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Michael Green
"Hey" "Guru Name Here"
You suddenly lose all your money, along with your name and reputation, and only have your marketing know-how left.
You have bills piled high and people harassing you for money over the phone.
Plus, you have a guaranteed roof over your head, a phone line, and an internet connection for only one month.
You no longer have your big guru name or JV partners. Other than your vast marketing experience, you're an unknown newbie.
What would you do, from day 1 to day 30, to save yourself?
Joe Kumar
Answer – By Michael Green
Good copywriting is as valuable as gold bullion!
If you are serious about making sales then your copy must be top notch and it will need to take your reader through the following phases:
An opening that creates interest and bridges the credibility gap
A middle section that builds on that interest
An end section that creates desire and the “must have” attitude.
Now let’s take each of these in turn.
An opening that creates interest and bridges the credibility gap
There’s probably nothing more crucial than the wording you use right at the top of your page. This text is so critical that I usually experiment with a dozen or so headings until I stop fiddling and let the site sell.
Scientific Split-Testing
I always carry out some scientific split-testing on my sales websites and the heading is one of the elements that I test to death. Here’s the actual tool I use for my split-testing http://profitinfo.com/catalog/v4/
You’ll find much more about split-testing in my http://www.CreateAndSELLproductsONLINE.com toolkit.
Right underneath my main heading or even as part of the heading itself, I generally use a third-party testimonial.
Testimonials right up top
Testimonials are a great way of creating credibility that would otherwise be missing. A good testimonial will be believed far more than even your best crafted own words. Think about it. If someone else is saying something good about your product, then it must be good. And of course the strength of that testimonial will be multiplied even further if the person providing the testimonial is themselves known and trusted.
So I like to place my testimonials right up front. In fact I usually like to combine a one line testimonial quote about my product right in the main heading. Failing that I will always place a great testimonial immediately under the main heading.
A later chapter tells you all about how to gather knock-out testimonials once your product is up and running, but initially you will simply complete your product and ask friends and colleagues to review it in return for an emailed testimonial.
In fact if you are in anyway struggling to find reviewers, then simply turn to your market-research group who already downloaded your free mini-series and ask them to review the product for you. You should find plenty of takers.
Your website is a long sales letter
Other than your heading, your sales webpage will largely consist of one long letter, this will actually be signed at the end by you and will even contain a P.S. (PostScript) just like any other marketing letter you might write.
Time and date it right now
When you receive a letter through the post, it’s hard not to glance at the date on the top or sometimes even the postmark on the envelope.
The same effect is apparent with a website. People instantly want to know: “Is this current information that I’m reading or has it been sitting on the web for years?”
Don’t leave them wondering.
You can clear up this point instantly by including today’s date at the start of your letter. Now you might think that because you are in one time zone and your potential customer lives elsewhere that the date won’t be correct for them.
No problem – just use the bonus script that you’ll receive with this toolkit and you can display the accurate date wherever your customer is in the world. It reads it right off their computer and displays it at the top of your sales letter.
Dear salutation
Now you need to jump right into the letter itself and you must address it to someone.
Ideally you’ll use the salutation to narrow down the focus. So, for example, if I were creating my fictional product called: “Learn How To Fly Today”, then I would write something like:
Dear Future Aviator
Or
Dear Fellow Aviator
Or
Dear Future Pilot
You get the idea. My point is that everyone who arrives at your website will have one primary question in mind. Does this website apply to me and the problem that I’m trying to solve?
Providing them with the answer is your challenge, but clearly if someone has no interest in learning to fly, you don’t need them to read any further.
Open with a passion inducing statement or a question
The first line of your actual letter is one of the most important items on your page (I split-test this too of course).
It must create the interest and there are a few well worn techniques to achieve just this.
My favorite method (I’ve ended up using for many of my toolkit sales letters) is the technique where you open the letter by asking a question.
