7 Steps to Powerful Bullets in your Copywriting

Bully for Bullets!

Once you start looking for them, you’ll notice bullets – the verbal kind – being used to great effect in practically any kind of written marketing piece. They can condense a lot of information into an easy-to-absorb format. Brochures almost always use them, often in a boring or off-putting way. Flyers, more limited in space, use them even more, as do many catalogs. Text-heavy ads couldn’t get across as many selling points as they do without bullets. You’d be hard put to find a multi-page Web site without them somewhere. And any sales letter longer than half a page contains their distinctive point-after-point arrangement. I haven’t seen bullets used on billboards, but that’s mainly because the optimal length there is only seven words, not enough for more than one thought.

You wouldn’t usually open a marketing piece with bullets. You keep them in reserve until it’s time to enumerate advantages, features, selling points, reasons to buy and so on in a pow-pow-Pow-Pow-POW fashion. They don’t work to conclude something, either. But in between they can sure generate a reaction in the reader.

Step 1. Reread what you already have hanging around about the product, service or business.

When a professional copywriter goes to work on the words that will sell, let’s say a book, he or she reads with highlighter in hand, yellow pad at the ready. What gets covered with color or written down on the pad are not necessarily the most important points. Often they’re the bizarre-but-true facts, little details that might surprise an outsider, eye-opening examples or contrary-to-expectations arguments. Sometimes they’re completely ordinary observations that can be made to sound startling with a little verbal cunning.

For example, legendary marketer Gary Halbert quotes a passage from a book on selling a house that recommends, as a way of dealing with the question, “How long has the house been on the market?” taking the house off the market for a while so that you can honestly give the answer the questioner wants to hear. Halbert’s bullet from this passage:

How to sell your home faster by taking it off the market!


This is a different kind of reading than you normally do. To experience it, read the following paragraphs from Patricia Smith’s book, Each of Us, and see if you can isolate at least three points that could be turned into bullets marketing the book. Don’t worry about wording the points in a catchy way, just try to identify the bullet-worthy material here.

Higher education is a top priority for so many women, and yet the great majority of us remain in low-paying careers. What’s going on?

The world of business is filled with individuals with every level of education, working side by side. People with high school diplomas often fill the same positions as people with MBAs. They may have similar work experience, or they may have made similar impressions on the people who hire and promote. People with a high school education are promoted over people with more education all the time, for lots of reasons.

In a Gallup poll, chief executives from various-sized companies were asked, “What does it take to get ahead?” Education was ranked eighth out of eight on their list of answers. The two top reasons in every case were integrity and the ability to get along with others. If you are over 25, your work experience and abilities will weigh much more heavily on your resume than your education.

Here now are some bullets I might pull out of the above:

Learn what often-recommended career move is a serious waste of energy for women over 25.

Why years and years of education may hold you back rather than help you get ahead.

Which two qualities most accounted for promotability in a national survey of chief executives.

Find out whether you’re worrying about the factor that came out last in a poll of chief execs on qualities they value in their staff!

A qualification that costs you nothing matters more to chief executives than a credential that costs thousands of dollars and years of hard work.


The bullets above are in different styles and overlap a bit in content, so I would never combine them as in that list, but they still illustrate how to choose facts from a text that can easily be made to sound totally fascinating.

Now let’s do the same with a couple of paragraphs on a very different topic in a more literary style. This passage comes from an article called “Blessings in Exile” by travel writer Pico Iyer in the magazine Civilization in 1997.

Dharamsala, therefore, is Tibet’s one great hope to maintain and disseminate a meaningful cultural, religious and quietly political identity, and 8,000 Tibetans have gathered there around the man they think of as a god. Some are relatives and monastic associates who left with him 38 years ago, while others are newcomers who have fled across the Himalayas to be near him. And, as the Dalai Lama said to me the first time I met him here, in 1974, and has repeated every time I’ve returned to see him, the trials of exile have brought some blessings.

For him, his new home offers the chance to start afresh, free of all the stifling traditions and protocol that kept parts of Tibet in the Middle Ages even as late as World War II. And for a variety of foreigners – hippies, religious scholars and people just wanting to see, or get sustenance from, a famously accessible Buddhist teacher – Dharamsala represents the world’s first chance to come in contact with a culture long imagined as a kind of mythic Shangri-la and visited, before the Chinese takeover, by fewer than 2,000 Westerners in all its history.

