Thinking up great benefit statements has always been the most challenging part of copywriting for the web. But, other than a good headline, to sell visitors to your service, product and ideas you need great benefit statements.

Coming up with headlines, stories, price offers and all the fancy Buy Now! buttons you’d need to fill a sales page was easy for me in comparison. But creating a benefits list drove me crazy; that is until I learned how to come up with one or more benefits every minute.

You may recall from Sales 101 that benefits are what sells your product or service, not features. Understanding that, I wanted to understand what exactly benefits really are. They’re action items, right? For example, you “lose” weight or “make” money. So, what do you think about starting out each benefit statement with a verb that takes action? This is the process to take:

1.  Get a long list of alphabetized action verbs.

2.  Put the list on your desk or computer screen where you can see the entire list
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3.  Beginning with the letter A, read each verb aloud and come up with a descriptive sentence about your product or service that includes the verb.

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

Then, my descriptive sentence might be that my service helps “accelerate” the time it takes to learn to read Spanish.

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. Don’t worry about duplicates right now either. Just keep an open mind and write down any benefit statements that come to mind about your product or service.

5.  Now is the time that you will prioritize your list from most important to least.

This process has worked for me to write great benefits statements, as well as when coming up with article ideas for my blog, 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.