The Plus-Minus Method for Writing Landing Page and Email Copy
No Whisper Ideas 🤫
The Plus One - Minus One Method for Writing Great Copy
We’ve got a bunch of founders building OPLP’s (One Person Landing Pages) these days, a tool that is one of the most useful in our tool-chest.
The lightning fast explanation is that you build a landing page geared at one customer - the customer you’ve met who you think is most likely to be your perfect customer - without them knowing you built it specifically for them. This is a reality check - have we actually understood their problem and process and what they’re willing to pay to solve it? Can we regurgitate exactly what this customer said they wanted back to them? Do they actually want it?
The landing page should end up looking more like a personalized email pitch than a website. Don’t worry, the customer won’t notice.
The OPLP is designed to make writing compelling copy easy, because copy is compelling when it’s specific to the person reading it.
“You own a coffee shop with three locations and you want to find a buyer for the business but have no clue where to start”
Is roughly 1000x more compelling to a coffee shop owner than
“We help small businesses find buyers”
That said, writing copy is still hard. Enter the plus one minus one method.
The Plus One - Minus One Method
The method is as simple as it sounds. It’s also probably the writing tool I use the most. Every podcast episode I write is marked up with a bunch of plus and minus signs when I start to edit.
When you draft out a landing page or a cold email or LinkedIn message or, anything, re-read and put a (+) or a (-) next to each line. A (+) indicates something hyper specific to the person reading it that’ll cause them to push forward, and a (-) is something generic, or, now, clearly written by AI, that’ll create friction.
Here’s an example from a cold email I got while writing this post.
PLEASE do not read this whole thing. No one would ever read an email this long. So, right away, the whole thing is a giant (-) and an auto-delete for me. But, for the purposes of the exercise, let’s dig in a bit.
Zooming in to make it a bit more manageable:
This method really lets you appreciate how atrocious this email is. It’s borderline criminal that this PR person is charging money for this. There are no plus signs - only friction.
Here’s the +/- translation:
“Hi, I don’t know who you are and haven’t listened to your podcast. Here’s a pitch I’d like you to read, and here’s a description I copy and pasted to 20,000 other people.”
Let’s try another that just hit the inbox:
Much shorter, and sort of getting to something maybe useable?
Let’s break it down:
Still not good, but you can see how much more digestible it is.
Any sort of “hook” value will create a (+), because humans are interested to see what that value is. The tease of their list of Educated Professionals does that.
Again, not great. But, if I was looking for a list of Educated Professionals, and if they cleaned up the CTA… maybe?
-
Try this for your landing pages and cold emails. Delete every (-) and make sure every sentence is a (+). It’ll make your copy short, specific and compelling.