Transform your Home Page to Pull Sales with Passion CopywritingJudy Cullins c 2003 All Rights Reserved.
If you are like many professionals, you know your subject, you are an expert in your field. You are even passionate about it! What you may not know is how to tell people about your services and products to get [...]
Written on February 28th, 2009
Read more articles on Copywriting.
Transform your Home Page to Pull Sales with Passion Copywriting
Judy Cullins c 2003 All Rights Reserved.
If you are like many professionals, you know your subject, you are an expert in your field. You are even passionate about it! What you may not know is how to tell people about your services and products to get them to buy.
Your home page needs passion. You have only 10 seconds or so to impress your visitor. Make sure you don’t have long paragraphs of bio or description of your mission, service, or book. Visitors, who really are potential clients or customers, want to know what’s in it for them. Make every word count.
Place the most important messages in the top half of your Web home page.
“How to Transform your Home Page to Pull Sales With Passion Copywriting”
1. Prepare a list of benefits for each product or service. Some of the top benefits are making money, saving money, creating loving relationships, saving time, disappointment–anything that solves the person’s particular problem. Be sure to survey your friends and associates, ask them to vote on which phrases compel them to buy. Ask them to add words or phrases that would convince them. Benefits sell.
2. Prepare a list of features. These describe your products and services. They are the parts of your book such as charts, tips and how-to’s. These are the ways you can help your clients such as phone coaching or teleclasses.
Choose the best five benefits and features. Combine them. For example: “Seven Ways/Steps to Quadruple your Online Sales Within Four Months.” The ways or steps are the feature, the specific benefit is “quadruple sales within four months.”
2.. Include a benefit-driven headline for each product or service.
Remember, your visitors are thinking, “So, what? Why should I buy this?” They are easily distracted, so you need to grab them by the collar with your headline. Your dazzling headline can include a specific benefit, can ask a question, or make an outrageous claim you can prove. Remember to speak to your audience’s problem or challenge and give them a reason to buy.
Sample headlines: “Imagine Yourself a Published Author in Just One Month!” or “Enjoy Leap Out of Bed Energy” or “Make Decisions with Confidence and Ease.”
If you have a product you want to sell, place that headline at the very top–even above your opening question or statement.
You can even use a testimonial as your headline. The whole phrase can be the link to your product.
Include another headline for your service. If it’s coaching or consulting try something like this, “Let the Book Coach Make Your Book Dream a Reality,” or “Pull Ongoing, Lifetime Profits by Marketing Your Products with Online Promotion.”
If you want to boost subscribers to your ezine, first give it a catchy name. Then put a short testimonial from an expert in the field near the place to subscribe. Another proven technique is to include an offer of a free report with each subscription. Potential customers come to your site for free information, not to buy your product. Be patient with this process because after your visitors know and trust you, they are be likely to buy.
Be sure to add a notice: “Please bookmark this site, we upload new material every two weeks.” Or, “If you like this Web site, send this page to a friend or associate.” Of course, have your Web master include the correct links.
3. Include a short piece about yourself–maybe three or four lines. Web visitors don’t care about you. They want to know what you can do for them.
4. Include 3-5 questions you think your potential buyer has and that you have the answers for. Offer a link to your service page.
Wondering what these benefit statements (links) connect to? Your award-winning, “what’s in it for me” sales letter of course, but that’s another article.
Think passion and benefits when you revise your Web home page. Make sure it’s fast loading and easy to read. Get feedback from others to make sure your Web home page gives what your potential customers want.
Judy Cullins: 20-year author, speaker, book coach Helps entrepreneurs manifest their book and web dreams eBk: “Ten Non-techie Ways to Market Online” http://www.bookcoaching.com/products.shtml Send an email to Subscribe@bookcoaching.com FREE The Book Coach Says… includes 2 free eReports Judy@bookcoaching.com
Ph:619/466/0622
IT’S TIME TO START THAT “SWIPE” FILEDavid B. Silva
IT’S TIME TO START THAT “SWIPE” FILE
David B. Silva
Just as great fiction is an art, so is great copywriting. Beneath the art, however, there’s a foundation of basic knowledge and skills. The craft that goes into your writing.
Craft comes first. Art follows.
You learn the craft of writing by educating yourself, by the actual process of writing (the doing), and by reading incessantly. Every successful writer will tell you that reading has been and still is the cornerstone of developing his craft.
Reading presents you with a written illustration of what works and what doesn’t, of what you like as a writer and what you don’t. It helps you understand the possibilities, and offers practical instruction of how the rules of your craft are used.
Most writers, when they start out, mimic their favorite authors. I have a friend who became incredibly adept at writing like Stephen King. For several years, everything I wrote had a Ray Bradbury flavor.
Eventually, we developed our own styles, which were richer for having first gone through this mimic stage.
The point is this: part of any effective learning process is to mimic what has been successful before you.
This is true of copywriting, too. And it’s the reason you need to start a “swipe” file if you want to become a successful copywriter.
What is a “swipe” file? It’s exactly what it sounds like … a file of great copywriting examples that you’ve collected, studied, and can access whenever you’re in need of a little inspiration. These are not examples meant to be plagiarized. You aren’t copying work here; you’re adapting it to your own copywriting needs.
For example … suppose you’re writing a sales letter for an Internet site that sells an expensive men’s wristwatch and you’re in need of a great headline. You search through your “swipe” file and find a sales letter for The Oxford Club (actually taken from my own “swipe” file) with the headline: A Man’s Right To Wealth. How To Master Every Situation And Prosper On A Grand Scale.
You toy around with it and come up with this: A Man’s Right To Elegance. How To Impress In Every Situation With A Watch That Does Far More Than Keep Accurate Time.
See how a good “swipe” file can help?
You can use it to adapt opening sentences. Or the layout of a sales letter. Or the guarantee you or your client offers. Even the pace or the emotional “tug” of a piece.
By using your “swipe” file, your creative juices are instantly flowing. There’s no blank page. You already have something to work with. And as any good writer will tell you, it’s easier to edit than it is to write.
So where do you get the material for your “swipe” file?
The quickest and easiest source is the Internet. Start checking out website sales letters. Print them out. Good or bad (even the bad ones can inspire your work). Study them. And keep them close by in a handy file.
The other great source is from mailing lists. If you’re already on a few lists, then start filing those pitches away when they arrive instead of tossing them out. If you’re not on a list, try purchasing a product or asking for a catalog. It won’t be long before you’re on a number of lists and your “swipe” file is growing exponentially.
Two good places to get started are: Publisher’s Clearing House, 101 Channel Drive, Port Washington, NY 11050; and Nightingale-Conant, 7300 N. Leigh Avenue, Chicago, IL 60648.
Try them both. Try any others that come to mind, as well. Just start building your “swipe” today!
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Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. David B. Silva is the author of seven novels and numerous short stories. He served as a magazine editor for eight years, and recently edited and published a small e-mail newsletter dedicated to writers and fans of the horror genre.
Learn all you’ll ever need to know about effective, result-producing copywriting from the very best: http://www.thesuccessfulwriter.com/copywritingseminar.htm
Copyright 2003. All rights reserved. David B. Silva is the author of seven novels and numerous short stories. He served as a magazine editor for eight years, and recently edited and published a small e-mail newsletter dedicated to writers and fans of the horror genre.
Learn all you’ll ever need to know about effective, result-producing copywriting from the very best: http://www.thesuccessfulwriter.com/copywritingseminar.htm
Written on February 28th, 2009
Read more articles on Copywriting.