Ha, a craven headline if ever there was one.

If you came here looking for short cuts you won't find them here. This is about to get serious.

Vanessa recently wrote a great post on the Psychology of Copy writing, and if you haven't read it, you should before reading this one.

Vanessa points out that great copy is more about appealing to our emotions rather than our intellect.

Many of you may have heard it put this way: "Sell the sizzle, not the sausage," or sell benefits not features.

For example: 99.99% pure gold is a feature.

"The highest quality gold jewellery/investment to be found, will only appreciate in value in years to come etc, etc" is a benefit, even if it is only a perceived one rather than an actual one.

In other words we must craft our copy and sales messages in terms that appeal to our customers particular emotional needs and desires.

I'm going to expand on Vannessa post, because, copy writing can get a whole lot more complicated than just emotional/intellectual, left brain/right brain, creative/systematic or A/B type personalities.

The A/B split is a start, but even Myers Briggs who gave us the A/B type personality definition have long since moved on from that simplistic classification.

Myers Briggs now have a 16 personality type indicator, and if you head on over to their site there's a fun test you can take to figure out which type you are.

Still others, like Brian Tracy, and Accelerated Learning have given us another 16 personality types that are different again from Myers Briggs.

And, depending on how spiritually enlightened or well read you are, the great Joseph Campbell gave us a whole range of human archetypes that are common throughout all humanity and history in "The Hero With a Thousand Faces."

The point being there are more than just two types of personality coming to your online business. If you only write for one or two of them, you'll probably miss out on doing business with 80% of the rest.

One of the mistakes many business owners and budding new writers make, is in thinking that everyone thinks like them, and so they write accordingly.

At best, this will only appeal to about 20-25% of your potential customers.

You have to cater for all personality types.

OK, I know right about now some of you are thinking this whole copy writing caper just got 16 times more difficult. Well yes, that's why you pay good copywriters big dollars. It's not something you can master in a few months.

Knowing how to write for the different types of customers increases the selling power of your site exponentially . So even if it takes time, it is very worthwhile undertaking.

In the marketing and ecommerce world, perhaps the best known practitioners of this type of writing, research and application are Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg from Future Now in New York.

In various books, blog posts, newsletters and whitepapers they illustrate how to identify the types of "personas" relevant to your business, how to develop cohesive copy that actually appeals to all of them, and when and where to place the copy and visual cues that they each need in order to make a decision to do business with you.

Then there's the recent best sellers by Robert Greene on the different character types for seduction and gaining power.

For those of you who are interested in the psychology of what makes us do the crazy things we do, what motivates us, this is all engrossing stuff. It's the stuff many of us revel in.

For some of you I realise it may be a bit of a daunting eye-opener into what it really takes to make your marketing copy truly perform for you.

Great results always take hard work and passion.

PS. For those of you who are really interested, all of the books mentioned above are available form any good bookshop in any major city. However, as they are perennial best sellers they may not always be in stock.