It's all you're hearing. Recession. Emergency interest rate cuts. Plunging foreign stock markets.  Will consumer reluctance to spend effect your quarterly results? If your business has affiliations with the housing, building or retail industries, you probably already feel the burn.

Check out my tips for strengthening your business' sales capabilities.  It's only January. If you identify what needs improving now, you can attack it and fix in all in the first quarter.   Imagine, a sales chart that doesn't point down this summer!  Click the Panic Button above for all the tips and details.

Look at the key ingredients that make Senator Barack Obama's speeches so spell-binding and try to apply those features to your ad or web site sales copy:

1. From the Heart. 

Read your copy with a straight, monotone narrative voice. Now repeat the reading with a little more emotion-packed voice.  As you get more strident, what words do you accent? When you're screaming it, do you need to add some words? Imagine there are four exclamation points at the end!!!!  What else would you say if you were passionately screaming out your sales benefits.  Find three new ways to improve your copy, even if it's as simple as one word underscored or set in all caps or published in flaming red.  

Or change the pace.  Or add silence.  .....
Persuaders love passion!  Oh yea

2. Share the Pain.

Think about your prospects and why they buy. What fears or pain do they avoid when they buy your product or service? Don't you and your prospect SHARE that fear or pain? Let them know that you and the prospect, together, will avoid that problem.  You're together with your prospects because people like to buy from people like themselves.  So, let them know that you share their concerns and say it with passion.  "I dont' want you putting out an email that doesn't work and makes your readers cringe with embarrassment!  It's horrible to lose business!"

3. Find a Crescendo. 

Obama warms up and gets hotter and hotter and more articulate and more powerful as he goes along.  He "peaks" with a few lines that make everyone weep, that witness the moment, that make history, and then he cools down.  Your copy can do the same thing.  See if you can find any pattern in your copy's pace or rhythm.  Give it an energizing start, but be sure it gets into full gear  and "peaks" with power, passion and persuasion.  Use the close with an action to take (or invitation to buy) to summarize and reconnect and calmly close the deal!