As a result, all kinds of travelers stream through Dharamsala these days, from Steven Seagal and Harrison Ford to Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys and Philip Glass, and as the Tibetan cause grows better known – especially with the release of two Hollywood movies this fall (Seven Years in Tibet, with Brad Pitt, and Kundun, directed by Martin Scorsese) – the stream threatens to become a flood. When last I bounced and jangled up the winding road that leads to the Central Tibetan Administration, I was surprised to see three new “luxury” hotels accommodating visitors in $20-a-night comfort. Star TV had arrived in the mountain village, and signs at a central intersection advertised “fast food.” More terrible reminders of the world at large had also arrived. This past February, Dharamsala was the site of a grisly crime when three of the Dalai Lama’s monks were found murdered in their beds (apparently killed by a rival Tibetan faction).


Bullets from that passage:

Find out where the world’s most prominent Buddhist master holds court, amidst movie stars, fast food joints and murderers.

Why the Dalai Lama’s 38-year exile from his homeland has its bright side for the spiritual leader

The one place on earth where a Shangri-la experience costs just $20 a night

Which movie stars and musical luminaries have made a pilgrimage to a small town in the foothills of the Himalayas, and why


And just to show that the process works with dry facts and figures, too, let’s create bullet points from an Internal Revenue Service publication on how to audit bed-and-breakfast inns.

Based on a 1988 national survey of innkeepers, Bed and Breakfasts with less than four guest rooms do not make money. With up to seven rooms, an average profit would be about 8 percent annually. Inns with 21 rooms can have a 29 percent annual return. If there is an absentee-owner the profit will go down and according to the survey, “nothing less is workable” than inns with more than 20 guest rooms.

Tax treatment of inns will vary. IRC sec. 280A will come into play more often when you have a few rooms being rented out in a personal residence. Whereas, with an inn of 20 rooms it will not. IRC sec. 162 will govern because these are more like a hotel and motel business. Frequently, IRC § 183 will dominate because the taxpayer has not shown he is engaged in an activity for profit. One of the most common issues is personal use and/or expenses per IRC § 262, especially with food, utilities and auto expenses.

The following are a first pass at creating bullets from the above paragraphs, with the intended audience bed-and-breakfast owners:

Learn the number of rooms IRS auditors consider as a cutoff point for profitability (less than that, and you’re in danger of having all of your business deductions thrown out!)

Find out what percentage of profit IRS auditors expect to find if you have up to seven rooms or about 29 rooms for guests

The minimum number of rooms considered to be profitable for absentee-owners, a yardstick used by auditors even though your figures may show otherwise

Which tax-code section auditors will apply if you have a few rooms rented out in the residence where you live, and which they use when they consider you comparable to hotels and motels

The regulation that enables auditors to come down hard on you when they claim you’re not running your B&B for profit

Which categories of B&B expenses auditors consider especially fruitful to challenge when they grill you at an audit


Now suppose you’re not promoting any kind of text or working off of specific content, but you do have outdated marketing pieces hanging around, such as last year’s catalog or brochure, articles written by reporters about the business, product directions, a business plan, a Web site that’s being scrapped, etc. Copywriters often find crunchy ingredients in these morsels that they can recombine for effect. No matter how clumsy and unpersuasive the piece, how banal the review, how matter-of-fact the engineers’ recital of attributes, it’s worth a scan. David Ogilvy says he spent three weeks studying all kinds of stuff about the Rolls Royce before he came upon the sentence he recrafted into a headline, “At sixty miles an hour, the loudest noise comes from the electric clock.” The same process applies to bullets.

For example, a 28-page catalog for Explorations in Travel’s outdoor and cultural vacations for women does not include a single bullet point. In the following trip description, which facts would you pluck out to turn into bullets?

Six monuments in Old San Juan are listed among the United Nation’s world-class historic sites, along with the Taj Mahal! Old San Juan provides a striking contrast to the modern city with its Gothic cathedrals, 400-year-old forts and massive sandstone city walls. Along with a visit to this spectacular colonial city we will travel into the rainforest where we have the opportunity to explore the forest and learn about the local environment. The island’s national mascot, the tiny coqui frog, which can only survive on Puerto Rican soil, is found here. Within this fragile environment over 240 species of trees, some of them thousands of years old, flourish along with 50 species of ferns and 20 different varieties of orchids.

The island of Vieques, off Puerto Rico’s east coast, is renowned for its beautiful beaches and we’ll take the opportunity to enjoy some of them. The snorkeling here is superb and in the evening we visit one of the world’s finest bioluminescent bays to swim in its glowing waters. At a local museum we get an introduction to the historical and political history of the island. A day for relaxing and enjoying the island’s slow pace has been set aside before returning to San Juan. Relax at our comfortable hotel, wander the town of Isabel Segunda or bask in the sun at the seashore.

My top three candidates, put into bullet form, from the above would be:

Enjoy a night-time tropical swim with friendly glow-in-the-dark creatures!

Gothic cathedrals and forts in the Carribean? Yes, and according to the United Nations, they rank in historic value up with the Taj Mahal!

Experience the fragile ecosystem of a rain forest that harbo