A middle section that builds on that interest
Now comes the meat of your sales letter. This middle section is designed to pick up on the interest you’ve just created with your killer opening.
The middle section must paint a picture of how life could be if only your prospect owned a copy of your product. You must present an image of a new world, where your product answers the pressing problems that exist today.
The key here is to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect and imagine that you just surfed the internet looking for a solution to their problem and up popped your site (not by co-incidence but because you’ve done a lot of work and probably paid for the search engines to get it there in front of them – more on this in a later chapter of http://www.CreateAndSELLproductsONLINE.com course).
Put yourself in your prospective customers shoes
So let’s return to my fictional product: “How to Learn to Fly” and provide some examples of the message I would want to be getting across during this stage.
I’ve put myself in the shoes of someone searching for answers to their search query and I figure that they have three main considerations:
Is it going to take me long to learn?
Will it cost me an arm and a leg?
Will it be safe (and is it really for me anyway)?
Again this is fictional and you may come up with a whole host of other pressing problems that need answering.
Create the desire and present a vision!
The key point about this middle section is that you must build desire by presenting a vision of how life could be, if only the reader owned their own copy of your product.
If I was writing the middle section for the Learning to Fly product I would focus on that dream:
“Imagine the freedom of being able to climb high above the rush hour traffic and look down on the crowded freeways, secure in the knowledge that you’ll make your meeting on time and in a relaxed frame of mind.
“…And you’ll be able to take your whole family away for that short, relaxing, break without those many hours of torturous driving with screaming kids in the back.”
You get the idea.
Create the desire, present a vision!
Use bullet points to rack up benefits
You’ve probably already noticed that virtually every sales based website uses bullet points.
That’s because bullets provide the most excellent way of presenting your message. People are lazy, they want to cut to the chase and your bullet points allow them to do just that.
Here’s where you get the chance to present the *killer benefits* of your product in little bite size chunks. Choose your words carefully, because this is probably the difference between a sale or not.
Bullets build interest, they generate enthusiasm, the attempt to provide specific benefits to the reader and so on…
Make the price seem cheap
Okay, you’re providing a great deal with your product and now you need to let people know what it will cost.
You’ve put a lot of work into producing the content and you’re building a compelling sales letter, so how best to present the sales price?
The answer is to try to make the purchase a “no brainer”.
This means building a convincing case why for only $50.00 (more about working out precisely what your price should be later), this has got to be the best deal since sliced bread.
The best approach is to contrast your price with the many exciting benefits that they’ve just been reading about.
This technique works very well as it stands to reason that if your product does what it says it does, the purchase will work out well for your customer.
The real crux of the argument is the final sentence.
This is important because people fundamentally prefer to delay a decision than make it on the spot. Ask any salesman about how much training they’ve had on “closing”? It’s vital to remove the opportunity for your prospective client to procrastinate, so set a timescale (more on this under below).
Here’s another justification of price that works very well. It’s part of my How To Find Happiness Toolkit, written by Jennifer Summers and published by me.
In this example Jennifer describes how much she might be paid to consult or lecture on the subject of the toolkit. Since professional fees are high, it is then an easy step to present any price of less than say $100 or so.
Incidentally, there’s a useful technique, which I attribute to another great online marketer, Yanik Silver (see http://www.instantinternetprofits.com/). You’ve just justified the price so brilliantly that some might start to wonder just why it is such incredibly good value. I provide the answer in everything that I sell and you can catch the drift in that final paragraph.
No as if that low price wasn’t enough…
Okay, chances are your customer is hooked, but why stop there?
You can go further in ensuring that you win the sale by pouring on some bonuses.
Now bonuses help to turn desire into greed. But it’s a good kind of greed that will help the prospective customer cross the line and buy.
An end section that creates desire and the “must have” attitude
Bring on the bonuses
Your prospect is *hot* and they like what they’ve been reading. They’re already primed on the price and now it’s your job to close that sale.
