Posted: 24 May 2010 09:11 AM PDT

I’m sure you’ve heard the old adage, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

This is especially true, when it comes to copywriting techniques. The same timeless copywriting techniques that were so successful fifty years ago, are just as effective today. In fact, some of the greatest ads in the history of advertising were written during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.

This exciting time period was known as The Golden Age of Advertising.

In that regard, I’ve decided to compile a list of time-tested copywriting techniques to help improve your sales conversions. Please don’t look for anything new here. Like I said earlier, these time-tested techniques are just as effective today as they were fifty years ago.

However, with the advent of the Internet, sometimes we need to be reminded of that fact.

1. Always Use a Compelling Headline

Readers will decide whether or not to read your ad, based solely on how compelling your headline is. And if your headline doesn’t capture the readers imagination, your ad is pretty much destined to fail. That’s how critically important it is to get the readers attention.

In essence, your headline needs to act like a big red stop sign. Your headline has to make readers slam on their eyeball brakes. This is especially true for online copy, because Internet users are notorious scanners.

If you would like to learn how to write effective headlines, I highly recommend you check out Brian Clark’s outstanding copywriting blog, CopyBlogger.

2. Get Right to the Point

After your headline gets the readers attention, next, you want to get them interested in your product or service. You do that by immediately delivering what your headline promises.

In other words, respect the readers time and get right to the point. That way, the reader can decide immediately if she wants to continue reading the rest of your copy.

Whatever you do, don’t string your readers along unnecessarily with a bunch of fluff designed to fill out your ad. For instance, did you notice how got quickly I got right to the point in this article?

3. Long Copy vs. Short Copy

There’s been a debate going on in Internet Marketing circles for several years about long copy vs. short copy. I’m going to end that debate right now.

Research has shown that long copy usually outperforms short copy – provided the copy is well-written and interesting. Every single day, people read long newspaper and magazine articles, as well as novels. They will read your long copy IF it is interesting.

That being said, I don’t believe you should intentionally set out to write long copy. Only make your copy as long as it needs to be to effectively sell your product or service. No longer.

4. Use Subheads and Bullet Points

Subheads and bullet points are important, because they serve two purposes: 1. They break up your copy, so that it’s easier to read. 2. They act like stop signs.

Remember what I said earlier? Internet users are notorious scanners. They’ll scan your copy first, before deciding whether or not to actually read it. That’s why compelling subheads and bullet points are so important.

5. Write the Way You Talk

Writing the way you talk is known as “conversational copy.” What’s conversational copy? Conversational copy simply means talking to the reader in a conversational manner – like you’re talking to your best friend.

6. Keep it Simple

Don’t try to be cute or clever with your writing. The purpose of copywriting is to sell products – not impress readers with your brilliance. keep your writing simple, instead of composing riddles or using sophisticated jargon.

The goal of your copy should be to entice readers to buy what you’re selling – period. Leave the riddles to The Riddler.

7. It’s Not About You

You may be a very nice person – the salt of the earth, in fact. That being said, readers don’t care about “YOU.” The only thing they care about is what can you do to help them solve their problem?

“What’s in it for ME?” That’s all your readers really care about. Remember, it’s not about you. It’s about your readers.

8. Always Sell Benefits

When you write copy, don’t make the mistake of focusing on features instead of benefits. There’s a huge difference. Features are the sizzle. Benefits are the steak. Features are distinctive characteristics that distinguishes your product or service from similar items.

Benefits, on the other hand describe how your product or service will help the customer solve her problem. In other words, what the customer will gain by using your product or service.

For example, let’s suppose your company sells light bulbs. A couple of features of your light bulbs may be the fact they burn cooler than normal bulbs and are guaranteed to last 10 years.

However, the benefits customers will derive from purchasing your light bulbs is the amount of money they will save on their electric bill, as well as the amount of money they will save not having to buy new bulbs every few months.

9. Be Specific

To make your copywriting as compelling as possible, you should always be specific. For example, instead of saying “lose weight” say, “lose 10 pounds in 10 days!” That’s a much more compelling statement. Be specific.

10. Use Testimonials

Using testimonials from current customers is an extremely powerful way to reassure prospects. But you have to do it correctly. Always use your customers full name and where they live. For example, David Jackson, Albany, NY, as opposed to initials only. When you read a testimonial written by DJ, New York, chances are it’s a bogus testimonial. NEVER use bogus testimonials, or you will find yourself in trouble with the FTC.

11. Offer a FREE Bonus

Offering a free bonus is one of the most effective copywriting techniques you can use. Not only does it give prospective customers extra incentive to purchase your product or service, free bonuses have been proven to dramatically increase sales conversions. The best type of free bonus is something unique – something that has real value – something that you can afford to give away cost-effectively.

