is the highly desirable and unique thing your One Reader gets from your One Offer.

How to find your One Reader

There are 6 key questions you need to answer to get to the core of who your one reader is.

1)  What do they want? It could be a personal or social transformation, or it may be a more functional job that they need done, done better, done faster, done cheaper, and so on.

2)  What is getting in the way of them getting what they want?

3)  How can we get rid of the blockers to that desired outcome?

4)  What kind of decision-makers do we believe they are?

  • Spontaneous decision maker
  • Competitive decision maker
  • Humanistic decision maker
  • Methodical decision maker

5)  What stage of awareness for the thing we’re writing about are they in?

  • Most aware
  • Product aware
  • Solution aware
  • Pain aware
  • Unaware

6)  How sophisticated are they? (Their level of market sophistication.)

  • High sophistication
  • Low sophistication

Questions 5 and 6 are important when choosing your One Offer.Answer these questions with as much detail as you need to understand who your One Reader is. If you are writing a highly targeted ad, go deeper into understanding your prospect. If you are writing a home page or an unsegmented pricing page, keep it more general. Apply the Rule of One to anything you write. It will make your copy specific and clear.