What are Power words – the secret tool that can send your sales soaring

You may have seen a lot of traffic recently about power words but what exactly are they?

Go to any sales seminar and you will receive this standard definition of what power words are

“Power words are words or phrases that elicit an action or reaction in their reader”

That tells us what they are but goes little way to tell us how we can exploit them to drive our sales and visitor engagement. To really appreciate the power of power words you need to understand how the human brain reacts to certain words or phrases.

American psychologist Robert Plutchik identified 8 key emotions that all human process. He then went on to amplify these emotions into even more characteristics as shown in the diagram below

These have been further researched by marketers who have looked at which emotions are triggered in the sales process. They have devised the following diagram based on their findings which we will find far more useful.

You will see that it does contain some of the original emotions but has the addition of things like greed and desire. Surprisingly maybe, lazy has also been added while not strictly an emotion I’m sure it is something we can all relate to.

So now we know what emotions we can elicit in our readers we need to use some power words to do that.

Power words can be used anywhere. The most obvious place is in the subject line of your email marketing but also on your website in page titles or others heading and even in the page meta description. Here is a list of all the areas we think that can benefit from a few power words

• Email Subject Lines
• Page / post titles
• Sub-Headings
• Product Names
• Website Popups
• Landing Pages
• Calls to Action

Power words in practice

Now we understand the importance of power words I am going to give you a few examples of how they can be used.

Headlines

Let’s start with this simple headline for a blog or webpage that offers free tips to increase web traffic.

Our headline is;

20 ways to gain more visitors to your website using power words.

Now let’s add a couple of words that can tap into the emotion of Greed 

20 ways to skyrocket your website traffic for free with power words

The same headline with words added that relate to the emotions of Trust and the act of being Lazy

20 surefire ways to use power words to boost your web traffic effortlessly

Now with Desire, Pride and Greed power words

Exposed –  20 sensational ways power words can explode your web traffic

Email Subject Lines

If I now use email marketing to drive visitors to this webpage I could also include some of our special words the email subject lines.

Firstly let’s use words that trigger Fear, Greed, Trust and Pride.

Don’t gamble with your page rank –start using our 20 powerful power word techniques to boost your web visitors today.

Remember power words can also be short phrases so let’s add “invitation only” and “costing you a penny”. These are phrases that fall under the heading of Exclusivity and Greed

Invitation only – let me show you 20 ways power words can increase your web visitors without it costing you a penny

We could go on and on but I hope you can see now how we can use a certain word to tap into human emotions. Of course, some of our examples are a bit OTT but they are here just to give you an idea.

The next thing you need to do is to start collecting those words.

To make life easier for you I have collected 845 of them and put them together in an Ebook which I have catchily titled 845 Power Words.

You can get your free copy by hitting the link below.