12. Use a P.S.

Readership studies show that after the headline, readers scan down to the end of the sales letter to read the P.S. (post- script). This means that the P.S is the second-most read part of a sales letter. Use this knowledge wisely. Make your post-script as potent as possible. Use it to summarize your offer, and as a final “call to action” to make prospects BUY NOW!

Here’s an example of an effective post-script:

P.S. Order NOW, and receive a FREE Blackberry. But only if you Order NOW!

One last thing. You’ve probably seen sales letters that use multiple post-scripts. I strongly disagree with this practice. In my opinion, using multiple post-scripts dilutes the effectiveness of your P.S.

13. Use Bold Type and Highlighting Sparingly

The overuse of bold, italics and highlighting in copywriting is rampant. Seriously. I’ve seen ads and sales letters that were so overly-highlighted, they looked like a big mustard sandwich with ants…hideous!

Unfortunately, I see this all too often with sales copy, as well as other types of copy. You should use bold type and highlight sparingly, and only to emphasize certain words, sentences or paragraphs.

If you overdo it with these tools, you dramatically dilute their effectiveness. Then it becomes impossible to effectively “highlight” (no pun intended) the points you were trying to emphasize.

Remember, “when you emphasize everything, you emphasize nothing!”

14. Test Your Copy

Testing is a critical element of successful marketing. You should always test your copy, to make sure that you are obtaining optimum results.

Experiment with different headlines in your ads and sales letters. Tweak your copy to increase conversion rates. You’d be surprised what a difference changing a few words here and there can make.

Did you know changing a single word in a headline has been known increase response by as much as 1700%? It’s true. That’s why testing your copy is so important.

The easiest way to test your copy is with multi-variate testing software, such as Google’s Website Optimizer.

By the way, when tweaking your copy, don’t make wholesale changes all at once. Tweak a little bit at a time. For example, test different headlines and subheads first, before delving into the body of your ad or sales letter.

15. Give a Strong Guarantee

One of the best things you can do to reassure prospective customers and give them peace of mind is to offer a strong guarantee. Unfortunately, some marketers are afraid to guarantee their products for fear of being hit with a mountain of refund requests. Their fear is unfounded. Here’s the truth:

If you provide good value for the dollar, statistics show that less than 2% of your customers will ask for a refund. In fact, even if you offer lousy value, most people just won’t go through the hassles of requesting a refund. That’s a fact.

Here’s something else to consider. Offering s strong guarantee has been known to increase sales dramatically. So, how long should your guarantee be? At least 30 days. But if you really believe in your product, the longer, the better. About the author

David Jackson is a marketing consultant, and the owner of Free-Marketing-Tips-Blog.com – Powerful, free marketing tips to help grow your business. http://free-marketing-tips-blog.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

15 Proven Copywriting Techniques to Help Improve Your Sales Conversions

Posted: 18 Apr 2010 10:00 PM PDT

The definition of a landing page is simply “the first page that visitors hit on your site,” so it is not strictly a certain page but any page that a user “lands” on. All websites have landing pages, whether they like it or not,

even if it was not specifically designed as such.

Landing pages can have a substantial impact on your e-commerce website. A poorly-developed one can hasten its breakdown just as an effective landing page can drive traffic to your site, respond to calls to action and make

your business website a success.

One vital measure of the effectiveness of your website is the “bounce rate,” or the percentage of visitors who immediately leave your site without making any other click. The bounce rate is inversely proportional to the

effectiveness of the landing page. Basically, this means that a high bounce rate indicates that your landing page isn’t compelling enough for the visitor to pursue his interest or take some other action.

Normally, the home page is the primary landing page of most typical websites. But more and more, site owners are designing landing pages outside of the home page, and for good reason.

Most users prefer to skip information which is irrelevant to their needs. They want to get directly to their search, hence the need for a landing page that delivers just that. They can avoid the delays caused by having to click through pages and pages of information when they already have something in mind.

Landing pages serve their purpose when the site owner knows the kind of visitor they are targeting. This is determined by knowing what the visitor clicked on to arrive at your site. A visitor who clicks on an ad for your product would not want to go through other pages to get the information about the product. Webinars, other event registrations and special offers make use of this same principle.

Not all visitors are looking for the same information. One may click on your link after reading an article you submitted to a consumer review site while another may arrive at your site after viewing your infomercial ad.

For each specific visitor, you can design a landing page that will cater to his needs and contain the information he is looking for. For example, infomercial viewers can be directed to www.yoursite.com/infomercial, while visitors who clicked on your banner ads for this month’s special will be directed to www.yoursite.com/specials.

These landing pages should be evaluated for their effectiveness. The bounce rate is a key measurement for determining the effectiveness of landing pages.