Here’s where bonuses can make all the difference. They turn a rational possibility of a purchase taking place into a “must have it right now” attitude.
Here’s another real life example, taken from my “How To Create And Make A Speech or Presentation” Toolkit. Remember the reader is already keen on the product and knows the price.
In this particular case, there are a further two bonuses and you can take a look at how the whole thing works here http://www.howtopresent.com
So the purchaser will also get an hour long audio on the subject of making a presentation, special reports, plus much else. Wow! What a deal.
Notice at the top of that screen they must act by a specific time to receive everything listed. I might change the price or withdraw some elements after that time!
Re-assure just prior to purchase
Not everyone is happy about purchasing on the internet. Let’s face it they don’t know you and you don’t know them. So you need to build some confidence.
Hopefully you’ve already achieved that with everything you’ve written in your sales letter. Occasionally (though surprisingly infrequently in my experience) someone may have even contacted you by email or phone to check a detail about their potential purchase. The speed in which you reply will also tend to contribute towards confidence building.
But the thing that everyone is really looking for on the internet is a cast iron guarantee and that’s precisely what you need to offer next.
Your guarantee must be better than great!
I make all my guarantees absolutely crystal clear, in fact I place them right up front and make a sales feature of them. This is all about creating the confidence for someone to buy online.
Now naturally I absolutely hate being asked for refunds and my refund percent is very small indeed (about 1.5% and some of that will be because someone bought a product and needs to swap for something else – I have two products that appeal to a similar market of newsletter producers).
But no matter how much I dislike refunds, I’m bound to honor them and I do.
Providing a guarantee has become accepted practice for internet based eProducts and I think that this is a good thing. In fact I make a play of it on my websites.
I’ve used the approach of providing a simple black and white approach. I ask that people give the product a proper try before asking for a refund and when people do follow the advice, they simply don’t come back and ask for a refund because it works.
Generating quality sales copy is vital
Don’t stint on the sales copy. It’s the most important element of your website. In fact you could argue it is more important than your content, because no one will ever even discover your content without a great sales letter.
So you must choose your words carefully and spend some time working on perfecting your approach.
You might conclude that you need to pay an experienced copywriter and if you are not comfortable with generating the sales letter yourself then this is a possible solution. If you do go down this route, make sure you’ve seen some of their work and importantly some of their web based copy.
Writing copy for the web is slightly different to print based sales copy. Mainly because the formatting on screen can make long paragraphs very difficult to read.
Another very viable alternative is to use a new piece of software by marketing expert Armand Morin. He’s generated software that quite literally produces your sales letter for you. That sounds crazy, but it takes your information and combines it with the very best sales techniques to create a potent mix – your winning sales letter.
Click here http://www.saleslettergenerator.com/ and check out his product. You can even listen to what other online marketers have to say about his product.
Judging by his other products, Armand is also the guy behind the software I use to generate all my Toolkit box covers (see http://www.ecovergenerator.com/), this sales letter generator software will be a big hit in the marketplace.
If you still don’t feel confident or you just want to take yourself above the crowd when it comes to writing a killer sales letter (and that’s quite a string to have in your bow, because great copy means great sales), then be sure to get hold of Yanik Silver’s Web Copy Secrets at http://www.webcopysecrets.com/ This is quite simply the best of this type of resource that I’ve come across and as they say:
“The right words have the almost magical power to make your visitors whip out their credit cards and...BUY!”
So it is the “Words” that REALLY sell.
To your online success!
Michael Green
This article is supplied for information purposes only and, as experienced in this subject matter as the contributors are, the material herein does not constitute professional business advice.
This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher and the contributors are not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional advice. If legal advice or other professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
The reader is advised to consult with an appropriately qualified business professional before making any business decision. The contributors, Joe Kumar and JoeKumar.com do not accept any responsibility for any liabilities resulting from the business decisions made by readers of this article.
copyright © Joe Kumar and JoeKumar.com
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