Another measure for landing pages is the success of a “next action.” It might be purchasing the product, requesting more information, signing up for a free trial, etc.

Determine your conversion rate by dividing the number of action takers into the number of visitors. A typical conversion rate is 3 to 5 percent for lead generation pages and 1 to 2 percent for e-commerce sites. If your site is successful, you should be getting twice those numbers.

A concept that is intrinsic in creating effective landing pages is “alignment.” This is the connection between your source (where the visitor came from) and your landing page. The more connected they are, the higher the success of conversion.

A good example is a banner ad for a specific product from a beauty products company. Clicking on the banner ad and being directed to a landing page showing the exact same product yields a higher conversion rate. If the alignment is not present, on the other hand, there will be a significant reduction in conversion rates.

In general, a landing page must stir these positive emotions in a visitor for it to be effective:

Credibility

Your page must be able to capture the visitor’s trust by presenting a credible appearance. Remove anything that can cause a negative effect in the minds of your visitors, such as a lack of contact information, grammatical errors and typos, buzzwords, “marketese” and jargon, fuzzy or blocky graphics and too much use of serif fonts, like Times New Roman.

Recognition

Your page must provide your visitor a “This is what I’m looking for!” moment upon landing.

Persuasiveness

Your page must be able to convince visitors that your product or service can help them achieve their goal. Keep in mind what attracted the visitor to your product in the first place so you will understand what he is looking for.

Action

You must highlight an action for the visitor to take while he is on your landing page.

Techniques to Use with Landing Pages

Here are some major principles to guide you in the process of developing an effective landing page:

Make the Visitor Feel an Instant Affinity With Your Page.

The top half of the first screen should be effective in making the visitor feel that he has come to the right place. The use of the right taglines, images and a position statement (usually about 12 to 15 words) can help to establish your declaration and inform your visitor what the site is about.

Use Specific Headlines and Sub-headings.

Throughout your page, include relevant headings and sub-headings so that as the visitor skim reads the page they can see what a particular paragraph or section is all about. This helps him decide whether he will read the text or which section he is interested in. The longer the page, the more you should be using sub-headings. The headline should be aligned as closely as possible with the banner ad or whatever the visitor clicked on to arrive on your landing page.

Focus on a Primary Goal.

A landing page can achieve only one primary goal. Examples of these goals are a lead capture mechanism, such as a free demo or product trial, or to lure the visitor to go further and view your main site. The best results come about when you focus on your goal. However, a secondary goal is possible in a landing page. For example, if your primary goal is to make the visitor purchase your product, your secondary goal would be to entice them to sign up for newsletters or emails to receive special offers.

Use Multiple Calls to Action.

Using multiple calls to the same action supports the one primary goal principle. This holds true on a long landing page. A page that doesn’t go below the fold may need only one call to action. Overall, one call to action above the fold and another at the bottom of the page are good.

Pay Attention to Your Layout and Graphic Design.

To make them easy-to-read, keep text columns narrow – about 80 characters or so wide – and left-aligned, not centered.

Place an image of the product (commonly called the “hero shot”) and make sure the quality and clarity are good.

Images are attention-getting, so put your key text, such as your offer, below the product image or other appealing graphics.

If your offer requires the visitor to fill out a form, it will be more effective if placed on the landing page rather than needing a click-through to another page.

Layouts and graphic designs depend on the products and their market and can be very diverse. In spite of the variety, however, they can all use the same design principles to help them be effective in achieving their goal.

Driving traffic to your site will require an investment on your part, so it is only sensible to maximize the impact of that traffic for a quicker ROI. Increasing website conversions is also an important consideration.

Developing effective landing pages for your business website only requires the simple implementation of changes, yet their impact is significant to the success of your business and the user experience of your website.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Landing Pages: What You Need to Explain to your Website Design Company

Posted: 08 May 2010 02:32 PM PDT

One interesting venue of email marketing already in existence, yet may be unknown to many, comes from an unexpected direction: photography. High-quality photography has always been associated with full-scale ad campaigns, found traditionally in billboards, posters, newspapers, and glossy magazines. But with the rise of the Internet as a powerful medium of marketing, even photography sites like Flickr have become a playground for email marketing campaigns.

Marketing with Photos at Flickr

Flickr is one of the most popular photo hosting sites in the Internet. While it is often synonymous with photography professionals and hobbyists, it is also a teeming community of marketers and potential customers. The demographics of Flickr covers a vast area not merely confined to people with photography interests. It is also a microcosm of the entire Internet itself, where people from all walks of life, and with diverse interests, upload captured snapshots of events, family affairs, and company products and services.

A picture speaks a thousand words, and can sell a million products. Flickr users can be potential customers reachable through email marketing with nice Flickr photos as a valued-added. The emphasis is on good quality photos, without which any email marketing campaign isn’t worth the effort. Why? As mentioned, there are many family photos and point-and-shoot images in the Flickr archives. It takes outstanding imagery to rise above the run-of-the-mill and be noticed by the entire community.

Tips to Market at Flickr

Ready to shine on Flickr? Here are some tips on how to go about it:

1. Build up a portfolio of quality photos. Most Flickr users have an eye and taste for quality. Many of them will certainly ignore email marketing efforts based on poor photos. Hire a photographer, buy the best camera, or capture images powered by enchanting concepts. By whatever means possible, half of the email marketing challenge is solved when the photos are there.
2. Tag for searchability. Flickr, like almost all online community sites, rely heavily on search tags to bring results to users. The most appropriate keywords should be used as descriptive tags to bring in the target audience. Further to this, keyword analysis should be conducted, to appropriately modify tags to suit the search patterns of users.
3. Organize photos properly into collections, for ease of access by users, who can click on the photo galleries based on themed groupings descriptive of actual content.
4. Grab attention with attractive thumbnails. From the photo collection, the best images should be selected as thumbnails, those tiny visual teasers that lure users to peruse the rest of the collection.
5. Regular photo updates. As in blogs and websites, frequently refreshing content builds reputation for being a reliable and consistent source of fresh images, with the possibility of being visited more often or linked to by other blogs and websites.
6. Treat Flickr as a social media playground. That means joining relevant groups and sharing tips, news and photos with the community. This builds relationships and reputation, and widens email marketing coverage further.

Summing up how to make email marketing work in Flickr, it takes nice quality photos, the will to keep going by regularly updating fresh content, and socializing with the Flickr community, to really reap the rewards of the email marketing campaign.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Make Your Business Shine on Flickr

Posted: 18 May 2010 04:40 PM PDT

Placing website elements

If you want your visitors to feel right at home at your site, there are a few things that you shouldkeep in mind when creating or updating your site. Unless you are an artist (and want your site to bean usual piece of art), you probably want it to make it as easy as possible for the visitors of your site.But how do you do that?

Approach #1: The scientific way

There have been several studies (Shaikh & Lenz, 2006; eResult 2003-2009) about this. They asked anumber of people where they expect several elements of the website, like login link or searchfunction. The answers to these question have changed over time because the way the websitesusually look also changed. Some things are quite logic (like putting less important links to thebottom), but others are more like the “culture of the web”, like putting the navigation to the left.Perhaps it will be on the right in a few years?

To put it in a nutshell, here’s a summary of where the users expect website elements to be:

The same data as a sample website:

The results cannot be surprising since they’re mostly the sum of all the websites that we visit everyday. Not all websites look like this, there are some exception, even popular ones. For examplesWikipedia placed the search function on the left instead of the upper right corner. Well, if you’reWikipedia, you can probably get away with this.

Approach #2: Do it yourself

If you don’t believe this or want to know about other website elements, there’s a simple way. Use anempty piece of paper (or a heavily blurred image of your website) and ask yourself and others whereyou would expect these elements. That’s actually quite simple and more or less the same how thestudies worked.

Naming website elements

Now you know where to put the elements. But how do you name them? Do you log in or sign in? Doyou have a shop or a store? Some of the typical website functions are not always named the same. Itested 30 popular sites of different sectors and counted the wordings that they used. Here are themost popular versions:

• § Sign in: 54% (Others: log in: 42%)
• § Sign up: 55% (Others: Create an account: 23%; Register: 14%)
• § Store: 50% (Others: Shop: 20%)
• § Privacy Policy: 52% (Others: Privacy: 34%)

Naming your products

If you want to sell something to your customers, you should make it easy for them to understand toproducts and product lines. This may seem obvious to you, but it’s not always obvious for others.Here’s a example. When shopping for my new computer, I visited Dell. Here’s what I saw:

Did I want a Studio, an XPS or an Inspiron? I didn’t have the faintest idea and bought the computersomewhere else. Check your website to see if you make the same mistake. I did and after visiting DellI changed the product menu of my website (Link: http://www.easy2sync.com/) to include speakingheadlines with a short explanation.

Summary

Making it easier for your website visitors increases the chance that they visit you more often and / ormake a purchase. Often it’s enough to make a few simple changes to make a difference, like move anelement from the left to right or change a few words.A final word of advice: Let a friend visit your website while you sit next to him. Don’t help him, justwatch if and how he reads/downloads/purchases something and where he has problems. This can bea real eye-opener…

–
About the author:
Thomas Holz is the owner of ITSTH and author of the Outlook duplicate removal software (Link:
http://www.easy2sync.com/en/produkte/1-Click-Duplicate-Delete-Outlook.php) 1-Click Duplicate
Delete for Outlook.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Modern Website Structures